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Working Together
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Knowledge Sharing for Sustainability
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 In your opinion, what are the most pressing issues of the urban environment? And, what is the biggest obstacle preventing environmentally friendly city planning/management? |
 Campbell: This can be answered in a number of different ways but I think the one way to guide our answers is to gauge the short-term versus long-term risks of environmental harm, which can mean both personal injury -- something very close to home, in the short-term -- as well as the very long–term, sort of massive injury but in a softer sense -- something that doesn’t actually hurt individual people but harms a society. Those long-term issues -- global warming is a perfect example or disposal of nuclear waste -- can take 50 to 100 years or more to be turned around. And the impacts are massive but the risks you have discount a little bit because you never know how exactly hard it’ll hit, or who it’ll hit, or what technologies will be at hand by the time they do hit. Whereas in the short term you have issues for instance of diarrheal diseases and depression in women and injury by traffic, and a whole bunch of other things that completely overwhelm local authorities and many national authorities, even with dedicating all the resources they do have to solve those problems in the near-term. So when you say what are the most pressing [issues], I think the way to look at that problem is for each society, each nation, each city to figure out for itself how they weigh the harm of future risks versus the immediate ones they know are going to be killers or heavy injurers right away. That’s how I would state that problem. I don’t think there’s any categorical way of saying it. Now within the shorter-term risks we can be more categorical. If you accept: ‘well let’s look at the shorter term problems,’ there I see the biggest issues being are the billion people living in slums. Without a doubt, in my view, it is the situation that is the most pressing and calls for most attention. A billion people that will grow right throughout the next century with consequences for health that change as we move into different circumstances in the future.
So for instance, 25 or 30 years from now we’ll be worried a lot more about chronic diseases and communicable diseases that arise from close proximity. The bird flue threat is one example of this but there are going to be many others, simply because the world is already almost completely urbanized -- or over the 50 percent mark. And we’ll be well into the 55 to 60 percent by 2030. This gives rise to all kinds of new issues with communicable and transmissible diseases that you have to worry about, that local governments are going to have to play more of a role in. Not all of the health issues are of communicable disease type. There are also new ones beginning to emerge now. For instance, there is a lot of work being done at Johns Hopkins University on obesity among the poor. And the reason there is obesity among the poor is the same reason there is malnutrition: because the nutrients people are getting are more processed, have more animal fat and are basically cheaper calories. So all of the attendant problems that come with obesity, including diabetes and heart disease, are going to be increasing as well in the future. How local authorities and national authorities deal with these problems is part of the urban sustainability issue.
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Cervone: Urbanization of large metropolitan areas is a complex phenomenon which can drastically affect the environment and its inhabitants due to the rapid growth in demographics often paired with a lack of proper planning and allocation of resources to ensure sustainability. The effects of such rapid development on the environment are not always immediately evident, since it usually reacts on longer-term time-scales.
Among the most pressing issues of urban environment and its usage are those of land, water and air quality. Rapid expansion of city limits and of the infrastructure required to sustain an always increasing number of inhabitants, tend to exhaust or irreversibly destroy the natural resources available. Human activity plays a central role in - contaminating aquifers through the use of chemical agents, increasing the emission of pollutants and greenhouse gases through fossil fuel energy power plants and vehicles, and changing the characteristics of the soil through deforestation and cementification. An excessive degradation of the water, land and air poses health risks and economic losses by putting at risks both lives and properties of millions of people.
Another pressing issue is the vulnerability of urban areas to deal with natural hazards. The by definition high population, large density of urban as opposed to rural areas, increases the natural disaster threat exposure for millions of people and makes disaster relief efforts more complicated. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and the recent earthquakes in Sumatra and Kashmir, show how natural hazards now threaten millions of people across state and even national boundaries.
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McNeely: The most pressing issues of the urban environment all relate to the quality of life. Contributors to this include congestion (which in turn relates to transportation); health and safety; air and water pollution; food and energy supply; and adequate green spaces.
The biggest obstacle preventing environmentally friendly city planning and management is public policy, which often relates closely to economics. Examples of environmentally friendly cities around the world, or at least environmentally friendly practices, indicate that these obstacles are not insurmountable.
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| What is the role of the private sector? Who are the stakeholders that affect the shape of a sustainable city and how can they cooperate? What helps or hinders public/private sector cooperation for healthy and sustainable cities in developing countries? |
Campbell: Private sector can play a role in two ways. One is through corporate social responsibility, where particular agents, like in the health area or water and sanitation, people who have a stake in the city, can help. But they are usually focused on other things, on running business and making a profit. Their initiatives should be welcomed but it should not be expected that the private sector by itself will take over and make these things happen. There has to be partnerships with the public sector. It takes leadership on both sides to make things happen. And it takes urging and some eye opening from sort of the middle sector to put these two hands together of the public and private. So they do have a role to play, they have a moral obligation to do things; they have a bottom line reason for doing it. In health for instance, you can look at the 10,000 businesses that are set up on the border between the US and Mexico. I understand their labor turn over is extremely high. They bring women to town mostly (65% of the workforce are women) who get trained, are very productive, and then move on because the living circumstances are hard. So it would be smart for the private sector to step in and do something about it, in fact they have tried. This maquiladora example is an idiosyncratic example that there is an interest for the private sector to be involved.
The WUF is a perfect example of why these things have to happen; we will see more of a systematic effort in the future to precisely engage in this knowledge exchange process. That is the big reason for it. Nobody is going to sign declarations or get commitments of money. The most important thing is networking and knowledge exchange, and they have to keep happening, in fact need to be more ordered, more strategic and coherent, and it will happen as we move forward.
Land use and traffic control are big areas in which we can gain a lot of ground, not just in ordering the urban environment and making it healthier, but also in reducing greenhouse gases and transport loads.
The greatest asset of cities is the land, and it is the last thing they do well in managing. I think that land use management and planning, combined with new techniques and transport, are the big frontiers for the next 20 years for cities. The Chinese know that their cities are growing too fast, and they want to do something about it. On the other hand you look at Latin America, and their cities are old. They urbanized in the fifties and sixties, with their biggest hits of infrastructure built in those times. Now it is time to do it all over again. Some studies in Brazil show that the big problem with shelter and housing is that there is not enough infrastructure to induce private sector builders. So this is a wake up call that will hit the streets in the next few months. Regions are different in all of these questions. Eastern Europe is a different case, where they are overbuilt in infrastructure but there is a large price to pay for the past negligence and handling of waste and toxic substances. Also you see longevity declining, and it is part because the cities were so poorly built and the issues about environmental quality were left for last.
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McNeely: The stakeholders that affect the shape of a sustainable city include the residents of the city (the primary stakeholders), the commuters who live outside the city but work within it (secondary stakeholders), and the nation at large (the tertiary stakeholders). All of these may have rather different priorities and interests, and promoting their cooperation will depend on sound and transparent public policy. In some cases, the stakeholders will have significant conflicts in priorities. Residents, for example, may have a higher demand for green spaces, while commuters may give higher priority to efficient transportation, while the nation at large is most interested in tourist attractions.
Public/private sector cooperation for healthy and sustainable cities in developing countries depends above all on public policy, which often in turn relates to economics. The private sector is typically most interested in making a profit, so cooperation with the public sector needs to relate to the profitability of the company involved. Different elements within the broadly-defined private sector may well have very different interests. The financial sector, for example, might have very different priorities than manufacturing, or retailing, or research. An automobile manufacturer might have a very different perspective from that of a manufacturer of electric trains or subways.
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| What are the best ways to bridge the gap between research and implementation of policies? Between capacity and financing? |
Campbell: It seems to me that in the technology, planning and management areas, it’s not that we have to wait for breakthroughs in technology or science or engineering. All that we need to know is already out there in the world somewhere. People in the World Bank call it a ‘market failure.’ Elsewhere you might call it an ‘information failure’ -- the problem is that there is not enough channels, not enough bandwidth so to speak, to bring the knowledge about solutions into the hands of people who can do something about it at the local level in the developing world. I think that one of the most common areas is just straight city-to-city cooperation, because we have something on the order of 4000 cities in the world that are 100,000 in population or larger. Each of them is a place where new ideas are being hatched all the time, new innovations are coming about, a little bit like I wrote in a book on leadership and innovation in 2003. The point of that book is that for every innovator we saw, every great leader we saw, we knew or could tell that there were 5 or 10 who wanted to be like that, but who didn’t have the circumstances, the luck, the money, the backing or the connections. You break one or another of those obstacles and you get some traction towards progress. My feeling is that the international community, particularly the donors, could do a lot more by simply widening this bandwidth; in making it possible for people to get access to try things rather than to spend efforts and money on inventing new things or training people in the way that is currently done. Of course, what I’m saying is not a solution to everything. You’re asking your respondents to address what can be done; I think this is one area that has the highest payoff and is being given the least attention. So that’s why we single it out.
Another factor is needed, even if we have wider volumes of communication and knowledge transfer between places, lots of times it’s an external agent that helps do the deal or get over the hump or to make things happen. By external agent I mean someone from outside the society, outside the city, outside the country, a non-governmental organization (NGO), an international NGO. It could be a World Bank or a retail development bank, or somebody who is not in the city but who is well-respected. External agents, like knowledge agents, are people aware of what’s going on and who can bring a solution into focus in a way that makes sense to local leaders. It’s something else that’s needed, external agents who are already there. There are universities, research institutes, and NGOs of all kinds that have opportunities to get access to international information and best practice and bring it home.
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Cervone: Research results are usually not readily grasped by policy makers and the general public, due in part to the scientific knowledge required to fully understand the findings. To bridge the gap between research results and implementation of policies -- which often requires substantial public support -- it is essential to provide the right information to the right people at the right time. Results should be easily accessible in an easy-to-understand format to facilitate policy makers' understanding of the problems and their consequences. The research community needs to sensitize policy makers and the general public on issues concerning our environment and the negative effects of unplanned development. Ideally pilot results should be achievable quickly to give further indication of the validity of the research results.
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McNeely: The best way to bridge the gap between research and implementation of policies is appropriate levels of political support, which in turn depends on both an informed public and appropriate policies. The gap may sometimes also exist because the research has been inadequately designed, often addressing only part of the problem and focusing on symptoms rather than fundamental causes of problems.
The gap between capacity and financing may not exist, because the capacity depends so closely on adequate finance. Generating sufficient financing to support sustainable urban areas, can be a challenge, but the first step is to identify perverse incentives -- that is, funds that are being spent in ways that undermine the sustainability of urban areas. The first place to look for such perversity is in public policies that may favour, for example, the moving out of cities of critical economic players, such as large companies. Appropriate tax policies can overcome such problems.
I must admit to having some problems with the concept of financing “sustainable urban growth”. Urban areas cannot continue growing forever, and far more common historically is expansion and contraction, with the latter following an excess of the former. Rather, it seems more sensible to plan for the optimal size of a city, and then seek to expand other cities. This is perhaps more a matter of national-level planning for appropriate urbanization rather than expecting existing cities to continue growing indefinitely. The latter can lead to a situation like Manila or Sao Paulo, which turn into urban nightmares. More appropriate strategies can be seen in cities like Curitiba in Brazil and Shenzhen in China.
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| How can rapidly growing and urbanizing cities in the developing world achieve a balance between development and environmental-friendliness? |
Cervone: Rising awareness of policy makers and the general public to the problems caused by the rapid urbanization is the basis to develop and implement solutions to limit or avoid irreversible damages. Policies must be implemented and enforced to limit the widespread of uncontrolled development, and protect people, landmarks, and natural resources against degradation. In both much of the developed world and virtually all developing countries, a critical step is to institute policies to limit population growth. In rural areas, such growth feeds a demographic flow into cities, which cities -- witness Sao Paulo, Nairobi, Mexico City, Calcutta, Dhaka, to name but a few -- are unable to absorb on any basis much less an environmentally friendly one. Occurring in urban areas themselves, such growth exacerbates problems even more directly.
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Faruqui: Not only is a balance possible, I would argue that in the long run development leads to a better environment. As a country begins to industrialize, the environment does suffer. Fortunately, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. As people grow richer they demand a cleaner environment. Pollution levels in developing countries start to fall when per capita income reaches about $US 8000. (Kruger and Grossman, 1994). South Korea, which, was as poor as Ghana only three decades ago, now has a per capita income over $10 000, and its environment is starting to improve.
Conversely, for the urban poor, I would say that a better environment leads to development. Poor urban communities without access to credit often occupy marginal lands, such as floodplains or steep hillsides. These sites are characterized by lack of environmental services, including inadequate access to water and sanitation, poor drainage, lack of wastewater collection and treatment, and lack of garbage collection. Partly because of poor environmental services and partly due to the location of marginal lands - near waste dumps, along drainage canals, or beside polluting industries - such sites also suffer from environmental degradation. For example, in Dakar, hundreds of people live in the Mbeubeuss Dumpsite.
But it is largely a myth that the poor damage the environment. In fact, the opposite is true. The environment is degraded because cash-strapped governments are unable to provide environmentally friendly services and because they are unable or unwilling to enforce pollution control standards on private industries such as tanneries. Yet industries, at least large ones, can afford such costs, because for most industries, environmental compliance adds up to less than two percent of total productions costs (Vogel, 1999). So, environmental degradation is more a function of lack of development than because of development. As societies become more developed, their institutions are able to fund environmental services, develop the capacity to enforce environmental standards, and eliminate corruption that allows industries to escape the penalties of environmental regulations.
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Mcneely: Achieving a balance between development and environment-friendliness in rapidly growing cities in the developing world is a serious challenge, calling for significant investments in urban planning and enforcement of zoning regulations. Development and environment should not be seen as contradictory goals, but rather as mutually reinforcing. Where cities are designed to be environmentally friendly, they are far more likely to be sustainable and competitive. Effective urban design can prevent problems from arising, thereby reducing the need for costly corrective expenditures. Recognizing the value of natural systems in maintaining a productive environment is a crucial step in environmental planning; examples include maintaining riparian zones under natural vegetation to reduce threats of flooding, maintaining hilly areas in vegetation to avoid excess runoff during heavy rains, and maintaining vegetation along highways as a means of addressing noise and air pollution.
IUCN is contributing through its Task Force on Cities and Protected Areas, seeking to maintain a connection between urban people and nature. More broadly, IUCN has a particular focus on cities in Mediterranean-type climates (including California, the Mediterranean Basin, parts of Chile, South Western Australia, and Southern Africa). IUCN is seeking to demonstrate how protected areas provide substantial health and social benefits to urban people, and publicizing more widely examples of outstanding practice.
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| How can they resolve the trade-off between the two goals? |
Faruqui: I do not believe that there is a trade-off between the two goals. By improving the environment within cities, we are likely to make a big impact on urban poverty. And by unleashing the productivity of the urban poor, we are likely to increase the economic growth of the city as a whole. This is particularly true in cities where the majority of the population is poor. For example, more than 70% of urban Africans live in slums—most are so focused on providing for their basic needs that they are able to contribute little to the city’s development.
This is because the environmental burdens identified above make poverty worse. They erode the assets of the poor. Waterborne diseases, such as diarrhea (resulting from inadequate water supply and sanitation) erode human health assets. In the Embakasi informal settlement in Kenya, one in four children die before the age of five, mostly from waterborne diseases such as diarrhea (IIED 2006). The cost of medicine and health care to treat disease degrades financial assets. Finally, environmental degradation threatens natural resource assets, such as fresh water, productive soil or coastal reefs, upon which the poor depend for livelihoods such as urban farming or fishing. For example, untreated effluents from domestic and industrial wastewater in the Indian Ocean have decimated marine resources. This has adversely affected food security and the income generation of the poor practicing artisan fishing in coastal urban centres, including Mauritius and Madagascar.
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| With the unavoidable growth of urban cities in the developing world, which basic strategies should urban planners take into account in the next 15 years? |
Cervone: The critical strategy is to realistically estimate and plan for conditions as they will be in the mid- or long- term future, not just -- an easier task -- as they may be "a few years out". Understanding
the problems caused by rapid unplanned urbanization, and the long (not just mid- ) term costs associated is crucial. In the short term, the quick growth of a city could bring both economic advantage and prestige to a region, but could also bring long term disastrous consequences when the environment reacts to the changes with different weather patterns, more extreme climate conditions, pollution, etc. Particular care should be taken to identify ways to avoid or limit the irreversible negative effects of urbanization on the environment, and understand the potential threat of natural hazards to develop strategies to limit the loss of lives and property. For example, about once a year a catastrophic earthquake of Richter magnitude 8 or more strikes somewhere on the Earth, which can claim thousands of lives, cause billions of dollars of damages, trigger an economic depression that might affect directly or indirectly the entire world, destroy natural landmarks, cause tsunamis, floods and landslides. Taking into account the potential effects of earthquakes and other natural hazards into city planning has become a fundamental challenge for the survival of our civilization.
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| Have information and communication technologies been an effective tool for urban development? Why or why not? |
Campbell: What it is playing a major role is awareness and horizontal exchanges between and among city leaders. Web-based technologies are effective once the bigger pieces are put into place. You really need several heads of corporations that are doing business locally, that are looking at doing business outside, plus the elected leader of the city and other major actors. They have to get on the same page and decide where to go, how fast, who is going to pay, all the strategic planning approach. Then the IT tools can really be effective. They can figure out what to get and how to get it.
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Cervone: Quick access to information has raised the awareness of people to the potential effects of human activities on the environment. Topics such as global warming and global climate change are universally known, and are the subject of continuous research and debate in the scientific community and among policy makers. Proper communication technologies ensure the dissemination of crucial information, and raise the awareness of the public to the importance of protecting the environment.
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Mcneely: : Information and communication technologies are an essential tool for urban development. Where these work efficiently, they can help reduce congestion, and build links between the various stakeholders. Communication is essential for reaching out to urban communities with information about the environment and building support for protecting urban nature. Appropriate information networks can also contribute to safety and health, and create employment opportunities that enhance quality of life.
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| What are examples of Best Practices and Lessons Learned with regard to sustainable urban environmental management? |
Campbell: The most shining examples are Barcelona and Bilbao in SpaiThe requested resource (/editor/default/) is not availablen. These two cities very deliberately put together all of their active forces in society - neighborhood groups, community groups, the church, chambers of commerce, labor unions, elected representatives and the private sector. They are a very good example because it is a setting that Latin America can relate to. Not too long ago, those cities were on the downside edge of European prosperity, and now they are on the upside edge, are very rich and prosperous. Cities did it in a very deliberate fashion, it took them 25 years to do it, but they saw that the European Union was coming. Bilbao used to do shipping and steel, and could no longer compete, so they (the community in the larger sense) decided Bilbao was going to be a place of culture, academia, and communications technology, and that decision, made in the middle 80’s, led to the creation of the Guggenheim Museum, which is one of the centerpieces although not the only one. There are 20 major projects in Bilbao right now which are the results, not the cause of the strategy in Bilbao. That is how they made themselves competitive. It is looking very carefully and holding about 40 international seminars in the 90s and early part of this decade, to find out what other cities are doing and that is how they became competitive. They looked around in a deliberate way to take measure of how much this was going to cost.
The problem is, in a city such as Hanoi or Lusaka, many are going to look at this and say “We can never do that.” But the truth is that they can and have to do something to get ahead. The point is not that they have to build a Guggenheim Museum but the point is that they have to get organized and that is how they become competitive. At least that is what the lessons are showing us. What the shining cities have done, such us Bilbao, Barcelona, Curitiba, Seattle, all of those cities do this in some way.
Other examples are the west coast of Australia and Kuala Lumpur. Not all have to be like that - the point is to get organized.
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Faruqui:Sustainable urban environmental management—i.e. cleaning up slums to reduce poverty and increase economic growth, requires partnership between local communities and local governments. Neither solely bottom-up nor top-down approaches are likely to be sustainable. Citizens have often lost faith in the ability or the commitment of local governments to provide services for them. But when local governments demonstrate that they are pro-poor, they can rebuild trust. And once the trust exists, daunting environmental problems in slums become solvable. When governments and their citizens work together, innovative win-win solutions can be identified.
Beyond trust, and innovative solutions, environmental improvements will only be sustainable if they are economically feasible. And ultimately those funds must come from people through taxes and users fees. Some funds may come through subsidization of the poor by the rich, but a modest amount will have to come from the poor themselves. This is not as impractical as it sounds. The poor are already paying high costs for environmental services—for example, on average the urban poor that do not have access to the public piped water supply, pay private vendors 10-20 times the price paid by those served. This typically represents two to four times the full cost of providing water services. But no one, rich or poor, is typically ready to pay until they are convinced that they are getting value for their money. This is why pilot projects funded by donors are so important. They can help convince the poor that they have an economic incentive to invest in the project.
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Mcneely: Numerous examples of best practice are available, and many of these are collected in a recent IUCN publication entitled “The Urban Imperative,” edited by Ted Trzyna and published jointly with the California Institute of Public Affairs. Many of the examples deal with protected areas and biodiversity, and examples include some of the world’s largest cities (London, Paris, Los Angeles, and Chicago). The commitment of San Francisco to maintain substantial green areas through the de-commissioning of a military reservation at the Presidio is an outstanding example. Sydney, Australia, has numerous protected areas in and around the city, helping to make it a scenic attraction (though it must be admitted that other developments have tended to create new problems). The Chicago Wilderness involves at least 178 organizational members ranging from governments at all levels to NGOs, cultural organizations, and volunteer groups. It has established a corporate council which has at least 25 corporations who are supporting the Chicago Wilderness, a clear example of corporate interest in the quality of life in the city where they are working (and earning a profit). In India, the “Kids for Tigers” programme is reaching out to urban children and re-establishing their link with nature, while a conservation agency that runs a national park in Los Angeles has also contributed to establishing smaller “natural parks” in the inner city, giving the urban poor an opportunity to establish links with nature. Cape Town has its own biodiversity strategy, as does London, and establishing such strategies could be replicated by virtually any city in the world. Some cities have established policies to maintain agricultural land within the cities; Beijing, for example, until recently was able to provide all of its domestic vegetable requirements. Curitiba, Brazil, has avoided development along the river that flows through the city and has established transportation corridors with low-polluting transport systems that follow planned construction of high-rise buildings, with higher population density along the transport corridors and lower population density further away. This has enabled the city to maintain its green character
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| Are these techniques, measures or frameworks transferable to other geographical locales? |
Faruqui: These three principles—bringing together local communities and local governments to build trust, funding innovative pilot projects, and developing economic incentives so that people save or make money, are transferable. In fact, I would argue that efforts to jointly reduce poverty and improve the environment not based on these principles are unsustainable. UPE has just begun a new initiative—the Focus Cities Research Initiative in which it will fund multi-stakeholder teams composed of researchers, community groups, and local government in nine cities around the world to develop a shared understanding of environmental burdens in selected neighborhoods, validate potential solutions, and integrate those solutions into planning, policies, and practices. Five of the cities, Jakarta, Colombo, Kampala, and Dakar, Moreno, are already chosen and another two each will be chosen in the Middle East and North Africa and in Latin America and the Caribbean.
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The requested resource (/editor/default/) is not available
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Daniel A. López, La Cumbrecita, Argentina
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- WB Development Marketplace: Innovations in Water, Sanitation, and Energy Services for Poor People: Washington, DC, May 8-9, 2006
- Global City: Lyon, France, May 17-19, 2006
- World Environment Day 2006: Deserts and Desertification: June 5, 2006
- World Urban Forum: Vancouver, Canada, June 19-23, 2006
- World Urban Festival: Vancouver, Canada, June 21-25
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