Last week the United Nations took to the streets of Rio, New York, Cairo and Nairobi to announce the arrival of the ”new urban revolution”. The explosive growth of world cities in the past few decades, it said, has left more than 900-million people in slums, with the probability that twice as many more will live in unsanitary, overcrowded, unofficial settlements within 30 years.
There are now more than 550-million slum dwellers in Asia; 187-million in Africa; 128-million in Latin America and the Caribbean; and another 54-million in the world’s 30 richest countries. The global urban population, according to the authors of a UN-Habitat report, increased 36% in the 1990s alone. They expect almost all future population growth to occur in cities of one million to five million people.
No one could accuse UN-Habitat — the youngest of all the UN organisations — of over-egging its case. The 300-page report is the most comprehensive study yet into the global urban condition, drawing on the combined research of academics and consultants from more than 100 countries, and examining in depth the record of 27 cities.
But just as interesting as the phenomena they describe is the analysis of why there is now so much urban poverty, increasing inequality and poor public services.
The authors point the finger at local authorities for not keeping up with the problems posed by rapid urbanisation. They argue, too, that governments have been marked by corruption and incompetence, but that the greatest underlying reason for the massive growth in slums has been laissez-faire globalisation. By this they mean the tearing down of trade barriers, the liberalisation and privatisation of national economies, the structural adjustment programmes imposed on indebted countries by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the lowering of tariffs promoted by the World Trade Organisation.
Globalisation, say the authors, has partly caused and greatly exacerbated the perilous social and physical condition of slum dwellers. While the liberalisation of all economies may have offered opportunities for a few entrepreneurs and for cities to act in their own right, the report says that the new insecurities that globalisation has created are legion, with barely any benefits going to the poor.
In the past decade — the period of the greatest wealth creation in history, and the largest growth in cities ever recorded — the rich have gained and the poor have lost. Some developing countries would have done better to stay out of the globalisation process altogether if they had the interests of their own people in mind.
The authors argue that the few benefits going to the slum dwellers have been far outweighed by the disadvantages. They’ve lost jobs, seen their land grabbed by the rich, paid more for privatised basic services, their social cohesion had been damaged and none of the wealth accumulated by the few had ”trickled down”.
In cities like Dhaka in Bangladesh the slum dwellers range from established communities to thousands of newcomers living in squatter settlements, set up on waste ground or on rubbish dumps. All may be moved on by the city authorities or private sector landlords. Tens of thousands of people moved when trade protection barriers were pulled down, making cotton or rice growing unprofitable. Many more have been displaced by the global shrimp industry that has taken over vast tracts of former rice land.
In South Korea the cities have been flooded since world trade rules allowed cheap, subsidised rice and other food imports to pour into the market from the United States. Fishermen in Senegal, Mexico and Ghana have left the countryside because the global fishing fleets have not only denuded catches, but made it impossible for small operators to compete with large foreign fleets. Equally, the young of Burkina Faso and Mali have left for cities throughout West Africa in hope of work, rather than try to scrape a living off marginal land. But, the report notes, it is seldom the process of globalisation alone that makes people leave the land, but often the expectation of work and fulfilment, fuelled by global TV networks and the media.
The authors take off the gloves and, in a very un-UN way, share the passionate analysis of Oxfam, Christian Aid and even the protesters at Seattle and Cancun. Dominant ”neo-liberal” economic doctrines, they argue, have demanded an increase in inequality, including the reduction of all government welfare spending, the privatisation of everything that the state controlled, the reform of regulation and the removal of planning restrictions.
The jury is still out on the waves of privatisations that have followed the IMF demands, but the authors take on the World Bank and governments like Britain that have consistently encouraged them. ”Privatisation is a way of shaking up moribund organisations and improving efficiency but … the conduct of privatisation has been done in a great hurry and the result [in many cases] has been outright theft,” says the report.
So is it possible to have cities free from slums? The authors believe yes, but only if countries are given help to prevent their cities being swamped by congestion, environmental degradation and social unrest. The onus will be on cities, and particularly the slum dwellers, to come up with solutions — just as the very poor of London, Manchester and Paris did in the wake of the industrial revolution.
But, they note, it took 150 years to rid Europe of the majority of its slums, something that the poor of the world will not accept. — Â