Providing infrastructure to the urban poor
The lack of infrastructure in many developing countries is a significant barrier to economic growth and social justice. Investments in transport, energy, housing, sanitation, and water improve lives and reduce poverty. However, informal settlements are especially under-served when it comes to infrastructure, as they often lack both the government's formal recognition and the resources to supply themselves. This week, URB.im profiles solutions from Bangalore, Dhaka, Rio de Janeiro, and Cairo to see what impact centralized, distributed, private, or public initiatives can have on the urban poor.
|
|
|
|
|
What Taksim Square tells us about Bangalore's future
Carlin Carr, Bangalore Community Manager
Last week, protestors in Istanbul's Taksim Square took to the streets to stop their time-honored public meeting space from becoming a shopping mall. The city, they say, has been increasingly swallowed up by privatization and commercialization; parks and open spaces have essentially disappeared. The redevelopment story is one that Indian cities know too well.
Bangalore, once lauded as the "Green City" for its numerous parks, has turned into a traffic-snarled urban jungle. Office parks and gated communities dominate the city's landscape. As Bangalore rose to prominence as the world's IT hub, economic growth spurred population growth. A 2008 article by EMBARQ says that the city expanded outward by nearly three-fold from 1971-2006, going from 175 square kilometers in 1971 to more than 560 square kilometers 35 years later.
As in most Indian cities, the poor have increasingly been pushed to the periphery due to land costs in the center. In Bangalore, this has become particularly troublesome due to the lack of networked transport options. EMBARQ says the growth has "generated a new human species aptly named 'Transport Challenged People.' The common trait of these people is that they are forced to become captive to a mode of transport just because they don't have an accessible alternative. Their other characteristic is that they pay a price for traveling that they do not consider fair or just, but because they have no other option, they continue to pay it."
When the poor pay more for transportation, other areas of their lives suffer. In all likelihood, these are areas such as education, health, or food. Therefore, there has been much criticism over the city's major infrastructure initiative: the Namma Metro. Radha Chanchani, an urban planner working with the Indian Institute of Science, is skeptical of the cost factor in an article proposing bus rapid transit services (BRTS): "Comparing BRTS to the metro, everyone knows that a BRTS would cost a fraction of a metro structure. I heard somewhere that the cost of constructing metro Phase 1 and Phase 2 cost more than Rs.40,000 crores [Rs.400 billion, or $7.4 billion]. The BRTS also has better accessibility than the metro and would be more affordable to people."
As with megacities around the world, urban planners in India have been pushing for BRTS. Governments, on the other hand, have been slow to follow, opting instead for high-cost options that serve few. In Mumbai, for example, the Bandra-Worli Sealink Bridge cost the city an estimated INR 1634 crore ($28.8 million), and the fare for crossing it is often what a majority of the city's population makes in a day.
The protests in Taksim Square teach a valuable lesson when discussing the future of India's cities. The gap between the government's focus and what the majority needs is wreaking havoc on our urban environments. After all, the poor cannot improve their income without affordable transport options to get to work. Without getting to work, families have less money to spend on food. Without food, children can't focus at school. And the cycle continues. Government policies and offices need to work more collaboratively to create integrated policies and planning to ensure equitable development of urban spaces. If not, Taksim-style protests will become the norm across cities where citizens' voices are being left unheard.
Photo credit: Ramnath Bhat
Water points quench thirst for safer water in informal settlements
Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, is one of the cities with the highest population growth in the world. The World Bank estimates that approximately 28 percent of the population is poor, and about 3.4 million live in precarious conditions in slums and low-lying lands. These people do not own the land they live on, making access to water and sanitation in urban low-income communities a growing challenge. These communities often collect water from private vendors or unreliable sources like polluted rivers, which pose biological and environmental health threats. Plus, a significant number of slum residents live without access to toilets and garbage collection services, so human waste and garbage contaminate the environment, further elevating health risks. It is clear that poor water quality is a leading cause of morbidity and mortality in Dhaka slums.
DSK, established in 1992, is a Dhaka-based NGO that operates in partnership with WaterAid Bangladesh and advocates for supplying Dhaka's residents with water, regardless of land ownership. In order to get around DWASA's fear that slum dwellers would not pay their utilities fees, DSK designed the Watsan Project. According to the model, water points were constructed in slum communities and were then connected to the DWASA water mains. Access to these water points costs just Tk. 50 per month, and security deposits help ensure that DWASA's fees are paid on time.
Construção e manutenção da infraestrutura pública no Rio
O objetivo de centralizar os serviços mencionados numa secretaria só, ajuda à Prefeitura a garantir padrões de segurança e qualidade. Também ajuda na coordenação das ações com outras instancias locais tais como as secretarias de finanças, planejamento, urbanismo, meio ambiente, saúde e educação, para assegurar que as obras públicas respondam as orientações técnicas e consigam-se desenvolver eficientemente.
Follow @urb_im
Recent discussions
Retooling 'Cities for Life': New approaches to urban infrastructure and service provision 03.14.2014
Urban planning and design: Laws, regulations, and the informal city 03.03.2014
Food security in coastal cities 02.17.2014
The competition for water 02.10.2014
Violence against children 02.03.2014
Comments
Cities surrounded by water, but drought in sight
Kalpana, I could see when I flew into Dhaka a couple of years ago that the city has a precarious relationship with water. It is obviously on very low lands with a high danger of flooding in the monsoons. With all this talk of water, it made me think of the absence of this resource. This year was a particularly difficult year in Maharastra, the state that Mumbai calls home. Severe drought hit, causing many resource-devastated farmers to have to move to the city for work. What they left behind was often quite nice--a decent home on acres of land--in return for squalid conditions on the outskirts of Mumbai. Just as the situation was hitting crisis level, a very wet June monsoon month arrived.
The situation, however, brings up the question of whether officials in areas of extreme weather conditions, such as Mumbai or Dhaka, have a grander plan for water resource management. Water Initiatives such as the Watson Project are innovative and necessary, but there seem to be larger questions looming in mega-cities where not only the people are being stretched to the limits, but so too are the natural resources. What happens when water tables dip too low or wells dry up and the monsoon doesn't drop enough rain? Given the situation that happened with water in this state this year, these questions need to be addressed with greater immediacy.
The legal questions about new infrastructure projects
Looking at all of our cities, I think we have all picked up on the fact that right to clean water, paved streets, working sewage systems and reliable access to electricity is not easily given to residents of informal areas. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that these people do not always have the proper land titles for them to pressure their respective governments to provide these resources to them. This is especially true in Cairo as I mentioned in my article. Legal action is definitely needed in order to secure proper land titles and zoning in order to connect these settlements to the main grid.
However Egypt itself is in its own transitionary period. With the political system trying to rebuild itself post-revolution, and the legality of the new constitution being questioned, I found myself questioning advocacy for legal changes when there is currently no political body that can create new legislation and no clear date set for when the next parliamentary elections will take place. Does that mean that residents of these areas will not have access to new infrastructure developments until law pass? Will they be able to wait that long? Even more importantly, should they wait that long?
Already there are political movements against the new Muslim Brotherhood regime and many more people will again be in Tahrir Square come June 30. Even more importantly, entire neighborhoods that live in informal areas have already declared that they will take to the streets because their living conditions haven't yet improved since Jan. 2011, if anything they have worsened. Houses that were already connected to the grid face power cuts almost daily for two-hour periods, water cuts are soon to come with Egypt's access to the Nile being threatened with the new dam in Ethiopia. With the pressures mounting, can the Egyptian population wait for new legislature or are there alternatives that we can seek?
If any of your cities face similar issues I would love to hear what is happening and how the people/government is managing this crisis.
Infrastructure maintenance
Good to read you all this week! Although the focus of the debate has been the challenges of infrastructure provision, I think it is also relevant to bring the issue of infrastructure maintenance, as it is the only way to keep structures in good state and to ensure a longer service life.
In many places around the globe there is little culture of maintenance, as sometimes it is difficult to ensure resources in improving structures and in fixing them before they are fully deteriorated. A challenge faced almost everywhere is who should be responsible for maintaining public structures. I thought Dhaka’s Watsan Project was actually very interesting as it is investing in training dwellers to be able to maintain their water facilities. Hopefully they are actually following up on this task. Kalpana do you have any feedback on this?
I was also interested in Cairo’s GIZ project, which adopted a participative approach in project design. Howaida could you let us know if the approach goes beyond participative design to operation and maintenance? How is this done?
Participation in Maintenance
Hi Catalina. First of all thanks for bringing up this important point about maintenance and sustainability. Cairo unfortunately is privy to any and all issues that result from poor management of resources, especially in physical infrastructure, where the tragedy of the commons is experienced first hand.
The GIZ participatory approach has actually had more success in regards to sustainable use and maintenance as reported after the first two phases of implementation because the local communities are key stakeholders. Involving the CBOs in the planning process has provided a sense of entitlement, which also brings with it a sense of responsibility, towards keeping these assets functional rather then rely on government systems to provide everything. While the GIZ doesn't conduct further projects towards the maintenance of these new infrastructure projects, part of their capacity building work during the planning stages includes workshops on sustainability in the management of common property resources. You can read more about the impact of their program at http://egypt-urban.net/impact.
Add new comment