Geneva, Palais des Nations - May 3-6, 2000
CITIES OF THE SOUTH:
SUSTAINABLE FOR WHOM?
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ESF/N-AERUS International Workshop Geneva, Palais des Nations - May 3-6, 2000
CITIES OF THE SOUTH:
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Luis Ainstein
Professor of Regional and Metropolitan Planning
Buenos Aires University
The evolutionary patterns of metropolitan settings in the context of underdevelopment constitute in most cases neat examples of lack of sustainability, both social and environmental.
In the current scenario of fast and all-embracing globalization to which also those metropolises are subject, their age-old processes of differentiation and fragmentation -of both a social, economic, environmental and institutional character- deepen themselves and become trascendental.
Among other, the conditions of their institutional organization become crucial as vehicles of the overall determination of the types of planning and control -and the selective lack of them- to which these metropolises become subject.
Deregulation and, mainly, decentralization, are normally presented as the key features associated with the promotion of both social participation and democratization, and, thus, of social -and eventually overall- sustainability. In fact, those traits should be considered, in and for themselves, functional towards social, functional and environmental disintegration.
Instead, the simultaneous implementation of small / local administrative units, taking care of the day-to-day management, prone to participation, and metropolitan-scale governments, responsible of medium-term, thematically integrated planning, should be promoted as means of achieving both genuine social participation and the capacity to master the huge problems characterizing metropolitan agglomerations, particularly, though not exclusively, in conditions of underdevelopment.
The Buenos Aires Metropolitan Agglomerate makes out a significant example to consider with respect to the above mentioned types of conditions, and political and administrative experiences.
With around 12 million inhabitants -the result of a 400 year-long period of development in very much "globalized" conditions -in the diverse patterns which became specific during the different periods of that time span-, its recent evolution, involving the two most recent intercensus periods (1970 / 1991) is particularly worth mentioning.
In demographic terms, although the aggregate increase was of slightly over two and a half million people, or about 30 % of the1970 value, the relative level of implication of the (then existing) twenty local jurisdictions was widely differing: while the 'central city' -Buenos Aires itself- was stable at 3 million (number which didn't change since 1947), some of the peripheral municipalities grew at levels as high as 125 %, mostly through individual housing of lower density levels.
But, very important, in terms of income and access to urban services, the set of seven municipalities which concentrated the poorest levels of behavior -as more than 20%, and up to 32%, of their population bases were implicated in the category of lack of access to basic urban necessities- were those in which demographic growth became maximized. This, consistently, in a worsening framework in which during 1997 the upper 20% of the population (incomewise) had access to not less than 58,2% of total income.
At the same time, the level of regional accesibility through infrastructural resources aimed at the private automobile grew very significantly both in quali and quantitative terms during the last decade, providing much more fluid access to the outer lying and interstitial sectors of the metropolis.
Thus, a 'three-tier' process of spatial segregation of population characterized the mentioned period, and is still underway: as the Buenos Aires core municipality is retaining medium-level social sectors, the lower ones are migrating to the 'second and third peripheral belts', and the higher standing ones still further out, setting in motion a renewed level of urban sprawl of the conurbation, which already implicates more than 4.000 sq.km.
Furthermore, metropolitan Buenos Aires has essentially retained a very high level of spatial concentration of employment in its original central core, which derives in a progressive amplification of the total incidence of commuter travel.
The resulting scenario is one in which both global inefficiency and inequity tend to maximize themselves. A few examples of a diverse character confirm this assertion:
i. fully inappropriate areas for urbanization -including even river overflow beds-, get 'urbanized without urban services', and their inabitants exposed to limitless strains and risks; ii. water acquifers, even though historically plentiful, are under depletion, and polluted, affecting directly (1991) the close to 36% of the total metropolitan population which is not connected neither to water nor sewage mains; iii. private car trips have seen their level of participation grow from around 10,4 % in 1969 to about 37 % during 1997, furthermore dilapidating the transportation potential of the existing railroad and subway networks, and generating enhanced traffic congestion and environmental conflicts.
The presented examples offer clear hints of the prevailing situation, all of which make out the scenario of lack of social and environmental sustainability.
This situation takes place within a very particular -although characteristic- type of institutional framework, consisting in:
To make things worse, the process of administrative decentralization has reached its climax through the policy of subdividing municipal jurisdictions, of which several have already taken place, and more are to come, without any hint of setting up even any sort of real coordination between the growing number of institutional nodes.
The local admistrative sector has experienced during the '80s, a period in which the three most important governments involved in the Area -the Federal and Buenos Aires Province executives, and the then Municipality of the City of Buenos Aires-, were governed by members of one single political party, the setup of a (merely) 'consulting and coordinating' organization. Even in those terms, the said entity was put into (functional) crisis shortly after its inception through two locally well experienced mechanisms: on one side, the 'passive strategy', implemented through the mere lack of establishing functional relationships between existing political and administrative entities and the newly created one; on the other, the 'active strategy', consisting in the creation of a second institutional body with about the same responsibilities, thus blurring any remaining identity that there might have existed, and sterilizing both of them. To this day, the two still exist, but only in nominal terms.
As a fully different experience, one can only admire the functioning conditions, and their consequences, of the two more highly structured metropolitan organizations worldwide, those of Paris -through the Region of Ile-de-France-, and of Tokyo -through the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, as well as some of the (disappeared) characteristics of the Toronto Metropolis.
The former two have become attractive examples of terms in which efficiency, equity, and social and environmental sustainability come to grips with each other, for the profit of their present and future populations.
The mentioned elements point towards recognizing that the field of Metropolitan Administration has become an extremely sensitive field in terms of any possibility of sensible planning to arise in relation with that type of complex entities, of increasing relative significance in less developed areas, conducive to social and environmental sustainability.
Ainstein, Luis (1996) Buenos Aires: a case of deepening social polarization in The Mega-City in Latin America. Edited by Alan Gilbert. United Nations University Press. Tokyo, Japan.
Ainstein, Luis (1997) Urban asymmetries. Inefficiency and inequity in the social conditions of access to sanitation and transportation in the Buenos Aires Urban Agglomerate in Proceedings of the International Colloquium 'Infrastructures, Territoires, Villes et Architecture'. Ecole d'Architecture de Versailles / CNRS. Paris, France. (being published).
N-AERUS: Network-Association of European Researchers on Urbanisation in the South
http://www.naerus.net