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26-01-2016

The World Urban Forum 7 declaration on urban equity

and its conceptual resonance with the issue paperselaborated for HABITAT III1 

Matías Rivera

The city of the global south

First semester, 2015/2016 academic year

Introduction 

 According to data retrieved from the World Urbanization Prospects (Population

Division of DESA-UN, 2014), on the next 20 years the urban population of the world

will increase in the staggering amount of 1,4 billion people, which also implies that

by 20362 the urban population will represent the 63% of the entire world population.

It’s under these projections that the Habitat Conference and the World Urban

Forum3 , both sponsored by the United Nations, justify the urgency to gather

government officials, scholars, decision makers, NGO’s and other influential world

leaders to debate and agree upon guidelines and actions, seeking to impact in the

most positive way possible the development of urbanization in the coming years.

The present essay is an attempt to reveal possible continuities and ruptures

between the official discourses of WUF7 and Habitat III, this in order to achieve a

better (if only partial) understanding of the international debate on urbanization in the

specific issue of urban equity, at the same time recognizing that despite the shared

topics, there are clear differences that set both events apart, most fundamentally

the fact that “as an official UN Conference, Habitat has the potential of going further

than the non-legislative WUF in linking its outcomes to impacts on national

legislation, which essentially will shape the development of our World’s cities.”

(Paraschivoiu, 2014)

1 In particular, the Issue Papers that seemingly relate more directly to the debate addressed on WUF7on urban equity, namely the ‘Issue Paper on Inclusive Cities’ (2015), ‘Issue Paper on Spatial Planning

and Design’ (2015) and the ‘Issue Paper on Urban-Rural Linkages’ (2015)# The 20-year time span was chosen to coincide with the time span in-between Habitat Conferences.$ The upcoming versions are Habitat III (Quito, 2016) and WUF9 (Kuala Lumpur, 2018)  

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The WUF7 concept paper 

Prepared in 2012 and titled “Urban Equity in Development – Cities For Life”, the

document was elaborated by Eduardo López Moreno (director of GOU-UN) to serve

as a background for the conferences and debates that where to take place in

Medellín on April, 2014.

 As an introduction, it contains an extensive review and a few relevant data insertions

on the increasing levels of structural inequalities/differentials present in urban areas

in general, and in the cities of “developing countries” in particular. Special emphasis

is made on the physical, cultural and economic divides that burden many

contemporary cities as a result of said differences on opportunities, that tend to

affect to a greater extent the most vulnerable sectors of the population.

These inequalities are therefore evaluated as structural since they are considered to

be present in ”almost every area of development”, hence at the very core of the

urbanization practices of recent years, and believed to constitute a relevant issue

even for the so-called “developed countries” that oftentimes consists on partial or

fixed lack of social mobility, increasing immigrant poverty, many forms of urban

violence and other issues related to spatial segregation based on the physical

manifestation of historically-rooted social classification.

 After presenting this rather grey scenario of unequally distributed urban advantages

(access to all basic, decent living conditions) the document goes on to concentrate

on the other side of the coin of structural inequality: the possibility that urban equity  

represents as a concept and as an operational tool nowadays, arguing that the

impediments for it to be considered a serious, fundamental aspect of human and

urban development debts to the existence of, per example, the Washington

Consensus (2003) where López Moreno criticizes the view that equity is “a by-

product after economic growth has taken place” implying that the very divide

between equity and growth might as well be the main reason for the sustainedincrease of urban inequalities, proposing instead both terms as “partners rather

than adversaries”.

The document continues on to address what urban equity as a concept “is and is

not”, while trying to convey the message that it has both conceptual and practical

qualities for city planners and decision makers. With the subsequent proposal of

“Cities for Life” as the embodiment of all practical aspects of urban equity and

portraying the host city, Medellín, as exemplary on “Cities for Life” standards.

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Commentaries on WUF7 concept paper 

While generally conveying a clear, strong message about what a concept like urban

equity in development can signify in the context of a worldwide development

agenda, there are a few aspects of the discourse that are prone to critical inspection

and would require further discussion, namely:

1)  The way in which the paper attempts to indicate the substantial differences in

meaning between the three important terms used to define the central

argument: differentials, inequality and inequity   using them extensively for a

couple of paragraphs and then providing a separate “definitions” box (that then

proposes that all terms somehow work ‘always at the same time’) is simply not

clear enough to generate a convention to keep as reference for future research. 

In essence, “an  inequality   is basically a “difference in size, degree or

circumstance” and as with the word differentials it constitutes a “potentially

neutral description of variation in circumstance.” on the other hand “ inequity  

describes a lack of fairness or justice” (Stephens, 2012) which strips from it the

neutrality of the previous terms. 

2)  Even if it’s true that the paper goes on great length to stress the reasons why all

types and kinds of inequalities generates inadequate living conditions for the

poorest urban population, to the point where it is said to transgress their basic

human rights. The main arguments to invite adhesion from stakeholders to the

urban equity policy break down mostly to (liberal) economic justifications on

growth efficiency and, if ever mentioned, the social aspects product of urban

equity are portrayed merely as a safeguard from “risks of political instability

(that could) reduce incentives to invest and reproduce impair growth”, all of the

above added to the use of dated categories like “developing world”, “emerging

economies”, “traditionally egalitarian nations” and the reductive “local, national

and regional levels” template (where “local” could be virtually anything within a

national state) amount to a far too simplistic and abstract treatment of the

complexity the issues of equity and equality represent for the cities and their

future development. 

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3)  The paper proposes a friendlier, slogan-like term to exemplify urban equity as a

possible policy, labeled ‘Cities for Life’, it is described a “simple concept that

can facilitate a better understanding of the fundamental problems of humanity”

and that “brings a new dimension to equity” while never backing up such

hyperbolic statements with actual work schemes, other than the characteristic

of “long-term vision (that) go beyond the boundaries of short-term and

fragmented agreements that are imposed by the governor’s political terms in

office, ensuring continuity” that does not constitute a novelty in planning theory

by that alone.

The praising of Medellín as an exemplary city under these criteria is also a

paradigmatic aspect of the text and the forum, and was openly criticized4

. While

it is true that a good amount of work is verifiable on the recovery of the

metropolitan area from the hands of drug cartels and the reduction of poverty5,

the city relationship with progress on equity and equality is not as evident, or

only evident on a superficial level, since the urban recovery started in the early

2000’s there has been a positive image of the city in the media “despite the fact

that Medellin is one of the most socially unequal cities in the world ”6. Claims are

perhaps rightfully made that in this case a branch of “contemporary urbanism

(…) has become increasingly inclined towards the spectacular and its marketing

 potential (…) (A fetish-like attitude towards) the architectural object and urban

design project is an inevitable outcome.” (Brand, 2013) 

4 “With Joan Clos, former mayor of Barcelona, at the helm of UN-Habitat, it is not surprising that the

consensus has settled around what we might call the Barcelona model of the compact city”(3)

5 ”From 2005 to 2012 poverty in Colombia’s two largest cities, Bogota and Medellín fell by an average

of 23.3%”(2)

6 “Inequality in Colombia`s urban centers grew by 15% between 1990 and 2010. (…) inequality isgrowing faster in Colombia than in any other of the 18 Latin American countries studied by the UN.”(4)  

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Urban equity’s presence on the ‘New Urban Agenda’: 

Presented as the guideline documents for debate on more than 20 specific topics of

human settlements, the only Habitat preparation documents that slightly address

the issues debated on WUF7 are the ‘Issue Paper on Inclusive Cities’ (2015) and

‘Issue Paper on Spatial Planning and Design’ (2015). Only marginally highlighting

one of the many statistics introduced in the 2012 conceptual paper and replacing

the concept of equity for the newcomer term ‘inclusion’ as in ‘inclusive cities’ in the

first paper, and introducing ‘income equality’ as a keyword in the second (and never

directly mentioning it again) the life span of the concept seems to have reached full-

circle, at least for now.

While some countries and organization recommend the addition of an –equity in

cities- appendix (Finland, European Union, Ecuador, to some extent Mexico) there

seems to be a bigger interest in nations to campaign the ‘right to the city’ slogan

when it comes to conceptualizing urbanization, in an attempt to find and easily

agreeable common ground to work on.

 As a final statement the author will take distance from both the ‘inclusion’ and ‘right

to the city’ monikers, since they represent an ambiguous stand on urbanization.

Inclusion being an appreciative ‘attitude’ of rather compassion-fueled actions by the

rich and for the poor (‘-we- the rich include –you- the poor’) ‘Right to the city’ has

had a well over 60 years of constant stripping down into a “formative manual in

‘participation’ and ‘conflict resolution” that holds barely anything of it’s original

proposal.

The goal to achieve cities that are more cohesive, fair, and above all equal in

opportunities for all the inhabitants without distinction should remain intact given the

challenges of today and, specially, tomorrow’s urbanization.

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REFERENCES:

1) Brand P (2013) Governing inequality in the South through the Barcelona model:

‘social urbanism’ in Medellín, Colombia. Universidad Nacional de Colombia

2) DANE Colombia (2014) Pobreza Monetaria y Multidimensional 2013.

3) Datu, K (2014) The road to Habitat III: a wake-up call to the New Urban Agenda. 

The Global Urbanist.

4) UN-Habitat - López Moreno, E (2013) Human Development Report for Latin

 America 2013-2014

5) Paraschivoiu, I (2014) Lessons learned from the World Urban Forum 7. Why the

 new Urban Agenda matters. London School of Economics

6) Stephens, C (2012) Urban Inequities; Urban Rights: A Conceptual Analysis and

Review of Impacts on Children, and Policies to Address Them. Urban Health

Journal.

7) UN-Habitat (2015) I: Issue Paper on Inclusive Cities

VIII: Issue Paper on Urban and Spatial Planning and Design 

8) World Urban Forum 7 (2014) Medellin Declaration