Written evidence submitted by the Development
Planning Unit, University College London
1. INTRODUCTION
1.1 The Development Planning Unit (DPU),
University College London, is an international centre with over
50 years experience of addressing issues related to urban
and regional development, and urban development policy and planning
in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. Our mission
is to strengthen the knowledge and capacity of professionals,
institutions and citizens at local, national and global levels
to design and implement innovative and sustainable policy and
planning for urban and peri-urban areas.
1.2 The DPU's work on urbanization and poverty
draws upon synergies across our research, postgraduate teaching,
practice-based work, and knowledge sharing and advocacy. Our research
is action and policy oriented, interdisciplinary and builds on
South-North and South-South partnerships and learning alliances.
In carrying out its activities, the DPU has worked with DFID,
UN HABITAT, UNDP and other agencies in the UN family, the Commonwealth
Secretariat, and all major donors involved in urban development.
1.3 The DPU, along with others in the development
field, has actively promoted critical views of urbanization and
poverty, among which the following two ideas are of key significance
for policy and planning. Firstly, urbanization is a positive process
serving as an "engine of economic growth" and as an
arena for the diffusion of innovation and progressive collective
action to address poverty and inequality. In particular, the concentration
of urban population give rise to opportunities for economy of
scale, while the diversity and multi-cultural character of urban
populations is a positive factor promoting creativity. Secondly,
slums and informal settlements contribute positively to the socio-economic
and political life of cities and urban areas, and governments
should seek to support and build on the energy and endeavours
of poor women and men, girls and boys, instead of treating them
as illegal, stigmatising them and creating obstacles to their
development.
2. FACTUAL INFORMATION
2.1 Framing the issue of urbanisation and
poverty
2.1.1 In framing this evidence, it is important
to recognise that the term "cities" be understood in
a sense which reflects the enormous variety of cities and urban
areas that are found in the urban continuum. Recognition of this
diversity is crucial because in the last two decades, the fastest
urban growth has occurred not in large cities, but in medium-sized
and small urban centres. Moreover, any understanding of urbanisation
and poverty must crucially recognise the socio-economic and political
importance of both urban-rural linkages and changes in the "peri-urban
interface" In the 1980s and 1990s DFID-supported research
contributed greatly to elevating the importance of both in development
debates.
2.1.2 Furthermore, the term "slums"
disguises the enormous heterogeneity of the places and conditions
under which poor women and men, girls and boys live in cities
and urban areas. Areas defined as "slums" often comprise
diverse populations on the basis of class (not all slum dwellers
are poor), gender and lifecycle, ethnicity, religion and disability.
In addition, depending on the context, poor people can be located
in different areas of the city that may not be labelled as "slums",
for example, in historic city centres, in recently occupied areas
on the periphery of cities, as well as in central city slum tenements.
An understanding of this diversity provides a unique opportunity
to address difference and equality in the promotion of peaceful
and secure cities.
2.1.3 Recognition of this diversity also
calls into question the dominant understanding of property rights
only as titled ownership. The variety of land and housing situations
in cities and urban areas indicates a much broader range of forms
of secure tenure from outright titled ownership, to right of use,
leasehold, as well as to collective forms of tenure. A focus on
property titling in policy to secure property rights, has been
a source of market driven evictions when not put in a wider policy
framework which protects the rights of the poor to housing and
land.
2.1.4 With its promotion and adoption of
the sustainable livelihoods approach, DFID has provided a good
basis to build on and embrace the contribution that poor people
in a variety of spatial, socio-economic and political conditions
can make to cities and urban areas. A recognition of the assets
of poor women and men, girls and boys in their diversity, opens
up new paths for understanding urbanisation and poverty, and possible
policy and planning directions, which a needs approach often disguises.
2.2 DFID's remarkable and now diminished international
contribution
2.2.1 In the 1980s and 1990s DFID was a
leading actor in the urban development arena, playing a prominent
role among international aid agencies. Since 2000 this role
has largely been eroded and its international presence is much
less influential.[87]
Although DFID's work on issues such as urban/rural linkages, sustainable
livelihoods and community driven financial facilities for housing
and infrastructure has made a valuable international contribution,
the dispersal of urban expertise and the resulting loss of any
institutional entity to address the specific issues of cities
and urban areas, has hindered DFID's capacity to maintain this
leading role. This is a crucial issue, in the light both the limitations
of some of the policies of international agencies and the considerable
current and future challenges facing the urban developing world.
2.2.2 Goal 7, Target 11 of the MDGs,
as recognized in the House of Commons call, does not respond to
the scale of urban residents living without secure tenure, adequate
housing and infrastructure, only addressing approximately 10%
of this need. It is widely recognised that even this target is
unlikely to be met by 2015. In addition, in the slum index set
up to measure Target 11, the fifth sub-index on security of tenure
and evictions has been dropped, excluding a key variable in the
assessment of progress. Furthermore, while recognising the importance
of the measurement of targets and outcomes, it could also be argued
that the MDGs have diverted attention from creative and innovative
local initiatives under way in many contexts at the city and community
scales, as well as from the structural and causal dimensions of
poverty.
2.2.3 Goal 7, Target 11 of the MDGs
plays an influential role in the "Cities Without Slums"
campaign run by Cities Alliance, an alliance set up in 1999 by
UN HABITAT and the World Bank housed in the World Bank. While
"Cities Without Slums" might be a catchy slogan, it
is neither feasible nor desirable in some of its consequences.
Slums play an important role in the growth and development of
cities, and if adequately supported by governments, they will
upgrade and consolidate to maximise the human potential of its
dwellers. The slogan has also been manipulated by some governments
to justify slum clearance and forced evictions.
2.2.4 The Community Led Infrastructure Finance
Facility (CLIFF), financed through Cities Alliance and coordinated
by Homeless International of which DPU is a founding member, has
demonstrated how successful community-driven processes in slum
upgrading can be when the right kind of capital and technical
support is provided. DFID has been the lead donor for CLIFF and
will hopefully continue to support its expansion into other countries.
2.2.5 The United Nations Housing Rights
Programme (UNHRP) launched in April 2002 as a joint initiative
by UN-HABITAT and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner
for Human Rights (OHCHR), is a positive initiative for secure
tenure which goes beyond the narrow concept of property rights,
and could be strengthened with donor support.
2.2.6 The newly launched Slum Upgrading
Facility (SUF) is an innovative programme for the development
and support to Local Finance Facilities for slum and settlement
upgrading. DFID has been a major funder and supporter of SUF,
and the facilities that it has created will continue to need additional
capitalisation and support in the future if the model is to spread
more widely.
2.3 Future challenges for urbanisation and
poverty
2.3.1 The DPU would like to highlight three
critical challenges that are particularly relevant for urbanization
and poverty, and that we have encountered in our recent work.
These are: hunger and the urban food crisis; disasters caused
by climate hazard; and forced and market-driven evictions.
2.3.2 Hunger and urban food crisis:
Planning currently continues "as if" energy and finance
are plentiful and the effect of emissions can be neglected, while
city marketing focuses on attracting the finance sector and tourism,
on the assumption that a trickle-down effect will improve conditions
for the poor. All these assumptions must now be called into question,
and policy must face up to fundamentally different realities in
the coming period. The urban poor are particularly vulnerable
to such uncertainties: as the sustainable livelihoods methodology
shows, their livelihoods hover close to a tipping point where
their networks may collapse and be difficult to reconstitute.
Worrying trends include a growing insecurity in the provision
of water to the urban poor and rising food prices. Reasons for
the latter include a shift of speculative investment from property
to the food market in the current economic crisis, and the increase
of biofuel plantations and the new tendencies for wealthier countries
pre-emptively to buy up large tracts of food producing land, for
example in Africa. This suggests that a major food security crisis
is in the offing, but urban strategies continue as if unaware
of it, even though it would have a devastating effect on the poor,
given their endemic problem of lack of entitlements and their
precarious livelihoods.
2.3.3 Disasters caused by climate hazards:
The ecology is now entering a period of increasingly unpredictable
and extreme events, the ill-effects of which will tend to be concentrated
disproportionally in poorer urban districts with the least adequate
provision for protective infrastructure and services. The principal
driver of increasing loss of life as well as social and economic
vulnerability is poverty (limiting individual, household and community
investments) and exclusion (limiting public investments and services).
Climate change not only exacerbates existing risks but also reveals
new hidden vulnerabilities as more urban and peri-urban locations
are exposed to more intense floods and storms.
2.3.4 Forced and market driven evictions:
There is evidence that over the last three years forced evictions
in cities and urban areas have increased dramatically in frequency,
number, level of violence and often in scale, involving hundreds
of thousands and even millions of people in at least 60 countries.[88]
They are gradually becoming an insidious common practice in
lieu of progressive long-term urban planning and inclusive
social policies. Each year they affect the lives of millions of
children, women, men and the elderly, most of them poor, destroying
homes, livelihoods, social networks and political capital. They
also jeopardise the attainment of the Millennium Development Goals.
At the current pace, 60 to 70 million people will have
been evicted between 2000 and 2020, a dramatic number when
compared with the Target 11 objective of improving the living
and housing conditions of 100 million slum dwellers by the
year 2020. This is a central challenge for our urban future.[89]
Despite the devastating effects of forced evictions, local initiatives
taken at various levels and by different actors do indicate that
solutions are possible and that evictions not only must but can
be averted and addressed in a suitable way to realise Human, Land
and Housing Rights.
3. RECOMMENDATIONS
3.1 Policy recommendations for DFID
3.1.1 Urban issues need to be mainstreamed
and made more visible in the organization. At the same time, there
is a need for a specific "centre" within DFID where
resources and knowledge can be brought together, in order to catalyze
changes, mainstream urban activities, liaise with UK constituencies,
sectors, geographic regions and international agencies actively
involved in urban related issues and finance aid projects addressing
the challenges of urbanization and poverty. An effective way to
address these challenges therefore is to establish an urban entity
at a high decision making level and with a significant level of
resources. Even if the format of this entity draws on lessons
from past experience at DFID, it does not mean a "re-opening"
of the previous institutional format.
3.1.2 An urban development policy is urgently
needed. It could be a two-pronged policy to support both central
and local governments. With respect to the latter, cities and
local governments are a crucial and emerging actor to address
the challenges of poverty and urbanization. There is a need to
strengthen DFID's engagement with local government. Localizing
aid through strong support to local governments is important,
not only to support community led initiatives or to improve the
access to basic services for the poor, but more importantly to
strengthen democratic governance and the construction of well
planned, rights based cities, which are respectful of citizens'
diversities.
3.1.3 Support to central governments
is important (i) to promote a decentralization process from
central to local and regional/provincial governments, and (ii)
to redistribute wealth between rich and poor cities and regions.
In doing this, the difficulties for poor cities associated with
municipalisation of education, health and housing need
to be addressed. The support to decentralization of power, based
on the principle of subsidiarity should not necessarily mean the
full transfer and de-concentration of education, health or housing
responsibilities from the central to the local level.
3.1.4 Support to local governments and
to the international organizations networking local governments
is important to (i) strengthen institutional capacities to address
the challenges resulting from a growing decentralization that
brings a new set of responsibilities; (ii) finance programmes
and projects, primarily to address the issues mentioned previously;
(iii) support the municipal programmes and facilities that are
in turn fostering community-driven initiatives; (iv) support initiatives
to develop a unified and organized voice through provincial, national
and regional networks or associations of cities and local governments,
such as UCLG-Africa, who could be key DFID partners; and (vi)
provide matching resources with UK cities that are engaging in
aid projects in priority fields to be determined in a newly drafted
DFID Urban Policy.
3.1.5 Just as it did in the 1980s and 1990s,
DFID should once again play a leading and progressive role in
the global urban agenda and arenas of debate. This could be achieved
through various channels and definition of priorities: (i) being
pro-active with respect to the United Cities and Local Governments,
the recently established political and technical voice of cities
and governments in the world; (ii) increasing its active engagement,
primarily with UN HABITAT Programme, and with other specialized
organizations in the UN system on specific issues such as the
Advisory Group on Forced Evictions, or Urban and Municipal programmes;
and (iii) establishing a more permanent dialogue with and support
to the Development Dialogue Committee of the OECD
3.2 A proposed research and development agenda
for DFID
3.2.1 To document the innovations from local
governments, local communities and local alliances of actors in
successfully addressing unemployment, disasters, evictions, hunger,
discrimination and other dimensions of poverty. This experience
should be analysed in order to deepen our understanding of how
these innovations can be scaled up or down as cities implement
partial or full responses to current challenges. They should also
explore the opportunities of initiatives building collective rights,
which go beyond participation of individuals or households. Current
documentation efforts are weak and inadequate relative to the
scale and wealth of the responses which are constantly being created
locally, and a more systematic documentation would be an important
step towards the production of knowledge and effective methods
of intervention. A permanent observation system should be put
into place and some of the existing urban observatories should
be supported.
3.2.2 Managing urban growth: The
urbanization of poverty in developing countries is an indication
of the inability of governments to manage urban growth. To effectively
address this, it is necessary to strengthen poor households' assets
while ensuring pro-poor economic growth at the city level. More
applied research at city level is necessary to explore the linkages
between strategies promoting pro-poor economic growth, the role
of local governments in guiding growth and the livelihoods of
poor women and men.
3.2.3 Understanding the changing nature
of slums, informal settlements, inner cities poor neighbourhoods,
in all their diversity. This understanding is still limited and
partial. Changes are continuous and occur at an extremely rapid
pace, reflecting an extraordinary capacity of poor women and men
and their organizations to find ways to survive in extremely difficult
environments. Understanding these changes is necessary to tailor
pro-poor policies to the specific realities of urban dwellers.
For instance, poverty in a decaying inner city area might primarily
affect old people living alone whereas in a recently formed slum
youth employment might be the priority.
3.2.4 Understanding the urban planning
necessary to mitigate risks of disasters in the context of climate
change. In managing such risks, there is a significant overlap
between disaster risk reduction (DRR) and climate change adaptation,
though these agendas have evolved independently until now. DRR
can deal with current climate variability and be the first line
of defence against climate change, being therefore an essential
part of adaptation. Conversely, for DRR to be successful, it needs
to take account of the shifting risks associated with climate
change and ensure that measures do not increase vulnerability
to climate change in the medium to long-term. Embryonic work on
the integration of urban planning, DRR and climate change adaptation
at urban level needs to be strengthened. More understanding is
necessary of how to manage risks and uncertainties for all shocks
and stresses in a coherent locally driven framework in which adaptation
measures are rooted in the particulars of each local economic,
social, political and ecological context. In response to these
challenges, the key must be resilience. Because the crisis is
complex, the best form of resilience is diversity. Aid policies,
focusing on building a diverse range of strategies, should recognise
that, inherently, the urban poor have a capacity for finding solutions,
and for self-management. This will be particularly important in
the area of resource management. Proven methodologies such as
participatory budgeting municipal levels should be emphasised.
3.2.5 Understanding the causes and the
mechanisms of forced evictions. Evidence from the field indicates
that the causes of forced evictions in urban areas are often multiple
and are changing through time. Insufficient attention has been
paid to market driven processes that fuel massive and often ruthless
evictions. The same holds true, but to a lesser extent, for gentrification
processes that affect primarily historic and heritage cities and
neighbourhoods, and for the social and economic cost of sometime
consensual relocation faced by the urban poor after eviction..
An understanding of the causes and of the underlying mechanisms
is essential to design preventive approaches and address the roots
of the problem.
3.3 City to city decentralized cooperation
3.3.1 More can be done to strengthen the
UK involvement in City to city cooperation, which can make
a valuable contribution to the challenges mentioned in the present
report. Over the last 20 years, decentralized cooperation
has grown into a major trend of aid and yet few UK cities have
a portfolio of cooperation projects or are actively engaged in
this form of aid. A large number of cities, for instance in Spain
or Sweden are earmarking 0.7% to 1% of their budget for aid and
solidarity, thereby fulfilling international community guidelines.
The experience of UK cities in issues such as multicultural management
of cities, participatory democracy or allotment gardens and peri-urban
agriculture could bring a great deal to potential partner cities
in the South.
3.3.2 Cities that would engage in decentralization
cooperation could get matching resources from DFID and/or other
relevant government departments. The mechanisms and procedures
of operation could draw from successful experiences from European
cities and countries.
UK cities could also increase their participation
in international initiatives such as the Forum of Local Authorities
for Social Inclusion
87 The case for a focus on urban development was clearly
made in the DFID Strategy Paper on "Meeting the Challenge
of Poverty in Urban Areas", one of 8 papers sub-titled
"Strategies for Achieving the International Development Targets",
DFID, 2001. The acknowledgements noted the "Substantive contributions
have been made by a Drafting Group led by the Development Planning
Unit (DPU), University College London". Back
88
Estimate by the Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE)
and the International Alliance of Inhabitants (IAI), 2007. Back
89
The DPU's Prof Yves Cabannes is currently the Chair of the UN
Advisory Group on Forced Evictions, established in 2004 by
UN HABITAT. Recent evidence of forced evictions wordwide is reported
in the Executive AGFE Report, 2007. Back
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