By Humberto Márquez
ISTANBUL, Jun 12 1996 (IPS)

It’s official. People living in the cities of the North are better off than those in the cities of the developing South – 100 times better off in some cases.

U.N. statistics gathered from 183 cities around the world showed people in the urban areas of Africa and the Asia-Pacific region have the lowest standard of living – just below Latin American city dwellers and those in the Arab and former states of the Soviet Union. All were way behind the quality of life in the industrialised cities of the north.

The indicators, presented at the U.N. Conference on Human Settlements (Habitat-II) this week, “were collected to serve the policies of the nations, regions and local powers towards their cities,” said conference official Steve Mayor from the United States.

Colombian viceminister of housing, Fabio Giraldo said that “reasonably chosen indicators offer information that society can use,” though he warned that poorly thought out indicators could be misleading.

“Before making comparisons, firstly, an outline of what constitutes a city is needed,” said Giraldo. “This conference discussed the right to decent housing, but in Latin America, for instance, this concept does not include the same factors in Colombia as in Central America, Bolivia or Haiti.”

Habitat-II, the “Cities Summit,” has an agenda which aims to promote sustainable urban development in the first half of the 21st century. Some 183 cities were surveyed in 97 nations of the world, with information gathered on 46 indicators.

African cities showed an average annual Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of 919 dollars per person, compared with 1,061 in Asia, 2,114 in Latin America, 2,983 in the Arab nations, 3,357 in the former socialist countries, and 23,187 in the industrialised states.

The per person GDP of 20 percent of the poorest cities, meanwhile, stood below one-hundredth of the value in the richest 20 percent, meaning some Northern cities have standards of living 100 times better than their Southern counterparts.

This undeniable poverty “is more serious in those cities where the poor are forced to live squashed together in precarious housing,” a situation which has direct gender-related side effects, the U.N. report said.

Although the total number of female heads of household is similar in Latin America and the industrialised countries, at 24 and 23.5 percent respectively, the amount of these households living in poverty is very different – at 52.2 and 29.7 percent.

The figures also reflected the right to life itself. The rate of infant mortality is a mere 0.5 percent in the industrialised nations, it stands at 11 percent in the least developed nations.

There are 130 patients per hospital bed in the industrialised nations compared with 320 in Latin America, 600 in Asia and 1,200 in Africa.

The rate of access to clean drinking water in Africa stood at a meagre 38.5 percent, while the dry Arab nations had levels of 75 percent, Latin America, 77.8 percent, and the industrialised nations enjoyed 99.4 percent.

Access to housing meanwhile, is more linked to whether the land and housing acquisition policies are open or restrictive, than a simple North-South division. Here, Latin America comes off well, with house prices worth an average of 3.7 years of income compared with 4.4 in the industrialised nations, 8.5 in the Asia Pacific region, and 9.7 in the Arab states.

Rents in the various regions eat up approximately 20 percent of income, while the amount of space available for each person ranges from 41 sq m per person in the rich nations, through 16 in Latin America, to a mere eight in the Asian countries.

The indicators “respond to a world methodology, but if the details are looked at they can be converted into a tool for subnational, national and regional policies to follow the Istanbul agenda,” said the report.

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