Brave New World

[Al-khiyal]

More people will live in cities than in the countryside next year, for the first time in the history of the human race, a UN report said yesterday - and a growing number of them will be living in slums.

The United Nations report says the number of slum dwellers will pass the 1bn mark in 2007, which means that one in three city residents will live in inadequate housing with no or few basic services. It adds that urban growth and slum expansion rates are nearly identical in some regions, and that the world's urban poor are rapidly becoming one of its biggest problems.

Anna Tibaijuka, the executive director of UN-Habitat, which published the State of the World's Cities 2006/7 report, said: "For a long time we suspected that the optimistic picture of cities did not reflect the reality on the ground. This report provides concrete evidence that there are two cities within one city. One part of the population that has all the benefits of urban living, and the other part, the slums and squatter settlements, where the poor often live under worse conditions than their rural relatives."
She called for aid agencies and governments to target help for slum dwellers, saying that encouraging results from countries including Egypt and Thailand showed such projects could improve living conditions.

The report says the conditions in slums are remarkably similar to those in impoverished rural areas in terms of health, education, employment and mortality. In Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Haiti and India, child malnutrition in slums is almost the same as in rural regions. In many sub-Saharan African countries children living in slums are more likely to die from water-borne and respiratory illnesses than those in rural villages. Women living in slums are more likely to contract HIV.

Mrs Tibaijuka said the trend threatened one of the UN's key millennium development goals: to improve the lives of at least 100m slum dwellers by 2020. "The millennium goals might be lost in the slums," she said.

The report analyses more than 200 of the world's cities. Globally, it says the slum population will swell by 27m people each year over the next 20 years - the vast majority in the developing world, which will have to absorb 95% of all urban growth.

In a foreword to the report the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, says: "Governments and aid agencies have traditionally emphasised the improvement of rural areas, because that is where the vast majority of the world's poor live. But as rapid urbanisation continues, similar energies are needed in urban areas. The problem is not urbanisation per se, but the fact that urbanisation in many developing regions has not resulted in greater prosperity or a more equitable distribution of resources."

There is some good news. The UN praises countries in north Africa, including Morocco and Tunisia, which have reduced the growth of city slums.

"Some low- or middle-income countries, including Brazil, Colombia, Philippines, Indonesia, South Africa and Sri Lanka, have managed to prevent slum formation by anticipating and planning for growing urban populations - by expanding economic and employment opportunities for the urban poor, by investing in low-cost affordable housing for the most vulnerable groups, and by instituting pro-poor reforms and policies that have had a positive impact on low-income people's access to services," it says.

But it says that the situation is worsening quickly in many sub-Saharan African countries.

Last year the world's urban population was 3.17bn out of a total of 6.45bn. Current trends suggest the number of urban dwellers will rise to almost 5bn by 2030, out of a world total of 8.1bn.

Urban population to overtake country dwellers for first time

[nesreen]

wow . Some sad pictures in there.

Life is so unfair . really . Call me Utopic , but sometimes when my kids are watching Cribbs on tv and they show a mansion with a pool and tennis court and 4 cars in the driveway , including a hummer , for a single guy living on his own , (usually artists ) and that s just one of his homes. . instead of appreating the beauty of his home, the first thing that comes to my mind , does he really need all those bathrooms and those bedrooms, and those cars and those hundreds of shoes, suits , hats, trainers , gym, recording studios and a cinema ..... when others dont have a roof over their heads and a meal to look forward to . (Yes i have been called a tree hugging lefty ) but i dont care. this is how i feel.

[Al-khiyal]

"When a critical mass of people are in one place, if you don't empower them they will empower themselves through revolution."

June 16, 2007 (Reuters) -- The world's growing number of poor slum dwellers is a ticking time bomb that governments dare not ignore, the United Nations said on Friday.

The world will pass a critical point in 2007 when the majority of its 6 billion people will be urbanized, the world body said.

One-third of them will be slum dwellers, many trapped in poverty but overlooked by governments and with no prospects of improvement.

"When a critical mass of people are in one place, if you don't empower them they will empower themselves through revolution," Anna Tibaijuka, head of UN-HABITAT said in London, presenting the agency's State of the World's Cities 2006/7 report.

"If we want to avoid chaos we have to empower the poor people," she told a news conference ahead of the third World Urban Forum meeting in Vancouver, Canada, from June 19-23.

Far from being better off than their rural cousins, the urban poor were in many ways worse off, ignored by aid agencies and with little access to housing, adequate sanitation, clean water, education or health services.

For example, even the children of relatively affluent slum dwellers had higher rates of killer diarrhea than poor children in the countryside, the report said, noting that slum dwellers also tended to die young.

Tibaijuka said the world's slum dwellers faced multiple disadvantages being near to services, durable housing and the seat of political power but having no access to any of them.

This in turn led to rising divisions and tensions between the "haves" and "have nots" in burgeoning towns and cities.

In sub-Saharan Africa, 72 percent of the urban population live in slums, attracted there by prospects of a better life but, once sucked in, are trapped in a cycle of poverty, degradation and violence.

By 2030, the urban population of Africa, the least urbanized continent, will be larger than the total population of Europe, the U.N. report said.

"The peace and stability of cities is in question if the majority are in slums," Tibaijuka said, urging governments not to simply bulldoze them as President Mugabe had done in Zimbabwe but to provide housing and services for them.

The report said that in seven African countries surveyed, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Ghana, Kenya, Mali, Niger and Zambia, HIV/AIDS was more prevalent in the urban than rural population.

It also noted the rise of mega- and even metacities - conurbations with populations of more than 10 million and 20 million respectively - saying nine percent of the world's people now live in megacities against four percent in 1975.

The trend is accelerating, the report said, noting that by 2030, nearly 4 billion people, or 80 percent of the world's urban dwellers, will live in cities of the developing world.

Forgotten urban poor a living time bomb: UN

[Al-khiyal]

There are 27.7 million people in Uganda. But by 2025 the population will almost double to 56 million, close to that of Britain, which has a similar land mass. In 44 years its population will have grown by nearly as much as China's.

"You look at these numbers and think 'that's impossible'," said Carl Haub, senior demographer at the US-based Population Reference Bureau, whose latest global projections show Uganda as the fastest growing country in the world. Midway through the 21st century Uganda will be the world's 12th most populous country with 130 million people - more than Russia or Japan.

Startling as they are, the projections are feasible, and a glance at some of the variables shows why. A typical Ugandan woman gives birth to seven children - an extraordinarily high fertility rate that has remained largely unchanged for more than 30 years. Half the population is under 15, and will soon move into childbearing age. Fewer than one in five married women has access to contraception.

Taken together, the factors point to a population explosion that has demographers and family planning experts warning that efforts to cut poverty are doomed unless urgent measures are taken.

And not just in Uganda. Across much of sub-Saharan Africa the population is expanding so quickly that the demographic map of the earth is changing.

In the rest of world, including developing nations in Asia and South America, fertility rates have steadily declined to an average of 2.3 children to each mother. Most will experience only modest population growth in coming decades. Some countries, particularly in eastern Europe, will see their numbers decline.

But by 2050 Chad, Mali, Guinea Bissau, Liberia, Niger, Burundi and Malawi - all among the poorest nations in the world - are projected to triple in size. Nigeria will have become the world's fourth biggest country. Democratic Republic of Congo and Ethiopia will have vaulted into the top 10 for the first time. Nearly a quarter of the world's population will come from Africa - up from one in seven today.

"What's happening is alarming and depressing," said Jotham Musinguzi, director of the population secretariat in Uganda's ministry of finance, pointing out the clear correlation between high fertility levels and poverty. "Are we really going to be able to give these extra people jobs, homes, healthcare and education?"

Development may not be the only casualty of the population boom. With increased competition for scarce resources such as land, conflict is likely to increase. Consequences will be felt far beyond Africa: pressure to migrate abroad - already great - can only grow, experts say.

It is not yet a lost cause. Experience has shown that with strong political will population growth can be tackled in Africa. Southern Africa's population is expected to remain stable thanks to sustained efforts to cut fertility rates, although Aids-related deaths are also a factor. In 1978 Uganda's neighbour Kenya had the world's highest fertility rate - more than eight children per mother. The government made family planning a national priority and by the mid-1990s the figure was less than five.

But a number of African leaders, including Uganda's president, Yoweri Museveni, believe that their countries are under-populated, and that a bigger internal market and workforce will boost their economic prospects. In a speech to MPs in July Mr Museveni said: "I am not one of those worried about the 'population explosion'. This is a great resource."

Studies across Africa have shown that the desire for large families remains powerful. In Nigeria a recent survey revealed that just 4% of women with two children said they wanted no more.

Part of the reason is cultural, with bigger families seen as a sign of security. It is also because of fears of high levels of infant mortality.

Stigmas about birth control are another factor. Reproductive health experts say that a lack of information and of availability of female contraceptives plays a major role. In Ethiopia just 8% of married women use contraceptives. In Uganda more than a third of all women say they would like to stop - or at least stall - having children.

For that, donors must share in the blame, said Steven Sinding, director-general of the International Planned Parenthood Federation. He said the world had declared premature victory in the battle to cut fertility rates. Curbing population growth is not one of the UN's Millennium Development Goals, which aim to halve poverty by 2015, and barely features in the Commission for Africa report championed by Tony Blair.

"In sub-Saharan Africa population remains a very serious problem," said Mr Sinding. "Yet donors have completely shifted their focus to HIV/Aids and nobody is talking about it any more. Population is off the development agenda and that's a tragedy for Africa."

Elly Mugumya, head of the Family Planning Association of Uganda, agreed. In a tiny clinic in Kampala's Owino market, one of the biggest food and clothing bazaars in east Africa, he watched as six women - and two men - crammed into a tiny clinic to receive information about contraception.

Cost is not the problem in Uganda, he explained: a three-month supply of birth-control pills costs 15p; condoms are free for the men. It is access - in most parts of Uganda clinics like this simply do not exist.

Population explosion threatens to trap Africa in cycle of poverty

[Al-khiyal]

"No one can be proud of Algiers."

~ Interior Minister Noureddine Yazid Zerhouni

NAIROBI (Reuters) - John Ochieng has lost count of the number of Kenyans who randomly knock on the door of his one-room shack in Nairobi's Kibera slum seeking a place to stay.

Lured by dreams of a better life, hundreds flock each month to the ramshackle settlement of tin-roofed shacks that already houses 600,000 people in a packed 3 kilometre (1.8 mile) corridor that is one of Africa's biggest slums.

"Maybe four people will knock on my door a week asking if I have space or if I know of somewhere," butcher Ochieng, 26, said at the home he rents with his wife and four children.

Every day, new arrivals heave carts loaded with bags into Kibera before carrying their belongings across trenches of sewage and past mountains of garbage.

Once settled, many lack electricity, pay for water by the bucket and use over-flowing holes for toilets.

Slums like Kibera are the ugly face of urbanisation in Africa whose cities are increasingly overwhelmed by property crises, crime, over-population and creaking infrastructure.

"In the 1970s, Nairobi was truly the green city in the sun. It was safe to go for walks, there were no haphazard kiosks, no potholes," said a bookshop owner who gave his name as Chan. "Now the population has increased and infrastructure is strained."

International planners will come together next week in Nairobi for a five-day "Africities" summit to seek solutions to the problems caused by swelling populations in the continent's capitals.

Flows of rural people have strained resources for years. While some major cities have seen this migration stabilise, many remain burdened by the flow of people abandoning traditional subsistence farming due to conflict, environmental degradation and the breakdown of family structures devastated by AIDS.

According to the United Nations, sub-Saharan Africa, where 72 percent of the urban population lives in slums, has the highest rate of annual urban growth in the world.

By 2030, more than half of Africans will live in cities, making up a larger population than the whole of Europe.

Lagos estimates its population at about 17 million, making it Africa's largest city. Its population is growing at 6 percent to 8 percent per year, or about 600,000 more people every year, attracting migrants from across Nigeria and West Africa.

But the sordid realities of city life make a mockery of official labels like "land of aquatic splendour".

The whole city has only 67 operating garbage trucks.

Police or gangsters demanding bribes man checkpoints and sights of dead bodies being dumped in public are frequent. Millions of Nigerians cook on firewood, collect water in buckets and spend nights in darkness.

About two-thirds of the city's residents live in poverty in more than 100 slums while housing for the rich has failed to keep pace with demand. Foreign executives can pay $60,000 a year or more for a three-bedroom flat in the city centre.

Algiers, capital of relatively rich oil producer Algeria, also lacks space. More than 3 million people and 1 million vehicles are jammed into narrow alleyways and hillsides.

Years of conflict in the countryside have pushed millions into northern cities.

"No one can be proud of Algiers," said Interior Minister Noureddine Yazid Zerhouni, lamenting the decline of a city whose white-washed hillside buildings still retain - if only from afar - a fading picture-postcard charm.

"Problems of water, dirt, transport, insecurity. ... With all of that you can't rate it as one of the world capitals."

But there is money to seek solutions. Foreign firms have signed deals to build a tramway and Algiers' first metroline.

Angola's capital Luanda, built to accommodate 400,000 people, has become home to up to 5 million after many moved there because of a 27-year civil war that ended in 2002.

"In Luanda, very few people have gone back (to rural areas) and I think very few will," architect Allan Cain said. "Every year they spend in the city, their roots grow deeper."

Africa's mega-cities creak under heavy growth

[Al-khiyal]

Africa's slums are dens of disease and death

January 2, 2007 -- A billion people now live in slums. The explosion of city populations threatens the poor of the world - none more so than those in sub-Saharan Africa, where the flood of people away from rural areas is unsustainable and unsupportable.

Tragedy stuck Nairobi three times in mid-2007. First, a police crackdown on the Mungiki gang led to more than 30 deaths in Mathare, one of the oldest and most deprived slums in the city.

That weekend heavy rainfall caused a wall in the Mukuru kwa Reuben slum to collapse and kill 13 more.

The next day, an explosion ripped through downtown Nairobi during rush hour, killing a hawker and wounding nearly 40 people.

As Kenyan writer Rasna Warah pointed out: "The tragic events in Nairobi show that cities are and will, increasingly, become the sites of disaster and conflict in the 21st century, and that the urban poor will be the main victims."

That was the year when the world became primarily urban, but what remains to be seen is whether local and global actors will rise to the challenge. In the developing world, urbanisation is often synonymous with the growth of slums and worst-hit is sub-Saharan Africa, where, according to UN-Habitat, more than 70% of the urban population live in slums.

"An urban nightmare in less than 50 years' time is certainly what will engulf us if current trends continue," warns Walden Bello, executive director of the policy research and advocacy NGO Focus on the Global South.

Agencies such as Care or the Humanitarian Practice Network maintain that urbanisation should not be perceived only as developmental challenge.

They argue that as the locus of poverty shifts from the countryside to the city, so should the attention of humanitarian workers.

A UN-Habitat report revealed in 2006 that slum dwellers were more likely than other urban inhabitants to die early and suffer from malnutrition and disease; and that they would be less educated with fewer employment opportunities.

UN-Habitat contends that slum dwellers endure a double punishment: not only do they live in misery, but their plight is the blind spot of humanitarian action, which traditionally focuses on the rural poor.

The UN defines a slum as an area with at least one of the following characteristics: non-durable housing, overcrowding, lack of access to clean water, inadequate sanitation and insecure tenure.

Historically, people were pushed from rural areas by the mechanisation of agriculture and pulled to the cities by the prospect of higher incomes, better employment opportunities and improved access to education and health care.

Nowadays, however, most urbanisation is taking place in the developing world, where the agricultural sector is not showing any signs of improvement.

According to Bello, people are leaving the countryside because of agrarian crises caused by natural disasters, civil wars and bad policies, such as the lack of agrarian reform, industry-biased development policies, and the dumping of cheap subsidised agricultural products from the North.

But local authorities do not have the means to provide the services that rural migrants hope to find when moving to cities. This migration-without-absorption has led to what UN-Habitat calls "premature urbanisation" and urban theorist Mike Davis described as "over-urbanisation".

"The global forces pushing people from the countryside seem to sustain urbanisation even when the 'pull' of the city is drastically weakened by debt and economic depression," Davis said.

Furthermore, argued Senator Rodolfo Biazon of the Philippines at the last World Urban Forum in Vancouver in 2006: "Many developing countries' farmers are defeated by the farmers of the developed world, causing these farmers to flock to the city to find a job. But there they find that our industries are also in unfair competition with the developed world, which leads to a growth in the slums."

Specialists agree that the most important factor in the urbanisation in Africa and Asia of the past 50 years has been the removal of what urban expert David Satterthwaite calls "apartheid-like controls" on population movements after independence.

Academic Gareth Myers has argued that colonial powers imposed strict policies to prevent rural-urban migration because they were afraid of the "detribalising" aspect of urbanisation that would breed anti-colonial sentiments across various ethnic groups.

For example, women and children were not allowed to join their partners working in the cities. The removal of such policies, combined with the need of new countries to develop state institutions and education systems, created an urban explosion in post-colonial states from the 1950s onwards.

In China, meanwhile, the 1949 revolution led to a temporary inundation of cities by refugees and former soldiers: 14 million people had arrived by the time policies were reversed and strict controls were imposed on migration in 1953, according to On-Kwok Lai, an analyst quoted by Davis.

In the 1960s, vast numbers of rural migrants were deported back to the countryside - by some estimates, up to 50 million. Other examples of ideological anti-urbanism include North Korea, north Vietnam and Cambodia.

In the south of Vietnam, however, the US military followed a strategy of bombing the countryside in order, according to Samuel Huntington, the military strategist and analyst, to "produce massive migration from countryside to city so that the basic assumptions underlying Maoist doctrine of revolutionary war no longer operated".

Indeed, civil wars have also been important factors for urban growth. Thus, in south Asia, partition in 1948, the Indo-Pakistan war in 1964 and the secession of Bangladesh in 1971 created a flood of refugees to Mumbai, New Delhi, Calcutta, Karachi, Lahore and Dhaka.

In Angola, Mozambique and Sudan during the 1980s and 1990s, millions fled the war-ravaged countryside, seeking refuge and new livelihoods in the cities.

Half of Algeria's rural population was displaced by the colonial war and poured into the cities after independence in 1962.

In the Middle East, the urbanisation explosion occurred a decade later, with the oil price boom in the 1970s. China experienced its own informal urbanisation when it relaxed its internal migration controls in the 1980s.

The breaking-up of the Soviet Union and the creation of numerous new countries also brought about major shifts in populations in eastern Europe and central Asia.

Post-dictatorship Latin America followed a very similar route to post-colonial Africa: institutional roadblocks to urbanisation were removed with the overthrow of anti-democratic regimes, as well as the shift from import substitution to export promotion.

Meanwhile, governments failed to deal with informal urbanisation effectively, despite promises made by many developing country leaders to rehouse the poor in the 1950s and 1960s.

"The idea of an interventionist state strongly committed to social housing and job development seems either a hallucination or a bad joke, because governments long ago abdicated any serious effort to combat slums and redress urban marginality," writes Davis in Planet of Slums (2006).

Their minimalist approach was made worse by structural adjustment programmes, which required slimming down of government initiatives and often the privatisation of housing markets as well. Even when attempts at providing public or state-subsidised housing were made, they were often "poached" by the middle class, as witnessed in Algeria, India, Nigeria and Mexico.

An even more striking difference between the urban and rural poor concerns the health crisis: studies have shown that the prevalence of diarrhoea is higher among children from high-income groups in slums than in the poorer rural families.

This is because the prevalence of the five diseases responsible for more than half of child mortality (pneumonia, diarrhoea, malaria, measles and HIV/Aids) is linked to bad living conditions (contaminated water and food) rather than income.

Disasters, both natural and environmental, also affect urban areas more than rural ones.

The urban poor are more likely than other urban dwellers to be hit by earthquakes, floods, landslides or industrial catastrophes, because slums are often located in low-value urban land prone to disasters, such as floodplains, river banks, steep slopes, swamps or contaminated reclaimed land.

Today, the key factors leading to urbanisation are the reclassification of rural areas as urban ones, positive net birth rates and rural-urban migration.

Contrary to traditional understanding, "most of the urban growth will be a result of natural population increase and the structural transformation of formerly rural areas on the periphery of urban areas."

[Al-khiyal]

Planet of Slums by Mike Davis

"Urban theorist Davis takes a global approach to documenting the astonishing depth of squalid poverty that dominates the lives of the planet's increasingly urban population, detailing poor urban communities from Cape Town and Caracas to Casablanca and Khartoum. Davis argues health, justice and social issues associated with gargantuan slums (the largest, in Mexico City, has an estimated population of 4 million) get overlooked in world politics: "The demonizing rhetorics of the various international 'wars' on terrorism, drugs, and crime are so much semantic apartheid: they construct epistemological walls around gecekondus, favelas, and chawls that disable any honest debate about the daily violence of economic exclusion." Though Davis focuses on individual communities, he presents statistics showing the skyrocketing population and number of "megaslums" (informally, "stinking mountains of ****" or, formally, "when shanty-towns and squatter communities merge in continuous belts of informal housing and poverty, usually on the urban periphery") since the 1960s. Layered over the hard numbers are a fascinating grid of specific area studies and sub-topics ranging from how the Olympics has spurred the forceful relocation of thousands (and, sometimes, hundreds of thousands) of the urban poor, to the conversion of formerly second world countries to third world status. Davis paints a bleak picture of the upward trend in urbanization and maintains a stark outlook for slum-dwellers' futures.