Stressing the potential value of the world's cities, as well as the concentration of poverty there, a new UN report on Monday said national governments should pay more attention to urban development.
Compiled for a three-day special session of the UN General Assembly starting Wednesday, the report, The State of the World's Cities, described cities as "the most complex and potentially rewarding of human artifacts."
But it noted that more than one billion people live in inadequate housing, mostly in slums in Third World mega-cities such as Lagos, forecast to become the third largest metropolis by 2015 as its population swells by almost 10 million.
Lagos, already home to 13.4 million people, comes close to bottom of the report's city development index, scoring 29.3 out of a possible 100, compared with 97.4 for Stockholm.
But Anna Tibaijuka, director of the UN agency Habitat, said Nigeria had adopted a constitutional right to housing which would feature as one of 16 success stories to be debated at the General Assembly session.
The session is a follow-up to the second global conference on human settlements, held in 1996 in Istanbul, and will focus on "the challenge of the divided city," Tibaijuka told a news conference to launch the report.
"Cities are engaged in cut-throat competition to attract the business of transnational corporations, but our analysis shows that this competition has not necessarily benefited the residents of the city," she said.
"We have very affluent central business districts while we have tenements and slums, squatter settlements in other parts of the city."
The problems were particularly acute in Africa, she went on, "because people are moving to get away not only from poverty but also from civil strife; most of the wars are not being fought in the cities, but in the countryside."
Jay Moore, the author of the report, said that in 1800, only two percent of the world population's lived in cities, but there had been a dramatic increase in urbanisation in the past century.
"We have really not developed our institutions yet very well to manage cities, and the process of governing cities is something we are learning about now," he said.
Citing the 1997 Asian financial crisis as an example, he said "the urban poor suffered as a result of national governments not paying enough attention to the kind of activities that occurred then."
Bangkok had suffered "from great over-investment," he said.
"The main message is that national governments must start to fill in their policies by paying more attention to urban development," he went on.
"Cities have their own governance structures; they deal with themselves in a holistic manner. Mayors, councilors, city managers, are on the front line for almost everything that happens in a city. They have to deal with disasters, housing problems, economic problems, immediately and by themselves."
National governments were losing control over financial elements to the forces of globalisation, Moore said, "but they still play, and should play, a very strong role in regulation."
It would, he said, be "absolutely the wrong way to go" to try to reverse population drift to cities by developing rural areas.
"Cities provide opportunities for people to become upwardly mobile and escape poverty, and educated people in rural areas look to cities as places of opportunity, and they move there," he said. |
