Global Report on Human Settlements 2007 - PoA-ISS

Reducing urban crime and violence
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as cities across the world benefit in these terms by being
‘twinned’ with other cities, so too could partnerships
benefit from similar arrangements. The points about the
importance of capacity-building and of the open and accessible
reporting of evaluative work have already been made
earlier. Encouraging developments in these areas ought to
be helpful not just in its own right, but also in helping the
Safer Cities partnership process in individual cities. The
difficulty of relating individual initiatives in Safer Cities
programmes to national and even international initiatives in
these fields is important, and a willingness to address issues
of this nature is one of the ways in which national governments
can improve their contributions to particular
place-based partnerships. As far as the resources available
for Safer Cities projects are concerned, there is no getting
away from the fact that resource availability affects both
what UN-Habitat can do in relation to the programme as a
whole, and what can be done in individual cities. It is, of
course, a matter for individual jurisdictions to decide
whether they wish to do anything about this situation; but
the challenges of urbanization are among the greatest faced
by humanity, and within this the drive for safer cities is of
considerable significance to the quality of life. There is also
scope, as some of the examples have demonstrated, for help
both in terms of financial resources and expertise to be
made available to individual partnerships. This is a very
effective way in which the Safer Cities process can be
moved forward.
On the basis of this quick review, however, none of
these points suggests that there is anything basically wrong
with the Safer Cities model. They merely indicate that there
is more that could be done to help overcome some of the
operational difficulties being experienced in trying to put
into practice something that is inherently quite complex and
difficult.
■ Options for scaling up and enhancing the
impact of the Safer Cities Programme
There are two broad areas where the impact of the
programme could possibly be enhanced. These are: at city
level, in terms of direct impact on local insecurity; and at
the international level, where the programme could
increase its impact on partners and actors that can deliver at
the local level or provide enabling frameworks for local-level
action.
The scope of institutional change and reform should
indeed be considered as paramount for sustainability of
actions and impacts as well as the development of local
capacities among key actors. Both are ways to enhance
impact of individual initiatives. A third important strategy to
increase impact is to look at leveraging large-scale investment
in support of the implementation of local crime
prevention strategies. This report has identified in some
detail areas of planning and service delivery that are considered
as providing an important contribution to the
prevention of crime in cities. Accessing resources for such
types of investment is crucial for the larger-scale impact of
Safer Cities processes at local levels.
Box 10.5 Major difficulties encountered in implementing
Safer Cities strategies in African cities, to date
The 2006 review of progress with Safer Cities programmes in African cities itemized eight difficulties
encountered in implementing strategies:
• the necessity to translate general goals into a concrete and targeted action plan geared
towards short-, medium- and long-term benefits;
• the complexity of creating and implementing projects involving several partners;
• the experimental or pilot nature of several initiatives, which is quite often marginal to the
traditional ways of doing things by the involved institutions and organizations;
• limited financial resources available for the municipality or the partners to ensure the
implementation of such initiatives;
• limited resources and technical capacities of the municipal services in several countries
working on implementing decentralization policies;
• the difficulty of anchoring these initiatives to larger national and international programmes
addressing poverty and exclusion, good governance, decentralization, social development,
women, children, youth and family support, and criminal justice system modernization;
• insufficient partnerships blocking the development of a joint approach to safety and
prevention, and making coordination very difficult; and
• limited access to information on good or promising practices.
Source: UN-Habitat, 2006e, p26
■ The strategic focus of the Safer Cities
Programme in a new global context
The first ten years have been dedicated to establishing the
programme, assuring its position on the international scene
as a global knowledge base, and supporting local actors in
their crime prevention policies. Since its inception, the
environment in which the programme works has evolved
considerably. On one hand, there is an increasing and diversified
demand for security, for which the traditional level of
state intervention would appear to be insufficient. On the
other hand, there is growing awareness among global institutions
responsible for supporting sustainable social and
economic development that development cannot be
achieved independently from the rule of law and everyday
security. Local, regional and national authorities and organizations
and civil society, as well as international
organizations, constitute today the universe of actors
concerned with prevention and the fight against crime.
These new circumstances require a reinvigoration of the
Safer Cities Programme, highlighting its strategic role as a
normative and evaluation facility, in addition to its operational
functions.
CONCLUDING REMARKS:
WAYS FORWARD
Positive ways forward to address the problems of crime and
violence in urban areas, particularly in the rapidly growing
urban areas of the developing world, can be summarized as
follows:
• The ‘traditional’ approach to these problems, which is
to see them as being the primary responsibility of the