Priorities for the New UN Centre for Human Settlements

BARBARA WARD

International Institute for Environment and Development, London

Even if no UN Conference had ever been held to consider “human settlements”, and Vancouver had never played host to HABITAT as it did in June 1976, it would still have been impossible for the international community to ignore what may well be the most radical and explosive change taking place in an already sufficiently radical and explosive century. This phenomenon is, of course, that of urbanization at breakneck speed within a world population likely to grow by two billions in the next twenty years.

The facts are so well known that they read almost like a liturgy. But they must be repeated:

“If we take ‘urban’ as the adjective to qualify settlements of more than 20,000 inhabitants, throughout most of human history at least ninety percent of the people have lived not in cities but in hamlets, villages, or at most small towns. At the time of the American Revolution, for instance, this was the percentage of Americans living in centres of no more than 2,500 people.

“Now compare with this the sudden explosive acceleration of change in the twentieth century. . . . By 1960, urban populations had grown to a thousand million in a world of three thousand million-only a two to one rural-urban ratio. Today, urban peoples are racing toward the 1500 million mark out of a total world population of four thousand million. Ten years from now, they will pass the two thousand million level. By the year 2000, there will actually be more urban dwellers than rural people in a world population which will have risen to between six and seven thousand million.

“We also have to realize what an astonishingly new phenomenon is the city of a million people. Probably neither Rome nor Byzantium reached that peak even at their greatest extent. True, if Marco Polo’s impressions can be trusted, Kinsai in China-on the site of today% Hankow - may have had three million inhabitants in the thirteenth century and Edo-as Tokyo was first called -seems to have reached a million by the eighteenth century. But the concept of a ‘big city’ did not go much beyond 100,000 until the beginnings of the nineteenth century; it is almost comical to recall that at the time of the American Revolution, only two cities-Boston and Philadelphia- had even reached 50,000.

“Then with the spread of industrialization and of world-wide trade, the city of a million begins to race ahead. London reached the mark in the 1820s. By 1900, there were eleven

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‘million-cities’, six of them in Europe-still the imperial and commercial dominant of the world. But the jump from two to eleven in the nineteenth century has been followed by an infinitely more formidable acceleration in our own time. By 1950, there were seventy-five ‘million cities’, fifty-one of them in developed regions, twenty-four in the developing world. Today, the developing nations have pulled ahead. They contain 101 such cities, out of a world total of 191. By 1985, the million-city will have jumped from 11 to 273 in less than a century-and 147 of them will be in the less-developed lands.

“And even this vast multiplication does not fully measure the contemporary upheaval in human settlements. The million-city begins to explode into the ten-million city. There were two of them in 1950 -New York and London. By 1970 there were four. But by 1985, there will be at least seventeen of these gigantic agglomerations, ten of them in developing areas-with Mexico City, at nearly eighteen million, only a step behind New York. And at the head of the list Edo’s successor, Tokyo, will recover its earlier primacy with the dubious distinction of bringing 25 million people together in a single conurbation.“(‘)

This then is the scale of the phenomenon which the UN system took up at HABITAT and now, more than two years later, has subjected to the discipline of establishing an orderly structure for research, counselling, prodding, encouraging and generally persuad- ing governments to see that a “settlements strategy” is as important to public decision- making as industrial policies or fiscal policies or any of the other critical areas in which, if a government loses control, it can find itself in profound disequilibrium and even facing collapse.

So the first step has been taken. Settlements are recognized as requiring attention in their own right as a critical segment in general public policy-making. The next question is the likely effectiveness of the new Centre for Human Settlements that has been set up by the General Assembly and brings together the long-established Housing, Building and Planning Secretariat from UN Headquarters in New York with the more recently established HABITAT Foundation, hitherto an adjunct of the UN Environment Programme. Both are to join forces in Nairobi and share with UNEP occupation of the planned UN complex to be built outside the city. That such upheavals of both structure and geography will demand a little time before full effectiveness is possible can hardly be denied. But the new unit faces profounder difficulties and ones which must confront any effort by any agency or set of agencies that tries to make a settlements strategy into a reality.

One can pick out three problems among a host of others. “Settlements” include most of human working, moving about and living. How can any programme be devised which does not at once call into question or strongly impinge on at least ten others? In which case, how can one possibly conceive of a single unit trying to produce a strategy at all?

A second difficulty is the sheer physical, cultural and economic diversity underlying the planetary avalanche into cities. The physical background can vary from the foothills of the Andes to the desert fringes of the Sahara. The cultures may all be undergoing the homogenizing effect of the modern technological order, but between the skilled artisan moving from a European centre city to a growing prospering new community and a

(1) Barbara Ward, The Home of Man, Penguin Books, 1976. p. 3

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landless Bengali heading for Calcutta, what are the common elements-beyond, perhaps, a more or less strongly-felt, ill-defined and all too often mistaken urge for human betterment? What have Liverpool and Lagos in common beyond the letter “L” and a certain inability to cope with the most disquieting problems of their docks and hinterlands? As for the economic differences, we are dealing with structures as different from each other as are, say, on the one hand, Britain’s orderly, publicly-managed, financially responsible corporations set up to develop New Towns and, on the other hand, a casual choice of sites from locations chosen first by business interests and then largely handed over to real estate developers waiting to engross, with the help of an advanced construc- tion industry, all the “unearned increment” of the expanding city, with land prices growing, as in the Paris or Madrid of the Sixties, by at least 10% per annum-giving the inflationary spiral another careless spin in the process.

And this reflection leads to the third-the relative lack all round the world of genuinely popular and acceptable urban patterns. What is much in suburbia but an escape from the city? And what is much of the even vaster migrations of the developing world but a push out of deteriorating country life rather than a pull towards a more satisfying urban existence? The world seems littered with ill-devised urban patterns, many of them moving to graver insolubility - for instance, the structural unemployment emerging in market economies or the growing underemployment of developing cities. A problem may be the first spur to the search for policy. But one or two successful models greatly speed up the process of solution-seeking. Are they to be found? Can they be propagated? Can their relevance be analyzed? Can action be devised in time?

But, of course, such questions, while they underline the appalling problems the new settlements unit will face, also illustrate the necessity of creating it and the possibilities open to it for effective action. Take first of all the question of strategy. It is perfectly true that a successful settlements policy includes not only housing, sanitation, layout and amenities but also land and resource surveys, knowledge of local eco-systems, land-use planning coupled with optimum locations for the development of agriculture, industry and transportation and capturing all forms of unearned increment that result from such changes. But many urban problems exist precisely because these factors have not been considered rogether. A resource opened up here, a deep water berth there, an industrial decision somewhere else (or even a Minister’s private land-holding) have so often casually decided a location--often the worst-for urban development that, as a result, too many cities are all but intolerable to live and work in. If, as a result of the Human Settlements Centre’s existence, governments can be persuaded to look at the separate geographical, cultural and economic elements of settlement creation as part of a wider and coherent whole, the chance at least exists of better planned and humane settlements.

Clearly, the Centre itself cannot undertake the whole task. Its work must be essentially one of co-ordinator and co-operator. But, if it handles this role with tact, works especially closely with its most relevant partner, UNEP, draws on the expertise of other concerned UN bodies - FAO, WHO, the World Bank -it could become a catalyst both for coherent local policies and - for the first time-of settlements planning as an accepted, worldwide, governmental discipline.

But so large a change in public thinking can hardly be stimulated from one place. AS the group of experts convened before last summer’s meeting of ECOSOC made clear,

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regionalism and respect for local variety must be at the roots of the new Centre’s work. It is appropriate that the unit should be in a developing country because it is in the Third World that the greatest growth of people and settlements will occur (and it is also the biggest chance to avoid past mistakes). Nonetheless, each region has its own traditions, resources and opportunities. There are no blanket answers (or where there are, they tend to be like the world’s appalling skyscrapers of which one can truly say: “When you have seen one, you have seen them all”). Regional operation is expressly part of the new unit’s mandate. But between the mandate “and the reality” may fall the shadow. Every bureaucracy, public or private, tends to have certain centralising tendencies. Rules to cover everything are easier to administer than the obstinately exceptional and refractory character of local realities. No one can say in advance whether the new unit will be fully aware that Bolivia and Nepal do not have everything in common. But one can say in advance that the quality and impact of its work will depend upon its regionalism being real-not lip service or rhetoric but a real response to local conditions, a real acceptance of local differences, a real and indeed happy recognition of the fact that the very last thing humanity needs is the standardized city in the standardized surroundings full of standardized buildings and finally producing standardized discontent. The unit must rejoice in variety and experiment, in local participation and decision-making. Administratively, it may all be a great nuisance. Actually, it is the difference between the genuine catalyst and the dead hand.

And, inevitably, this vital factor of local involvement can be of critical importance in the third area of difficulty- the relative absence of good models for settlements, the relative discontent of the world’s peoples with what they are offered for their settled life- a settled life which comes into being without consultation or consent-by public bureaucracies and private interests, by intention, by absence of mind, by every sort of pressure or inadvertence but rarely indeed by the processes of forethought, of cultural inheritance, of comparative ecological and economic advantage, above all of the full involvement of the citizens themselves. The new UN Centre can fulfil one of its primary tasks only if it accepts a fundamental responsibility to spread round the world the few working models of successful settlements-or even parts of models-and the appalling number of catastrophic failures and, in this way, both guide and scare other governments and peoples to the realization that they need not be trapped in settlements planned for every purpose under the sun save that of providing a decent environment for their citizens.

Here the new concept of “basic needs”, of an acceptable human standard for all earth- lings acquires its full dimension - for where is man, woman or child to live in dignity and decency except in settlements? Wherever, in the whole planet, there are practical instances of settlements which provide a nearer approach to mankind’s “basic needs”, these are the models which the new unit must propagate by every means it can dispose of-conferences, publications, the press, the NGO community, pressure on governments themselves. If Holland and Sweden have effective land banks, let it be known in Korea or Japan and the appropriate administrative or structural changes be repeated. If Britain’s New Towns decentralize work and prove a profitable public enterprise, encourage the United States of America to go back and look once more at its “model cities” programmes. If China has a decentralized urban structure, supporting rural renewal, let it be known in India or Brazil. If Poland or Rumania have contrived to decentralize industry and prevent the overloading of the centre city, tell the story in Western Europe-and add the French experience in its

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Datar planning. If whole provinces are made “priority development areas” to take the pressure off the capital-as in Cuba-let Nicaragua and Guatemala publicly be told the tale. If in colder climates, Sweden and Holland and Denmark begin in subsidized insulation in housing, let the Anglo-Saxons increase their efforts.

Of course, such a process of propagation involves confronting the most explosive problems of land ownership, land-use planning and incremental taxation. One can imagine the reception the Centre would receive in El Salvador if it turned up with an unvarnished variant of the Cuban model. But the mere fact of having a sort of settlements “Helsinki” -an open and frank confrontation of good and awful results would not be without its impact. At present, the world is half-blinded in its search for better settlements by the sheer blank failure to communicate promising or catastrophic results-a process which the Habitat Conference began to reverse but which must now become one of the new Centre’s most urgent tasks.

For we cannot doubt one thing. In the world at large, the millions will be born. The settlements will grow-in squalor and violence or in work and hope. The whole world - linked by its communications, its airlines, its hi-jackers and its terrorists-has really only one choice: to become a place worth living in or face “the way to dusty death”. And where else do people live save in their settlements? So where else is salvation to begin?