NAERUS Annual Conference
Urban Governance, Diversity and Social Action
in Cities of the South
Social Action to Build Equitable and
Sustainable Settlements
Adrian Atkinson
Although not a subject that
interests many people, urbanists, for whom this is their focus of attention, generally
perceive the global urbanisation process as being in its final stages. In the North ‘rural’ has almost lost its
meaning, farming having become largely an industrial process employing few and
erstwhile villages having evolved into chic places for middle-class urbanites
to hang out. Even much of
Even those in the North who should
be taking an interest in the processes and consequences of urbanisation in the
South seem largely to refuse to face the facts.
Many development agencies, rather than recognising the growing
importance and urgent problems associated with urbanisation in the South, have
been abandoning in the most irresponsible way what in the past were in any case
only marginal divisions or foci.
However, there are evident serious problems
and in the medium term clear dangers in what is unfolding by way of spatial
restructuring of social and economic life.
The cultural, social and physical dysfunctionality of the emerging urban
world involving increasing social conflict and insecurity and degraded
environmental conditions are an almost universal accompaniment to the urbanisation
process in the South. Informal settlements
and economies are rapidly increasing in extent, defining the lives of much of
the citizenry who exist on the margins of survival. In the medium-term the sustainability of this
way of organising life must be seriously questioned[1].
Meanwhile, in contrast with the
middle years of the 20th century it is extremely unfashionable today
to think coherently about the future consequences of what is happening or of
what steps might be taken to create urban societies and conditions worthy of common
human dignity and which can be genuinely sustained into the indefinite future. In this postmodern world things just happen
and intellect is restricted to observing from the margins[2], at
best becoming involved in small-scale actions that aim (at least) to ameliorate
the worst conditions of the poor – but avoid looking at the larger picture and thus
from whence the worsening conditions emanate.
The purpose of this paper is to urge
a return to more strategic thinking about the utility and wisdom of what is
happening by way of urbanisation in the South and, indeed by reflection, the forms
of settlement in the North, with a view to reviving coherent thinking about
steering settlement patterns and processes in directions more likely to satisfy
the needs of citizens into the future.
It is thus necessary, to start by sketching the larger picture, looking
at the forms of, and forces driving, urbanisation processes. The paper then moves on to look at the way in
which global processes are not only driving urbanisation in the South but at
the same time disempowering the resulting citizenry. This disempowerment proceeds via the removal of
skills, knowledge and control over local resources expressed in particular
through the undermining of local economies.
Ownership of resources is increasingly concentrated in fewer hands with
a weak sense of social and environmental responsibility. Social control over the use of resources –
via government or any other social organisational mechanisms - is progressively
weakened or abandoned within the framework of liberal policies.
A prerequisite to creating
decision-making processes that can genuinely question and start to counter
these trends is to understand social – class, ethnic etc. – complexity of the
emerging cities and the different aspirations and perspectives that different actors
bring to the formation and functioning of emerging towns and cities. Over the past 10 years there has been genuine
progress in at least experimenting with participatory decision-making in urban
management and the issue becomes: how to
build this into a more coherent and effective system of governance and how to
raise the sense of self-responsibility and the level of action to one that is
able to master strategic decisions and not just the solutions to immediate
pressing problems of survival and thence neighbourhood improvements. The paper ends by looking back over the history
of utopian urban and regional planning to see how this needs to be revised to
make connection into new, bottom-up governance processes where the local and
regional economy, and in this context the management of local resources, is
largely returned to local hands.
Urbanisation
Processes and the Resulting Structures
Until some 50 years ago rural
existence, expressed in a multitude of different cultural forms, defined the
lives of the vast majority of humanity.
Notwithstanding the Rousseauian idea that urban life represents a moral
decline of humanity[3], the idea that ‘urbaneness’
is superior to ‘rurality’ is nevertheless deeply embedded in Occidental – and
indeed in Oriental – culture. The terms ‘politics’
and indeed ‘civilisation’ are each built on respectively the Greek and Latin
terms for ‘city’ and the term ‘idiot’ (and hence Karl Marx’s reference to
‘rural idiocy’) derives from the ancient Greek term for ‘peasant’.
Perhaps this is obvious in so far as
all manner of aspects of status have been embedded in the urban context. Emperors, kings and all manner of power
structures, surrounded by their entourages and administrators, inhabited and
emanated from cities. Religious leaders
and their edifices and those who manufactured goods out the raw materials
obtained from the countryside, together with traders and financiers also
gathered together to build cities.
Wealth and power concentrated in cities attracting those with ambition
or simply seeking a ‘better life’ in the terms of their own cultural universe.
However, there were also important
cultures that did not encourage urbanisation, including the herdsmen of central
A very different perspective sees
cultural evolution as being driven by the increasing employment of energy by
society[5]. From this point of view, urbanisation was
until recent centuries inhibited by the diffuse nature of energy sources and
difficulty of supplying concentrations of human activity. The rapid changes in the configuration of
spatial distribution of populations in the North over the past two centuries
are clearly related to changes in the exploitation of energy sources. Early industrialisation lead to the
accumulation of populations near water power resources and thence, much more
forcefully – epitomised by the UK but also evident later in the 19th century in
Germany and the US – to coal fields as the energy source powering the industrial
revolution and with it urbanisation.
The invention of electricity and the
rapid construction of electricity grids in the 1880s radically changed the
nature of the urbanisation process.
Trams and thence rapid rail systems allowed for a huge increase in the
contiguous area[6] that cities could occupy
and the industries, now relatively footloose, could return to the centres of
political power and the traditional civilising processes. The final development in the industrialised
North happened following the Second World War with the ubiquitous spread of the
car and highway-based transport. This
coincided with the final stages in the industrialisation of agriculture and the
diffusion of much industrial and some major service facilities across the
erstwhile countryside to give tapestries of dense and less dense urban
development over vast areas dependent on vast inputs of (non-renewable) energy
to function.
Jean Gotmann’s major study
‘Megalopolis’ was the first attempt to understand this phenomenon as it was
occurring along the north-east coastal region of the US – subsequently known as
‘Boswash’. But increasingly the phenomenon
was seen to be expressed in metropolitan complexes right across the
This process also took place in
European cities and regions, albeit displaying the more advanced dispersion two
decades after it became evident in the
This is not to say that there is
not, at the same time, a continuing culture of living in cities. Even in the
All of this sounds as if
urbanisation is but an epiphenomenon of inner forces of cultural, social and
economic evolution – or the evolution of the availability of energy - with no
attempt at application of the human intellect concerning what might in practice
be a form of spatial distribution of human settlement and activity that would
better satisfy human needs in a sustainable way. Whilst on the surface this seems almost
overwhelmingly the case, particularly in recent decades, there is nevertheless
enough evidence that, when a society generates the will, cities and their rural
contexts can be and are planned in a conscious way to provide for the
reasonable needs of all citizens. It is
useful at this point to remind ourselves of some good examples[9].
Little is known of Harappan culture
but what is evident in the remains of their cities is that some 4,000 thousands
years ago the need for urban sanitary infrastructure was recognised and cities
built in ways that facilitated their efficient management[10]. It seems the great knowledge of technology and
health we have today was not necessary to perceive of simple ways to obviate
basic urban problems.
The Greek and Roman colonies show
more than a functional attitude to infrastructure. Miletus in Asia Minor, was sacked in 479 BC
and Hippodamus, a citizen of the city - sometimes called the ‘Father of Urban
Planning’ - developed rules which he convinced the Milesans to adopt in the
rebuilding of their city and which were subsequently adopted by a much wider citizenry. These rules governed the overall structure of
the towns with regard to the location of key structures and spaces and then the
general infrastructure serving the residential areas. These rules governed the foundation of over
60 small towns around the
The
Even the 20th Century had
its highlights in terms of thoughtful planning of human settlements that successfully
obviated many of the serious problems that the urbanisation processes today are
facing. True, the British New Towns may
be criticised today for not adequately addressing the issue of excessive use of
energy – and in the end for not succeeding in creating the self-reliance
originally intended as a consequence in great part of the lack of foresight
regarding the changing structure of industry and employment[11] -
nevertheless, many positive lessons can be learned from the attempts,
especially in terms of the strategic notion of appropriate size and
containment. There may well be even more
significant lessons to be learned from the construction of over a thousand new
towns in the
Of course, in the face of the fact that cities have
more often than not simply happened, ‘organically’, with minimal planning – and,
once there, the reorganisation of which has proved to be a greater challenge
than almost any society has been prepared to face - we must ask ourselves under
what circumstances it becomes possible to ‘design’ cities, why societies that once
planned stopped planning and, of course, whether designed cities are
necessarily superior to cities that just happen. These questions cannot be asked in general
but only in relation to particular circumstances. What can, however, be said is that a coherent
planning of the built form depends on many factors that have themselves little
to do with construction. Above all,
there has to be a broad social agreement – at one extreme via authoritarian
dictat but in principal, alternatively, through widespread tacit or active
social agreement and what become vernacular sets of planning rules. To an extent such rules have prevailed in
many if not most places in certain aspects of the built environment, in market
or town squares and in the form of individual houses and their agglomeration
into villages and towns. ‘Planning’,
however, denotes a qualitatively more coherent level of agreement.
Finally reference must be made to the extremity of
two aspects of urbanisation today. The
first is the sheer scale of our settlements that seems to cow the planning
imagination into a refusal to take responsibility. In the North we see the piecemeal nature of
planning interventions that manage to keep the cities more or less functioning
(albeit with massive inputs of energy to accomplish this). In the South, plans are made but observed
only in a few, superficial gestures, as the growth progresses at a hectic rate,
uncontrolled and observing few rules and in practice deeply dysfunctional in
terms either of efficiency or to the creation of a humanly secure and pleasant
environment. Perhaps the process is
inherently ‘out of control’. However, in
today’s globalising world there is a
logic and a control over certain dimensions of what is happening that actively
discourages effective spatial planning which we will look at in more detail as
this paper progresses.
Globalisation
and Urban Development in
As noted in the introduction, today the ‘urban’, at
least in the North, is ubiquitous where it is difficult to say where ‘urban’
ends or, indeed, if there is anything other than urban. In this respect, it becomes tenuous to gauge
current urban form against those of the past in that one is not comparing like
with like. One of the most coherent and
vociferous critics of the modern urbanisation process, Murray Bookchin, in
acknowledging this, asks what has been gained by ‘global cities’ over against traditional
cultures of appropriately scaled cities, civic life and citizenship and a clear
contrast between urban and rural[12]. This is, indeed, a question that needs to be
asked: against what criteria should we
judge the ‘universalisation of the urban’ in the manner in which we are
experiencing it today? Can we really
point to some kind of urban ideal that is superior to this?
Until recently the transition of the bulk of the
population to living an urban existence was restricted to Europe and North
America such that, just 50 years ago some eighty percent of the world’s
population lived an overwhelmingly rural existence as peasants, employees of
rural enterprises, those providing immediate services to these populations -
and their families. Before embarking on
a more extended critique of the spatial reorganisation of human settlement and
activity, it is necessary to look in a little detail at the processes and
mechanisms that are driving it: it is not
very useful to criticise the end result without some knowledge of how the
process works.
Cities sprang up in history in various civilisations
quite independently one from the other.
Over the past 400 years, however, we can say with some certainty that
these traditions have been submerged in ‘global processes’ that have resulted
from the progressive extension of European and thence Occidental culture to the
furthest corners of the world[13]. The mechanisms that are driving urbanisation
in the South today, however, look very different from those that drove the
process in the North. Crudely speaking,
urbanisation in the Occident was accompanied – or driven – by a simultaneous
process of the reduction in the demand for rural labour (increasing efficiency
of farming methods) and demand for urban labour from the process of
industrialisation and the growth of accompanying services. With few exceptions – notably the ‘Asian
Tigers’ and the Yangtze and Pearl River Deltas in eastern China – current
urbanisation is not associated with industrialisation. Here are a number of factors other than
industrialisation which combine to drive the process forward[14]:
·
The traditional values of subsistence amongst erstwhile
peasants are being undermined by intensive exposure to the values of urban
society. This is proceeding simply
through primary education but accelerated though access to television and the
ease, through the extension of transport systems, with which cities can be
visited and seen as a potential alternative set of values. Peasants – subsistence farmers - are being
encouraged to want to join!
·
In any case in many regions increasing population densities
reduce the amount of produce per individual per unit of land, amounting to a
steady impoverishment.
·
At the same time, areas where peasants have in the past made
a reasonable income from selling primary produce, are also receiving less money
as a consequence of consistently falling prices of such produce due to mounting
international competition in a regime of free trade. This, also, is impoverishing.
·
Plantations and mines in rural areas that in the past were
major employers in certain instances, are increasingly efficient – both per se
and to compete effectively in the face of falling commodity prices - and hence require
less labour; in some areas
land-ownership is becoming more concentrated and plantations, whilst more
variegated in what they are producing, nevertheless requiring little labour, in
some cases displacing erstwhile subsistence farmers.
·
In some countries civil conflict is leading to ‘internally
displaced people’ (IDPs) looking for safe havens that generally means urban
areas.
·
‘Natural’ disasters including drought, flood, etc. are
encouraging rural populations to look for safer places to live.
·
‘Aid’ money spent in rural areas, whilst widely intended to
support rural communities in situ, is in practice often introducing hidden
incentives to flee the land.
·
Increasing populations in the South are coming to depend on
remittances from relatives working in the North; these are generally received in urban areas
where the means to spend them is also more readily available.
·
Although the numbers of urban poor are growing with the
urbanisation process, in most countries of the South rural poverty is more widespread
such that it seems that opportunities are better in urban or urbanising
locations than in the countryside.
None
of these can be said in all honesty to be positive reasons for rural populations
to urbanise but all of them are contributing to urbanisation as being seen to
be more likely to provide better security, incomes and/or lifestyles than is
available in rural areas. In fact when
analysing the growth of existing cities, immigration of rural populations is
only part of the story: cities are also
growing from the net internal increase in population.
The
form of urbanisation is, however, clearly different from that experienced in
the history of the North. In a sense it
is, rather, emulating the more recent spatial redistribution of population in the
North without going through the progression of urbanisation – suburbanisation –
ex-urbanisation which characterised the urbanisation process in the North. Villages are in some cases depopulating
whilst others are growing into towns.
The transport infrastructure – and cheap petroleum - are playing a key
role here: new kinds of ‘villages’ are
in many cases – and this is true across much of
On
the one hand the peri-urbanisation process involves the relocation of poor
populations forced out of the cities by increasing densification of the cores
and through eviction – active or passive - via direct or indirect economic
pressures. On the other it involves
rural populations finding incomes in serving the needs of the larger regional
economies including those of the old city cores and of the suburbanising formal
urban developments (middle class suburbs, commercial and recreational
facilities, industries, etc.). New
peri-urban settlements in the regions around older cities are in some cases
growing into enormous labyrinths of informal housing with minimal urban
services.
Urban Economies of the South
It
is evident that the conditions in which large sections of these urban
populations are living in are far from satisfactory. Most readers of this paper will be aware at a
minimum of pictures of slums developing sometimes in the centres but
increasingly on or beyond the periphery of cities or even in open
countryside. The most recent,
authoritative overview and detailed analysis of this situation is given in the
UN-HABITAT bi-annual report on urbanisation focusing specifically on the issue
of urban slums[15]. The situation is, to an extent, recognised by
the international agencies and particularly the World Bank, with ‘upgrading
programmes’ and from the year 2000 the financing of the ‘Cities Alliance’ with
its goal of eliminating slums by the year 2020 and, as a component of the
seventh Millennium Development Gaol directed to ensuring environmental sustainability: “to achieve significant
improvement in lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers by 2020” [16].
Notwithstanding
the question of what level of habitat is deemed to be no longer a slum, it is
contended here that the goal of radically improving conditions in the growing
urbs of the South is hopeless unrealistic without some thorough analysis of the
causes of the problems and thence developing mechanisms for treating the causes
and not the symptoms. In the first
instance we take a hard look at the situation faced by the growing urban
populations of the South now and continuing along the present path. We then look at some of the key factors that
might usefully be considered to result in a more realistic path to improving
the lives of urban populations of the South.
It
can certainly not be said that industrialisation produced, from the outset,
pleasant urban conditions for the rural populations that underwent rural-urban
migration in the North in the course of the 19th century. On the contrary, it is well-known that,
particularly in the
It
is contended here that it is the weakness of urban economies – or shall we say
the distorted access to, and unsustainable use of, resources - in the South
that is a major reason for degraded living environments that will continue to
be such – and worse – well into the future whilst the current international
economic regime prevails. In the middle
years of the 20th century, when the present development institutions
were founded and the ideology of development came to be provided with machinery
(the founding of the World Bank, the UN agencies – especially the UNDP – and
the bilateral development agencies) there was almost a universal assumption –
an essential ingredient of the Occidental ideological hegemony - that
eventually all countries would industrialise and urbanise and that industry
would bring to the ‘underdeveloped’ world all the ‘benefits’ experienced by the
‘industrialised’ world[18],
eventually in some version of the ‘American Dream’; a house in a garden in an ex-urban setting,
bound into the wider world through the mobility provided by the private car.
Industrialisation
is happening only in very restricted areas in the South for two inter-related
reasons. The first is simply that modern
production machinery has become so productive that most of what is needed in
terms of industrial products can be and is being produced with relatively
little labour. The second reason,
related to the first, is concerned with the control and thence the distribution
of industrial production. Whilst
transnational corporations had been incipiently increasing in power across the
20th century in determining where and how production should take
place, over the past 20 years, within the framework neo-liberal policies
progressively forced on southern countries, the power of transnational capital has
become overwhelming in securing the freedom to move and exploit wherever and
however they please.
Over
80% of international ‘trade’ in value terms takes place within corporations,
moving materials and goods to production locations and thence to markets. Although factories to finalise goods for
local markets may be regionally distributed (final assembly of cars, filling
consumer materials into containers, etc.) the main centres of production have
become increasingly centralised. Although
the production system as a whole is predominantly financed and controlled by
corporations headquartered in the US, Europe and Japan (the Fortune 500) the
main location for industrial production is increasingly East Asia: over the past few years almost one third of all
foreign direct investment (FDI) from the North has gone to just one country,
China[19], with
its endless supply of cheap, efficient and hard-working labour.
Most
countries of the South are of little interest to northern investors except for
minor investments in specific industries that make little impact on the overall
need for investment as the basis for effective economic development: software
production and call-centres in India, clothing manufacture in Bangladesh and
Poland, cross-border ‘maquila’ production in Mexico which is tantamount to
being in the United States but with considerably cheaper labour, of course all
manner of agricultural produce relevant to different climatic conditions, etc.
On
the other hand, southern countries are targets for the sale of produce of northern
enterprises. The sheer efficiency of
production of all manner of goods on the part of transnationals, plus the
influence of advertising enables these to undermine local production in terms
of conquering markets. Tastes are
changed through a barrage of advertising and the soft-sell of
As
noted, the reason for no longer locating production in the North is because
corporations wish to take advantage of cheap labour[20]. The process of urbanisation outlined above is
resulting in huge pools of potential labour looking for an income from which to
buy the means to live. This is
exacerbated by the neo-liberal rules forced upon countries by the IMF and World
Bank (‘structural adjustment’[21]) that
reduce the capacity of governments to attempt to maintain employment levels and
provide the support of social security systems.
People have to work for a living and if jobs are so few then they
compete in what the ILO refers to as a ‘race to the bottom’. Transnational corporations can find any
amount of labour in the South at less than living wages and there is no reason
for the countries or, more accurately, the people of these countries to even hope
that at some stage wages will rise in the way they did in the countries of the
North across the 20th century without a fundamental change in the
regime of production and the control which national and local governments can
exert over key dimensions of economic management.
It
is currently estimated that throughout
The
net result for the cities and lesser urban entities is that there is very
little money circulating in the system with which living conditions can be
improved. Large populations living in
slums have no money to pay for improvement (materials or labour) and the cities
have little income to invest in infrastructure.
Indeed, whilst much is said of corruption and poor management in
southern cities, it is amazing to see what is achieved with such meagre
resources. Unfortunately, quite
generally the investments that are made tend – in some respects overwhelmingly
- to favour the more or less small percentage of the population that continues
benefiting from formal economic activity.
This
includes the comprador class (complete with eg drug Mafiosi) that facilitates
the deepening penetration of northern economic interests, including those
servicing the international tourist industry, the (with few exceptions)
diminishing class of manufacturers, politicians and their entourages (senior
civil servants) and professionals. There are in this process ever growing
economic differentials between the rich minority and the urban poor[24]. The ‘middle class’, that was supposed to be
the condition of everyone at the end of the development process, is
disappearing[25].
It
should be clear from the foregoing that the urbanisation process in the South
is at the same time a process of radical disempowerment and growing dependence at
all levels. The levers of power, the
skills and the knowledge of the past necessary to organise a more independent
way of life are slipping ever further away from the inhabitants of southern
countries and their systems of governance (referred to as ‘the growth of
ignorance’[26]) – in the worst case
(Somalia) with 80-90% unemployment, total dependency on remittances and ‘aid’
with much of the population permanently on drugs[27]. Erstwhile peasants are decreasingly able – or
even interested – to provide for themselves.
The urban poor – although participating in consumption of
internationally traded goods in the few products they can afford to buy as
displayed in even the poorest stalls in slum settlements - do not have the
means either to supply their own needs adequately or to access any economic or political
structures that might help them to improve their position[28]. The artisanal classes[29] and
manufacturing bourgeoisie are no longer in a position to supply more than
marginal ‘niche’ markets and the rest of the benefiting classes sell themselves
short to international corporate and political forces in a lifestyle that is
utterly dependent on imported resources for almost everything that makes up their
comfortable lives (cars, office and home equipment, most consumer goods and
materials including food).
It
is necessary to focus on the question as to the causes of this
disempowerment. At one level it is
clearly a question of the global competition of corporations to win markets and
make profit and the way in which, through neo-liberalism, they have usurped
political as well as economic power[30]. This has certainly been facilitated by the
end of the struggle for ideological hegemony of the 20th century
where the
Looked
at today, we might be wise to be sceptical of Smith’s optimism. However, from
the perspective of the ‘post-modern condition’[31] we
can also say that the process has taken on a life of its own. The sheer virtuosity of the production system
to flatter our desires in presenting us with a deluge of commodities and
situations – especially the desire to be on the move - such that the world of
our dreams becomes reality, is, at the same time, a kind of inebriation that
blunts our criticism of what is unfolding.
We are drunk on consumption and, what we also need to be aware of, drunk
on the material base of this consumption, namely oil.
Thus
at this point it is pertinent to revisit the issue of energy dependence of the
whole process outlined above. Already in
1971 Howard Odum, inventor of what became the standard method for analysing
energy flows through ecosystems, applied this to human economic system and in
passing commented that "(t)he
great conceit of industrial man imagined that his progress in agricultural
yields was due to new know-how in the use of the sun...(t)his is a sad hoax,
for industrial man no longer eats potatoes made from solar energy; now he eats potatoes partly made of
oil."[32] The Pimentels then went on to gather together a mass of
studies that had been made into the use of energy in agriculture and were able
to contrast non-solar energy inputs to traditional agricultural systems with
the increasing amounts of fossil fuels being used to produce and deliver food
to the American table[33]. The modern food production and distribution
chain is by no means the most energy intensive part of our production and
distribution system but this is illustrative of the way in which non-renewable
energy use has insinuated itself into every part of modern life.
Global
analysis of the use of non-renewable energy sources[34]
indicates clearly the way in which the evolving restructuring of production and
lifestyles has progressively involved increasing energy use. The vast majority of this increase is from
fossil fuel sources; indeed the use of
biofuels, potentially renewable, has been diminishing as a consequence of new
urban populations of the South, however poor, adopting fossil fuel sources for
their relatively diminutive energy requirements[35]. In recent years there have been signs that at
least European countries have been mildly reducing their energy needs but this
is a deception looked at globally because it has involved the transfer of
energy-intensive industries to
Looking
in detail at the evolving uses of energy it is immediately clear that the major
part of the global increase in energy use is in transport – which is the sector
most dependent on the use of fossil fuels and, indeed, specifically on
petroleum. The international restructuring
of industry and a related increase in trade (that is to say movement of
materials and goods) is premised on the ready and extremely cheap availability
of petroleum (fuel for ships, aeroplanes and read vehicles). The urbanisation processes underway in South
– and even more markedly the restructuring of the spatial distribution of
activities (above all lifestyles) in the North – are also being accompanied by
a rapid increase in the per capita use of energy for transport.
Most
striking is the increase in use in those countries to which the productive
activities – and with them increases in per capita income – have been
gravitating.
Analysis
of per capita energy use for a wide range of countries plotted against levels
at which a range of ‘social goods’ are present indicates that it seems as if
modern life can be lived satisfactorily per capita on 1.5 toea. Western Europeans, however, consume over four
toea and US citizens over eight. In so
far as the increasing use of non-renewable fossil fuels is concerned, it thus
seems that the North is the problem, rather than the South. However, it is clear that the urbanisation
processes and increasing economic dependence of southern countries is also
tying them into this energy system. 1.5
toea is not a necessary amount of energy but an amount that relates to our
lifestyle at the end of the urbanisation process.
Finally
it is necessary to stress the problems associated with this energy
situation. These are well-enough known
and yet thoroughly detached from any meaningful analysis of the causes of the
problems and consequently of any realistic solutions. On the one hand the use of fossil fuels is
systematically increasing the proportion of carbon dioxide in the earth’s
atmosphere, resulting in increases in the ‘greehouse effect’ which, in turn, is
leading to ‘global warming’. This does
not mean a general rise in temperature but rather complex changes in
climate. Where this will end is unknown
but is thought already to be resulting in extreme weather conditions which in
time will alter ecosystems – adding to their impoverishment in line with other
human interventions in nature resulting from the spatial reorganisation of
human activity certain aspects of which are the main concern of the paper.
The
second major problem is that some time in the future fossil fuels will be
exhausted so, prima facie, we cannot continue to rely on them. If we really wish to continue the current
trajectory of global development, with its continued rise in demand for energy,
then other sources of energy will have to be found. Renewable sources are available but need to
be developed and whether they can realistically take over the current
trajectory of growth in energy use is extremely unlikely and unthinkable in the
time left to make the transition before petroleum production starts to decline. True, natural gas remains in relatively
abundant supply for longer than petroleum and coal even longer. Both of these can be adapted (converted) to
substitute for petroleum – albeit in the latter case with substantial increases
in negative environmental impacts.
Discussions come and go as to exactly when exploitable petroleum resources
will start to decline – and hence prices rise steeply - but best estimates are
that this is a matter only of one or two decades into the future.
Although
recent history has shown that certain energy transitions can be made relatively
rapidly[38], it
is highly likely that the start of the decline in petroleum production will
result in massive disruptions to the global economic systems as the price of
moving of goods and people escalates.
There can be little doubt that the increasing economic dependence on the
global production system and the urbanisation processes currently in train in
the South are increasing greatly the vulnerability of southern societies to the
negative impacts of such a shock. It
seems evident that the solution to this problematic lies in devising production
and spatial distribution systems that radically reduce the need for
energy. This issue is incorporated into
the consideration in the last part of this paper of a renewed focus on
strategic initiatives in spatial planning.
Governance of Emerging Urban Regions
The
term ‘governance’ was until recently a little-used term with vague connotations
of the running of society in all its aspects. That is to say that ‘governments’
have major responsibilities to organise aspects of the way in which societies
work but that other organisations – notably private businesses, all manner of
associations and so on also provide structure for other aspects of the way in
which societies work. We can be sure
that the concept of governance has come to the fore in recent years as a
consequence of the diminishing of government.
This diminishing was initially a consequence of the aggressive way in
which the organised private sector promoted neo-liberal ideology, asserting
that during much of the 20th century governments had usurped the
role of private initiative in many areas where this was not deemed to be
legitimate. Thus the regimes of Margaret
Thatcher and Ronald Reagan spoke of ‘rolling back the state’[39].
At
the same time, starting already in the early 1970s, a range of other kinds of
non-government organisations surfaced which, during the 1980s, went under the
title of ‘new social movements’[40]. These came be interpreted broadly as the
representatives of ‘civil society’ over against governments and the private
sector, harking back to the political philosophies of the 18th
century where civil government had first been justified as the way in which
European society (and with the spread of Occidental culture, the rest of humanity)
should be governed by ‘democratic’ regimes. Whilst now widely used as a term to describe
non-government self-organisation and initiative of all kinds, the concept of ‘civil
society’[41] remains fluid, as does
the concept of ‘governance’. We need to
look more closely at the structure of ‘civil society’ in terms of its key
dimensions if the concept is to have any analytical utility.
It
is certainly useful, as a preliminary to any constructive approach to combating
the problems raised so far in this paper, to look in some detail at the issue
of social differentiation. Without such
an understanding it becomes difficult to make recommendations that are likely
to have any effect: the fact is that cities
are made up of groupings that have very different visions and strategies
concerning what they are trying to achieve out of the situation they find
themselves in and how they go about this[42]. Thus if a project aimed at obtaining a
consensus to plan the future of economic and spatial organisation is to be
successful then it is necessary to understand how the society acts in ways that
enable us to break down barriers and achieve a common language and common basis
of understanding of the predicament we are in.
In the first instance we need better to understand the nature of
differences in the growing urban agglomerations and how different groups see
the world and relate to one another. We do
well to start from conventional approaches to such an analysis and see where we
go from there.
‘Conventionally’
the structure of (urban) societies is analysed in terms of classes, of ethnic
and related groups (including race and religious divisions) and familial
relations ranging from age and gender roles to extended family and thence
patronage structures that extend affective relations into the wider world. We will look briefly at each of these for
their usefulness to the subsequent discussion.
The
concept of class – of society being divided into different economically
functional groups - is different from society to society and, particularly in
Occidental history, has been undergoing changes in recent times. Caste – including in feudal
Already the French Revolution threw into question the
legitimacy of class differentials and across the 19th century,
utopians, socialists, communists and anarchists insisted that everyone should
have an equal right to access resources and a good life. This crystallised out in the early 20th
century into the set-piece notion of class conflict in which owners of capital
and those who work for capital negotiate the means to elaborate the capacities
and direction in which society might develop.
There was in reality substantial difficulty in interpreting
class within this framework in any objective fashion in that actual economic
classes possessed nuances and complexities that could not legitimately be
shoehorned into the simple framework of (economic) rulers and ruled[43]. It was as if there were players and onlookers
watching to see which vision would triumph:
the interests promoting a ‘liberal’ society or those pursuing a society
without privilege or prerogative, without significant economic
differentials. States adopting
‘communist’ regimes asserted that class was no longer an issue and whilst
economic differentials were certainly substantially diminished in these
countries, these nevertheless maintained definite privileges amongst a de facto
elite.
Liberalism - and thence neo-liberalism that seemed
from 1980 on to have won the battle - denies the existence of class, this being
a means to obviate the debate and hence the capacity this might have to
(re)assert the moral legitimacy of egalitarian society. Liberal policies of northern countries quite
generally (and in spite of the pretences that things have not changed, viz
‘social-democratic’ political parties exercising power) have resulted in
growing economic differentials[44]. It must be emphasised that liberalism is not
simply oblivious to class differentials.
Whilst it has no interest in returning to some form of caste society, it
nevertheless harbours the belief that some people are better than others and
that this superiority should be rewarded in life, conversely that other people
are undeserving of the benefits of society and should be disciplined to accept
their inferior position[45].
The question that becomes relevant to this essay
is: does this matter and if so how are
we to interpret class in a way that will help address the problematic outlined
in earlier parts of this paper? It is
asserted here that this does matter
for the following reasons. Caste – and
indeed any form of class society - fragments the social understanding of
predicament. In so far as caste
societies in the past found a modus vivendi that – if we take the Indian
version – more or less provided for all in a sustainable fashion, then we might
say that we have no right to fault it.
Modern society is, on the contrary, one that is in
rapid motion towards what seems – it is difficult to avoid – a denouement of
catastrophic proportions. It has found
the means to be ‘rational’, through the physical sciences, concerning the
exploitation of the physical world but has fatally lost the understanding and
hence power to control the socio-political forces driving the whole process
forward. Run on the basis of competition
with de facto classes that have very different partial visions of the world
they live in as a consequence of specific, rather than general, positions they
occupy, there is no incentive within the socio-political process on the part of
any group (and the society as a whole has no centre of intellectual gravity
that might undertake the task) to solve the problems ahead. We can usefully refer indeed to ‘class
cultures’ and to the irony that class conflict has been reduced by a common
metaculture of consumerism that encourages concern with personal consumption
and a very weak notion of a common fate and the need to organise in order to
defend or promote the wellbeing of anyone but oneself and one’s immediate
affective world.
The spatial redistribution of functions characterised
as urbanisation (and more recently suburbanisation and ex-urbanisation) in the
Occident can to a certain extent be interpreted as having a definite class
dimension. Towns and cities were
relatively small until the 20th century, with class-distinct
quarters. The urbanisation process
involved urbanisation of rural populations for whom quarters were built as they
were inducted into the industrialisation process – albeit for at least a
generation continuing certain rural practices including the keeping of animals
and a disregard for sanitary practices.
In some European countries the social democratic
consensus really did attempt to erase the distinction between classes in
spatial terms[46]. However, class culture expressed itself much
of the time through lifestyles: with the
rich living in large, individually designed, houses in spacious suburbs whilst
the lower classes lived more densely in urban quarters in tenements and as
constructed during the third quarter of the 20th century, in
high-rise ‘social housing’. Class, when
caste lines are loosened, releases a tendency for the lower classes to attempt
to emulate the rich and thus the process of suburbanisation and ex-urbanisation
has involved the spread of lower density housing into the countryside in
emulation of the rich but generally still spatially separated. It is this culture that is clearly most
dysfunctional from the point of view of the sustainability of the whole – as is
recently recognised in an accumulating literature advocating urban re-densification[47]
which, however, fails to discuss the dimension of the class drive behind the
de-densification process of recent years.
The extension of Occidental culture to other parts of
the world has on the one hand taken with it Occidental class cultures but
imposed these on existing class cultures yielding complexities particular to
each region and even each city, over which it is difficult to generalise. Everywhere there is an upper class that is effectively
integrated into this same class in the Occident, who largely share its values
and lifestyle. There is then an
intermediate class that shares much of the culture of its equivalent in the
North (especially in
This brings us to the issue of ethnicity including
race, religion and related cultural entities and the role they play in urban
areas. The term Ghetto originates in the
way in which Jewish communities were granted rights to settle in European
cities at the end of the middle ages which initially was a valued right but in
time became the name for a defensive community with separate identity where the
population experiences discrimination.
Ghettos are a common characteristic of ‘outside’ communities that come
to occupy specific economic niches because the inhabitants bring particular skills
or propensities, because of religious and other moral requisites or because
they are forced into roles by the exigencies of the society into which they
have migrated. Even when more dispersed
– not living in Ghettos - ethnic communities generally occupy clearly defined
economic roles which therefore are relinquished by the mainstream society. These can persist over generations to become
tantamount to castes within what otherwise are not caste societies.
The best example to illustrate the way in which
ethnicity can operate in a dynamic way and yet contribute to the fragmentation
of the society can be seen in the evolution of urban societies in the
The urbanisation process in the South in so far as it
follows the new patterns outlined above – of strip development along regional
highways and agglomerations condensing out in per-urban regions – these tend to
be ethnically homogenous. But the older
cities are everywhere increasingly complex in terms of ethnic groupings and the
way in which these deepen cleavages in the socio-economic structure of the
cities. An extreme case can be seen in
the oil-rich countries of the
A different case is presented by
A final issue to be dealt with here concerns the way
in which affective groups operate within societies and come to dominate urban
political power, excluding majorities of all kinds from access to
decision-making or to economic resources.
In the first instance, there are traditional patterns of family
structures and allegiances (but including also sometime internal enmities). This may be seen as a mechanism, very strong
in most traditional societies – indeed continuingly so in most societies with
the exception of the Northern European and North American – by which welfare is
distributed from individuals benefiting from the economic and power system to their
affinity group. Whilst this might be
seen as functionally beneficial – even necessary – amongst poorer people,
amongst the rich and powerful it becomes the key to understanding why countries
and cities that have such great potential in resource terms remain so poor and
dysfunctional.
Nepotism and beyond this patronage structures with
their ‘big men’ and their ‘entourages’ – the system as a whole being termed ‘clientalism’
- are primarily machinery for looking after the needs – and desires – of
‘insiders’ and hence are crucially disinterested in servicing the needs of the
wider community. Ethnic communities
outside their place of origin almost always cohere through such structures and
can forge powerful political and economic positions via this mechanism. In the case of the urbanisation of the
But it is also true of elites right across the
non-Occidental world evidenced by the way in which relatively small numbers of
families, intermarrying but at the same time competing, dominate political and
economic power with similar and usually interconnected structures across the
country, in particular cities and in lesser geographic entities. Ultimately this is sanctified through
traditional religious leaders, nobilities and monarchy. In the final analysis it is these structures
that are the main inhibition to a broader process of inclusion in terms of
decision-making and economic equality. It
must be pointed out already at this stage that what goes for ‘democracy’ in
most southern countries is in practice the continued rule of traditional elites
and new elites governing through patronage systems.
Now that we have investigated the fragmented nature
of the emerging cities of the South, it remains to ask how we might go about
creating a consensus and commitment to change directions around a realistic
analysis of problems. In recent years
much has been said about the need for participatory decision-making and
everywhere some effort has gone into interpreting this and trying to turn it
into a reality. The result comes under
various names and involves various procedures – one text identifies and briefly
describes over 20 different approaches[50]. Visioning, Future Search, Planning for Real,
Local Agenda 21: each of these methods
as practiced across literally thousands of communities in the North today purports
to include a range of community interests in a decision-making process in which
‘sustainable development’ is one, if not the main, target.
This interest in ‘participatory decision-making’ also
has its champions in development work in the South – often in political
climates that are potentially and sometimes actually hostile to the idea of
involving common people in decision-making that essentially usurps or at a
minimum diminishes the power of established or elected elites. It is seen as subversive or worse as
‘communist’. Already in the 1970s the
International Labour Office was developing a method referred to as
Participatory Action Research (PAR)[51]. At the same time a method of rural
participatory planning, Rapid Rural Appraisal (RRA)[52] was
being experimented with. This
subsequently was extended into a method that could also be used in urban areas.
Indeed, in many northern countries these
methodologies, in so far as they are concerned with ‘sustainability’ have been
promoted by local authority associations and in some cases have become either
strongly recommended by central governments[53] or
even mandatory[54], generally under the
title of Local Agenda 21. The European
Commission has both provided guidelines and incentives, financing the
Sustainable Cities Campaign, with major events aimed at reviewing progress and
exchanging experiences with those organising and involved in the processes. The first major conference took place in
Meanwhile, development agencies have also been
adopting such procedures either in certain projects or even as a basis for
project implementation. ‘Stakeholder
analyses’ identify the people and institutions that need to be involved in projects
or programmes. Consultation exercises
are undertaken, community representatives are trained in local planning and
project execution with some funds or funding mechanisms being put in place for
plan implementation. UN and bilateral
development agencies have promoted numbers of programmes, some referring to
LA21 and with similar structures under other names[56]. In general the urban and rural versions have
been pursued with little interaction but with similar approaches.
It is necessary to scrutinise these in the light of
the foregoing analysis of the fragmented nature of urban societies today to
obtain a perspective on what has been achieved relative to the overall need. Regarding the LA21 and related processes in
the North, it may be said that there a few examples of genuine attempts to make
an impact on unsustainable lifestyles[57]. Broad organisation around key issues – for
instance the need to radically reduce the profligate use of energy[58] – exist,
hold conferences, have active web-sites but attract only tiny groups that take
them seriously in terms of changing practices.
Projects are contained within localities and the
process has made almost no impact on pre-existing urban management. ‘Participation’ is one of the basic
principles but none of the many methodologies used make any more than gestures
to analysing the ethnic and class structure of cities and show absolutely no
understanding of affective structures and thence to develop processes that will
penetrate into the fragments and obtain genuine involvement. Whilst local politicians have often been
involved in and promoted these processes, there is no indication of local
elites, who have greater resources that might be redirected, opening their
world up to the notion of participatory decision-making. ‘Participatory planning’ in the North
involves small, - often enthusiastic and committed but nevertheless marginal –
groups that have yet to discover the complexes of the societies they are trying
to change and hence the need for complex strategies to move beyond their own
ghettos.
Private corporations may make small donations but
there are few attempts[59] to
question the activities of the corporations with regard to their contribution
to sustainable cities or, more broadly, the competitive ethos within which they
operate. The plans made become no more
than window dressing, proven by the fact that overall statistics indicate
little change in such basic parameters as resource – particularly energy –
use. Furthermore indications – such as
the reduced attendance at the Aalborg plus 10 conference and the reduction in
local authorities with active LA21 processes – are that, in spite of a very
broad recognition of the unsustainability of current lifestyles and the
organisation of economic activity, LA21 processes are nevertheless treated as ‘last
year’s fashion’.
In the South, the problems to be addressed are more
basic, present and pressing.
‘Sustainable development’ might be a problem of the coming decades but,
already today, poverty and degraded living environments cry out for immediate
attention. Thus are participatory
processes in the urban South focused on engaging the poor in improvements in
immediate surrounding largely on the basis of self-help. No attempt is made to extend the processes
out to incorporate other fragments of the urban society. Little attention is paid to the way in which
the middle classes and elites are adopting the unsustainable lifestyles of the
North and where this is the case, this suffers from similar problems
experienced in the North: the lack of a framework to evaluate and prioritise
what is genuinely sustainable, what kind of society and cities can be
realistically created over a longer time span and how current resources can be
redirected to achieve this. Just as in
the North, it is evident from the wider statistics that these initiatives are
almost nowhere substantial enough to change the direction of trends towards an unsustainable
urbanisation with increased use of non-renewable resources and with increased
insecurity and conflict resulting from the obvious exploitation and/or
disregards of the needs of the disadvantaged by those who possess access to
power and wealth.
Rebuilding
Local Economies
It is a major contention of this paper that the if
‘participatory planning processes’ are to make a significant impact then they
will have not only to address the issue of social fragmentation but to do this
via a strong focus on the economic dimensions of unsustainability and the
growth of poverty and related degraded living environments. It is a strange anomaly that is in part a
question of tradition that urban planners pay little attention to the way in
which urban economies work even though, prima facie, the health of the urban
economy says much about the health of settlements as a whole. Even more anomalous is the way in which the
World Bank and with it other development organisations fail to address urban
poverty issues as a function of failing urban economies.
Behind all of this perhaps lies a refusal to look
critically at the lifestyle of urban elites – and even middle classes – who
have no desire for the light to be shone upon their priorities and the way they
want to live their lives. Thus in the
North participatory planning processes are tolerated at the margins as long as
they ask no important economic questions and in the South as long as they focus
on charity work amongst the poor. It is
necessary to be clear about how these processes have been contained, that it is
necessary to break the bounds in which they are contained and, in the current
jargon, to ‘mainstream’ participatory planning that is takes genuine
responsibility for the current and future health of human settlements.
Perhaps we need to recall Chairman Mao Tse Tung’s
approach to creating a consensus for change, in the first instance assessing
with whom we can stat the process[60]. This was realistic in understanding that it
will not be possible to appeal to some ‘general public’ on the basis of ‘common
sense’ that points out the unfairness and unsustainability of what is happening
around us. It is a matter of extending
the ‘stakeholder analyses’ to a deeper understanding of the necessity to work
in the interests of a multiplicity of groups, understanding the ways that these
operate within themselves and how an approach to change might appeal in
different ways to different groups. The
advertising world has taught us – in a negative way – that we cannot rely on
rational explanation to appeal to interests but must become involved in
creating engaging images not simply of the badness of what is happening but of
the goodness of the future one is trying to promote. This is the semiotic dimension of the project
and although the following paragraphs set out a rational process of
organisation along the lines of conventional PAR, LA21 etc., the semiotic
dimension must be utilised in any attempt to walk this path, as a powerful
means of breaking down the walls between and within the fragmented social substance.
It is becoming clear not only to the economically
excluded (actors in the informal economy) that the economic system is
dysfunctional, but also to many entrepreneurs at the level of the small and
even medium enterprise level. As these
are the people who are supposed to subscribe to neo-liberalism as being in
their interests, it is extremely important that they should be amongst the
first to be recruited into any project to construct and alternative approach to
local economic development. However,
remembering that ‘businessman’ might mean many orientations depending on the
nature of the business, such a recruiting process needs to be aware of, as
Chairman Mao put it, distinguishing between who are our (potential) friends and
who are our enemies. But the role of
conviction is crucial and the battlefield here is at the level of understanding
what is actually happening in the world as a prelude to joining in the project
of building a new kind of world.
The process needs to be sold on grounds of rationality
– sustainability and a less violent society - interest, moral and political
correctness and sheer aesthetics (a nicer way of life). There is need for clarity from the outset
that the local/regional economy needs to be protected from aggressive external
competition and be inherently tending towards redistribution (creating work,
empowering through the development of skills).
There is then a series of steps in the process of constructing such an
economy which are only sketched here but which at least touch the main points
that must per necessity be adapted to particular places and situations.
· A very wide spectrum of groups need to be brought into a structured decision-making process. This may have as many as three levels: a broad forum that disseminates information (propaganda) to all constituencies aimed at creating a consensus across many fragments of the city/region and opening groups out to an orientation of participation; a council that involves key actors – but also marginalised interests such as occupied in informal activities – that defines the scope of the initiative; and an executive that maintains the pace of organisation and formulates legal and institutional structures
·
The initiative must be oriented from the outset not only
towards a conventional idea of the local economy (production, income and profit
earning activity) but equally to consumption patterns (lifestyles). The planning process is centrally about
building economic initiative primarily to satisfy local – or sub-regional – need
as explored and developed through the activities of the forum.
·
A ‘critical knowledge’ of the structure of the local economy
must be developed as a basis for discussion and planning. What potential local human and physical resources
are there, who owns them and what do they choose to do with them, what is
locally produced or provided, what is imported to satisfy local markets and who
controls their importation to the region.
But also what do different groups actually consume with a focus ranging
from the super-affluent to the deprived and what might we on the one hand
define as superfluous (flaunting privilege, unsustainable) and what needs are
failing to be met through lack of access to resources? What is the structure of employment and of
currently available local skills?
· Consideration of the ultimate sustainability of the regional economy must be incorporated from the outset in the process of planning for changes in local production patterns. Regional physical resources need to be understood in an ecological (self-reproducing) framework – with a major focus on energy (using less, managing it more efficiently, changing over to renewable sources) – but focusing also on feed and water, inputs to all kinds of industry and building materials.
·
The initiative cannot pretend to change things overnight or
separate radically from ongoing economic activity. It must move step by step to provide local
needs and through this displace step by step markets served from outside; to de-escalate unsustainable lifestyles and
raise the level of resources amongst the disadvantaged. In the first instance demonstration
initiatives with a high likelihood of success (wide commitment) need to be
undertaken but at the same time longer-term strategies and plans must be developed.
·
Self-education of forum members and through the forum the
local population is crucial. This will
mean building local self-consciousness and new forms of local culture that choose
selectively from tradition but are prepared to forge new cultural features as
an essential approach to breaking down walls between social fragments and
dissolving the inward-looking ethos of clientalist structures. This will focus on ‘detoxification’ against
the aggressive advertising and sales of externally produced products and
services. Local media must be developed or captured and a scepticism of the
importance and status of externally provided messages built up.
·
There will everywhere need to be training and education in
skills relevant to new local/regional economic development initiatives ranging
from knowledge of the potential of local resources (use and conservation)
through technological capability and the development and use of technologies
appropriate to place and capacities, to planning and administrative skills.
·
Pragmatism is needed with regard to the structure of
economic initiative. In the long run
various social forms of ownership would be encouraged, rather than separating
entrepreneurship from productive activity.
But whether cooperative or municipal initiative or local community-owned
should not be an issue from the outset.
The ethos of individualist entrepreneurial competition needs to be
progressively displaced by the ethos of cooperation. Experience should direct preferred forms in
the longer term.
·
Equally the financing of economic initiative should be
relatively pragmatic, making use in the first instance of pure private sector
and government but within a strategy of accumulating locally-controlled
financial mechanisms and from the outset using such mechanisms as LETS, credit
unions, cooperatives, etc.
Of
course such a local process will not proceed without influence also on legal
and political structures well beyond the sub-regional boundaries. Local and sub-regional fora need to exchange
experiences and where they find problems resulting from laws, structures or
influences at a regional or national level, should join to combat these to
recapture their own powers to decide.
Obvious targets from the outset are national laws favouring national and
transnational businesses (everything from tax breaks and subsidies to legal
frameworks).
This
must come into conflict with rules accepted by governments in the framework of
international trade law as administered by the WTO. Regions adopting this paradigm will need
national – and eventually international – organs to influence policies and the
development of laws at these levels.
This will not happen, however, unless there is a firm understanding from
the outset of the dysfunctionality of liberalism and unfocused (‘free’) trade
relations and the need to develop a consistently cooperative and largely
self-reliant regional economy[61].
But although the step by step process set out above
may seem logical as a way out of the problems we face it is in reality no small
project. Just as Greek philosophy lost
its way in the lee of the magnitude of the Alexandrian ambitions and triumphant
progress across Asia, collapsing into a meek expression of hopeless quest of a
personal morality of asceticism, so today the scale of globalisation cowes us
into submission to the sheer, brazen success of capitalism in conquering the
world. And we are silenced in awe of
magnitude of the panorama which this presents and in consequent paralysed in
the face of the catastrophe that this ‘success’ must bring in its wake…
Future
Urban Settlements
We might think that the reconstruction of local
economies, being already a very substantial move against the drift of things
and already addressing the issues of growing urban poverty is enough in
itself. However, we cannot stop here in
our quest for a sustainable and socially healthy society: the amorphousness of megacity regions and the
difficulty of defining areas to become self-reliant, the ease with which, in
the absence of such definition, the sheer scale of the areas involved and the
problems which they face is liable quickly to lead to loss of direction and
thence to defeat. Perhaps we are already
witnessing this in the diminishing of enthusiasm for Local Agenda processes. The processes aimed at local economic
reconstruction should thus be seen as the start of a larger process, lending a
sense of going somewhere that then needs to be utilised to ask the question:
going where?
At the outset of this essay, some space was given
over to affirming not only that it is, in theory, possible to plan the
distribution and structure of human settlements but that history shows us times
and places where this has been effectively done. Societies have collectively decided that they
wish to organise their settlements in a particular way to serve their needs and
have gone about thinking through how best to do this and then putting it into
practice. We are in great need of a
shift in our collective consciousness that will escape from the fatalism – the
liquid modernity of today[62] -
and take hold of the means to determine how our future will be organised.
The procedure set out above for reconstructing local
economies will inevitably ask questions about what is mean by ‘region’ and
need, in each case, to come to some meaningful conclusion. There are socio-political approaches to
answering this and then there are ecological approaches. The ‘bioregional movement’ has attempted to
incorporate these into a new vision of culture that goes back through history: how did our region obtain the resources
needed by its people and how did they organise themselves to live sustainably
with this resource base? Although this
may be one facet to be taken into consideration, in many regions of the world,
the configuration of settlements and the uses of the environment are far, far
away from their historic configuration and starting from today cannot be
thought of in any way a march back through time, even if this were genuinely
desirable. This does not mean that this
dimension should be entirely abandoned:
we do need to look back critically at our history, particularly with
respect to possibilities of living sustainably within our region.
A second line of investigation must be to recognise
that in the past much thought has been given to ‘ideal’ ways of organising our
communities. Utopia may be out of
fashion and derided as being ‘no place’ because it is either unreachable or
worse is authoritarian. There is a huge
literature particularly generated by the ‘cold war’ that asserts the
impossibility of positive utopias[63]. It should be clear that the idea of Utopia is
something of an opposite to the idea and the liberalism and this has been
explored by many at the level of idea, of philosophy[64].
Utopian thinking has an exceedingly rich history in
Occidental culture[65] that
does not have parallels in any other culture.
It is clear that this is one facet of the Christian apaocaliptic and the
idea of progress that has evolved out of this.
We can look in two ways at a world that progresses, that changes from
one year to the next: we should be able
to – in the framework of science - predict
the future and this, indeed, was the force that supported socialism throughout
the 20th century: the Marxist
conviction that we know that the
future will yield an egalitarian society.
The collapse of communism threw this belief into deep question which is
precisely the foundation of the force with which liberal fatalism has come to
dominate the present era.
But the other interpretation of the idea of progress
is that we can and must take the future into our own hands and make it the way
we want it to be. It is this
interpretation that is urgently needed to be grasped and activated if we are to
overcome the vast problems created by the current drift of social
irresponsibility and insecurity and the unsustainable – we should say in the
medium term simply unrealistic – (ab)use of resources that is associated with
present day lifestyle aspirations. The
drift towards what, at the outset of this essay, is termed ‘urbanisation’ is
clearly part – indeed a fatal part – of the problematic. This is not to say that urban living is
necessarily bad or unsustainable but that the way in which it is proceeding at
the present time certainly is.
So efforts to re-localise economies must progress to
discussions about the way in which the economy, including consumption patterns,
should be organised spatially to best contribute to overcoming social
fragmentation. Utopians would refer to
the creation of egalitarian, solidaristic societies where the reasons for current
escalating violence and conflict are eliminated and the possibilities for
cooperation as a basis for effective social decision-making in the interests of
present and future generations are realised. Critical review of models drawn from the
history of Utopianism can help, and need to be revived. But actual Utopias will be different for
different societies and regions and will need to be generated in specific
participatory processes of the kind outlined in the previous section of this
paper. It is unlikely that there will be
a return to nomadism amongst sedenterised nomads, but the possibility should
not be ruled out by the imposition of a single model. However, it might be speculated that urban
systems, in contrast to the recent past where the majority of humanity lived in
rural settlements, are in all probability the main form of settlement of the
future: the technological mans are
available to allow for the majority to live in towns and one can envisage the social
decision-making process confirming the present day urbanisation drift. That megacities will be part of this is,
however, unlikely: there are good
reasons why Utopias have usually opted for regions were networks of small and
medium-sized towns and cities, self-reliant to a point appropriate to size.
Utopian thinking about future settlement patterns
cannot be left to physical planners as happened in the 20th century
attempts of the new town movements across
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[1] The term ‘sustainability’ – and its
equivalent in other European languages - has been so thoroughly misused in
recent years to assert that whatever one wants to do is labelled ‘sustainable’,
such that it is difficult to continue employing it without incurring serious
misunderstanding. Unfortunately no
clearer alternative lies readily to hand and we will attempt later in the paper
to clarify what is meant here by the term.
[2] Bauman (1988) speaks of intellectual
endeavour in postmodern society as experiencing a 'status crisis' resulting from the way
that the consumer society has usurped their role as providers of "an
authoritative solution to the questions of cognitive truth, moral judgement and
aesthetic taste". This role is now
played by the commercial media and behind them powerful enterprises in their
quest for profit.
[3] Marx (1964) indicates via historical
analysis that whilst today Rousseau is seen as the exponent, even the inventor,
of this notion, he was in actuality doing no more than reiterating an ancient
idea.
[4] Whilst one of the earliest known
urban cultures was that of the
[5] See in particular White (1959), Odum
(1971), Debeir et al (1991) and Smil (2000).
[6] Warner’s (196..) meticulous study of
the growth of the ‘streetcar suburbs’ of
[7]
[8] Sieverts (1999)
[9] The following paragraphs are derived
from Morris (1994)
[10] As Sir Mortimer Wheeler put it (cited
in Morris (1994, 33): “the high quality of sanitary arrangements at
Mohenjo–daro could well be envied in many parts of the world today.”
[11] Hall et al
(1973)
[12] Bookchin (1974, 1987)
[13] Atkinson (2001, 2004) analysed in
detail the European ideological roots and Occidental practice of the extension
of power that gave us present day urbanisation processes; this is therefore not
repeated here.
[14] Bryceson et al (2000).
[15] UN-HABITAT (2003)
[16] The Subcommittee working on the
development of tools to implement the Millennium Development Goal concerned
with urban living conditions is more realistic in calling for programmes that
improve somewhat the living conditions of those already living in slums whilst
reducing the growth of new slums.
[17] This is standard background in texts
dealing with the origins of modern urban panning, but the book-length
description of these conditions written at the time by Frederick Engels (1974)
still bears reading.
[18] There is a substantial literature
from the 1940s to the 1960s concerning development that rests on this
assumption – see Agarwala and Singh, (1958) for a selection of papers by some
of the best-know ideologues of development from this era.
[19] Including
[20] As the Director General put it in
his 2001 annual report: (ILO,
2001:54): “…the comparative advantage
that some countries enjoy by virtue of a relative abundance of low-cost labour
has been affirmed as a legitimate advantage in trade…”
[21] Whilst, since the early 1990s the
IMF and World Bank have ostensibly abandoned structural adjustment for ‘Poverty
Reduction Strategies’, The United Nations Conference on trade and Development
(UNCTAD (2002)) recently commented that:
“A close examination of the macroeconomic and structural adjustment
policy contents of the PRSPs shows that there is no fundamental departure from
the kind of policy advice espoused under what has become known as the
‘Washington Consensus’.”
[22] ILO (2002)
[23] Atkinson (2001a)
[24] Interestingly the growth in
differentials in recent years has been more marked in the North than in the
South (ILO (2004)). For the
[25] ILO (2004, 44)
[26]
[27] Atkinson and Couté (2003)
[28] A few enlightened mayors – eg in
Durban and Bogota – are at least recognising the legitimacy of informal trading
but finding it extremely difficult to improve their situation without close
support by central governments and far broader strategy and consistent set of
policies that will combat the international economic logic in a coherent way.
[29] One area where southern manufactures
still have an edge is in artisanal goods.
There are significant markets for these in the North but competition is,
as in other areas, extreme, resulting in the overall income from these being,
with few exceptions such as
[30] Barnet and Cavanagh (1994), Chomsky
(1999), Greider (1997), Hertz (2001), Kelly (2001), Korten (1995)
[31] Although intellectual fashions move
on, it is worth revisiting the literature of post-modernism of the 1980s and
‘90s that analysed this state of our society.
See
[32] Odum (1971, 115-116)
[33] Pimentel and Pimental (1979)
[34] As a start, the BP annual
Statistical Review of World Energy at www.bp.com
provides a concise overview of evolving patterns of energy use globally and
regionally.
[35] IEA (2003)
[36] Setiyawan et al (1996)
[37] In 1960
[38] The transition to alcohol as vehicle
fuel, managed by the Brazilian government in the 1970s, was impressively
rapid. Of course the
[39] Gamble (1994), Hall and Jacques
(1983).
[40] Eyerman and Jamison (1991), Giddens
(1994), Melucci (19..) etc.
[41]
[42] Balbo (1993)
[43] A substantial debate arose in the
course f the 1960s and 1970s attempting to objectify the class structures of
Occidental societies, generally in pursuit of advancing the case for
egalitarian societies (Poulanzas (1974), Giddens and Held (1982) Wright (1985,
1989))
[44] In fact this ‘slide’ could already
be detected in the 1960s but has become more marked in recent years (ILO (2004,
44))
[45] I discuss the ideological foundations
of this belief in Atkinson (2004)
[46] The extreme case being where the
Swedish Prime Minster lived in ‘social housing’.
[47] Breheny (1992), Williams et al
(2000), Jenks and Burgess (2001)
[48] Ward (1971)
[49] Seagrave (1995)
[50] NEF (1997)
[51] Rahman (1993)
[52] Chambers (1983)
[53] For instance in the
[54] The case of
[55] ICLEI (1997). Also: the
international journal Local Environment
publishes articles describing LA21 and related initiatives.
[56] Atkinson and Allen (1998)
[57] For the more radical end, see the
web site of the Gobal Ecovillage Network www.gen.ecovillage.org. More
mainstream presentation of sustainable projects is to be found amongst the
‘Dubai Awards’ promoted by UN-HABITAT.
See www.dubai-award.dm.gov.ae.
[58] eg the Post Carbon Institute (www.postcarbon.org) and the Carfree
Cities Network (www.carfree.com)
[59] The EC introduced a procedure under
the title of Eco-Management and Audit Scheme (EMAS) wherein companies could
analyse and report on their own activities on particular sites with a view to
progressing in the direction of more sustainable production, but without any
overall framework – and in the end with very few companies participating.
[60] Mao (1957)
[61] These ideas are not isolated but
relate to a broader debate that can be accessed in the first instance via the
web site of ‘PareCon’ (participatory economy) at www.parecon.org. See also Albert (2004)
[62] Bauman (2000)
[63] The critique of the possibility of
Utopia is particularly associated with Karl Popper (1945).
[64] Kateb (1963)
[65] Manuel and Manuel (1979)