Building a just urban agenda
Making urban policy-making work for those that need it most in the Global South means elevating the voice of the urban poor. The DPU is showing how it can be done. Words: Brendan Maton
People are not just changed by what they learn but how the learning is done
In the north of Peru’s sprawling capital, Lima, the zone of José Carlos Mariátegui rises into steep, arid slopes dotted with informal human settlements, commonly known as barriadas or slums. José Carlos Mariátegui is within one of the poorest, most densely populated districts in the whole country, yet its population continues to grow fast. More than 13,000 people have arrived to the area in recent years. Chalked on the even higher slopes are new plots ready for more incomers.
Lima is situated in a mountain desert region. It is the second driest capital city in the world. But residents on the slopes of José Carlos Mariátegui take a bucket and tread a zigzag path through the rocks to reach the nearest tap – only two out of every five families have running water. Roads and buses stop far below the limits of housing.
The challenge for these residents is having their voices heard. In Peru, as elsewhere, urban planning tends to get done by experts centrally, often failing to acknowledge the right to the city of a large number of urban-dwellers. When it comes to risk mitigation, centralised priorities are often shocks such as earthquakes or mudslides, which are profound but rare. Settlers here face risks every day: rockfalls, diarrhoea from bad water, fires and harassment.
Established slum-dwellers and land-traffickers reproduce the endless occupation of the slopes by selling plots informally to newcomers, who cannot access land and housing elsewhere in Lima. As a result, everyday risks accumulate over time in pervasive ‘urban risk traps’ (see box, Urban Risk Traps) with severe impacts on the lives, livelihoods and assets of the urban poor and the city’s ecological and socioeconomic future.
“Capturing the full impact of urban risk traps, requires making such traps spatially and socially visible in the first place, only then can you trigger new ways of understanding and acting upon risk,” says Professor Adriana Allen at The Bartlett’s Development Planning Unit (DPU), Principal Investigator for cLima sin Riesgo – an innovative effort to capture everyday risks in José Carlos Mariátegui and Barrios Altos, another deprived area in central Lima. The cLima sin Riesgo project has used drones to photograph and create 3D maps of the two zones. Silvia de los Rios, from NGO project partner CIDAP, says that for the neighbours, having this aerial photo is “like having the urban block in their hands”.
Urban Risk Traps: Risk can be understood as the combined potential outcome of hazards and vulnerabilities, mitigated by the individual and collective capacity to cope. The DPU sees ‘risk traps’ as cyclically recurring dangers that accumulate over time in specific places. Risk traps are often repetitive and go unrecorded, which makes them invisible.
Drone improvements
In Barrios Altos, the drones reveal what official maps do not: illegal repurposing of residential dwelling as commercial storage. Another dimension of the map shows where official height restrictions have been breached. But this is only the beginning. The maps are then embedded with social information drawn from local settlers individually and collectively. Georeferenced household interviews allow for identifying who is at risk – where, how and why – and also their means of coping with adversity.
The last category is crucial because so often the poor are not deemed to have resources. The money they spend on improving collective accessibility and services, ameliorating housing conditions, buying land, spades to level the slope or hoses to carry water, is not recorded – as if they make no financial contribution to the growing city but instead just sap its resources. On the contrary, slum-dwellers in José Carlos Mariátegui are virtually self-reliant. cLIMA sin Riesgo found that they contribute on average 87% of the total to making their neighbourhood habitable. The State provides just 8.3%.
Technology harnessed to understand this way of life includes the drones, as well as geomapping conducted on smartphones using apps such as Epicollect. By collaborating with The Bartlett’s Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis and UCL Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering, the DPU then published the survey findings on open-access platform ReMapRisk.
But to reach into the heart of informal settlements, technology is subordinate to a methodology that begins by including residents’ groups in formulating survey questions and their participation in data collection. The DPU allies its expertise in urban planning with the knowledge of local-dwellers and citizens’ rights groups and the interests of municipal and national authorities. For comparability, socio-demographic questions are directly aligned with those found in surveys by Peru’s National Institute for Statistics; while authorities currently engaged in cLIMA sin Riesgo include the Lima Water and Sanitation Service, the Secretariat of Disaster Risk Management and the Ministry of Housing.
For Professor Allen, the methodologies themselves transform users’ thinking to build skills, confidence and aspirations. “People are not just changed by what they learn but how that learning is done.” The co-ordinated project challenges the internalisation of many slum-dwellers, who demand nothing from the outside world. “The mapping process has helped to strengthen social organisation,” adds Silva de los Rios.
For the authorities, this project offers a new form of risk-mapping (risk-mapping is a prerequisite for any Public Investment Project in Peru). For Peru’s urban planners, however, data from the ground up presents a particular policy challenge. There is a way of thinking, for example, that says that granting the poor legal title to their land is the surest way out of poverty, but evidence from cLIMA sin Riesgo and other projects finds that among the very poor, land titles acquired are readily sold on for cash. “So we have to ask ourselves whether there are more appropriate policies in areas such as José Carlos Mariátegui – such as collective renting rights,” says Professor Allen.
Let’s go Quito
This discussion is not confined to Peru. Almost two thousand kilometres up the Pacific coast from Lima lies Quito, capital of Ecuador and home to the UN’s third global convention on sustainable urban development, Habitat III, last October. The DPU has engaged with the Habitat III process by participating in different initiatives aimed at stimulating the debate around the content of the concluding policy paper, the New Urban Agenda, as well as the process by which it has taken shape.
The first principle of the New Urban Agenda is that in the process of building better cities “no one gets left behind”. This forms part of an ambitious goal that “by readdressing the way cities and human settlements are planned, designed, financed, developed, governed and managed, the New Urban Agenda will help to end poverty and hunger in all its forms and dimensions.”
Attempting to close the gap between this utopian phraseology and life on the barren slopes of metropolitan Lima, the DPU, represented by 11 academics, were active participants at the conference in Quito, hosting events, exhibitions and information exchanges.
Silvia de los Rios and colleagues from CIDAP were also there, exchanging ideas with other grassroots groups and agencies. One of the youngest, launched internationally at Habitat III, was the Sierra Leone Urban Research Centre (SLURC), represented by Dr Joseph Macarthy, an alumnus of the DPU and now Lecturer in Geography at Njala University; Sam Gibson, Mayor of Freetown; and Francis Anthony Reffell, Manager of the Slum Livelihood Project at the YMCA in Freetown. They have been building the SLURC with help from Dr Andrea Rigon and Dr Alexandre Aspan Frediani at the DPU.
Like cLima sin Riesgo, SLURC’s strength lies in its collaborative foundations – what the DPU calls “partnerships of equivalence”. Reffell told Habitat III that SLURC had created an opportunity to validate his project’s data. “The world of academia is far removed from the poor population but SLURC recently conducted a training for the slum-dwellers. That linkage helps us to be recognised as a player especially when dealing with the municipal authorities.”
“We act as facilitators,” says Dr Rigon. “What is beautiful is when you see residents and city planners all interacting and sharing knowledge.” The role of the DPU academics in SLURC is now to step back and let the local researchers generate new knowledge with its various partners.
No one is naive about the challenge. Sierra Leone was racked by civil war for 12 years and more recently the Ebola virus. Corruption is rife and the country ranks low on the Human Development Index. Mayor Gibson admitted there are no fewer than 30 slums in the city.
“SLURC will be a very good test of how the New Urban Agenda can be put into practice… Changing people’s lives for the better but also creating mechanisms for monitoring the process, and for that you do need a range of partnerships,” says Professor Julio Davila, Director of the DPU.
There have been criticisms within the DPU and elsewhere that Habitat III’s aims resemble a huge shopping list that does not sufficiently protect slum-dwellers, those most likely to get left behind as more of the world’s population comes to live in cities.
The research in Lima and Freetown brings to a wider audience the truth that local civic groups have long known: millions of slum-dwellers do want to be left, if not behind, then at least where they are. But with dignity, security of tenure, basic services and a voice.
Timeline
Habitat 1, 1976
The first UN Conference on Human Settlements was in Vancouver, Canada in May 1976, as governments began to recognise the magnitude of rapid urbanisation.
Habitat II, 1996
20 years after the first meeting, a second meeting, popularly called the ‘City Summit’, was convened in Istanbul, Turkey and extended to local governments, academics and key civil society players.
Habitat III, 2016
Unlike the previous two meetings, Habitat III put equity and sustainability at the very heart of the discussions and to ensure broad input into the New Urban Agenda.
Read the research
Infographic
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