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Focus on life in the urban sprawl

Kalpana Sharma

The World Urban Forum is looking at sustainable growth of the world's cities.

PHOTO: AP

SPOTLIGHT ON CITIES: Anna Tibaijuka, Under Secretary-General of the United Nations and Executive Director of U.N. Habitat, Stephen Harper, Canadian Prime Minister, and Alphonso Jackson, Secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, during the opening ceremonies of the World Urban Forum in Vancouver on Monday.

THE FACT that one out of every two persons in the world will be living in cities by next year is the main motivation behind the World Urban Forum III (WUF III) that opened on Monday in the picturesque west coast city of Vancouver, Canada. It has brought together around 10,000 people from over 150 countries, including representatives of governments, municipalities, academia, civil society, and community groups.

It is significant that the meeting is being held in Vancouver exactly 30 years after the first World Urban Forum was convened here in 1976. This was the first time that the United Nations and its member nations accepted the importance of dealing with the problems of urbanisation specifically and separately. It also led to the formation of a special agency, U.N. Habitat, that looked at the problems and challenges of urbanisation.

Inaugurating WUF III, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper pointed out that even a country such as Canada that had been largely rural, was becoming increasingly urbanised with 80 per cent of its 33 million people living in cities. The choice of Vancouver for the meeting was appropriate as it had been declared the most liveable city in the world, he said.

The Mayor of Vancouver, the wheelchair-bound Sam Sullivan, illustrated what the concept of sustainable cities meant by talking about the decisions Vancouver had taken with regard to its development. It was the only city in North America that did not have a freeway running through it. It was also the only city on the continent where the number of cars coming into the city had been decreasing rather than increasing. Further, over 70 per cent of the trips made by people were on foot, the result of a concerted effort to make the city pedestrian friendly. The city, with a population of 2.2 million, had also consciously sought to increase density rather than encouraging urban sprawl common to most cities in North America. As a result, unlike other cities, Vancouver's downtown area was alive and safe, where people lived and worked.

Politics need to become urbanised, said Anna Tibaijuka, Under Secretary-General and Executive Director of U.N. Habitat, while speaking of "the urbanisation of humanity." She said that while the idea of a sustainable city was within sight, why were cities in the developed and developing world actually become less sustainable? "Why are urban slums, which now contain over one billion people and their myriad problems, still growing at a rate that outpaces all our attempts to deal with them?"

The issue of slums is one that is likely to dominate many of the discussions over the five days of WUF III. According to the "State of the World's Cities 2006/7," released on Monday by U.N. Habitat, the rate of urban growth and that of slums was the highest in sub-Saharan Africa, almost double the rate in Southern Asia. Over 90 per cent of slums are located in cities in the developing world, "where urbanisation has become virtually synonymous with slum formation," it notes. It also predicts that by 2030, 80 per cent of the world's urban population, or four billion people, will be living in cities in the developing world. In actual numbers, over half of these, or 2.66 billion, will be living in Asia.

Two Indian cities, Mumbai and Delhi, come in for special mention in the report as future "metacities." Currently only Tokyo, with a population of 35 million, qualifies for that description.

But by 2020, the report states, Mumbai, Delhi, Mexico City, Sao Paulo, New York, Dhaka, Jakarta, and Lagos will have achieved metacity status.

India is officially represented at the conference by Union Minister of State for Urban Employment and Poverty Alleviation, Kumari Selja. At the opening plenary, she touched on the problem of slums in India saying that over 20 per cent of India's urban population lived in slums.

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