Padma Prakash: The WUF III way

How can urban growth be funded best? How can cities' resources be marshalled for their growth? These were a few issues that were addressed at the UN World Urban Forum.

Urban growth in the developed world has been along well ordered lines. Urban poverty and homelessness were not major policy concerns and could easily be classified as a temporary aberration. But with third-world cities registering sharp growth trends, the sustainable city""a city that provides infrastructure and support services, that provides employment and education and is a producer as well as a consumer""is no longer an expected outcome. "Based on current trends, cities in the developing world will spread out to occupy about three times their present land area. The demographic trends also mean that poverty will increasingly become an urban phenomenon," pointed out John Friedman, professor, UBC School of Community and Regional Planning, while delivering the first UN habitat lecture at the third session of the UN World Urban Forum (WUF III) earlier this month in Vancouver. The booming growth of cities in third-world countries, especially the least-developed countries, is a development fraught with the potential of a rise in social and economic tensions. These problems are not amenable to quick resolution through an injection of funds alone.

The WUF III saw the well-structured trialogues among governments, civil society organisations and the private/corporate sector on three major planks: The evolving of multi-cultural, multi-ethnic inclusive and safe cities that will ensure affordable housing, equal opportunities and equitable access to education, health and livelihoods; financing city development and the economics of sustainable growth; and urban governance and structuring a creative urban environment with participant planning and governance and resource generation.

How can urban growth be best funded? How can cities' resources be marshalled for their growth? Through the 150-odd networking sessions, several special session and theme-based round-tables, it was clear that the most serious questions that worry UN agencies and multilateral funding agencies is the need to find ways and means of ensuring the flow of investments for urban growth that that does not pose challenges to, or compromise the achievements of the Millennium Development Goals. While city growth so far has been largely promoted by private investment, it has often led to a sharpening of inequities, as is evident in the housing sector. How are these private flows to be sustained even to the less profitable areas such as the upgrade and enrichment of community resources?

As Friedman pointed out, and many other participants underlined, the key factor is, "... an endogenous development "" a development from within "" based chiefly on local savings supplemented by international aid and private contributions." Soliciting global investment on a weak and underdeveloped asset base will, as likely as not, make for distortions. Regional asset development rests on an expansive definition of assets that would be measured not just by regional growth product but also its intellectual, social and cultural wealth.

Innovative measures for public-private partnership have been evolving in South Africa, Venezuela, Teheran, Canada and Bangladesh under the initiative of the World Bank. Not all have been successful: in some cases, grants to the public department remain unspent, giving rise to uneven growth of targeted areas. In some, financing authorities persuade urban players, for instance power generation companies, to set aside a dedicated portion of revenues to compensate areas that suffer because of the construction of power utilities.

Participatory budgetary exercises in some cities have been hugely successful in maintaining the availability of need-based resource at all times. The problems of balancing short-term and long-term financial planning and the issue of erosion of intellectual assets of cities through brain-drain were firmly placed on the mainstream agenda.

How can cities be made inclusive, accommodating youth and women, the disabled and the socially and economically disadvantaged? The NGO roundtable provided ample evidence that in the context of unplanned growth and poverty, it is these organisations that have created alternative means for upward mobility in thousands of communities. It was also obvious that while there were many models for creating inclusive environments, there was little research, especially in the developing countries that informed public policy on urban social issues. At an informal session on urban research organised by SIDA, the contrast between wealth of urban research in the developed countries and narrowly-focused research on city issues in countries like India, which have seen decades of urban growth, became evident.

Dismayingly, the introduction of urban planning in older cities is only giving rise to forcible evictions of large populations. This trend came in for criticism by Miloon Kothari, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Adequate Housing, who said that despite 30 years of standard development and progress in achieving adequate housing, "there is increased land-grabbing, forced eviction, homelessness, and property speculation."

Two clear perspectives on inclusion stood out. The first was the voice of women's groups across the world: From the urban grassroots women's organisations in Africa to the pavement dwellers of Mumbai and health and reproductive rights groups of Latin America. Although there were special sessions devoted to the work of women's groups in creating alternative models of participation, it is evident that a significant mainstreaming of gender issues has taken place. The other cross-cutting perspective that elbowed itself into the mainstream was the voice of youth across the continents. The World Youth Forum that preceded the World Urban Forum after three days of deliberations, had posted a youth statement that posed challenging issues. But in every session, governance, finance or social inclusion, the particular problems of the young who will be the most significant group in the cities of poor countries came up for considerable attention.

It was left to an undergraduate student of the University of British Columbia to articulate a persistent dilemma of building sustainable cities: By definition and historical understanding, growing cities are the melting pots of the cultures and social mores of the world. Yet there are far too many reasons why city size and growth have to be controlled and slowed down. How do we sustain the historic social vibrancy and cultural vitality of cities even while we achieve the second?