Explaining urban poverty

from The East African

SOMEWHERE, SOME TIME THIS year, a baby will be born on the 25th floor of a city hospital or the dirt floor of a dark slum shack; a first-year college graduate will rent a cramped apartment in lower Manhattan or a family of five will finally concede their plot of farm land to an encroaching desert — or sea — and turn towards Jakarta or La Paz or Lagos in search of a new livelihood and a new home.

The arrival of this family or graduate or baby will tip the world’s demographic scale and, for the first time in history, more than half the human population will live in cities.

At present, 3.3 billion people live in urban centres across the globe. By 2030, this number is predicted to reach five billion, with 95 per cent of this growth in developing countries. Over the next three decades, Asia’s urban population will double from 1.36 billion to 2.64 billion, Africa’s city dwellers will more than double from 294 million to 742 million, while Latin America and the Caribbean will see a slower rise from about 400 million to 600 million, according to the UN Population Fund (UNFPA).

While megacities appear more frequently in headlines and on development agendas, overall growth in urban centres of 10 million or more inhabitants is expected to level out. Instead, over the next 10 years, cities of less than 500,000 will account for half of all urban growth.

All this growth is not necessarily a bad thing. As David Satterthwaite of the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) points out, the speed at which a city grows — if it is responding to economic opportunities — is a benefit, not a problem. “A very large part of the economic value in any country is being generated in the urban areas,” Satterthwaite says. “Even in developing nations where 60 to 70 per cent of the population is in rural areas, you still have more than half the economy — and often more than that — generated in urban areas.”

The problem is not growth, but unplanned growth. In 2001, 924 million people, or about 31 per cent of the world’s urban population, were living in informal settlements or slums, 90 per cent of which were located in the developing world. By 2030, the number of worldwide slum dwellers is projected to reach two billion.

IN THE BANGLADESHI CAPITAL, Dhaka, 3.4 million of the city’s 13 million residents live in 5,000 slum and squatter settlements. Sixty per cent of Nairobi’s city dwellers are packed into more than 130 informal settlements occupying only 5 per cent of the city’s total land area, while the squatter settlements of Mumbai are growing 11 times faster than the city itself, with 300 people arriving from the countryside each day.

What this translates to is abject poverty, disease, and appalling conditions. Take Dhaka: every time the river level rises, it floods the illegal clusters of tiny stilted huts built on the flood plain with smelly water full of factory effluence.

In Delhi, the water problem is one of scarcity as slum dwellers fight each other to gain access to the one working standpipe in their area and often go without for days at a time. Malnutrition is often highest in slums, as unemployment means people are too poor to purchase produce that could be grown on the land.

Defining a “slum” and the “urban poor” invariably focuses on what people lack — access to education, social services, employment, safe and affordable water, sanitation housing and residential status. In many cases, they live in sub-standard housing, in public spaces, or in squatter settlements near major urban areas.

It is generally assumed that urban poverty levels are lower than rural poverty levels, but the absolute number of poor and undernourished in urban areas is increasing.

“In general, the locus of poverty is moving to cities ...a process now recognised as the ‘urbanisation of poverty’,” the UN Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) noted in 2003.

If the locus of poverty is moving to cities, development aid has been reluctant to move with it. CARE USA chief Helene Gayle makes a blunt assessment of urban development capacity: “The NGO community is dependent on outside donor funding and its priorities often depend on where donors have put their focus,” with the result that “neither the NGO community nor the donor community has co-evolved in the direction of facing urban poverty as rapidly as urban poverty has occurred.”

THROUGHOUT THE 20TH CE-ntury, city growth was largely fuelled by rural to urban migration. Today, however, cities are mostly growing from within — more people are born than are dying in urban centres. This process of urbanisation — what demographers call “natural increase” — is partly an indicator of medical advances across the developing world and of better access to healthcare in urban areas specifically.

But the fact that mortality rates are generally lower in cities masks a health crisis in slums. Worse, those most affected by this urban healthcare divide are children. A 2006 analysis in the International Journal for Equity in Health found that in 15 sub-Saharan African countries, the difference in child malnutrition within cities was greater than the urban-rural divide.

As the UN’s 2006/2007 State of the World’s Cities report notes, in Ethiopia, child malnutrition in slums and rural areas is 47 per cent and 49 per cent respectively, compared with 27 per cent in non-slum urban areas. In Niger, child malnutrition in slums and rural areas is 50 and 52 per cent against 35 per cent in non-slum urban areas; and in the slums of Khartoum, the prevalence of diarrhoea among children is 40 per cent compared with 29 per cent in rural areas.

“Living in an overcrowded and unsanitary slum,” the report concludes, “is more life-threatening than living in a poor rural village.”

Access to water and sanitation in urban areas, like access to healthcare, is generally better than in rural areas. But again, comparing aggregate urban and rural numbers hides the fact that, for example, in the Mbare neighbourhood of Harare, Zimbabwe, 1,300 people share one communal toilet with six squatting holes.

As urban populations increase, the number of people without access to improved water sources is also rising, doubling from 108 million in 1990 to 215 million by 2010. In dense city environments — and in even more dense slum environments — communicable diseases can quickly become epidemics, making the consequence of unsafe water and poor sanitation much more severe than in rural areas. And more people are affected due to city concentrations.

In addition to the outwardly identifiable impacts of poor access to water, sanitation, and health services (pneumonia, malaria, diarrhoea, tuberculosis, HIV and Aids), a dearth of services also perpetuates poverty.

The urban poor spend a higher percentage of their income on treating illness, and are more vulnerable to lost wages and have less job security when they are forced to miss work — all of which erodes their coping capacity, and can keep potentially mobile families trapped within a cycle of poverty.

In the last quarter-century alone, 98 per cent of the people injured or affected by natural disasters were living in 112 countries classified as low income or low-middle income, according to the World Watch Institute’s 2007 State of the World Report.

And while tsunamis and earthquakes continue to grab the headlines, flooding and landslides affect a much larger number of the urban poor.

While the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami accounted for about 90 per cent of that year’s natural disaster death toll, the 2.4 million people affected was a relatively small number compared with the 110 million people hit by flooding in Bangladesh, India and China the same year, according to the International Federation of the Red Cross (IFRC) 2005 World Disasters report.

With little available land in urban areas, the poor, by necessity, live on floodplains, unstable cliff sides and in the shadow of industrial facilities. In the developing world, an earthquake or a hurricane is not a disaster, but a catalyst for disaster — exposing poor infrastructure, substandard housing, haphazard city planning, and often nonexistent response measures — all of which constitute the true disaster for the urban poor.

Poverty has long been considered a key driver of violent crime. In recent years, however, this relationship has been challenged as too simplistic.

A 2004 ARTICLE ON URBAN violence and insecurity in the journal Environment and Urbanization identifies inequality as a primary driver, noting that “interpretations based on statistical modelling have demonstrated that with regard to national-level data on murder rates, inequality is more influential than poverty, with income inequalities being generally more marked in urban than in rural areas.”

A World Bank study on violence in Latin American urban areas showed that homicide rates ranged from 6.4 per year per 100,000 in Buenos Aires to 248 in Medellin, Colombia. Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Mexico City, Lima and Caracas account for more than half their countries’ national homicides.

More difficult than measuring crime within urban areas has been differentiating between underlying structural causes (like unequal power relations), and trigger risk factors (such as alcohol and drug abuse), which can often precipitate gender-based violence.

The danger in mapping and measuring urban violence is that perceptions of violence are then reinforced; because statistically-speaking, urban centres (and especially slums) are subject to more crime.