Global Report on Human Settlements 2007 - PoA-ISS

This <strong>Global</strong> <strong>Report</strong> on Human Settlements examines some of
today’s major threats to urban safety and security within the
broader frame of rapid urban growth, uneven socioeconomic
development and the quest for human security. 1 It
seeks to review the growing concern about the safety and
security of people, rather than states, linking this to the risks
and opportunities that accompany increasing social and
economic complexity, which is itself a result of growth and
development.
In the last decade or so, the world has witnessed
increasing numbers of threats to urban safety and security.
While some of these threats have taken the form of dramatic
events, many have been manifestations of the nexus of
urban poverty and inequality with the physical, economic,
social and institutional conditions of slums. Urban crime and
violence in countries in all regions, regardless of level of
development, have led to increasing debate about how to
address its origins and impacts. Gang violence in Brazil,
Guatemala, Honduras, South Africa and Kenya has affected
many people. Dramatic violence in Paris and throughout
urban France has demonstrated that such violence could also
occur in cities in high-income countries with large disparities
in income and opportunity. Many households have faced the
threat of insecure tenure and the likelihood of forced
evictions. These problems have been evident in cities in
Nigeria, Turkey and Zimbabwe, with the case of Harare
receiving the most global attention during the last three
years. There have also been dramatic impacts of so-called
natural disasters, with significant global attention being
focused on the Indian Ocean Tsunami affecting Indonesia,
Sri Lanka, Thailand and India; monsoon flooding in Mumbai;
Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, US; and earthquakes in
Pakistan and Java, Indonesia.
While these ‘events’ receive media coverage, they are,
in fact, symptomatic of deeper and more pervasive processes
that affect these cities. While crime and violence are,
perhaps, the most obvious of these processes, insecurity of
tenure and disasters are also the results of deeper processes
and institutional failure. This report seeks to describe these
phenomena, to provide a framework for analysis of their
causes and impacts, and to suggest a set of recommendations
for policy and action that can help to reduce urban insecurity
and increase safety.
Growing numbers of urban residents living at increasing
densities in horizontal and vertical space necessarily
increase opportunities for productive employment and social
interaction; but in some situations, particularly in slums,
they also increase vulnerability to the harmful consequences
of development. In rapidly growing cities, more people need
food, housing, water supply, sanitation and employment to
generate incomes to buy basic services. This demand, in
turn, generates many opportunities for productive, as well as
criminal, responses to ever more stimulating and demanding
social environments. With opportunities, however, come
risks. The social imperative for urban residents to adjust to
urban life brings many forms of disequilibria, shortages and,
necessarily, differences between the abilities of individuals
and households to satisfy their needs and ambitions.
Inequalities in opportunities lead to differences in outcomes,
perspectives and willingness to live within rules that may
appear (particularly for growing numbers of the urban poor)
manifestly unjust.
This process of urban social and economic differentiation
interacts closely with the physical location and
ecological features of cities: their geography, landscape,
natural environment and access to specific natural resources,
particularly water. Cities historically developed near sources
of water supply and water for transport or energy, such as
Manchester and Chicago, or on coasts with harbours and
colonial entrepots. 2 Cities sit on an ecological edge, between
solid ground and watersheds. Over time, these historical
origins also brought risks such as periodic flooding. Now,
there is growing global public awareness that nature itself is
no longer inherently stable, but is, rather, at any one time,
an outcome of dynamic forces such as climate change or
other human-induced pollution or disruption. The physical
sites of cities, whether Mumbai or New Orleans, are recognized
as dynamic landscapes that can no longer be assumed
as benign or as given. The individual circumstances of particular
cities fit into a global pattern where 70 per cent of the
world’s population lives within 80 kilometres of the coast.
Land and ocean are thus brought closer together, increasing
human vulnerability to the environmental hazards associated
with rising sea level.
Within this broader ecological context, cities have
always been spaces where many individuals and households
have been successful in generating incomes and opportunities
for themselves and their families. The differentials
between urban and rural incomes explain most of rural to
urban migration over the past 50 years. Not surprisingly,
successful individuals and households tend to protect their
interests in maintaining these prerogatives in the face of the
many who have not. History has shown that private interests
have public consequences, largely expressed through politics