Sustainable cities of the South: an introduction

David Westendorff

This Development in Practice Reader builds upon the May 2001 double issue of Development in Practice, which comprised approximately half of the papers initially prepared for presentation at the European Science Foundation's annual N-AERUS Workshop, held on 3–5 May 2000 in Geneva. Its title, 'Cities of the South: Sustainable for Whom?', reflects concern within the N-AERUS and the host institutions – UNRISD and IREC-EPFL – that urban development processes in many cities of the North and South are being guided by superficial or misleading conceptions of sustainable development in the urban context. As will be seen in the contributions to this Reader, the aims of different groups proposing strategies for the sustainable development of cities tend to skew their arguments about what this means and how to achieve it. Environmentalists who see the pollution-free city as the only sustainable one may be willing to sacrifice the only affordable form of mass transport for poor people, or dirty low-tech jobs that provide them their meagre living. Those pursuing the globally competitive city may succeed in attracting foreign and domestic investments that boost economic growth and productivity, but which concentrate the benefits of growth very narrowly, leaving an increasingly large majority to live in penury at the foot of glass skyscrapers. Beleaguered bureaucrats attempting to improve or extend public infrastructure may adopt financing mechanisms that weaken poorer groups' capacity to benefit from the newly installed infrastructure, even though they bear a disproportionate share of the costs of paying for it. International organisations seeking to promote more effective governance of cities may encourage decentralisation processes that fragment responsibility in the absence of legal, administrative, and institutional frameworks to organise and finance governmental responsibilities at the local level. Such a vacuum may be filled by local bosses or other power brokers who have little interest in the common good. In different ways, our various contributors focus on these contradictions.

The contributions are grouped into four partially overlapping categories. The first group comments on different aspects of the international challenges to achieving sustainable cities. In the second group, researcher-practitioners from Africa, Asia, and Latin America offer their understanding of the principles that would have to be followed in order to achieve sustainable development in their cities, and the current set of constraints against doing so. These chapters necessarily touch on the contested roles of international agencies and bilateral donors in shaping national strategies for urban sustainable development. The next five contributions discuss issues of housing and land-use management in cities of developing countries. The next group, comprising two contributions, provides updates on new information technologies that may play important roles in planning for sustainable development, whether in cities, their regions, or countries. This collection ends with a salutary reminder from Hélène Rivière d'Arc that planners' solutions to the problems of poor people have long been formed by a technocratic vision and expressed in a technocratic language. These rarely reflect the language or the approaches to the problems the marginalised groups themselves elect to use. The misapprehension of the meaning and role of 'community' remains a crucial 'dis-connect' for many planners and urban officials.

In the first of the two papers on the international context for urban sustainable development, Adriana Allen chronicles the impact of the increasing internationalisation of Argentina's fishing industry on the city of Mar del Plata. This process included the transition from small-scale producers catering for local markets to larger highly capitalised international fishing enterprises producing for export markets. As neo-liberal policies of deregulation pushed catches to unsustainable levels in the 1990s, Mar del Plata's native fishing and canning industries became progressively sidelined by foreign competitors operating in Argentinian waters. Over time, Mar del Plata's unions could provide less and less protection to workers, enterprises cut back on investments in plant and equipment, and the city's tax revenues began to fall, affecting its ability to provide infrastructure and enforce environmental standards in the port area, etc.. Today, the prospects for sustaining decent livelihoods and living conditions for Mar del Plata's residents are as uncertain as the fate of the fish from which it has drawn its sustenance for decades. In the second of these papers, Amitabh Kundu reviews the recent experience of a number of large Indian cities in financing infrastructure through domestic and international capital markets since the imposition of structural adjustment policies in the early 1990s. One...