City as an entrepreneurial organization. Interview with dr Anna Kajumulo Tibaijuka, Under-Secretary-General of the United Nation and Executive Director of the UN-HABITAT conducted by prof. Marek Bryx and prof. Andrzej Herman, editor-in-chief.
Almost every social science has at least one metaphor for city (organism, growth, machine etc.). The first question refers to the subject of our discussion – the metaphor that becomes to be used by enterprise researchers and scientists: Can a city be regarded as an entrepreneurial organisation? What are, in your opinion, the most important evidences of and against such metaphor? Are spatial planners inspired by such metaphor?
Anna K. Tibaijuka: The city is humanity’s greatest achievement. It needs care and stewardship to bring its historic role into the new century. It is an enduring artifact, a resilient organism, and of course it is entrepreneurial. The city is fragile, yet robust, a global partner in social, economic and environmental progress. The recently concluded fifth session of the World Urban Forum in Rio de Janeiro celebrated these accomplishments and showed us a new way forward in improving global urbanization, the most important phenomenon of the world we live in.
UN-HABITAT was born in 1976 in Vancouver as a legacy of the First UN Conference on Human Settlements. With the Rio meeting, the biggest of these biennial events to date, the trajectory has moved from Africa (Nairobi 2002) to Europe (Barcelona 2004), to North America (Vancouver 2006), to Asia (Nanjing 2008). Modern social science and its teaching is starting to take on board what all of these meetings tell us: the fact that urbanization encompasses all continents. It is truly global.
The city’s historic role is deeply embedded in most languages, carrying within its Latin roots civitas yielding to ‘civilization’. The Greeks gave us polis, we thrive in metropolitan communities. Recently, and on a global scale, all of us proclaim citizenship as allegiance to a nation state, we acquire and change citizenship ceremonially.
It is very interesting to note that the city as an adaptive and transformative institution is long embedded in Chinese. The symbol for city corresponds to its dominant influence in a nation’s governance. The most common Chinese word for “city” is (chengshi), which equates literally to “a market with a wall around it” – something that distinguishes cities from villages and towns. Another historic linguistic link is through “citizenship” (gongminquan), literally “public people’s rights” or “rights of citizens”.
Historically, in eastern and western civilizations, the city has offered its residents protection, security and freedom. The city nurtured invention; learning and teaching became an art and a continuing commitment. The city assumed a central social, cultural, and global economic function, carrying this characteristic down the ages through every continent. The world’s economic, social and political stability rests on the city’s shoulders and deserves celebration. City states preceded the creation of nation states and have endured.
So we must use what we know and build on experience. This is why I launched the World Urban Campaign in Rio de Janeiro – to help inspire anew; to keep the very important urban dimension of our age high on the global agenda; and to help cities learn from one another’s experience by sharing good policies and best practices.
Perceiving city as an entrepreneurial organization, we would like to see entrepreneurship and effective management as primary capacities of cities’ governors. However, more spectacular and more visible are chaos and negligence of mayors and city councils. Maybe it is specificity of Polish young democracy, but urban and metropolitan governance are still challenges for many other societies. What are your hints for city leaders concerning harmony in urban governance?
A.K.T.: The European Union, the world’s biggest trading bloc, established at the European Parliament a body called the URBAN Intergroup (previously known as URBAN-Housing), to ensure that urban problems such as those now encountered in Poland are incorporated in the decisions of the European Parliament. With over 60 MEPs working in 22 Parliamentary Committees and representing all European political groups, the URBAN Intergroup was formally approved for the 2009-2014 Parliamentary term. It is now working in close liaison with UN-HABITAT.
On World Habitat Day 2009, UN-HABITAT became the first UN agency to fly its flag at the European Parliament in Brussels. We agreed on that occasion among other things, to focus on a Mayor’s Pact, so that mayors are both better informed on what other cities are doing, but also so that they can communicate better. With this in mind, UN-HABITAT tools on capacity building guidelines for local authorities in Europe, are being passed on to mayors through the Committee of the Regions and the URBAN Intergroup. It is easy to point a finger at the mayors and blame them for the problems of their cities. But first one has to ask whether they have central government political and financial support to carry out the changes needed to improve their towns and cities. I say this knowing that we also need the business community on board here with us because many problems are too big even for government.
I am pleased to learn that there is already a Polish town that has signed up to our 100 Cities Initiative. A key component of the World Urban Campaign, the initiative is designed to appeal to and mobilise people, communities, municipal officials, service providers, and the political leadership of any city. It does so by encouraging these actors to tell their story on how they are contributing to a better and more sustainable city. Each city also has its champion, typically an institute or a university that helps draw lessons learned from the story, lessons that can be useful to other cities and champions around the world. We would welcome additional Polish towns and cities to join this initiative.
It is in our quest for harmonious cities that we must work harder than ever. It is the duty of governments to ensure that everybody can feel that they live in a clean, democratic, tolerant space in relative comfort and security, and that they have a right to the city. Women especially must have the right to feel safe in the city. So, in response to the last part of your question, my main hint here is that while Poland and Europe have much to teach the rest of the world, you can also learn from the developing world. For example, some of the best solutions towards improving urban management and building harmony come from Latin America, where cities are leading the way in what we call participatory democracy by involving communities and neighbourhoods in finding solutions to problems being debated at the city hall.
The 100 Cities Initiative will bring you to the heart of many of these solutions.
Another great challenge in the democratic societies is empowerment and partnership. Although we all know that the cities are governed by our representatives, we mainly perceive their job as political issue. The mosaic of different stakeholders and their interests becomes the more complicated, the more complex are contemporary cities. Therefore partnership and empowerment are not neutral terms in the public debate, but their meaning is determined by the meaning they are given to. What is your opinion about importance of these two terms for contemporary cities?
A. K.T.: Both are of paramount importance. Your question in fact goes to the heart of UN-HABITAT’s Medium-term institutional and strategic Plan (2008 –2013). As agreed by the 58 member States of the Governing Council which oversees our work programme and budget, the plan has a set of key areas: (i) effective advocacy, monitoring and partnerships; (ii) the promotion of participatory planning and governance; (iii) the promotion of pro-poor land and housing; (iv) environmentally sound basic infrastructure and services; (v) strengthened human settlements finance systems; and an institutional component, (vi) excellence in management.
It is after all, with partnerships, that we at UN-HABITAT can act as catalysts in order to turn today’s daunting urban challenges into sustainable opportunities – for all. Partnerships with a wide range of institutions and bodies are the linchpin of UN-HABITAT’s operational, capacity-building and even normative activities. They are the linchpin too of any successful smart city that takes advantage of all the resources – human, technical, institutional and financial – required to bring about sustainable urban change.
As part of efforts to ensure sustainability of local ownership of projects and policies, UN-HABITAT maximizes the use of national expertise and procurement, supporting national execution in developing and transition countries.
We have broadly speaking four forms of partnership. These are with civil society at all levels, business, government and local government and learning institutions, and technical partnerships. I will discuss each briefly.
Civil society: partnerships at all levels. Civil society organizations bring their expertise to bear on UN-HABITAT’s projects, technical activities and research. The fact that roughly one-third of most new legal arrangements UN-HABITAT contracts these days are with non-governmental and community-based organizations. highlights the major role of civil society in the local implementation of the Habitat Agenda, and the relevant Millennium Development Goals on slums and water and sanitation.
UN-HABITAT is almost unique in that it deals directly with grassroots organizations to further common objectives. Community-based organizations are ideally placed to activate networks and provide information on which projects can build, as well as to know the status of what is being or has been implemented on the ground. International non-governmental organizations mobilize their own, broader networks with their own unique perspectives and knowledge.
Civil society is also a partner in UN-HABITAT’s normative (or process-oriented) activities, with the twin aim of providing up-to-date research and to reach out to a wider audience. We are proud that we encourage civil society participation at our global meetings like that World Urban Forum. We are proud to give them a voice.
Business partnerships. A major force behind the reshaping of 21st century cities, business is a crucial agent of change as far as sustainable policies are concerned, including basic services, climate change and energy conservation. This is why the agency in 2007 launched the Business Partnership for Sustainable Urbanization, in an effort to build partnerships under the corporate social responsibility agenda. The agency continues to leverage the capacities of a number of top international firms in favour of local projects involving crucial areas like water, sanitation, housing, urban data management and finance. Some of the world’s biggest corporations have joined hands with us to make the World Urban Campaign a cornerstone of smarter, better cities.
UN-HABITAT can act as a facilitator to help empower business sector participation in manageable, flexible small-size projects in some 120 countries. The agency’s comparative advantage lies in its familiarity with local, including institutional, conditions, allowing for maximum resource optimization and tangible response to local needs and requirements.
Business and related bodies are also keen to share expertise and to advise UN-HABITAT on new ways of improving living conditions and achieving harmonious cities. This includes ‘bottom up’ development of market chains, responsive business practices as well as designing innovative business models and affordable, flexible technologies that are adaptable to climate change. This is the purpose of UN-HABITAT’s Business Partnership for Sustainable Urbanization (BPSU), a strategic platform for debate on sustainable urbanization.
National and local government partnerships. Some of our partner governments (with donor arms in brackets) include Belgium, Canada (including CIDA), China (for the Shanghai World Expo 2010), Denmark (incl. DANIDA), France (AFD), Germany (incl. GTZ), Italy, Japan (incl. JICA and Japan Bank for International Cooperation), Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway (inc. Norwegian Refugee Council), Russia, Spain (incl. AECI), Sweden (incl. SIDA), Turkey, United Kingdom (incl. DFID), the United Arab Emirates and the United States of America (USAID).
Local government partners include many cities around the world too numerous to list here, as well as various local government associations such as United Cities and Local Governments (UNACLA), Metropolis, the Association of Burkina Faso Municipalities, Association of Cities in Vietnam, Commonwealth Local Government Forum, FLACMA (Latin American Federation of Cities, Municipalities and Associations), Kinshasa Metropolitan authorities, and the big regional groups – the African Ministerial Conference on Housing and Urban Development (AMCHUD), the Asia-Pacific Ministerial Conference on Housing and Urban Development (APMCHUD), and the Assembly of Ministers of Housing and Urban Development of Latin America and the Caribbean (MINURVI). All serve as a partner platform for policy dialogue, lesson sharing in slum improvement and slum prevention. They also act as a mechanism for strengthening UN-HABITAT South-South and triangular cooperation.
UN-HABITAT’s academic and professional partners from around the world include the Commonwealth Association of Planners, Beijing University, Development Institutions for a Sustainable China, Facultés Catholiques de Kinshasa, the Institute of Local Government Studies (Ghana), the International Urban Training Centre (Korea), the International Development Research Centre (Canada), and your own Polish Society of Architects, to name just a few.
Technical partnerships. UN-HABITAT’s country-level activities are focused on supporting governments in the formulation of policies and strategies to create and strengthen a self-reliant management capacity. In some countries, partnerships with local stakeholders – including central or local government and NGOs – require some capacity-building if they are to be effective.
Technical and managerial expertise (including monitoring activities and collection of data and best-practice) is provided for the assessment of the development problems and opportunities specific to human settlements.
Country-level activities also seek to identify and analyze policy options, design and implement housing and urban development programmes, help mobilize national resources and external support for improving human settlements conditions.
This national capacity-building process involves central government institutions, local authorities, and their partners in community based and non-governmental organizations, universities, and research institutes. Emphasis is also placed upon strengthening monitoring capacities of governments in human settlements management.
In the contemporary world, partnerships and empowerment are the only way forward.
There are different kinds of assets used by the cities’ managements to build strong position of their cities. e.g. city’s space with buildings and infrastructure, natural resources, geographical location, heritage, etc. The most important and unique asset of every city are people (citizens). One of the most popular and also controversial ideas of city sociology is Ricardo Florida’s creative class, and its meaning for the well-being of contemporary and future cities. Florida argues that happiness at the city-level is closely associated with human capital with a correlation of 0.68 and also with the creative class, a correlation of 0.45. What is the real notion of human capital in the biggest cities around the world? Are the cities’ governors aware of this potential and willing to make use of it?
A.K.T.: I have no doubt they are aware of it! But you have to look at the world’s cities to put this into context, especially from my vantage point at the head of a global agency. And so I will ask some questions here too. Indeed it is projected that with half of us already living in cities, that figure will grow to 70 percent in just a generation from now. What will that mean for the people crammed in big slums in Asia, Africa and elsewhere? How much more pollution will cities generate if one considers that cities are already responsible for over 70 percent of emissions? How will it affect climate change? How will this have an impact on the poorest of the poor, always the most vulnerable when disaster strikes? If the poor remain excluded, how can we all live in harmony, let alone look at a happiness index?
I have now come to the end of my second and final term as Executive Director of UN-HABITAT. And yet I find myself having to repeat here in print how angry and shamed I am at the global urban poverty crisis.
Every two years I present our latest flagship report, the State of the World’s Cities 2010/2011. The latest one released at the Forum in Rio de Janeiro, shows that a total 227 million people in the world have moved out of slum conditions since 2000. This means that governments have collectively surpassed the Millennium Development Goal on slums more than two times over.
Indeed it is commendable that 22 million people in developing countries moved out of slums each year between 2000 and 2010 as the result of slum upgrading. While this is welcome, the overall reduction in the world’s urban divide still requires greater effort, since the absolute number of slum dwellers has actually increased from 776.7 million in 2000 to some 827.6 million in 2010.
This means that 55 million new slum dwellers have been added to the global urban population since 2000. It thus troubles me deeply to have to tell you here, that the progress made on the slum target has simply not been enough to counter the growth of informal settlements in the developing world. This is unsatisfactory. It is inadequate, and it can lead to social danger.
Sub-Saharan Africa today has a slum population of 199.5 million representing 61.7 percent of its urban population. This is followed by South Asia with 190.7 million in slums making up 35 percent of urban residents, East Asia with 189.6 million (28.2 percent), Latin America and the Caribbean with 110.7 million (23.5 percent), Southeast Asia with 88.9 million (31 percent), West Asia with 35 million (24.6 percent), North Africa with 11.8 million (13.3 percent), and Oceania with six million who constitute 24.1 percent of the urban population. We can learn from Florida, and it is my wish that those to whom you refer to as the “creative class” will share their story with us, as part of the World Urban Campaign’s 100 Cities initiative so that we can make use of it by helping spread the word.
How do you think - what are the most important drivers for changing cities towards higher quality of lives of their citizens?
A.K.T.: Referring to the figures I have cited in the previous question, there is now doubt that urban poverty reduction is the most important way forward to a sustainable urban future and a better standard of living. It is with considerable reflection that China, for example, decided to make the idea: Better cities, better life, the theme of the Expo 2010 (1 May–31 October 2010).
It is the prospect of life in a very urban future that makes the theme a subject of global interest, and concern to all countries, developed or less developed, and their people. Being the first Expo the theme of city, Expo 2010 will attract governments and people from across the world. I am very proud that UN-HABITAT is the lead agency of the giant UN pavilion.
The world is at a crossroads: the fight to combat poverty and climate change is to be won or lost in our cities. Cities, as much as they embody the challenges, also offer the solutions. The hundreds of communities and cities whom we recognize for their good practices symbolize this potential. The challenge is that many cities in the developing world are not endowed with the capacity to harness and mobilize knowledge.
A sustainable city must be a learning city which is continuously exploring and innovating, sharing and networking. Universities and knowledge centres have much to contribute to this endeavour. Universities bring their knowledge and expertise, whilst cities offer them unique opportunities to link research and education with policy and practice.
What are the most emerging priorities concerning planning for harmonious cities? United Nations Organization suggests that the optimal city population is bellow one million citizens. Does the harmony depend primarily on city size or population?
A.K.T.: Planning our urban future was the theme of World Habitat Day last year. The global celebration of the occasion turned into a weeklong series of events in Washington with the support of President Obama himself. Such is the importance rightly accorded to this topic. The figures I provided earlier, tell us that there has never been a time within human memory when planning for our urban future was more urgent than it is now.
In the developing world, a combination of rapid rural-to-urban migration and natural population increases in cities has resulted in a situation where the rate of population growth has outpaced the ability to provide affordable housing; employment; essential water, sanitation, education and health services; efficient transport; and a sustainable base of natural resources. Slum populations are on the increase. Natural disasters on the rise. Our youth cannot find gainful occupation and are succeed into anti crime and anti social behavior. Rapid and chaotic urbanization is now recognized as Africa’s most challenging threat after HIV and AIDS.
In many cities of the developed world, consumption patterns have not been sustainable leading to an ever-increasing ecological footprint, increased inequalities and social exclusions, exemplified in limited access to services such as health care, education and affordable housing.
The disparity between the haves and the have-nots, at all scales, from local to global, has today become so great that it is a politically destabilizing force within many countries, rich and poor, and across national borders. This disruptive state of affairs can no longer be ignored or simply addressed from the top to down, through governance mechanisms that are unresponsive to human and environmental needs. While livable cities depend upon rational economics, that is just one leg of the stool. If our cities are to be truly sustainable and harmonious, we must improve the lives and well-being of everyone, especially the urban poor. We must not continue to consume natural resources at rates that deny opportunity to our children and grandchildren or, as is so often the case, at the expense of distant indigenous communities whose socio-economic and ecological equilibrium we have disrupted.
I thus find myself having to shout loudly on this matter also. For a more secure urban future for all can only come about through effective, participatory, public planning.
Forgive me for reciting what is familiar history, but it is instructive to recall that the profession of planning was a product of the American Progressive Movement. In a response to the abuses and failures of the unbridled capitalism of the late 1800’s, this venerable movement arose from the American middle class on a platform of good governance. Specific aims of the Progressive Movement included:
• Removal of corruption and undue influence from government through the taming of bosses and political machines.
• Inclusion of more people more directly in the political process.
• And an increase in the role of government in solving social problems and establishing fairness in economic matters.
Those aims still apply today.
Behind Theodore Roosevelt and other great American leaders of all political persuasions, the Progressives succeeded in altering the course of American government, making it more responsive to the needs of its citizens. It resulted in better city management, in social legislation that protected women’s rights and the welfare of children, and in a new appreciation for the environment that found its way into city plans and national legislation.
Planning has long been recognized as a multi-dimensional urban management tool that can assist the political process in balancing the ecological, economic and equity dimensions of development. Planning today is capable of organizing a myriad of subjective variables through new techniques of visioning and public participation. Planning is also capable of complex analyses using new technologies like geographic information and global positioning systems. Just as our problems appear to be beyond the control of established management functions, planning is adapting and reinventing itself to meet the challenges.
It is our responsibility as politicians, public officials and citizens to grasp firmly the one instrument – planning – that will help mitigate our penchant for public folly, to place our faith in an open and inclusive planning process. We must either plan with and for people or perish from the pressures of population, climate change, migration, consumption, irresponsible individualism and unaccountable corporatism.
Harmony depends thus not on the size of a city, but on the best planning possible.
And the last question for you as the leader of United Nation Human Settlement Programme – what would you like to see changed in the city of future?
A.K.T.: I would like to see all of the improvements I have spoken of here. I would like to see cities without huge pockets of poverty, cities that are safe for women. The world is and will become more and more urban. So the biggest challenge of the changed city in this context, the most important is urban poverty reduction. This must be conducted at the same time as we green our cities, and make them safer for all. That is best measured by whether or not a woman can feel safe on the streets. Smarter, more tolerant and more inclusive cities are more sustainable and good for business.
As we carry the torch for a sustainable urban future we need the support of all of you more than ever. We cannot do it alone. Governments cannot do it alone. Cities, big business, universities and civil society cannot do it alone.
I urge you to join the World Urban Campaign. And as we make any changes, we must keep the urban poor, the jobless young people in poverty, the women and the children they support uppermost in our minds.
|
