Researching-the-Urban-Dilemma-Baseline-study

Executive Summary
Introducing the urban dilemma
The world recently entered an unprecedented period of urbanization. Just 600 urban centers now generate
roughly 60 per cent of global GDP. Most urban growth, however, is occurring not in wealthy settings but rather
in the expanding cities and slums of developing countries. Many of the fastest growing metropolises are also
witnessing a sharp escalation in the incidence and severity of various forms of urban violence, particularly in
Latin America and the Caribbean and Sub-Saharan Africa, though other urban centers in South and Central Asia
are increasingly affected. Concerns registered by security and aid experts alike are the ways in which the urban
poor are directly and indirectly implicated in such violence, and the wider consequences of violence in cities
for national and regional stability and development more generally.
There is a comparatively wide-ranging engagement with issues of urbanization, urban poverty and urban
violence by social scientists. Indeed, much has been written on the scale and distribution of urban growth as
well as the character of urban impoverishment and inequality. There also appears to be considerable
scholarship on the real and perceived costs and consequences of urban violence across an array of low- and
medium-income settings. But much of the research and debate continues to be segmented and
compartmentalized within certain disciplines and geographic settings. There are also major silences in relation
to the interaction between urban poverty and urban violence and, in particular, the effectiveness of
interventions designed to mitigate and reduce insecurity in medium- and lower-income cities.
Notwithstanding these gaps, policy makers across the security and development domains are starting to
engage more proactively with the “urban dilemma”. The dilemma is exemplified by the paradoxical effects of
urbanization in the twenty first century: as a force for unparalleled development on the one hand, and as a risk
for insecurity amongst the urban poor on the other. While the research base on this urban dilemma has only
recently started being built, development specialists have long been confounded by the double-edged
character of urbanization. Moreover, increasing numbers of military and law enforcement specialists are
seized by the implications of dilemma, convinced as they are that “fragile” cities and their urban peripheries
constitute likely sites for the future wars of the current century.
The growing preoccupation with the urban dilemma amongst diplomats, development and defense sectors is
not, however, matched with commensurate investment in research. The 2011 World Development Report
usefully pointed out how multilateral and bilateral agencies are drilling down on the two-way relationships
between poverty and insecurity. But the Report had little to say about these associations at the metropolitan
or city level: the socio-spatial dimension was missing altogether. A recurring challenge is the poor state of the
underlying data which frustrates empirical measurement and testing. Agencies such as the Organization for
Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the United Nations and the World Bank continue to privilege
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