Mega cities, mega woes
July 17th, 2007 by Anindita Sengupta
It’s no secret. Our cities are growing at a furious pace.
As more opportunities are created in sectors that have their base in urban areas, more and more people are leaving their homes and farms in villages to find work in the cities. The World Urban Forum predicts that that in the next fifty years, two-thirds of humanity will be living in towns and cities.
This growth is often visible to us in ways that affect our daily lives: increasing traffic, crowded streets, longer queues at the supermarket. But there are larger ways in which this is affecting the world around us–a growing population of the urban poor.
These are the people who come to a city and become immersed in a cycle of survival. They clean our streets, guard our houses, get rid of our waste, drive our cars and buses, run our tea-shops. Usually, they go home to slums where they do not have access to even basic needs like ventilated rooms, safe water, clean toilets. The United Nations estimates that by the year 2020, 40% of the population will be slum-dwellers.
According to this story, in Mexico City, the second-largest city in the world, 40% of the people live below the poverty line. Mumbai, which is home to 19 million people, has half its population living in slums. Rio de Janeiro is home to 12 million people. One third of Rio’s population lives in slums, known as favelas. In these cramped living arrangements, poor sanitation leads to disease easily. But there are other ills that breed here as well–crime, drugs, alcoholism and violence. According to UN-HABITAT’s State of the World’s Cities Report 2006/7, Sub-Saharan Africa is worst hit where 72% of urban inhabitants live in slums rising to nearly 100% in some states.
Migration to cities is inevitable and unstoppable. People will move where they expect to have a better life, regardless of whether or not the reality lives up to their dreams. Expecting migrant populations and dealing with their needs is something that governments have long avoided, taking the easier route of demolishing slums or illegal tenements, and burying their heads in the sand, ostrich-like, the rest of the time.
What’s needed is realistic planning and provision of low-cost housing that provides a certain basic standard of living, and adequate monitoring to ensure that the right people are benefiting from this.
In parallel, they need to ensure that the larger infrastructure of a city is able to handle the burgeoning population. This means providing better roads, clean drinking water, convenient commercial and educational spaces, social and recreational facilities, adequate health facilities, and a healthy environment. A tall order? Not really. Poor planning, inefficiency and plain stupidity are often to blame for delays. In many places, the situation has been exacerbated by a deliberate refusal to deal with the facts, or worse, rampant corruption and lack of concern. Perhaps, it’s time to holler a little louder for the things we need. It just may go a little way towards saving tomorrow’s cities, if not today’s.