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Special Report: Anthropologist Discusses Effect of Poverty on Achieving Green Cities
Published: November 08, 2007
By Diana Mosher, Editor-in-Chief
Chicago—With an anthropological perspective, Dr. Janice Perlman spoke Wednesday about the challenges that come with efforts to implement sustainable design, methods and strategies in cities across the world during her session titled “A Global Perspective on Mega-Cities and Urban Innovations” at the Greenbuild International Conference & Expo in Chicago.
Cities are a relatively recent phenomenon when seen in the context of human history, said Perlman, who holds a B.A. from Cornell University in anthropology and Latin American studies as well as a Ph.D. from MIT in political science with a concentration in international urban studies. For centuries, rural people made a living from the land, she pointed out, and currently, the world is only halfway through the urban transformation. Over the next 30 years, as we continue to move away from agricultural societies, the majority of global growth will be in urban areas, Perlman said.
Unfortunately, the cities whose populations are expected to increase the most (for example, Mumbai, Lagos and Mexico City) are also the least equipped to handle the massive influx of people. The world’s already-epidemic slums will likely become even more massive in scale, and this, in turn, will hinder the ability of many cities to be truly sustainable. However, according to Perlman, there are steps that can be taken now to avoid an ecological disaster.
Perlman is the founder and executive director of the Mega-Cities Project Inc., a transnational nonprofit network that strives to aid urban dwellers around the world. Mega-Cities provides a forum for communication and innovation between cities to assist the process of recovery. It concentrates its efforts to make cities more socially just, ecologically sustainable, politically participatory and economically productive.
“There’s not a big separation between a city’s green agenda and its brown agenda,” noted Perlman. “Every city is dealing with how to dispose of garbage.”
Urban planners, government officials and others can learn much from each other, whether it’s how to dispose of garbage, what to do about overcrowding in mass transit, or housing issues.
“One-third of humans in cities around the world are being excluded because they have no jobs,” observed Perlman. “Many are unable to enter the rental or purchased housing market. Cities located in the [southern hemisphere] have been growing most rapidly in the last several decades.” In these “mega-cities” of 10 million or more people, self-built housing is frequently erected without adherence to codes and without environmental and safety controls (e.g., on steep hillsides or in swamplands).
“The scale of growth is completely unprecedented,” said Perlman.
And mega-cities lack the major systems to deliver water and remove waste from these self-made affordable housing areas, she added. Rather than fixating on investing in the countryside, donor agencies need to recognize that people want to come to the big cities.
“The international funding agencies of investment institutions need to give more to urban development and less to rural development,” said Perlman. “I’ve argued that the people who come to the city [and live in squatter developments] are the cream of the crop with the highest ambitions and aspirations. If given the chance, they would build middle-class communities. You can’t blame people for polluting the watershed if you don’t provide them with water infrastructure.”
Perlman advocates integrating squatter developments into the surrounding neighborhoods. Rather than demolishing these self-made communities, she recommends connecting them to the city’s infrastructure by incorporating paved streets, steps, plazas and new facades as well as offering services such as clean water, sewage connections and electricity. If visually they’re more like the surrounding neighborhoods, these needy areas will be more likely to interact with the middle class nearby, she said.
“While to plan is human, to implement is divine.” Perlman noted. “There can be no global ecology sustainability without urban ecology sustainability.”
MHN Editor-in-Chief Diana Mosher reported on-site for this story.
