HABITAT II and the challenge of the urban environment: bringing together the two definitions of habitat

Michael Cohen

Posing the question

As the final global United Nations conference of the twentieth century, the HABITAT I1 conference scheduled for June 1996 in Istanbul, Turkey, faces challenges of both relevance and substance. In a decade of increasingly frequent global meetings bringing together national governments and interested parties to debate important global and national issues, the con- venors of the last confer- ence must demonstrate to the international public and the UN General Assembly itself that the enormous cost and effort associated with such a gathering is justified. Such a justification is needed to avoid the com- monly-heard criticism that the international com- munity talks about prob- lems but does not mobilize the resources to solve them. HABITAT 11, therefore, must demonstrate that it will be relevant to the solutic lems at hand.

mandated to examine the world’s progress on the problems of human settlements since the first conference in Vancouver in June 1976. The twin themes of the second event: ‘Shelter for All’ and ‘Sustainable Development in an Urbanizing World’, as defined by the Preparatory Commit- tee were intended to be sufficiently broad as to encompass the major trends and problems facing human settlements in all countries, including demographic pressures. the need for shelter.

Michael A. Cohen is Senior Adviser to the Vice-president, Environmentally Sustainable Development, The World Bank, Washington, D.C. 20433, USA. Until September 1994 he was Chief of the Urban Development Division, with responsibilities for policy, research, technical assistance, aid co-ordination, and project and sector work. He is the principal author of The Urban Policy and Economic Development, A n Agenda for fhe 1990s, and Learning by Doing: World Bank Lending for Urban Develop- ment. 19724982.

infrastructure, and services, governance, economic base, social context, the needs of particularly disadvantaged groups, disaster mitigation, and the environment.

While both the pre- paratory process and the conference itself can focus global, national, and local attention on this laundry list of problems, it is certainly beyond the substantive scope and resources of this second effort at global consciousness-raising to

of urgent prob- ‘respond’ constructively to such a list. Directing attention to the ‘best practice’ cases in which

To be relevant, HABITAT I1 must provide substantive responses to these problems. This second challenge is particularly difficult given the myriad global and often contradictory dis- cussions and national and local efforts which are underway to address the problems of ‘habitat’ as understood by the conference convenors. As the second United Nations Conference on Human Settlements, HABITAT I1 has been officially

creative and sustainable solutions have been put in place will be an important contribution. But any expectation that this process will discover a whole new set of solutions to difficult societal problems is unrealistic. Indeed, the presumption that a single ‘solution’ might exist for any given problem is also misplaced, because all of the problems on the HABITAT I1 agenda are con- textually based and therefore highly dependent

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on locally developed solutions if they are to be sustainable.

With this ‘local imperative’ in mind, what is then the ‘substantive challenge’ for HABI- TAT II? How can it make a contribution and justify its expense if the local dimension to problems and their solutions precludes global remedies? I believe the answer lies in focusing on ‘the challenge of the urban environment’, an issue which has hitherto been given relatively low priority in the broader ‘green environmental debate’ of the past twenty years and which threatens all of the other objectives of urban policy likely to be discussed at the conference.

In simple terms, the HABITAT I1 process must bring together two definitions of the word ‘habitat’: the first, ‘habitat’ as human settlement (the 1976 Vancouver definition), and the second, ‘habitat’ as ecosystem (the 1992 Rio definition). The perception of ‘habitat’ prob- lems, the language and discourse to describe them, and the processes of thought and action to address them must integrate these two dimen- sions: the natural and human, and the physical and social. This idea is not simply a rhetorical exhortation, but rather is based on the over- stated but not wildly incorrect perception that Vancouver focused on settlements without nature and that Rio examined nature without people.

The Vancouver context and its impoverished legacy

In the early 1970s and the years immediately leading to the Vancouver meeting, the economic and social prospects of the world appeared to many to be relatively stable and reasonably prosperous. The political and military assump- tions of the Cold War were not unlike the pre- Columbian notions of the earth as flat. The world was politically divided, wars such as Viet- nam might be fought, but the fundamental divisions between East and West were accepted as being of long, if not indefinite, duration and as such were reflected in the organizational arrangements of the United Nations. The poli- tico-economic challenge posed by the two blocs was whether one (or both) would succeed in continuing to grow, to provide prosperity for its population, and therefore avoid being ‘buried’ in the politico-economic competition threatened

by Nikita Khruschev a generation earlier. These political imperatives justified huge military bud- gets which dwarfed other categories of public expenditure. Their perceived compelling urgency obviated any discussion of their longer- term, inter-generational fiscal and economic impacts, much less their social or environmental consequences. Nuclear weapons, nuclear energy, industrial growth, development of chemical and biological warfare, and official relative neglect of their opportunity costs were the critical elements of the dominant ‘paradigm’ of the 1970s. If Vietnam and other ‘wars of national liberation’ had taken place as reminders of national and local political aspirations in the ‘South’, they were not regarded as central to the major global political drama at hand. Rather they were, to use a military term, ‘theatres of engagement’.

What were the implications of these forces for a global conference on human settlements to be held in pristine, peaceful British Columbia, Canada, at the end of the spring of 1976?

First, it would have been an amusing exag- geration for anyone to argue at the time that the discussions at Vancouver were likely to have important consequences for the world at large. Indeed, the assembly of housing and planning ministers, some mayors, and many architects and planners were hardly a threat to the estab- lished order, in any country.

Secondly, this group had defined them- selves in such narrow terms, as the guardians of ‘the home of man’, to use Lady Barbara Ward’s (1976) term, that their assertion that all societies needed to improve that home seemed relatively unthreatening and probably banal.

Thirdly, their moral imperative, to improve the living conditions of the urban poor, could in part be addressed by physical solutions, by better architectural designs for low-cost housing and appropriate technology for water supply and sanitation, options which were neither con- troversial nor significant for the public at large. The world hardly noticed when the prize in the design competition for low-cost housing was awarded to a design for housing in the Tondo Foreshore slum area in Manila in the Philip- pines.

The fourth preoccupation of the conference was the exhortation that the concern with ‘human settlements’ be translated into govern-

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mental organization, specifically within a national ministry of spatial planning or urban development (Renaud, 1981). This relatively harmless, although somewhat expensive initiat- ive for some countries, proved to be one of the few enduring legacies of the Vancouver discussions.

It is noteworthy that Vancouver did not impart a sense of urgency to world leaders that the process of urbanization might prove to be less ephemeral and more enduring than the Cold War. The transformation of both indus- trialized and developing societies from rural to urban, with enormous demographic shifts and consequent public and private investments in the welfare and productivity of those popu- lations, was not perceived as a phenomenon having political consequences of great signifi- cance. Nor did the growing disparities in income and opportunity between rich and poor within and between countries appear to be priority issues for leaders and alliances in the bi-polar world. Government delegations brought glossy books showing their accomplishments in build- ing ‘low-cost’ housing for the poor and in dem- onstrating their mastery of urban problems. Even if the non-official attendees at the meeting demonstrated alternative viewpoints at the Forum, a swampy site miles from the Confer- ence Hall, there was little compulsion to feel that these informal discussions could or should have any effect on the official meeting itself.

When the Group of 77 broke onto the world stage after Vancouver and North-South differences began to challenge East-West relations, it was as if Vancouver had never occurred. Vancouver had notprovided a compel- ling point of reference for public policy beyond perhaps for the housing and urban development specialists. (Yet even for this group, it is surpris- ing how rarely one finds references to Van- couver in urban literature since 1976.) It had not influenced the coming development debates on trade, poverty, basic needs, gender, and notably, environment.

The inter-sessional decades

In contrast to the relative stability and com- placency of 1976, the following two decades have been marked by cataclysmic change. Not

only did the bi-polar world of East-West tension disappear, with only limited violence and loss of life, but it was replaced by four new sources of tension which appear threatening at a global level:

(1) A new global appreciation of environ- mental threat has emerged which, at the political level, has resulted in global treaties and conven- tions to address shared problems. If such shared perceptions and framework were possible before Vancouver, they had only been possible through the lens of East-West relations and competition.

(2) In the absence of a self-regulating framework for resolution of regional conflicts, numerous regional conflicts such as those in Bosnia, Chechnya, Rwanda, or Iraq-Kuwait erupted, with dangerous regional, if not global, military implications.

(3) The process of globalization of econ- omic markets and trade has created new patterns of economic competition and social dependency whose impacts are only now being discerned, for example, Mexico’s growing dependency on the United States.

(4) There is growing national and local resistance to the globalization process and the reassertion of new patterns of South-North con- flict where former partners, for example, East Asian countries such as Indonesia or Korea, are more likely to identify with the Asian- Pacific Economic Co-operation bloc members, including the United States, Canada, and Mex- ico, rather than the poorer Asian countries of Vietnam or Philippines.

While none of these major shifts appear, at first glance, to have obvious urban under- pinnings, it is nonetheless true that all of them are closely tied to emerging patterns of economic productivity, demographic concentration, and environmental pollution. By the early 1990s, it is broadly agreed that all countries generate more than half of their GDP from urban-based economic activities. In the industrialized world, in most of Latin America, and increasingly in East Asia, this figure is closer to 75 per cent. Indeed, more than 75 per cent of future GDP growth is likely to come from urban areas (Cohen, 1991). This pattern has resulted from three forces: growing productivity in agriculture and widespread rural-urban migration; the replacement of migration by natural increase as the major source of demographic growth in

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The Citroen Park, Paris. Xavier Testelinmapho

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all regions except Africa and South Asia; and growing productivity in urban areas resulting from agglomeration economies and biases in public expenditures and subsidies for the urban population. Paradoxically, increased urban income growth has been accompanied by grow- ing inequities in returns to capital and labour and consequent disparities in urban incomes and social mobility.

The upside of these processes is increased productivity and economic competitiveness in the global economy, with countries such as Malaysia or Indonesia able to reach new levels of prosperity for their populations. Investments in urban infrastructure and human capital have supported urban production and job creation for growing numbers of entrants into the labour force. Countries which have understood these relationships have become competitors, such as Korea, which had the same per capita income as India in 1960. Conversely, countries such as the South Asia giants, which ignored these cru- cial investments have fallen behind. Policies to enhance competitiveness have proved to have important urban foundations such as that found in newfound appreciation of the reliability of infrastructure in Manila or the need to address traffic congestion in Bangkok (Cohen, 1994).

The downside of these economic changes has been deepening inequities and larger num- bers of people left behind in market-led econ- omic growth. The poorly-educated, the un- healthy, and most critically, women and children, have, relative to men, been unable to benefit from the new processes of economic competition and globalization. A new process of marginalization is underway, as categories of people within an ever-interdependent economic world are simply not participants in growing prosperity. Not surprisingly, this process also applies to ethnic and racial minorities and spawns new ethnic tensions and conflict. These new economic patterns generate new forms of social conflict.

Given the different starting points of regions and groups of countries in 1976, it is not surprising that these forces have had quite varied impacts on different countries. In Africa, for example, small increases in productivity have occurred in only a few countries which have been able to adjust their economies to new global trading realities and the need for fiscal

discipline in order to service their external and domestic debt while controlling inflation. Coun- tries such as CBte d’Ivoire, a ‘success story’ in the 1970s, crashed badly as declining prices for coffee and cocoa were coupled with growing inefficiencies and debt resulting from over- spending by the public sector. When an adjust- ment programme was finally put in place, rural- urban terms of trade shifted towards rural areas, leading to rapidly dropping urban real incomes through the end of subsidies for food, water, energy, and housing. These changes clearly impoverished what had been an artificially grow- ing middle class. This process was accompanied by a lack of attention to urban environmental problems which then by themselves became constraints on the productivity of labour and capital. Similar processes occurred in Lagos, Dakar, Nairobi, Kinshasa, and Dar Es Salaam.

Similar patterns occurred in more urbanized regions as well, such as in Latin America where most countries had already passed the 60 per cent share of population living in urban areas. In response to fiscal tightening to meet the debt crisis, the region saw rapidly declining urban incomes in Sfio Paulo, Caracas, Mexico City, or Buenos Aires which resulted from the end of subsidies, changing patterns of demand for labour, and dramatic declines in public and private investment. These patterns were moderated in Colombia where debt service did not totally undermine investment levels. But in Peru, non-adjustment led to rapid inflation, almost no public investment, and finally an urban environmental disaster in the cholera epi- demic in Lima in 1989-90.

Patterns of economic change in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union also had environmental consequences, of two kinds. Because the previous regimes had almost totally ignored the environmental consequences of their economic decisions and activities - with the disastrous results of unimaginably polluted water resources and urban atmosphere - it was not surprising that the slowdown of economic activity caused by the transition to market- based economies actually resulted in improved environmental conditions, for example in Poland as documented by the OECD in 1994, or at least a slowdown in the rate of environmental deterioration. It is important to note that these countries have experienced declining life expect-

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ancies as a result of urban environmental health conditions. This is the only region where this is occurring; it is not happening in Haiti, Ethi- opia, or Bangladesh. Sick people are not pro- ductive. Moreover, their national competi- tiveness in an increasingly globalized economy also diminishes.

In contrast to these three tales of woe - Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe - most of East Asia has managed to achieve high rates of economic growth. This growth is in spite of growing population, con- tinued rapid urbanization, and, unfortunately, significant urban environmental deterioration. The most dramatic case is Bangkok whose traffic congestion now has the environmental conse- quence of air pollution causing loss of I.Q. in the children of the city. Earlier investments in education have created a productive East Asian labour force. But even the productivity of this labour force is reduced by infrastructure bottle- necks and severe environmental conditions. The spread of motorization has choked Bangkok and is rapidly doing the same in Jakarta and Manila. It threatens to reach an unprecedented scale if Chinese cities allow private cars as part of economic liberalization.

In all of these cities - in all regions - there is also a growing urban water crisis. The mar- ginal cost of water is rapidly increasing, as city water authorities are now going greater distances to find and transport drinkable water. Beijing’s current plan is to bring water from sources some 800 miles away from the city. As Mexico City has learned, transporting and pumping water also involves a huge energy cost as well. Declining quality of nearby water resources is also a result of pollution of these acquifers by industrial activity and the lack of residential sanitation systems.

The conclusion of this regional overview is that urban environmental conditions are playing an increasingly important role in the economic prospects of urban areas. The environment must be recognized as a central factor in the ‘urban production function’. It affects the productivity of labour through its impact on health, the availability of water, urban land and air, and the ability to process, distribute, and market the products of investment.

The messages for HABITAT II

The above suggests that environment must be a central feature of the global messages of the HABITAT I1 preparatory process and the conference itself. In conveying to political lead- ers and the public that the economic and social prospects of nations in the twenty-first century will depend on cities, the conference must reassert the centrality of the urban environment. It must refer to the experiences of the respective regions of the world and show that all countries and localities share the challenge of urban environmental management. The response to that challenge must in the first instance be local - with local authorities and populations being aware of the threats at hand and how they need to change patterns of behaviour. It must assemble the evidence to demonstrate that the prospects of cities have depended and will continue to depend on environmental resources. Communities without water are no longer communities - as a recent study of the Mayan civilization demonstrates, or as suggested by the declining numbers of people living in the northern regions of Sahelian African countries.

If people do not recognize their role as members of a highly sensitive and interde- pendent ecosystem, they will discover that the ecosystem and the quality of life will change for the worse, irreversibly. Identifying these thresholds well ahead of time is critical. If these threats do not appear as overwhelming as the nuclear threats of the 1950s and 1960s, this perception is important, because we have seen that threats which have political origins can prove to be reversible - as arms control and reduction has proved actually to reduce the threats to humanity of two decades ago. No such control exists over natural processes at this time. The case of Chernobyl and the many Russian cases of toxic and nuclear waste dump- ing illustrate this problem.

It is therefore imperative that in dramati- cally signalling this threat, HABITAT I1 pro- vides positive examples of local practice and efforts to stop environmental deterioration and actually improve environmental quality. This includes emphasizing local responsibility and education as well as public policy and economic instruments to encourage positive private econ- omic behaviour .

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