rural-urban dynamics_report.pdf - Khazar University

GLOBAL MONITORING REPORT 2013 URBANIZATION AND THE MDGS 171
city leaders consulted through the Platform
asked the World Bank: What must be done to
create jobs? What must be done to improve
living conditions in slums and hazard-prone
areas and to bridge the social divide? What
must be done to expand the coverage and
quality of basic services?
So what has been learned to date? First,
there are no straightforward answers to these
questions, and the evidence base on many of
these issues is filled with critical knowledge
gaps. But the UKP’s discussions with hundreds
of city leaders from around the world
also taught that, while all cities are unique,
the challenges they face are remarkably similar,
even across stages of development—with
shared issues ranging from climate change
to social inclusion. That means that “know
how” and solutions are transferable—that
the lessons learned from one city can, and
should, inform the choices of cities on the
other side of the planet. In other words, while
there is no single blueprint for success, it is
the case that some countries and cities have
been more successful than others. There is
a need, therefore, for new and expanding cities
of today to learn what worked and what
did not from those that have gone before
and to collaborate on common solutions to
shared problems informed by the evidence.
Such shared learning and collaboration has
been obstructed by a lack of facilitating
global public goods (such as forums, knowledge
platforms, and open data). The World
Bank through the UKP aims to help fill this
gap and to play the role of knowledge broker.
Second, most cities face not just a single
bottleneck to sustainable development but
a wide range of challenges that require integrated
solutions and tight policy coordination
across multiple agencies, jurisdictions, and
disciplines that do not always have a natural
incentive to collaborate. Most obviously,
rapid urbanization has caused urban centers
to spread beyond city boundaries and across
disparate local governments that often fail
to coordinate their actions, making it difficult
to take a strategic approach to managing
urban growth. A lack of sufficient policy
coordination similarly hinders progress on
several other aspects of urban development.
For instance, UKP-led discussions and followon
research by Professors Paul Collier and
Tony Venables on the persistence of informal
settlements demonstrate that no single root
cause explains the failure to deliver affordable
housing. Rather, a number of interrelated
impediments need to be addressed
through integrated action across disparate
policy domains—from financing to housing
regulations to the cost of construction materials—because
isolated progress on any one
bottleneck will be of limited impact if the others
continue to bind. For urban knowledge
generators and development practitioners to
help, they must lead by example by leveraging
platforms like the UKP to collaborate across
disciplines and sectors to build integrated
solutions to urban challenges.
Third, the number one obstacle to providing
city leaders with a fact-based understanding
of their challenges and opportunities is
the poor quality and tremendous fragmentation
of city-level data. In fact, while many
policy decisions are made and implemented
at the local level, most statistical information
is collected at the national level. As a result,
more reliable data are available today on,
say, the island-nation of Fiji—with a population
of 860,000—than for the megacities
of Delhi, Rio de Janeiro, or Shanghai, which
each have populations in excess of 10 million.
This imbalance creates an enormous mismatch
between the scale at which information
is available and the level at which urban
development is conducted, and significantly
constrains the growth of cumulative urban
knowledge generation across countries,
regions, and disciplines. To address this issue
and respond to the overwhelming demand of
its members and participants, the UKP has
partnered with the Swiss government to, for
the first time, systematically bring together
and visualize data on cities for global benchmarking
and evidence-based decision making.
The goal is to work with cities and partners
to harmonize, standardize, consolidate,
and open-source city data to form a robust
global evidence base on the challenges and
opportunities faced by cities.
The World Bank through the UKP is committed
to facilitating this shared learning