perspective
Caren Levy
Urbanisation without
social justice is not
sustainable
Currently in Mumbai, India, 56% of the urban
population live in informal settlements without
secure tenure, with poor access to water and
sanitation as well as other basic services. Despite
some variation, this situation of inequality is the
reality of large proportions of urban residents in the
mega cities and fast growing medium sized cities
of the global South. The scale of the poverty and
inequality that this represents has to be understood
against the backdrop of the scale of urbanisation,
“…arguably the most complex and important
socio-economic phenomenon of the 20th century”
(Allen and You, 2002:3). The impact of this trend
reached a key moment in 2008, when the world’s
urban population exceeded the global rural
population for the first time.
distribution justly arrived at…” in his landmark contribution in
the 1970s captures the essence. Addressing social justice is not only
concerned with changing patterns of inequality but also the
institutional structures that produce them. Similarly in her seminal
contribution in the early 1990s, Iris Marion Young also argues for
a notion of social justice that is wider than distribution. While
recognising the importance of the distribution of material goods,
particularly in the context of poverty, she also argues for an
institutional dimension, which incorporates a concern for political
processes and participation in the decision making which produce
and reproduce these material relations.
In the contemporary global context, a concern for material
inequalities so evidently captured in the challenge of the ‘brown’
agenda, and the political debates and decisions in the institutional
processes permeating both the ‘brown’ and ‘green’ agendas, need
to be taken a step further. The impact of neo-liberal thinking,
and its translation into structural adjustment policies, promoted
internationally by the International Monetary Fund, the
World Bank and ultimately in various forms by most multi- and
bi-lateral aid organisations, has changed the organisational
landscape in most countries.
The emergence of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)
points to the international recognition that these kind of disparities
are not acceptable, whatever the debates about the formulation,
measurement and ultimate impact of the MDGs. Indeed, at least
in the terms of the UN Millennium Declaration, 2000, the origins
of the MDGs, and the human rights conventions of the UN, these
disparities reflect a denial of socio-economic and political rights.
As the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights, 2008 is also a significant year for a rights-based
focus on these disparities.
In the sustainability debates, these disparities reflect the rights and
demands in environmental terms of the so-called ‘brown’ agenda.
To-date this agenda has been the focus of a range of practitioners,
activists and academics addressing the planning and governance
challenges of urban development. They include concerns for unequal
access to suitable land, poor access to services like water and
sanitation, waste disposal and the unequal incidence of pollution.
By contrast, the so-called ‘green’ agenda has primarily been the remit
of environmentalists and ecologists concerned with global warming,
bio-diversity and other long term issues affecting the ecological
sustainability of the earth and of future generations. The relationship
between the ‘brown’ agenda and the ‘green’ agenda finds its primary
expression in the global environmental impacts of the unequal
processes of consumption and production in different parts of the
world. The current challenges of climate change have linked these
agendas, often dramatically in images of flooding and high levels of
pollution in urban areas in countries like Bangladesh and Mexico.
La Paz, Bolivia
The inequalities reflected at the core of the ‘brown’ agenda and its
intersection with the ‘green’ agenda make social justice a key principle
in any notion of sustainable urbanisation. How can social justice be
defined and made operational in policy making and planning in the
context of sustainable urbanisation? David Harvey’s phrase “…a just
Taken from the Summer 2009 edition of ‘palette’, UCL’s journal of sustainable cities
www.ucl.ac.uk/sustainable-cities
“Identifying the room for manoeuvre through the
powerful interests of the state, international agencies
and the private sector, while maintaining authentic
connection to the aspirations and needs of poor women,
men, girls and boys in all their diversity, remains the
foremost challenge of any progressive development
agenda, locally and internationally”
The delivery of material goods like housing, transportation, water
and sanitation, and other services, once the remit of the state, now
involves private sector and civil society actors in different roles and
relationships. This poses a range of challenges with which citizens and
governments alike are currently struggling.
These actors come into governance relations in cities on the basis of
very different operational principles. Despite the impact of structural
adjustment in the form of privatisation of ‘public’ services,
deregulation and the reduction of the state, most governments have
maintained, often in the face of fierce political debate, a redistributive
principle of operation. This is driven ultimately by the need to
maintain stability. A social justice prism leads us to question in whose
interests this redistribution takes place, but the redistributive principle
of state intervention, with all its imperfections, remains. Clearly the
private sector enters the governance arena pursuing profit
maximisation, while organised civil society operates on the principle
of mutuality or reciprocity. Building a consensus among these actors,
for example, around the delivery of water and sanitation for the urban
poor in cities of the global South, is an ongoing political challenge.
Not only are the principles of operation of these actors different, but
their relationship to the arena of governance is different, particularly
around notions of political accountability. Taking up the example of
water again, the privatisation of water provision has turned ‘citizens’
into ‘clients’, making ability to pay rather than need the basic criteria
for service provision. For poor urban residents of Dar Es Salaam,
Manila, La Paz and other cities of the global South, the recognition of
the rights of poor urban women and men is an ongoing struggle in
the first place. The shift to private sector provision of water has
often resulted in disconnection from formal water systems.
Recourse to accountable decision making structures for these urban
citizens is often tenuous or non-existent, made more complex by the
multi-national character of most water companies. For poor urban
citizens this has left despair, innovative but often ‘illegal’ alternatives,
and/or protest in different forms as the only possible response.
Reacting to the previous failure of the state to provide secure tenure,
housing and basic service, and the current exclusion of many residents
from private sector provision of services, organised civil society has
taken up the challenge in different ways. While some activist groups
have remained in the realm of protest and the demand for the
recognition of the rights of the poor, other civil society organisations
have taken on the delivery of material goods. The latter are built on
community processes but, given the challenge of the scale of urban
poverty, necessarily involve constructive engagement with the local
and/or central state. For example, in Mumbai, India, the Alliance is a
civil society coalition lobbying, negotiating and working with local
and national state structures to deliver housing, water and sanitation
to the poor. These are not always harmonious and easy relations, and
are constantly under review by civil society organisations that are
concerned with co-option and control by interests outside those of
the poor constituencies they represent. The blanket criticism of these
groups by authors like Davis (2007) as part of the ‘soft imperialism’ of
the World Bank and other leading organisations implementing the
neo-liberal agenda, needs closer scrutiny.
Taken from the Summer 2009 edition of ‘palette’, UCL’s journal of sustainable cities
www.ucl.ac.uk/sustainable-cities
Identifying the room for manoeuvre through the powerful interests of
the state, international agencies and the private sector, while
maintaining authentic connection to the aspirations and needs of
poor women, men, girls and boys in all their diversity, remains the
foremost challenge of any progressive development agenda, locally
and internationally. The policy and planning challenges this creates
for promoting social justice in sustainable urbanisation are
formidable. Haughton (1999) also reminds us that in linking the
discussions of justice and sustainability, we are not only addressing
questions of equal access to decision making structures and their
expression in spatial and geographic distribution of material goods in
the current generation. We are also concerned with intergenerational
equality in these relations, so that, in the sentiments of Brundtland,
future generations are not compromised by the development
demands of the current generation.
Academia has an important role to play in this multiple and
formidable challenge. In the sciences, the social sciences and
the arts, the formation of a next generation that is more engaged
with sustainability in the everyday practices of their lives is crucial.
The interaction of academia with the ‘applied’ dimensions of these
challenges is similarly critical. In partnership with government and
civil society organisations, learning from innovatory experience,
advancing knowledge and its application in the interests of all,
is a key basis for the hope of a sustainable urbanisation which has
social justice at its core.
References
Allen, A. and You, N. (2002) ‘Sustainable Urbanisation:
Bridging the Green and Brown Agenda’, UN-HABITAT/DFID/DPU
Davis, M. (2007) ‘Planet of Slums’, London & New York: Verso
Harvey, D. (1973) ‘Social Justice and the City’, London: Edward Arnold
Haughton, G. (1999) ‘Environmental Justice and the Sustainable City’
in D.Satterthwaite (ed) ‘Sustainable Cities’, London: Earthscan
Young, I.M. (1990) ‘Justice and the Politics of Difference’,
Princeton: Princeton University Press
Profile Caren Levy
Caren is a development planner specialising in
planning methodology, gender policy and planning,
environmental policy, and training and organisational
development, and previously was a consultant
working in transport planning, environmental policy
and research into communities. She delivers training
and advisory services in gender policy and planning
both in London and abroad for international
organisations, including ODA, SIDA, NORAD, IMO,
EU and IBIS, and in-country, including Sri Lanka,
Egypt, Namibia, Mozambique, Peru and Brazil.
Contact
Caren Levy
Director
UCL Development Planning Unit
Course Co-Director
UCL MSc Urban Development Planning
+44 (0)20 7679 1111
c.levy@ucl.ac.uk