an urbanizing world - confex

In 2007, engineers and construction workersare to begin transforming rural ChongmingIsland, in the Yangtze River near Shanghai,into a city. Arup, the firm preparing the mas-ter plan for this new development, calledDongtan, touts it as “the world’s first sus-tainable city.” Plans call for a city of 50,000by 2010, with the population expected toreach 500,000 by 2040. The developmentwill cover 4,600 hectares, less than a fifth ofthe entire island. Windmills will dominatethe skyline, and turf, vegetation, and solarpanels will cover the roofs. Some 80 percentof solid waste will be recycled, while organicwaste will be composted or burned to supplyheat and power. The only motorized vehiclesallowed on the streets will be powered byelectricity or fuel cells.1

In theory, Dongtan will be self-sufficientin energy, food, and water, with close to zerocarbon emissions from transportation. If this

is accomplished, each person living in Dong-tan will exert much less pressure on naturethan a New Yorker does today. AlthoughNew York City’s density of settlement is sim-ilar to that envisioned for Dongtan, the Amer-ican city relies on electricity that is virtually allgenerated by fossil fuels and nuclear fission,and its wastes are carried by truck to landfillsup to 650 kilometers away. New York’s recy-cling rate is less than 20 percent.2

The Dongtan eco-city project is one ofthe latest attempts to design an urban formthat brings the needs of people into line withthe needs of the environment. A century ago,Ebenezer Howard, a British reformer, advo-cated “garden cities,” self-contained towns ofroughly 30,000 people living on 1,000 acres(405 hectares) surrounded by greenbelts.Within these new towns, zoning was to sep-arate houses and gardens from factories andfarms. The first garden city, Letchworth, was

C H A P T E R 1

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Kai N. Lee

An Urbanizing World

Kai N. Lee is Rosenburg Professor of Environmental Studies at Williams College in Williamstown, Mass-achusetts. He gratefully acknowledges the contributions of Molly O’Meara Sheehan, who also wrote partsof this chapter.

founded some 60 kilometers from London in1902, and the idea spread to other coun-tries, including the Netherlands and Japan.But the new towns did not create their ownworkplaces, as planned, and were insteadabsorbed into the regional growth of thecities they surrounded.3

Dongtan has yet to be built and tested.Like utopian projects before it, there are sureto be negative consequences. Some may beexpected, such as the possible displacement offarmers now living on the island or the poten-tial disruption of the protected wetlands thathouse a bird sanctuary, while others have yetto surface. Nonetheless, this project comes ata time when humanity needs new models forurban development.4

The Global Challenge of Urbanization

Thanks to rapid urban growth not only inChina but elsewhere in Asia and Africa, sometime in the coming year the population of theworld will become mostly urban. By 2005,the world’s urban population of 3.18 billionpeople constituted 49 percent of the totalpopulation of 6.46 billion. Very soon, and forthe first time in the history of our species,more humans will live in urban areas thanrural places.5

This is a significant milestone on the longroad of civilization. Ten thousand years ago,humans were hunter-gatherers who movedwith their food sources. With the discoveryof agriculture came permanent settlementsand, in time, the imperial cities of the ancientworld. More than two centuries ago, improve-ments in agriculture in northwest Europemade it possible for a smaller fraction of thepopulation to feed everyone. In 1740 abouttwo thirds of the labor force in England andWales worked in agriculture. By 1840 this haddropped to less than a quarter, even though

the English exported food throughout thatcentury. On the heels of this increase in agri-cultural productivity came the invention ofmachines that could transform the heat ofburning coal or wood into useful work. TheIndustrial Revolution spread from Europeto North America and then Japan, and citiesgrew to house and serve the new factoryworkers, many of whom had left farms wheretheir labor was no longer needed. By 1900humanity stood on the threshold of moder-nity: a new way of life anchored in cities thatwould rewrite the conditions of human life.(See Box 1–1.)6

In parallel, human activity has emerged asan environmental force of planetary pro-portions: replumbing watercourses, exter-minating species, and altering the globalclimate. These changes have broughtunprecedented material gains to our species,particularly in the high-income nations.Whether these gains can be shared with allof humanity, and whether they can be sus-tained, are questions that now seem increas-ingly urgent, as the impact of humans on thenatural world can no longer be considerednegligible. These are also matters that will bedecided by urban inhabitants, becausealthough human population growth maywell cease in this century, cities and theirenvironmental pressures are continuing toexpand through economic growth, migra-tion, natural increase, and the transformationof rural areas into urban settlements.7

U.N. projections suggest that nearly allof the world’s population growth in the com-ing generation will be in cities in low- andmedium-income nations. Asia and Africa, themost rural continents today, are expected todouble their urban populations to about 3.4billion in 2030. Already, about 1 billion urbandwellers live in “slums” or informal settle-ments—areas where people live without oneor more of life’s basic necessities: clean water,

STATE OF THE WORLD 2007

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An Urbanizing World

sanitation, sufficient living space, durablehousing, or secure tenure, which includesfreedom from forced eviction.8

Urbanization thus presents a global chal-lenge of human development and humanrights. The shift in where we live brings to thefore the question of how we live—the chal-lenge of sustainable development, defined ina widely quoted form 20 years ago as meet-ing the needs of the present without com-

promising the ability of future generations tomeet their own needs.9

Many scientists agree that the global econ-omy is not on a path toward sustainable devel-opment. More than a decade ago, theIntergovernmental Panel on Climate Changefound that the burning of fossil fuels wasaltering the composition and heat balance ofthe atmosphere; the group has since docu-mented signs of a changing climate, from


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The cities made possible and necessary byindustrialization have incubated a mutuallyreinforcing set of transitions that haveredrawn the outlines of material existence.What we now think of as globalization is thelatest phase in a set of linked transitions inpopulation, health, economy, politics, socialrelations, and environment.

Families have grown smaller all over theworld, led by the high-income countries and byChina’s surprisingly successful one-child policy.This demographic transition seems likely toresult in the end of human population growthbefore the end of the twenty-first century. Sta-bilization of population has not been imposedby disease, famine, or war.With the exceptionof African countries hard hit by AIDS, healthhas improved almost everywhere over the past century, with declines in child mortality,decreases in infectious illness, and longer lifespans, especially in high-income countries.Thisepidemiological transition had an importantconsequence for cities: just over a century ago,cities had so much disease that urban popula-tions declined unless people moved into them.That urban penalty was erased by improve-ments in sanitation and clean water—althoughthe poor public health conditions of slums stillsicken and kill on a large scale.

Industrialization has brought an unprece-dented economic transition, one still unfoldingin the process of globalization.Average per

capita income has grown, with interruptions,since the early nineteenth century. But wealthand the indirect benefits of prosperity have beenshared unequally, even as the output of the worldeconomy has grown enormously. Economicpower has been rooted in cities; the purchasesof urban people, who cannot live off the land,form the foundation of national economies.Technological changes allowed cities to becomelarger and to spread further; steel-framed build-ings made skyscrapers possible, while fastertransportation brought people to and fromjobs in high-density downtowns even as theycame to live in distant, low-density suburbs.

As dramatic as the economic transforma-tions of the past two centuries has been theuneven but unmistakable rise of democracy.The fraction of the world’s people ruled bydemocratic governments rose from about 4percent in 1840 to about 12 percent in 1900,and crossed 50 percent around 2000.Thisremarkable transition reflects the end of colo-nialism, which added India and many othermedium- and low-income countries to the listof democracies.The widening reach of compet-itive elections has given city dwellers a chanceto demand accountability for the conditions ofurban life, and governments are now consid-ered responsible for matters ranging from edu-cation to parks to women’s rights that weresimply not on the agenda of feudal societies.

SOURCE: See endnote 6.

Box 1–1. Transitions of Modernity

shrinking glaciers to the decline of some plantand animal populations. An internationalanalysis of the world’s ecosystems, writtenby more than 1,300 scientists, found that 60percent of the services of nature—includingthose provided by farmlands, fisheries, andforests—are being degraded or used unsus-tainably. This Millennium Ecosystem Assess-ment warned in 2005 that “these problems,unless addressed, will substantially diminishthe benefits that future generations obtainfrom ecosystems.”10

This chapter reviews the state of theworld’s urban areas, highlighting the way inwhich urbanization and sustainable develop-ment are linked. At first sight, cities seem tobe the problem rather than the solution: thenumber of people living in slums has steadilyincreased, and industrial pollution in rapidlygrowing economies fouls water and air. Yetthe flow of people toward cities seems unlikelyto stop or even slow, in part because lifechances and economic opportunities are oftenbetter in cities, even for many of the poor.11

From that perspective, urbanization pro-vides a crucial opportunity: to create livingpatterns harmonized with nature’s rhythms aspeople continue to create urban habitat. Citiesoffer economies of scale for recycling waterand materials, for instance, and for usingenergy efficiently. Yet today’s high-incomecities use resources unsustainably, and thehigh-consumption approach is plainly unaf-fordable for slum dwellers. Finding ways tocreate better urban settlements in all soci-eties is central to sustainable development.

A city may be thought of as a physicaland social mechanism to acquire and deliveressential natural services, such as clean water,to a concentrated human population. Thephysical part of this mechanism is often calledinfrastructure, while the social part includesmarkets, government, and community orga-nizations. Cities vary tremendously, but

thinking of urban areas as linked to naturereveals an important pattern: the environ-mental problems of low-income cities aredifferent in kind and in scale from the prob-lems facing industrializing, medium-incomecities. And the challenges brought by rapidindustrialization in Guangzhou, China, or bypoverty in Cochabamba, Bolivia, differ fromthose found in high-income cities likePhoenix or Turin.

Cities are tied to nature through mar-kets and technology. Virtually all cities relyon food, fuels, and materials from elsewhere,and all cities are marketplaces. Thus, “sus-tainable” does not mean self-sufficient.Rather, a city moving toward sustainabilityimproves public health and well-being, low-ers its environmental impacts, increasinglyrecycles its materials, and uses energy withgrowing efficiency. Note the word “toward”:it is unrealistic for a human economy tohave no impacts on the natural world, butclearly it is necessary for the human economyto share its wealth more equitably and inways that enable our species to endure on afinite planet.

Urban Areas TodayWhile the trend of urbanization is clear, themeasurement of what is urban is not. Whenthe United Nations projects that the world’spopulation will become predominantly urbanin 2008, it is drawing upon information pro-vided by member nations, who define “urban”differently. More than two dozen nations donot document their definitions at all. Urbanpopulations can be identified using at leastthree different ideas: the number of people liv-ing within the jurisdictional boundaries of acity; those living in areas with a high densityof residential structures (urban agglomera-tion); and those linked by direct economic tiesto a city center (metropolitan area).


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These definitions yield quite different pic-tures of the “city.” The U.S. National ResearchCouncil remarked in 2003 that “cities such asBuenos Aires, Mexico City, London, andTokyo can correctly be said to be declining orexpanding in population, depending on howtheir boundaries are defined.” Moreover,about two dozen low-income countries havenot had a census in more than a decade, andthe populations attributed to them are pro-jections. Then there is the matter of howlarge a settlement must be to count as urban.India, for example, would change from beingmostly rural to being mostly urban if itadopted the definition of urban area used inSweden. Despite these weaknesses, the datapublished by the United Nations are widelyused (as they are throughout this book) forlack of better estimates.12

In the second half of the twentieth century,according to the United Nations, the urbanpopulation of the world increased nearly four-fold, from 732 million in 1950 to 2.8 billionin 2000 and to more than 3.2 billion in 2006.As shown in Table 1–1, growth has beenrapid in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, butmuch slower in Europe and North America,where more than half the population alreadylived in urban areas by 1950. Only40 percent of the urban popula-tion lived in low- and middle-income nations in 1950, but thatfraction will reach three quartersshortly after 2010.13

Since 1975, more than 200urban agglomerations in low- andmedium-income nations havegrown past 1 million inhabitants.Their local governments are facedwith the sanitation, housing,transportation, water, energy, andhealth needs of more than a mil-lion constituents—a striking newchallenge that arose in a single

generation. Many municipal governmentstrying to cope with these matters lack trainedworkers, the budgets to pay them, and tra-ditions of civic governance on a mass scale.14

The trends of the past generation are pro-jected to continue into the coming one. Moreimportant, as noted earlier, the overwhelm-ing majority of net additions to the humanpopulation—88 percent of the growth from2000 to 2030—will be urban dwellers inlow- and medium-income countries. Already,Africa has 350 million urban dwellers, morethan the populations of Canada and theUnited States combined. In terms of absolutenumbers of inhabitants, urban growth isunprecedented and will continue to be so. Butin percentage terms, the rate at which nationalpopulations are becoming urban lies withinthe historical range experienced by the high-income countries.15

The rapid swelling of urban populationsis due to both migration into cities and nat-ural increase of the people already there.Although policymakers tend to emphasizethe role of migration, which is high com-pared with historical levels in the placeswhere rapid growth is taking place, naturalincrease actually accounts for over half of


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Table 1–1. Urban Populations by Region, 1950–2000,with Projection for 2010

Region 1950 1970 1990 2000 2010

(million inhabitants)Africa 33 85 203 294 408Asia 234 485 1,011 1,363 1,755Latin America and

the Caribbean 70 163 315 394 474Europe 277 411 509 522 529North America 110 171 214 249 284Oceania 8 14 19 22 25

World 732 1,329 2,271 2,845 3,475

Note: Columns may not add up to world total due to rounding.SOURCE: See endnote 13.

the rise in urban population.16

Perhaps the most visible aspect of globalurbanization has been the rise of megacities,large urban agglomerations with more than10 million inhabitants. (See Figure 1–1.)These cities only account, however, for about9 percent of total urban population. Just overhalf of the world’s city dwellers live in settle-ments with fewer than 500,000 inhabitants.(See Figure 1–2.)17

The rapid urbanization of the world’s pop-ulation is unfolding in distinctive ways in dif-ferent parts of the world. Latin America, at 77percent urban, has already gone through anurban demographic transition like those ofNorth America and Europe, with nationalpopulation growth rates declining since the1960s. Growth in the region’s megacitieshas slowed considerably, as the costs of con-gestion have made smaller urban areas moreattractive. Yet thanks to the world’s highestlevels of economic and social inequality, LatinAmerican cities have large slum populationsthat continue to grow.18

In Africa, where some 38 percent of thepopulation lives in urban areas, urbaniza-tion is more recent and more rapid in pro-portional terms because of higher populationgrowth rates, rural poverty due to low agri-cultural productivity, and wars that drivepeople into cities. The spatial and economicstructure of African cities reflects choicesmade by Europeans in the colonial era, whentrading centers for agricultural products and natural resources produced for interna-tional export replaced an older network ofmarket settlements serving an agrarian pop-ulation. The colonial cities were designedby Europeans with small enclaves for them-selves; adjoining indigenous districts werebuilt with little attention to water and sani-tation, roads, transportation, or energy sup-ply. The lack of infrastructure for the poor,followed by rapid urban growth, has pro-duced large slum populations living at highlevels of risk from disease and environmen-tal hazards like flooding.19

Poor macroeconomic performance in sub-


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An Urbanizing World

10 million+ 5–10 million 1–5 million 0.5–1 million <0.5 millionSize of Settlement

Increasing WealthPoor Settlements Wealthy Settlements

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2015200519901950

Source: Millennium Ecosystem Assessment

Source: United Nations

Figure 1–1. Urban Agglomerations Projected to Exceed 10 Million Population by 2015

Saharan Africa since independence, nearlyhalf a century ago, has led to urbaneconomies dominated by informal work suchas food hawking and small-scale commerce,but little industrial employment. More thanthree quarters of nonagricultural employ-ment is in the informal sector, yet it accountsfor only 41 percent of economic output,because nearly all its jobs are in low-wage andlow-profit activities. African economies arelittle integrated into the global economy,and they still depend on exports of naturalresources and agricultural products in orderto import manufactured products—as incolonial times.20

Asia, the world’s most populous region, isroughly 40 percent urban, with a varied urbanlandscape. Pacific Asia—the coastal regionsfrom Japan to Southeast Asia—has undergonea remarkable economic transformation overthe past generation as China and the newlyindustrializing countries of East Asia haverapidly increased incomes and levels of urban-ization. China is now home to 16 of theworld’s 20 most polluted cities, as rapid eco-

nomic changes havepressed the ability ofgovernments to pro-tect and improve pub-lic health. In westernChina, South Asia, andinterior Asia, urbaniza-tion is also rapid, buteconomic growth hasnot been so meteoric,and poverty burdensnearly a third of India’surban population. Pop-ulation growth ratesremain high in Bang-ladesh and Pakistan,although they aredeclining. Urban pop-ulations shrank or grew

slowly in Central Asia in the severe economicand political disruptions that followed thecollapse of the Soviet Union.21

Beyond these regional generalizations,each city has a history and a population thatwill lead the city in its own direction. Citiesattract settlers and retain residents becausethey offer opportunities for employment, formeeting and being with people, for becom-ing someone different. As migrants to everyslum will affirm, they are there because theywant to be. Seizing the opportunities andtaking the risks of city life, some will fail andothers succeed. Often, people will do thingsthey could not have done in rural settings, andsometimes they will push the urban commu-nity and economy in a new direction alto-gether, whether this involves opening up anew kind of business like an organic foodmarket, or making new links to distant com-munities by sending earnings back home, ordisrupting the community by committing acrime or contracting a previously unknowndisease like avian flu.

The dynamism of cities makes each urban


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An Urbanizing World



Perc

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0

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Figure 1–2. Urban Population by Size Class of Settlement

area a place, a distinctive social and environ-mental setting around which loyalties andantipathies can form.

Dark AlleysThat each city is different has an importantimplication for policy: sensible support of orinvestment in an urban area requires knowl-edge of its relevant characteristics. Yet ourunderstanding of cities is strikingly limited,and this constrains the ability of internationalinstitutions, governments, and nongovern-mental organizations to act intelligently. Oneresult is that there is no simple model of howto spur economic growth—not to mentionsustainability—in cities. By comparison, it isan axiom of rural development that raisingagricultural productivity is an ingredient ofeconomic growth.

A basic limitation lies in the paucity ofinformation collected on cities. Urban pop-ulation is tabulated by the United Nations,but the variables that provide a picture ofsustainability—human well-being, environ-mental conditions, and economic data—aremeasured mostly at the national level, withscant coverage in the cities of the develop-ing world, where the most rapid urbaniza-tion is occurring.22

As noted earlier, the delineation of citiesvaries from country to country. Drawing aboundary between rural and urban spacesimplies a sharp separation between country-side and built-up area that simply does notexist in most places. Many families depend onboth urban and rural settings to make a liv-ing. Cecilia Tacoli of the International Insti-tute for Environment and Developmentpoints to studies that estimate the share ofrural households’ incomes from nonfarmsources, including migrants’ remittances, at 40percent in Latin America, 60 percent in SouthAsia, and 30–50 percent in sub-Saharan

Africa, reaching as much as 80–90 percent inSouthern Africa. In addition, the changes inland use at the fuzzy edges of urban agglom-erations are complicated, rapid in comparisonto the reaction time of local government,and often difficult to control. Municipal gov-ernments do not often take responsibility forslums outside their boundaries.23

Another challenge for policy is our unclearview of population growth. The urban pop-ulation projections of the United Nationsare not quite what they seem: they are purelydemographic projections, showing the pop-ulation trajectories if parameters observedand estimated now were to unfold in futureyears. They do not include the effect of eco-nomic, social, or environmental factors thatmight alter, for instance, birth or migrationrates. Although the assumptions behind themare spelled out in U.N. documents, theseprojections are commonly taken to be pre-dictions incorporating the best understand-ing of all the forces at play. Yet, studies ofdemographic projections have shown thatU.N. estimates have tended to overestimateurban growth in developing countries byabout 19 percent for estimates made 20 yearsearlier. Thus the projections of rapid urban-ization in sub-Saharan Africa may prove to behigh in the future if the economies in thosecountries remain weak.24

A further limitation arises from the lack ofdata about variations within cities. Wealthydistricts and slums occupy areas well knownto a city’s residents, but little information isavailable to analysts about how housing oremployment conditions vary between them.Even accurate maps—essential for planning,building, and maintaining streets or sewers—are missing in many developing countries,especially for informal settlements that wereoccupied without authorization or recordedland transactions. This lack of knowledgecompounds the difficulties arising from mul-


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tiple, conflicting sets of property rights. InGhana, as in many other former colonies,one system of property is rooted in precolo-nial family claims while another is inheritedfrom the colonial legal system. Sorting theseout, without maps or records of the traditionalproperty claims, clogs courts and hinders thedevelopment of housing and businesses toaccommodate rising urban populations.25

Geographic information systems (GIS)that use computers to assemble data fromdifferent sources and to overlay them onmaps are beginning to make a substantialcontribution. Building on studies of specificcities that find that slum dwellers may haveworse health conditions than people in ruralareas, GIS analyses of conditions in Accra inGhana and Tijuana in Mexico, among otherplaces, are showing how poverty is muchmore than a lack of money. It includes higherprevalence of disease, exposure to flooding,and other adversities.26

Why do these limitations of understandingmatter? There is about $150 billion spenteach year on physical infrastructure in devel-oping countries. The United Nations Mil-lennium Project estimates that meeting theMillennium Development Goal of improvingthe lives of 100 million slum dwellers wouldcost $830 billion over the next 17 years.These expenditures could help move poorpeople toward sustainable living and decentlives, but only if the donor agencies and gov-ernments allocating these substantial sumsare able to target spending sensibly. Mostdevelopment assistance has been aimed atrural poverty on the assumption that urbanpoverty is a transitory phenomenon for thosemigrating into cities. Yet with more than halfof urban growth due to natural increase, it isfar from clear when slum dwellers will escapeor be able to improve their dwellings andneighborhoods. Development that movespeople toward sustainable patterns will surely

need investments based on understandingwho lives where in growing cities and howthey earn their living.27

Research and learning are accordingly prac-tical necessities. UN-HABITAT has been col-lecting a large set of indicators in its GlobalUrban Observatory, and the important 2003study Cities Transformed undertook analysesof the international Demographic and HealthSurvey in order to illuminate urban health andsocial conditions. Another noteworthy effortis led by economist Stephen Sheppard andurban planner Shlomo Angel. They chose120 cities of various sizes from all regions ofthe inhabited world and developed a fast-track protocol to assess a wide range of vari-ables in each city, ranging from housing pricesto air pollution to urban planning policies.The protocol is designed so that a studentwho is a native speaker of the language cancollect information on several hundred indi-cators in about a week. The project includesremote-sensing analyses of the 120 cities,using satellite images from 1990 and 2000.This study, supported by the World Bankand the U.S. National Science Foundation, isbuilding a database for analysts worldwidein order to investigate social, environmental,and economic changes over a decade for alarge sample of cities.28

As important as research is learning fromexperience, translating failures and surprisesinto better choices going forward. This hasproved to be a challenge in both developmentand environmental management. Although


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Development that moves people toward sustainable patterns will need investments based on understanding who lives where in growing cities and how they earn their living.

surprises happen so often in social interven-tions that they should be expected, it is rarefor those implementing a plan even to con-sider unexpected results. Merely stating goalsclearly enough that failures can be identifiedis risky for politicians. Systematic methodsfor learning from policy implementation havebeen developed and tried out at a small scale,but uneven learning hangs like fog over thepath to urban sustainability.29

Wealth and EnvironmentThe environmental challenges of cities varywith their level of economic activity. To over-simplify, poor city dwellers face direct, every-day environmental problems, while thewealthiest urban residents cause environ-

mental problems that they do not experiencein their daily lives. A child in Soweto, SouthAfrica, risks dying from waterborne illnessesthat his distant cousin in Birmingham, Eng-land, will not be exposed to. A factory workerin Wuhan, China, may suffer from asthmatriggered by air pollution, while her coun-terpart in Nagoya, Japan, is less likely toencounter pollutants in the air she breathes.The college student in Denver, Colorado,contributes more to global warming as he dri-ves to the campus each day than does some-one riding a bus to classes at the Universidadde los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia.

These stories of individual experiences correspond to statistical differences amonglow-, medium-, and high-income cities.Table 1–2 compares indicators for threecities drawn from these three categories,


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Table 1–2. Sustainability Indicators for Ghana, Mexico, Singapore, Accra, and Tijuana

Indicator Ghana Mexico Singapore

Population 21.2 million (2003) 104.3 million (2003) 4.37 million (2005)Share of population urban, 2003 45.4 percent 75.5 percent 100 percentGDP per capita (in purchasing power parity), 2003 $2,238 $9,168 $24,481 Human Development Index rank,out of 177, in 2005 138 53 25Life expectancy at birth, 2003 56.8 years 75.1 years 78.7 yearsProbability of dying before age 5 (male/female) per 1,000 population, 2001 107/100 31/25 4/3Health expenditure per capita (in purchasing power parity), 2002 $73 $550 $1,105 Energy use (oil equivalent per capita), 2003 400 kg per year 1,564 kg per year 5,359 kg per year

Accra Tijuana Singapore

Population (2005) 1.97 million 1.57 million 4.37 millionShare of population without access to “improved” sanitation 48 percent (1991–92) 17 percent (2000) 0 percent (2002)Share of population without access to an “improved” water source 46 percent (1991–92) 29 percent (2000) 0 percent (2002)


showing economic and health indicators atthe national level together with indicators ofthe cities’ environmental conditions; energyuse, a national statistic, is used as an indica-tor of carbon emissions. National statistics donot accurately represent conditions in cities,and variations within cities can also be large.The economic and health indicators areincluded here to show the divergence in thenational contexts of low-, medium-, andhigh-income cities.30

These numbers illustrate a pattern of spa-tial, environmental, and economic variation.A low-income city like Accra faces directthreats to health: water contaminated withhuman waste, housing infested with insect androdent pests, streets and neighborhoods thatflood in the rainy season. Each person andfamily must cope with these environmentalproblems in daily life. An industrializing citylike Tijuana may face additional environ-mental problems from polluting factories andtoxins from manufacturing processes. Therapid rise of energy use during industrializa-tion, often in inefficient foundries and fur-naces, imposes a large burden of air pollutionon workers and residents, with substantialpublic health consequences. But industrial-ization also generates earnings that can beinvested in environmental controls and pub-lic health measures, as the data on Tijuana andSingapore indicate.31

With the transition to economies domi-nated by service industries, high-income citiescompeted with one another on quality oflife, seeking to attract the professional talentto staff service firms such as software engi-neering or finance. Good environmental con-ditions and amenities help create the clean,interesting places that draw and keep highlymobile people in cities like Singapore. The ris-ing economies of wealthy cities also poweredincreasing energy consumption and exploita-tion of forests, oceans, and other natural

resources—with effects that were often farremoved from the comfortable offices andhomes of those living there.

High- and medium-income cities todayare caught in the paradox of losing sight ofnature just as they become more dependenton it through increasing consumption and theglobalization of production. The paradoxitself is a gift of markets of ever greater reach:if a coffee crop fails in Indonesia, the supplyfrom Guatemala or Kenya will smoothly fillthe cup in Rouen or Buenos Aires. A disas-ter for rural growers is an unnoticed blip forthe urban coffee drinker. But there is anotherparadox of planetary-scale markets. Cities areplaces. Yet as cities become wealthier, theirresidents buy goods from around the worldand invest in global companies. The widen-ing spatial range of urban economies has fre-quently eroded a city’s distinctiveness. Thisprocess is accelerating. Industrialization tookmore than a century to unfold in Europe, theUnited States, and Japan. The spread ofindustrial production to the once-poor landsof Asia has transformed economies in a fewdecades. And the rise of the information-intensive service economy brings change mea-sured in years.32

The variations among low-, medium-, andhigh-income cities have been discussed interms of a curious empirical pattern known asthe environmental Kuznets curve, named forAmerican Nobel laureate in economics SimonKuznets. (See Figure 1–3.) Drawing togethera wide array of data, analysts have framed ageneralized scenario of urban environmentaldevelopment: local environmental problemsthat pose an immediate threat, such as lack ofsanitation, tend to improve with increasingwealth, while global ones such as carbonemissions worsen, slowly undermining large-scale life-support systems such as climate.And as a city industrializes, environmentalproblems at the scale of the city and metro-


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An Urbanizing World

politan region first worsen, as pollutionincreases, and then improve, as resources forengineered controls and regulation becameavailable. In some cases, those regulations,combined with economic changes, force pol-luting activities to other locations.33

This pattern does not mean that environ-mental problems automatically improve withgreater wealth, as has sometimes been sug-gested. Yet the fact that there are differenttypes of environmental challenges at differentincome levels does have significant implica-tions for sustainable development. The ideaof meeting the needs of the present has asharply different meaning for someone livingin a slum than for someone with a high-income lifestyle. Similarly, the obligation notto compromise the ability of future genera-tions to meet their own needs has a differentresonance for the poor and the rich.

Sorting cities by income alone is a drasticoversimplification, of course. A key differenceis the range of inequality in different cities,something that is missed by focusing only onaverage income. The poorest residents of

Tijuana or Accra facemore difficult environ-mental conditions thanthose at the high endof the income scale inthese cities, while theexposure to health andenvironmental riskvaries less in Singapore.Poverty does not nec-essarily translate intohigh risks to health andpoor environmentalconditions, however, ashas been demonstratedby the success of com-munity-level organiza-tions within a smallnumber of slums. (See

Chapter 8.) And transportation patterns varywidely among high-income cities, with largeeffects on energy use, air quality, and landuse. (See Chapter 4.)34

Despite the complex circumstances of indi-vidual cities, however, it is useful to under-stand overall trends. The rapidly growingcities of India, China, and other industrializ-ing nations need to organize and pay fortheir environmental cleanups. In rich nations’cities, reducing consumption of fossil fuels andother finite resources and redirecting invest-ment toward sustainably managed indus-tries—from renewable energy to sustainablyharvested wood to well-managed fisheries—are critical to managing global threats to bio-diversity, climate, and renewable resources.Poor cities whose populations are also grow-ing rapidly must deal with worsening envi-ronmental and health conditions, in manycases without comparable increases in locallygenerated income. They might not be able toafford high-cost, long-term solutions suchas expensive drinking-water purification plantsand citywide pipelines.


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Figure 1–3. Challenges to Urban Sustainability in Relation to Wealth

Nature: Still Essential toHuman Well-being

All humans rely on the natural world: watercomes from wells and streams; food fromfarms and fisheries; and wastes are returnedto nature. Some ancient civilizations mayhave been weakened by degrading the naturalresources they needed to keep their citiesoperating. Archaeological evidence suggeststhat although Sumerians had figured out by3500 BC how to draw water from the Tigrisand Euphrates Rivers to their fields to growwheat and barley, their irrigation systems didnot drain well, so salts built up in the soil andcaused wheat production to cease by 1700 BC.Overuse of resources is also implicated in thefall of the Mayan cities of Central America.35

Today, we still need trees and wetlands toprotect us from floods and storms, and we relyon nature for the raw materials of everyday life.These ecosystem services are essential to lifeand well-being. Securing necessary ecosys-tem services is a daily preoccupation of hunter-gatherer societies and a seasonal reality tofarmers and fishers today. But it is barelyglimpsed amid the hustle and cacophony ofcity life, at least until disaster strikes in the formof supply disruptions, skyrocketing prices, ora “natural” disaster for which engineeringproves inadequate. As noted earlier, a city canbe thought of as a mechanism to provide itsinhabitants with ecosystem services; this is alarge task, performed imperfectly for manyurban dwellers around the world.

In the early 1990s, William Rees andMathis Wackernagel devised the ecologicalfootprint to measure human communities’reliance on nature. The footprint is an estimateof “how much land and water area a humanpopulation requires to produce the resourcesit consumes and to absorb its wastes underprevailing technology.” The appealing notionof a footprint evokes the picture of a prein-

dustrial city, drawing its sustenance from thefarmlands around it. The ecological footprintattempts to adapt this picture to cities andnations deeply enmeshed in a global economy.Using this approach, the per capita footprintof high-income countries is eight times aslarge as that of low-income countries.36

Perhaps as important as the magnitude ofhumans’ reliance on nature is how peopletake care of the ecosystems that supply ser-vices. There are pastures in the Alps and irri-gation systems in Bali that have been used forcenturies with no diminution of their pro-ductive capability. In many other cases, ecosys-tems have been overused with disastrouseconomic and social consequences, particu-larly when the social institutions to govern usewere absent or ineffective. Many ocean fish-eries are now suffering this fate. Or considerlitter: no one owns it, and few want to pickit up—so government refuse collectors haveto be hired. There is a broader pattern here:when human responsibility does not matchthe cycles and patterns of nature, irresponsi-bility is likely to flourish. This is a problem ofhuman institutions, including markets, gov-ernments, and concepts of property. Thesemismatches between nature’s logic and therules and incentives that shape human behav-ior are called problems of the commons.37

In cities, the high intensity of human activ-ities leads often to problems where individ-ual interests are at odds with the commongood. The central task of urban sustainabil-ity is effectively managing commons problemsin the ecosystems that sustain cities.

During the Industrial Revolution, pollu-tion in cities of North America and WesternEurope spurred a renegotiation of the rela-tionship between humans and the environ-ment as more people came to live at muchhigher densities than in rural areas. As indus-trialization drew workers to cities, water fromwells was supplanted by piped water. The


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An Urbanizing World

availability of large quantities of relativelyinexpensive water, in turn, spurred rapidgrowth in use. Between 1856 and 1882, forexample, water consumption in Chicago rosefrom 125 to 545 liters per day per person.38

For poor people in low-income citiestoday, nature’s services are both expensiveand arduous to obtain, as illustrated by thecost of water. Water free of disease-causinggerms is available to a small and sinking shareof residents of low-income cities. An assess-ment of 116 cities by the World HealthOrganization in 2000 estimated that only43 percent of urban dwellers in Africa hadaccess to piped water. The fraction is declin-ing as more people settle in urbanizing areaswithout water service and as the existingdelivery systems falter from inadequate main-tenance, corruption, and the exhaustion oftheir sources from growing demand. Yetpeople still require water for drinking, cook-ing, washing, and bathing.39

Where water is not available by pipe, thecosts can be steep. (See Table 1–3.) In twoinformal settlements in Accra, Ghana, abucket of water from a standpipe costs about5¢, a price that seems modest to someonefrom Houston who readily pays more than$1 for 500 milliliters of bottled “spring”water. But water can command more than 10percent of a poor family’s budget. In AddisAbaba, Ethiopia, the poorest fifth of the

population spends roughly a sixth of itshousehold income on water. Moreover,water sold by private vendors in small quan-tities is far more expensive than water froma pipe: 37 times more expensive in Accra,nearly twice as high in a study done in EastAfrica. Water that is costly is used sparingly:usually, hygiene suffers and disease is moreprevalent. These problems have become sowidespread that they affect families that arenot poor. One scientist in an Accra researchinstitute rises before dawn each day to fetchwater for his family to bathe, carrying buck-ets up four flights of stairs. He lives in thetony district among diplomatic compoundsin his nation’s capital.40

Infrastructure andGovernance

The economies of scale possible with high-den-sity settlement in urban areas may offer the bestchance to bring decent conditions to all of theworld’s poor and to conserve the resources onwhich we all depend. Health, education, andother measures of human development arehighest in countries with mostly urban popu-lations. Our need to build at least as muchurban habitat as exists today, with its attendantinfrastructure and governance systems, is thecentral hope for sustainable development—if we can learn the lessons of the world we are


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Table 1–3. Cost of 100 Liters of Water in Accra and East Africa from Different Sources

Accra, East Africa,Water Source 2006 1997 Users

Sachet (500 milliliters) $8.01 General public for street drinking30-pack (sachets) $4.45 General public for household drinkingBucket from kiosk $1.87 18¢ Households relying on shared standpipeCommunity shower $1.33 (bathing only) Informal settlement dwellersVendor 27¢ 45¢ Mixed-income neighborhood without piped waterWater pipe 5¢ 10¢ Households with pipe connection


now modifying apace.41

Human life in cities is structured by infra-structure: water and food supply, sewers,transportation and communications networks,technologies to improve air quality, and build-ings to house people and production. Phys-ical infrastructure is largely inflexible. Streetsand water pipes are expensive, long-termcommitments, shaping urban form fordecades to come. A decision against masstransit locks in a commitment to buses andautos. If a power plant is built to burn coal,that implies a stream of greenhouse gases fortwo generations.

A good deal of the infrastructure in high-income nations, built in response to the healththreats in industrializing cities of the nine-teenth century, spawned new problems. Engi-neers built dams and aqueducts to boosturban water supplies, but the environment hassuffered. A study of 292 large river systems inthe United States, Canada, Europe, and theformer Soviet Union concluded that 42 per-cent of the ecosystems drained by thesestreams were strongly affected by impound-ments and diversions, putting at risk habitatsfor a wide range of plant and animal speciesin the rivers and their watersheds.42

Systems designed to channel waste awayfrom people as quickly as possible have alsoimproved human health while damaging theenvironment in other ways. When rainwaterruns off pavement and into drains and sew-ers, the rivers at the end of the pipes floodmore often and more severely than would bethe case if plants, soil, and wetlands soaked upsome of the deluge. Much as storm drainsshort-circuit the water cycle, urban waste dis-posal systems disrupt the nutrient cycle.Roughly half of the food brought into NewYork City is transformed into human energy;the other half is shunted to sewers or truckedto increasingly remote landfills. Yet organicwaste is a valuable resource if composted into

a product that invigorates agricultural soils.(See Chapter 3.)43

Twentieth-century transportation infra-structure has allowed urban food and energysupply lines to stretch to new lengths, as pro-duction has become ever larger and morecentralized. Although large farms and powerplants excel at producing more food and elec-tricity with fewer employees, they generatepollution and require complex distributionroutes, with use occurring far from the site ofproduction. And despite gains in productiv-ity, some 852 million people remain hungry,and roughly 1.6 billion lack electricity.44

Infrastructure is largely invisible—pipesare usually underground and water, sewer,electricity, and telecommunications servicesare widely taken for granted. But it is not inex-pensive. When it is financed and maintainedfrom the public purse, governments take ondebt that usually can be repaid only if thereis economic growth. In the decades ahead,access to capital to build infrastructure willplay a central role in the quality of life incities, particularly for poor people.

As the large costs of physical infrastructuresuggest, the social institutions needed tobuild, maintain, and pay for cities’ connec-tions to nature are also complex and varied.Foremost among them is the market, whichaffords access to ecosystem services to thosewho pay. The magnitude of poverty in rapidlygrowing low-income cities thus poses a starkdilemma. People who cannot afford reliableaccess to vital ecosystem services suffer risksto health and well-being. Yet many govern-ments are so poor and so overwhelmed bythe pace of urban settlement that they can-not afford to build the infrastructure thatwould, in many cases, bring down the cost ofwater, sanitation, and other services. Theproblem of creating a business model that canbring affordable and clean water to residentsof low-income cities has beset corporations


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and governments experimenting with priva-tization of water supply over the past 20years. (See Chapter 2.)45

In short, markets are not a complete solu-tion for provision of nature’s services to urbaninhabitants, especially where there are com-mons problems. The institutions that com-plement and substitute for markets rangefrom bureaucracies to assure control ofecosystem interactions, such as public healthand environmental protection agencies, totraditions such as informal harvest limita-tions in some fishing communities. Many ofthese social arrangements can be costly,requiring educated workers and durable orga-nizations. As with physical infrastructure, sus-taining formal organizations requires steadyrevenues and effective management.

The concepts of development and invest-ment in infrastructure implicitly assumearrangements found in rich nations: publicinstitutions that are largely free of corrup-tion, economic activity that takes place in aformal economy, and per capita incomeshigh enough that water, food, shelter, andtransportation become settled matters formost people rather than persistent crises ofdaily living.

In low-income cities, however, these con-ditions are not present for many people, par-ticularly those living in slums and in aninformal economy. Yet people cope andmostly survive. Safe drinking water, secureclaim to a dwelling, protection from criminals,and much else may not come from govern-ment at all. In these circumstances, commu-nity-level organizations have sometimes beenable to supply some social and public ser-vices. (See Chapter 8.) Urban initiatives suchas the Orangi Pilot Project in Karachi havedemonstrated that very poor people neednot live without sanitation or clean water.(See Chapter 2.)46

Recognizing that potential and linking it

to development assistance have risen higheron the agenda of international donors overthe past decade. Major efforts to decentral-ize government have been instituted fromMexico to Mali to Thailand with notablesuccess. Decentralization has channeled moreresources to municipal governments, andinnovations such as participatory budgetinghave in turn given poor communities a voicein allocating public funds. There is still a longway to go, however, in realizing the self-helppotential of slum dwellers and other poorpeople in meeting their needs for nature’s ser-vices. (See Chapter 9.)47

Circular MetabolismGiving the poor a voice in solving local envi-ronmental problems would be a big steptoward meeting the needs of the present,one of the two criteria of sustainable devel-opment. But for sustainability in the longterm, more is needed: to move institutionsand infrastructure toward forms that alsoprotect the ability of future generations tomeet their own needs. In this arena there areideas that cut across income groups. Whilethere have been some promising beginnings,particularly in high-income nations, here toothere is much work to do.

A key conceptual step is to reconsider infra-structure. In theory, much of the waste fromthe water, food, fuels, and materials that courseinto cities could be reused or recycled. Her-bert Girardet called for substituting a “circu-lar metabolism,” in which wastes are reused,for the linear metabolism of a city that simplyconverts resources into wastes. The notion ofclosing nutrient loops in a way parallel to theoperation of natural ecosystems can be pur-sued at different scales, ranging from an indi-vidual building to the design of a metropolitanarea. (See Box 1–2.)48

“Green architecture” is the name of an


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An Urbanizing World

approach to building design that movestoward circular metabolism by using tech-nologies that reuse water and generate elec-tricity. (See Chapter 5.) Vegetation planted ona building’s exterior captures water that wouldotherwise be wasted, for instance, whilereducing the energy needed for cooling. The15-story IBM headquarters in Kuala Lumpurdesigned by Ken Yeang is a good example ofthis. In New York City, photovoltaic cellsembedded in the south and east facades of theCondé Nast building in Times Square, com-bined with two fuel cells, provide enoughelectricity to operate the building at night.49

A well-known example of a circular designon a larger scale is the eco-industrial park inKalundborg, Denmark, where waste gasesfrom an oil refinery are burned by a powerplant, waste heat from the plant warms com-mercial fish ponds, and other companies use

byproducts of combustion to make wallboardand concrete.50

The concept of green infrastructure isgaining adherents in Europe and America.This is a planning idea for a whole metro-politan region, applicable also to rural areasfacing strong development pressures. Bythinking at a regional level, planners identifynatural areas and corridors that can sustain theecological fabric of the area, allowing plantsand wildlife to continue ecological functionssuch as migration and seed dispersal, even asland is converted to urban uses. The net-work of green spaces also provides flood con-trol, clean air and water, and recreationalservices to the urban residents.51

Cities in low-income countries could, intheory, leapfrog directly to twenty-first-cen-tury technologies, and many ideas are beingtried in industrializing economies, such as


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Stockholm’s new urban ecological district Ham-marby Sjöstad is the best demonstration todate of putting circular urban metabolism intopractice through creative design and building ina new, dense neighborhood. From the outset,planners tried to think holistically—to under-stand the resources that would be required byresidents and the wastes that would result andcould be used productively. For instance, about1,000 apartments are equipped with stoves that use biogas extracted from the community’swastewater. Biogas also provides fuel for busesthat serve the area.

People in the neighborhood put their solidwaste into a vacuum-based underground col-lection system, which allows efficient separa-tion of recyclables and organic and otherwastes. Combustible waste is burned andreturned to the neighborhood in the form ofelectricity and hot water, with the latter deliv-

ered through a district heating grid.Stormwater from streets is directed into a

purification and filtration system, and stormwa-ter from buildings is guided to greenroofs andwetlands. Both streams of water are kept apartfrom wastewater, which is treated separately.

Carbon emissions from residents’ transpor-tation are minimized, as the neighborhood isclose to central Stockholm, with a high-frequencylight rail system, the Tvärbanan, and an exten-sive pedestrian and bicycle network.There arealso 30 car-sharing cars distributed throughoutthe neighborhood.

While not a perfect example, Hammarbyrepresents a new and valuable way of seeingcity buildings, and it requires a degree of inter-disciplinary and intersectoral collaboration thatis unusual in most cities.

—Timothy Beatley, University of Virginia


Box 1–2. Circular Urban Metabolism in Stockholm

Which Urbanizing World?As most humans come to call an urban envi-ronment home in this century, we are learn-ing from the determined inhabitants of citieslike Accra. In the long-established slum ofNima, a member of the municipal assemblyhas organized his neighbors to manage themountain of refuse that emerges each dayfrom Nima’s numerous small businesses andmarkets, helping an overtaxed city deal withthe garbage that clogs drains and worsens

the large-scale adoption of solar energy inRizhao, China. Already, many cities haveskipped directly to wireless phone systems,and a number of projects are under way totest the viability of water recycling anddecentralized renewable energy in medium-income countries. A key element of leapfroginnovation is making it possible for munic-ipal governments to benefit politically fromsolving problems in new ways. One effort todo this in the rapidly urbanizing landscapesof Asia is described in Box 1–3.52


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In May 2006, mayors and other local govern-ment officials from 49 cities in 17 countriesaround the Pacific Rim gathered in Melbourne,Australia, at the fourth Mayors’ Asia-PacificEnvironmental Summit (MAPES), a conferencefirst held in 1999. Of 47 municipal leaders atthe 2003 meeting who pledged to meet specificenvironmental goals within two years, 7 receivedawards for doing so in 2006.Their achieve-ments ranged from building new compostingplants for municipal wastes in Nonthaburi,Thai-land, to extending water pipes to 4,000 poorhouseholds in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, andinstalling a new sewage-disposal system in Male,the capital of the Maldives.

Once a mayor makes a commitment, thesummit organizers provide technical supportand help line up funding. In 2006, each city thatreceived a MAPES award also won a scholar-ship for a resident of the city to study at theRoyal Institute of Technology in Stockholm in aprogram leading to a master’s degree in urbansustainable technology.The American softwarepublisher ESRI also offered assistance to citiesthat wanted to adopt geographic informationsystems in municipal management.

The brainchild of Jeremy Harris, formermayor of Honolulu, and Karl Hausker, an econ-omist who worked at the U.S. Environmental

Protection Agency, MAPES is funded by the AsiaDevelopment Bank and the U.S.Agency forInternational Development.

“We know how to build sustainable cities,”Harris says,“but it is still hard to marshal thepolitical will to do so.” With an eye on Asia’srapidly growing cities, he and Hausker devisedMAPES to give mayors political rewards formoving toward sustainability, together withtechnical resources and the chance to learnfrom one another.

Other attempts to transfer sustainabledevelopment projects from one city to anotherhave shown that lasting change is difficult toachieve. Even within a city, environmentalreforms can be started and stopped with thechanging of administrations. In Honolulu,energy-efficient lightbulbs in City Hall and awater recycling facility seem likely to lastbeyond Harris’s tenure. However, his successorhas ripped out some street trees, arguing thatHarris was fiscally irresponsible and that thecity could not afford the cost of maintaining thetrees.Whether MAPES, with its focus on politi-cal leaders, will be able to facilitate environ-mentally responsible development that is alsosustainable in a governmental sense is animportant question.


Box 1–3. The Mayors’ Asia-Pacific Environmental Summit

flooding in the rainy season.53

We are seeing cities with rapidly growingeconomies like Tijuana experiment withreforms that have streamlined municipalfinance, enabling the city to support residents’self-initiated upgrading of their housing.54

We have seen the transformation of Sin-gapore in only one generation from a strug-gling, newly independent city-state to amodern postindustrial city prospering in aglobal economy through financial services,manufacturing, and a major port. Singapore’sslums were replaced with modern housing,most of it built by a competent, incorruptiblegovernment. With its mass transit system andcompact urban design, Singapore also enjoysa high standard of living with lower energy useper person than in the United States.55

None of these cities is sustainable yet.Low-income cities stagger under their grow-ing populations’ unmet needs. Industrializ-ing cities’ demands for energy and materials

compound the demands already placed onnature by high-income urban and suburbanconsumers. All cities depend on many ecosys-tems. There are few cases now in which thatdependence would be durable over the longrun, even if population and consumptionwere to stabilize.

The urbanizing world must coexist withthe natural world if both are to endure. Theextraordinary diversity of human experienceand human enterprise provides ample evi-dence of the threat of wider irreversible dam-age to ecosystems but also promising pathstoward a sustainable future. Urbanization,perhaps surprisingly, is leading us to rediscovernature and the ecosystem services on whichall humans rely. Creating urban habitats thatdeliver the bounty of nature in a sustainablefashion to the inhabitants of cities in all soci-eties is an opportunity within our reach, aswell as a cardinal test of our humanity.


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Notes, A Year in Review, Chapter 1

York: 28 September 2006); Anna Dolgov, “Twoof Five People Around the World Without ProperSanitation,” Associated Press, 29 September 2006.

Chapter 1.An Urbanizing World

1. “World’s first sustainable city” and projectionsof growth from Arup, “Dongtan Eco-City, Shang-hai, China,” 23 August 2005, at www.arup.com/eastasia/project.cfm?pageid=7047; solid wasterecycling from Jean-Pierre Langellier and BricePedroletti, “China to Build First Eco-city,”Guardian Unlimited, 5 May 2006; other datafrom Frank Kane, “Shanghai Plans Eco-metropo-lis on its Mudflats,” Guardian Unlimited, 8 Jan-uary 2006.

2. The fraction of electricity generated by fos-sil fuels and nuclear fission is estimated from theload served by Consolidated Edison in New YorkCity and reported by the Environmental Disclo-sure Label Program of the New York State Pub-lic Service Commission, at www3.dps.state.ny.us/E/EnergyLabel.nsf/Web+Enviromental+Labels/A3655A006989E8EB8525719C0056A1A5/$File/CONED.PDF?OpenElement, viewed Sep-tember 2006; waste to landfills and recycling fromKate Ascher, The Works: Anatomy of a City (NewYork: Penguin Press, 2005), pp. 190–94.

3. Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of To-Mor-row (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1965,reprint); Rudolf Hartog, “Growth without Lim-its: Some Case Studies of 20th-Century Urban-ization,” International Planning Studies, February1999, pp. 95–130.

4. Displacement of farmers from “Develop-ment Jockeys With Ecology on Shanghai Island,”Reuters, 18 April 2006; wetlands disruption fromMeg Carter, “Life, But Not as We Know It,” TheIndependent, 4 May 2006.

5. United Nations Population Division, WorldUrbanization Prospects 2005 (New York: 2006),also available online at esa.un.org/unup.

6. Paul Bairoch, Cities and Economic Develop-ment: From the Dawn of History to the Present,translated by Christopher Braider (Chicago: Uni-

versity of Chicago Press, 1988), chapters 12–15.Box 1–1 from the following: United Nations Pop-ulation Division, World Population Prospects: The2004 Revision (New York: 2004); Roy Porter, TheGreatest Benefit to Mankind. A Medical History ofHumanity (New York: W. W. Norton & Company,1997), chapters 13 and 14; health conditionstoday from Alan D. Lopez et al., Global Burdenof Disease and Risk Factors (New York: OxfordUniversity Press for World Bank, 2006); urbanpenalty from National Research Council, CitiesTransformed: Demographic Change and Its Impli-cations in the Developing World (Washington, DC:National Academies Press, 2003), pp. 259–60,271–72, 284, 259–60; per capita income fromAngus Maddison, The World Economy: A Millen-nial Perspective (Paris: Organisation for EconomicCo-operation and Development, 2003); techno-logical changes from John Eberhard, “A NewGeneration of Urban Systems Innovations,” Cities:The International Journal of Urban Policy andPlanning, February 1990; George Modelski andGardner Perry III, “‘Democratization in LongPerspective’ Revisited,” Technological Forecastingand Social Change, vol. 69 (2002), pp. 359–76.

7. National Research Council, op. cit. note 6,pp. 89–92.

8. United Nations Population Division, WorldUrbanization Prospects: The 2003 Revision (NewYork: 2003), Table 14, p. 7; slum dwellers fromUN-HABITAT, State of the World’s Cities 2006/7(London: Earthscan, 2006), p. 16.

9. World Commission on Environment andDevelopment, Our Common Future (New York:Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 43.

10. J. T. Houghton et al., eds., Climate Change1995: The Science of Climate Change, Contributionof Working Group I to the Second Assessment ofthe Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change(IPCC) (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1996); James J. McCarthy et al., eds., Cli-mate Change 2001: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vul-nerability (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2001); Habiba Gitay et al., eds., ClimateChange and Biodiversity, IPCC Technical Paper V(Geneva: 2002); Millennium Ecosystem Assess-

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ment, “Summary for Decision-Makers,” Ecosystemsand Human Well-Being: Synthesis (Washington:Island Press, 2005), p. 1.

11. UN-HABITAT, op. cit. note 8, pp. 46–47;National Research Council, op. cit. note 6, pp.164–80.

12. National Research Council, op. cit. note 6,pp.132–35, with quote from p. 135; implicationsof changing definition from David Satterthwaite,Outside the Large Cities: The Demographic Impor-tance of Small Urban Centres and Large Villages inAfrica, Asia, and Latin America, Human Settle-ments Discussion Paper Series, Urban Change-3(London: International Institute for Environmentand Development (IIED), 2006).

13. Table 1–1 and data in text from UnitedNations Population Division, op. cit. note 5.

14. Ibid., viewed August 2006. A discussion withDavid Satterthwaite was helpful in formulatingthese paragraphs.

15. United Nations Population Division, op. cit.note 5, viewed July 2006; Africa’s urban popula-tion from Diana Mitlin and David Satterthwaite,eds., Empowering Squatter Citizen: Local Gov-ernment, Civil Society, and Urban Poverty Reduc-tion (Sterling, VA: Earthscan, 2004), p. 6; rate ofurbanization from National Research Council,op. cit. note 6, pp. 92–93.

16. National Research Council, op. cit. note 6,p. 107.

17. Share living in settlements below 500,000from United Nations Population Division, op.cit. note 8, p. 5; Figures 1–1 and 1–2 from UnitedNations Population Division, op. cit. note 5. Jan-ice Perlman provided the idea for Figure 1–1 onmegacities.

18. National Research Council, op. cit. note 6,pp. 95–99; Latin America’s urban population sharefrom United Nations Population Division, op.cit. note 5, viewed August 2006.

19. National Research Council, op. cit. note 6,

pp. 99–102.

20. UN-HABITAT, op. cit. note 8, p. 9. A con-trasting though not inconsistent account comesfrom Christine Kessides, who points out that eco-nomic growth in sub-Saharan Africa derives largelyfrom industry, including construction and mining,and from service sectors, which are mainly urban.These activities accounted for almost 80 percentof growth in gross domestic product in the regionin 1990–2003. Christine Kessides, The UrbanTransition in Sub-Saharan Africa: Implicationsfor Economic Growth and Poverty Reduction, AfricaRegion Working Paper Series No. 97 (Washington,DC: World Bank, 2005).

21. National Research Council, op. cit. note 6,pp. 102–06; polluted cities in China from WorldBank, cited in “A Great Wall of Waste—China’sEnvironment,” The Economist, 21 August 2004;India’s urban poverty from UN-HABITAT, op. cit.note 8, p. 11.

22. National Research Council, op. cit. note 6,chapter 10.

23. Cecilia Tacoli, “Editor’s Introduction,” inCecilia Tacoli, ed., The Earthscan Reader in Rural-Urban Linkage (London: Earthscan, 2006), pp.3–14.

24. National Research Council, op. cit. note 6,pp. 143–46; doubts about rapid growth withouteconomic growth from David Satterthwaite, TheScale of Urban Change Worldwide 1950–2000 andIts Underpinning, Human Settlements Discus-sion Paper Series, Urban Change-1 (London:IIED, 2005).

25. Accra Planning and Development Pro-gramme, Strategic Plan for the Greater Accra Met-ropolitan Area. Volume I. Context Report (Accra:Department of Town and Country Planning, Min-istry of Local Government, Government of Ghana,draft final report, 1992), pp. 77–81.

26. Health penalty for urban poor from NationalResearch Council, op. cit. note 6, pp. 284–89;Jacob Songsore et al., with the assistance of CERS-GIS, State of Environmental Health. Report of the

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Greater Accra Metropolitan Area 2001 (Accra:Ghana Universities Press, 2006); Institute forRegional Studies of the Californias, A BinationalVision for the Tijuana River Watershed (San Diego,CA: San Diego State University, 2005).

27. Infrastructure spending from UN-HABI-TAT, The State of the World’s Cities, 2004/2005(London: Earthscan, 2005), p. 28; cost of meet-ing Millennium Development Goal from UN-HABITAT, op. cit. note 8, p. 162; urban povertynot transitory from ibid., p. 49.

28. Global Urban Observatory from UN-HABI-TAT, op. cit. note 8; National Research Council,op. cit. note 6, chapter 5; Demographic and HealthSurveys, at www.measuredhs.com/aboutdhs/whoweare.cfm, viewed August 2006; ShlomoAngel, Stephen C. Sheppard, and Daniel L. Civco,The Dynamics of Global Urban Expansion (Wash-ington, DC: World Bank, 2005).

29. Center for Global Development, When WillWe Ever Learn? Improving Lives through ImpactEvaluation, Final Report of the Evaluation GapWorking Group (Washington, DC: 2006); C. S.Holling, ed., Adaptive Environmental Assessmentand Management (New York: John Wiley & Sons,1978); Richard Margoluis and Nick Salafsky, Mea-sures of Success. Designing, Managing, and Moni-toring Conservation and Development Projects(Washington, DC: Island Press, 1998); Kai N.Lee, “Appraising Adaptive Management,” Con-servation Ecology, vol. 3, no. 2 (1999), article 3.

30. Table 1–2 from the following: First five rowsof data and row seven on per capita health expen-ditures are taken from U.N. Development Pro-gramme, Human Development Report 2005 (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 2005). Probabilityof dying before age five from Lopez et al., op. cit.note 6, annex 2A, pp. 36–42. Energy use fromWorld Bank, World Development Indicators (2006),at devdata.worldbank.org/dataonline. Municipalpopulations, estimated for 2005, are taken fromUnited Nations Population Division, op. cit. note8, Table A.12, pp. 266, 268, 270. The populationfigures are current, but the information on water,sanitation, and energy was collected at earlier dates;Accra, in particular, was considerably smaller in

1991–92, and it is possible that the levels of accessto improved water and sanitation have declinedsince then. The estimates of populations without“improved” sanitation and water supply need to beread with caution, because the definitions used todefine “improved” vary across the cities, reflectingtheir different origins. These differences not onlyare unavoidable consequences of the way data arecollected but also reflect differing histories andcultural standards, as explained in UN-HABITAT,Water and Sanitation in the World’s Cities: LocalAction for Global Goals (London: Earthscan, 2003),pp. 2–5, as well as in the water and sanitationchapter of this book. The figures for Accra aretaken from Gordon McGranahan et al., The Cit-izens at Risk: From Urban Sanitation to Sustain-able Cities (Sterling, VA: Earthscan, for StockholmEnvironment Institute, 2001), chapter 4 (withsanitation considered unimproved if a householdshares a toilet with more than 10 other householdsand water supply considered unimproved if ahousehold lacks access to piped water inside thehouse). The figures for Tijuana are drawn fromPotable Water and Wastewater Master Plan forTijuana and Playas de Rosarito (Comisión Estatalde Servicios Públicos de Tijuana, 2003), p. 2-37,quoting census data for 2000 (with unimprovedsanitation defined as residences without sewageservices and unimproved water supply meaning aresidence without piped water). Figures from Sin-gapore are taken from World Bank, op. cit. thisnote. Other material in text from Carolyn Stephenset al., “Urban Equity and Urban Health: UsingExisting Data to Understand Inequalities in Healthand Environment in Accra, Ghana and São Paulo,Brazil,” Environment and Urbanization, April1997, pp. 181–202, and from Songsore et al., op.cit. note 26.

31. Gordon McGranahan and Frank Murray,eds., Air Pollution and Health in Rapidly Devel-oping Countries (London: Earthscan, 2003).

32. Thomas L. Friedman, The World Is Flat (NewYork: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005).

33. Figure 1–3 from Millennium EcosystemAssessment, Ecosystems and Human Well-Being.Vol. 1: Current State and Trends (Washington,DC: Island Press, 2005), p. 807; Xuemei Bai and

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Hidefumi Imura, “A Comparative Study of UrbanEnvironment in East Asia: Stage Model of UrbanEnvironmental Evolution,” International Reviewfor Environmental Strategies, summer 2000, pp.135–58; McGranahan et al., op. cit. note 30. Theenvironmental Kuznets curve was initially pro-posed in World Bank, World Development Report1992 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992),p. 11; see also Kirk R. Smith and Majid Ezzati,“How Environmental Health Risks Change withDevelopment: The Epidemiologic and Environ-mental Risk Transitions Revisited,” Annual Reviewof Environment and Resources, November 2005,pp. 291–333.

34. O. Alberto Pombo, “Water Use and Sanita-tion Practices in Peri-Urban Areas of Tijuana: ADemand-side Perspective,” in Lawrence A. Her-zog, ed., Shared Space: Rethinking the U.S.-Mex-ico Border Environment (La Jolla, CA: Center forU.S.-Mexican Studies, University of California,San Diego, 2000); Serge Dedina, “The PoliticalEcology of Transboundary Development: LandUse, Flood Control, and Politics in the TijuanaRiver Valley,” Journal of Borderlands Studies, vol.10, no. 1 (1995), pp. 89–110; Accra from Song-sore et al., op. cit. note 26; Singapore, where theimplementation of public housing on a very largescale since 1960 has dramatically altered the envi-ronmental risks facing households, from Tan SookYee, Private Ownership of Public Housing in Sin-gapore (Singapore: Times Academic Press, 1998),but compare the wider range of views in GiokLing Ooi and Kenson Kwok, eds., The City &The State: Singapore’s Built Environment Revisited(Singapore: Oxford University Press for the Insti-tute of Policy Studies, 1997); community-levelorganizations from Mitlin and Satterthwaite, op.cit. note 15.

35. Sumerians from Sandra Postel, Pillar of Sand(New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999) pp.14–21; Mayans from Jared Diamond, Collapse:How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (New York:Viking, 2005), pp. 156–77.

36. Definition from Global Footprint Network,at www.footprintnetwork.org/gfn_sub.php?con-tent=footprint_overview, viewed August 2006;relative sizes of per capita footprints come from

national footprint estimates prepared by the Euro-pean Environment Agency, at org.eea.europa.eu/news/Ann1132753060, viewed August 2006.The definition may make it seem that a country’sfootprint is related to the area within and adjacentto the national border, but all countries depend ondistant sources for resources such as oil or manu-factured products and sometimes water, so thefootprint is actually an abstract measure based onglobally averaged estimates of ecological produc-tivity.

37. Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons. TheEvolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cam-bridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1990),especially chapter 3; J. Stephen Lansing, Priests andProgrammers: Technologies of Power in the Engi-neered Landscape of Bali (Princeton, NJ: Prince-ton University Press, 1991); Daniel Pauly et al.,“The Future for Fisheries,” Science, 21 November2003, pp. 1359–61.

38. Joel A. Tarr, The Search for the UltimateSink: Urban Pollution in Historical Perspective(Akron, OH: University of Akron Press, 1996), pp.179–217.

39. UN-HABITAT, op. cit. note 30, pp. 8–12;John Thompson et al., “Waiting at the Tap:Changes in Urban Water Use in East Africa overThree Decades,” Environment and Urbanization,October 2000, pp. 37–52.

40. Table 1–3 from the following: EdemDzidzienyo and Kai N. Lee, unpublished fieldnotes, Accra, Ghana, January 2006, and Thomp-son et al., op. cit. note 39 (prices of water in Accrain Ghanaian cedis (GHC) were converted to dol-lars at the 2006 market rate of 8,900 GHC to thedollar; these prices were projected back to 1997dollars using the implicit price deflator in Execu-tive Office of the President, Economic Report of the President, 2006, Table B-3; the value for the fourth quarter of 2005 was combined with the 1997 value for an overall deflator of113.369/95.414 =1.188); Ethiopia from UN-HABITAT, op. cit. note 30, pp. 67–68, and fromUN-HABITAT, op. cit. note 8, p. 75; scientistfrom Dr. Frederick Amu-Mensah, Accra, Ghana,discussion with author, 9 February 2006.

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41. Association between human developmentand urbanization from UN-HABITAT, op. cit.note 8, p. 46; scale of urban population growth andneed for urban habitat from United Nations Pop-ulation Division, op. cit. note 5.

42. Nineteenth-century engineers from Hansvan Engen, Dietrich Kampe, and SybrandTjallingii, eds., Hydropolis: The Role of Water inUrban Planning (Leiden, Netherlands: BackhuysPublishers, 1995); Christer Nilsson et al., “Frag-mentation and Flow Regulation of the World’sLarge River Systems,” Science, 15 April 2005, pp.405–08.

43. Chester L. Arnold, Jr., “Impervious SurfaceCoverage: The Emergence of a Key Environmen-tal Indicator,” Journal of the American PlanningAssociation, spring 1996, p. 243ff; Thomas Dunneand Luna B. Leopold, Water in EnvironmentalPlanning (New York: W. H. Freeman and Com-pany, 1998, 15th ed.); New York from Toni Nel-son, “Closing the Nutrient Loop,” World Watch,November/December 1996; Vivian Toy, “Plan-ning to Close Its Landfill, New York Will ExportTrash,” New York Times, 30 November 1996;nutrient cycle from Gary Gardner, RecyclingOrganic Waste: From Urban Pollutant to FarmResource, Worldwatch Paper 135 (Washington,DC: Worldwatch Institute, August 1997).

44. Millennium Project, Halving Hunger: ItCan Be Done, Summary of Report of the TaskForce on Hunger (New York: Earth Institute,Columbia University, 2005); people without elec-tricity from V. Modi et al., Energy and the Mil-lennium Development Goals (New York: U.N.Development Programme, UN Millennium Pro-ject, and World Bank, 2006).

45. UN-HABITAT, op. cit. note 30, chapter 5.

46. Arif Hasan, Working with Government: TheStory of the Orangi Pilot Project’s Collaboration withState Agencies for Replicating its Low Cost Sani-tation Programme (Karachi, Pakistan: City Press,1997).

47. UN-HABITAT, op. cit. note 8, pp. 160–67.

48. Herbert Girardet, Cities People Planet (Chich-ester, U.K.: John Wiley & Sons, 2004), pp.123–25; Herbert Girardet, The Gaia Atlas ofCities (London: Gaia Books, 1992), pp. 22–23;Box 1–2 from City of Stockholm, “HammarbySjöstad: The Best Environmental Solutions inStockholm,” undated, from Timothy Beatley,Green Urbanism: Learning from European Cities(Washington, DC: Island Press, 2000), and fromsite visits and interviews with city officials by Tim-othy Beatley, 2000–06.

49. Ken Yeang, Bioclimatic Skyscrapers (London:Ellipsis London Press, 2000); Condé Nast from“Urban Sustainability at the Building and SiteScale,” in Stephen M. Wheeler and Timothy Beat-ley, eds., The Sustainable Urban DevelopmentReader (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 300.

50. Steven Peck and Chris Callaghan, “Gather-ing Steam: Eco-Industrial Parks Exchange Wastefor Efficiency and Profit,” Alternatives Journal,spring 1997.

51. Mark A. Benedict and Edward T. McMa-hon, Green Infrastructure: Linking Landscapesand Communities (Washington, DC: Island Press,2006); Laura Kitson, “Green Spaces WidenGrowth Area Purpose,” Planning, 9 June 2006.

52. International Telecommunications Union,“Mobile Cellular, Subscribers per 100 People”and “Main Telephone Lines, Subscribers per 100People,” at www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/statistics,viewed 21 July 2006; William McDonough,“China as a Green Lab,” Harvard Business Review,February 2006; Box 1–3 from Jeremy Harris, dis-cussion with Molly O’Meara Sheehan and author,19 June 2006, with additional information pro-vided by Karl Hausker, adjunct fellow, Center forStrategic and International Studies, Washington,DC, e-mail to Molly Sheehan, 19 September 2006,and by Peter Chaffey, manager, Business Mel-bourne, City of Melbourne, e-mail to Molly Shee-han, 20 September 2006.

53. Hon. Kodjo Gbli-Boyetey, discussion withauthor, Edem Dzidzienyo, and Dana Lee, 24 Jan-uary 2006.

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Notes, Chapter 1,Timbuktu, Loja

54. Tim Campbell and Travis Katz, “The Politicsof Participation in Tijuana, Mexico: Inventing aNew Style of Governance,” in Tim Campbell andHarald Fuhr, Leadership and Innovation in Sub-national Government: Case Studies from LatinAmerica (Washington, DC: World Bank Institute,2004), section 5-1, pp. 69–97.

55. W. G. Huff, The Economic Growth of Singa-pore: Trade and Development in the Twentieth Cen-tury (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1994); Tan, op. cit. note 34; energy fromWorld Bank, op. cit. note 30 (which shows energyuse at 5,359 kilograms of oil equivalent per capitafor Singapore in 2003 and 7,843 kilograms for theUnited States).

Timbuktu: Greening the Hinterlands

1. Estimate of 100,000 described in Richard W.Franke and Barbara H. Chasin, Seeds of Famine:Ecological Destruction and the DevelopmentDilemma in the West African Sahel (Lanham, MD:Rowman and Littlefield, 1980), p. 11; populationfigures from Jan Lahmeyer, Population Statistics,at www.library.uu.nl/wesp/populstat/populframe.html, viewed July 2006.

2. National income and poverty data from Gov-ernment of Mali, Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper(Bamako, Mali: 29 May 2002), pp. 7, 13.

3. Aly Bacha Konaté and Mamadou Diakité,Etude de la filière de l’Eucalyptus dans la vallée duYamé (Mopti, Mali: GDRN5 and USAID/FRAME, 2006), p. 28; quote from Aly BachaKonaté and Aly Bocoum, Lutte contre la deserti-fication, reduction de la pauvreté: Etude de cas duMali (Mopti, Mali: GDRN5 and USAID/FRAME, 2005), p. 36.

4. Konaté and Bocoum, op. cit. note 3, p. 36.

5. Yield from Konaté and Bocoum, op. cit.note 3, p. 36; net value from Konaté and Diakité,op. cit. note 3, p. 28.

6. Regional director, Forest Service, discussionwith authors, March 2005.

7. Yield from Konaté and Bocoum, op. cit.note 3, p. 33; quote from ibid., p. 32.

8. Konaté and Bocoum, op. cit. note 3, p. 31.

9. Quote from Konaté and Bocoum, op. cit.note 3, p. 32.

Loja: Ecological and Healthy City

1. Marlon Cueva, discussion with author, 23April 2004; Fernando Montesinos, discussion withauthor, 15 April 2004.

2. Dr. José Bolívar Castillo, discussion withauthor, 3 May 2004.

3. Dr. Ermel Salinas, discussion with author,29 April 2004.

4. Jorge Muños Alvarado, discussion withauthor, 21 April 2004; Dr. Humberto Tapia, dis-cussion with author, 28 April 2004.

5. Wilson Jaramillo, discussion with author, 16April 2006.

6. Fernando Montesinos, discussion withauthor, 19 April 2004.

7. Ibid.

8. Fabián Álvarez, municipal engineer, discus-sion with author, 19 April 2004; Fernando Mon-tesinos, discussion with author, 26 April 2004.

9. Lolita Samaniego Idrovo, discussion withauthor, 6 May 2004; Fernando Montesinos, dis-cussion with author, 6 May 2004.

10. Cueva, op. cit. note 1.

11. Montesinos, op. cit. note 6.

12. Tierramérica, Ecobreves, 2001, at www.tierramerica.net/2001/1216/iecobreves.shtml; Liv-Com, LivCom Awards–Previous Winners 2001, at www.livcomawards.com/previous-winners/2001.htm; “Turismo Nacional se Reunirá enLoja,” El Mercurio, 16 September 2003.

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