Global Report on Human Settlements 2007 - PoA-ISS

32
Understanding Urban Safety and Security
Box 2.2 Urban land-use processes and dynamics
A private investor in a city of 3 million people builds a factory in
1960 to produce a chemically based product. Following municipal
zoning procedures and industrial safety regulations, the factory is
located on the far periphery of the metropolitan area, outside the
borders of the central municipality, allowing the noxious fumes to
blow far away from any residential areas. Each year, however, the
expansion of the built-up urban area reaches closer to the factory.
Eventually, the land near the factory becomes an unregulated
residential area for poor households who had been evicted
from downtown locations. Having been evicted once, the poor
wisely do not invest heavily in their homes. Similarly, the poor
municipality on the periphery of the city has no interest or feels no
political pressure to provide water supply and other infrastructure
to the illegally occupied area. Households drill their own wells or
use water from nearby waterways, both of which are probably
polluted by the factory. The incidence of disease and other health
problems is significant, affecting employment and incomes. A consequence
is that the area becomes known for drug dealing and crime.
By 1980, however, the location of this residential land is
increasingly considered to be in the first ring of the metropolitan
area or central zone of a rapidly expanding city. The now wealthier
and politically more important municipality then decides to evict
the poor, clearing out ‘undesirable elements’, and announces that it
will provide infrastructure for a ‘proper’ residential neighbourhood.
However, having failed to secure international funding, on environmental
and other grounds, the municipality had to mobilize
resources for this from the area’s new and wealthier residents. Five
years later, the factory is surrounded by a mixed residential area of
50,000 people working in the formal sector. Residents form a
strong neighbourhood organization to ensure the security of the
area and, among other tasks, to keep the drug dealers out.
In 1990, with machinery in the factory now 30 years old,
there is a serious industrial accident with escaping chemical fumes
killing hundreds of people living near the factory grounds and
affecting thousands in the neighbourhood. Fortunately for the
poorest households who had been forced to leave the area ten
years earlier, they have escaped the effects of the accident and live
in a squatter area 16 kilometres to the west of the factory. Many
residents of the neighbourhood are gravely injured and are unable
to work. Neither the company nor public authorities at the municipal
or national level are able to provide much compensation to
cover medical costs or unemployment insurance.
Postscript. In some European capital, thousands of kilometres away,
the head of the Urban Development Division of the International
Aid Agency thanked his or her lucky stars that, despite the intense
lobbying efforts of the government of the city, the housing project
had been turned down for financing in 1980. Perhaps there will now
be an opportunity for a new development project including
environmental cleanup, showing the agency’s new ‘green awareness’.
Aerial photography
of most cities vividly
shows that the
poorest and most
fragile quality of
housing and
infrastructure is
coincident with
physical and
natural risks
particular, as well as those of the elderly and the disabled,
before and at the time of Hurricane Katrina and later in relief
and recovery efforts. 36
The cases of Mumbai and New Orleans are also very
instructive about general patterns of the complex multiple
factors that operate at the urban level. Vulnerabilities appear
to be cumulative; yet they also interact with one another,
exacerbating safety and security. For example, the poor
occupy the most hazardous sites in most cities, such as the
gecekondus and barrios on the hillsides of Ankara and
Caracas, respectively, or in the kampungs along the canals in
Jakarta, or between the railway lines in Mumbai. They are
unable to find ‘safe’ land in cities where land prices are high
or where public policy is not intended to allow the poor to
occupy central or desirable locations. So they are forced to
accept the risk of physically dangerous sites in order to avoid
the risk of forced evictions if they settle in other ‘safer’, but
prohibited, locations. In the event of a flood, their homes on
the banks of canals are the first to be flooded, with the risk
that they will lose everything.
These patterns explain, for example, the origins of
settlements such as Mathare Valley, an undesirable location
in Nairobi, or in the desert areas of metropolitan Lima.
Nezahualcoyotl, a large settlement distant from employment
in central Mexico City, initially grew spontaneously in
unhealthy, dusty and dry conditions, but is now home to
more than 2 million residents just across the border of the
Federal District of Mexico City. 37
The development of these settlements is essentially
determined by the distribution of risk in space. Aerial
photography of most cities vividly shows that the poorest
and most fragile quality of housing and infrastructure is
coincident with physical and natural risks. If household
decisions about urban location are generally determined
by price and access, for the poor these decisions increasingly
include weighing the probability of risks from
different forms of hazard. It is possible to identify a typology
of preferences among the poor in individual cities
according to such hazards, from living near waste disposal
facilities, to living near waterways, to settling between
railway tracks, to choosing between air pollution and the
likelihood of injuries to children playing near passing
trains or traffic.
This distribution of risk in space is intensified by the
growing proportion of slums in cities, such as Mumbai, with
more than 6 million people living in slums, 38 or São Paulo,
Lagos and other cities, where slum dwellers are more than
half the population. As their number increases, the poor
seek any available locations that offer cheaper access to
employment opportunities, including on environmentally
marginal land that no one else wants. A particularly dramatic
example of this scenario is the estimated 500,000 people
living in the City of the Dead in Cairo. 39 Cultural or religious
taboos about occupying cemeteries are at risk of being
overridden in many cities.
When considering the urban level as the unit of analysis,
it is easier to include the role of various forms of
externalities that operate at the urban and the metropolitan
scale. The prototypical fictitious example presented in Box
2.2 illustrates the various dynamics and processes found in