Pollution from urban sewage is visible in the Onça (jaguar, in Portuguese) River, near its mouth, seen here from the entrance bridge in the Ribeiro de Abreu neighborhood that suffers frequent flooding when it rains heavily in Belo Horizonte, capital of the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, in southeastern Brazil. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
BELO HORIZONTE, Brazil, May 17 2022 (IPS)

“We do everything through parties, we don’t want power, we don’t want to take over the role of the State, but we don’t just protest and complain,” said Itamar de Paula Santos, a member of the United Community Council for Ribeiro de Abreu (Comupra), in this southeastern Brazilian city.

Ribeiro de Abreu is one of the neighborhoods most affected by recurrent flooding in Belo Horizonte, capital of the state of Minas Gerais, as it is located on the right bank of the Onça (jaguar, in Portuguese) River, on the lower stretch, into which the water drains from a 212 square kilometer basin made up of numerous streams.

Cleaning up the river and preventing its waters from continuing to flood homes requires actions that also produce social benefits.

“We have so far removed 736 families who were living in high-risk situations, on the riverbank,” Santos told IPS in the same place where precarious and frequently flooded shacks gave way to the Community Riverside Park (Parque Ciliar, in Portuguese), which has a garden, soccer field, children’s playground and fruit trees.

The project, begun by local residents together with Comupra and the local government in 2015 and gradually implemented since then, aims to extend the community park 5.5 kilometers upstream through several neighborhoods by 2025.

This includes doubling the number of families resettled, cleaning up the Onça basin and its nine beaches, three islands and three waterfalls, preserving nature and developing urban agriculture, and creating areas for sports and cultural activities. All with participatory management and execution.

Itamar de Paula Santos, an activist with the United Community Council for Ribeiro de Abreu, longs to go back to swimming and fishing in the Onça River, as he did in his childhood. But its waters, polluted by urban waste, often flood the riverside neighborhoods in the rainy season as the river flows through the city of Belo Horizonte, in southeastern Brazil. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Displaced within the same neighborhood

The families removed from the flood-prone riverbank now live mostly in safe housing in the same Ribeiro de Abreu neighborhood, which had 16,000 inhabitants at the 2010 census, but is now estimated to be home to 20,000 people.

The Belo Horizonte city government has a rule to resettle families from risky areas in places no more than three kilometers from where they used to live, Ricardo Aroeira, director of Water Management of the Municipal Secretariat of Works and Infrastructure, told IPS.

That is the case of Dirce Santana Soares, 55, who now lives with her son, her mother and four other family members in a five-bedroom house, with a yard where she grows a variety of fruit trees and vegetables.

“It’s the best thing that could have happened to us,” she said. Five years ago she lived next to the river, which flooded her shack, almost always in the wee hours of the morning, every year during the rainiest months in Belo Horizonte – December and January.

“We had bunk beds and we piled everything we wanted to save on top of them. Then we built a second floor on the house, leaving the first floor to the mud,” she told IPS. “But I didn’t want to leave the neighborhood where I had been living for 34 years.”

She was lucky. After receiving the compensation for leaving her riverside shack, an acquaintance sold her their current home, at a low price, with long-term interest-free installments.

View of a beach on the Onça River, which the movement for clean rivers wants to recuperate as a recreational area for the local population in the city of Belo Horizonte, in southeastern Brazil. At this spot, the Onça River receives the waters of the Isidoro stream. There are another eight beaches to be restored as well. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Bad luck

Soares, who is now a domestic worker, had a daycare center that started losing money in the face of the increased offer of free nursery schools by the local government, and the COVID-19 pandemic over the last two years.

Itamar Santos, a 64-year-old father of three, has also lived in the neighborhood for almost four decades. Before that, he worked as a mechanical lathe operator in other cities and for three years in Carajás, the large iron ore mine in the eastern Amazon, 1,600 km north of Belo Horizonte.

In 1983, in Carajás, he lost his right leg when he fell into a 12-meter well. “It was night-time, and there was no electricity, just dark jungle,” he explained. After the first painful impact, he learned to live with his disability and regained the joy of living, with a specially adapted car.

He became an activist and among his achievements were free bus tickets for paraplegics and a gymnasium for multiple sports. “Creating conditions that enable the disabled to leave their homes is therapeutic,” he told IPS.

View of a community garden that local residents in the Ribeiro de Abreu neighborhood cultivate on the banks of the Onça River. Some 140 families who suffered annual flooding were resettled and now live in safe housing in the same part of Belo Horizonte, a metropolis in southeastern Brazil. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

But the cause that impassions him today is the river, which in January has a heavy flow due to the heavy rains that month, but dries up in September, in the dry season.

“Let the Onça drink clean water” is the slogan of a movement also promoted by Santos, to emphasize the protection and recovery of the thousands of springs that supply the river and its tributary streams.

Every year since 2008, this movement, driven by Comupra, organizes meetings for reflection and debate on the revitalization of the river in riverside venues in different neighborhoods in the basin.

The festivities are also repeated annually, or more often. Carnival brings joy to the local population on the beaches or squares along the banks of the Onça River, and giant Christmas trees are set up for the communities to come out and celebrate the holidays.

The basin, or more precisely sub-basin, of the Onça River comprises the northern half of the territory and the population of Belo Horizonte, which totals 2.5 million inhabitants. The south, which is richer, is where the Arrudas River is located.

Both emerge in the neighboring municipality to the west, Contagem, and flow east into the Das Velhas River, the main source of water for the six million inhabitants of Greater Belo Horizonte. As they cross heavily populated areas, they are the main polluters of the Velhas basin.

Major floods in the provincial capital occur mainly in the Onça sub-basin. The steep topography of Belo Horizonte makes the soil more impermeable, leading to more disasters.

Maria José Zeferino, a retired teacher from neighboring schools, at the Our Lady of Mercy Park, which was built to clean up a stream from urban pollution that was spreading diarrhea and parasites among the students of three nearby schools, in Belo Horizonte, a city in southeastern Brazil. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Other riverbank parks

The Belo Horizonte city government has been working on drainage plans for years and has been implementing the Program for the Environmental Recovery of the Valley and Creek Bottoms since 2001.

In April it published the Technical Instruction for the Elaboration of Drainage Studies and Projects, under the general coordination of Aroeira.

Since the end of the last century there has been a “paradigm shift,” said Aroeira. Channeling watercourses used to be the norm, but this “merely shifted the site of the floods.” Now the aim is to contain the torrents and to give new value to rivers, integrating them into the urban landscape, cleaning them up and at the same time improving the quality of life of the riverside populations, he explained.

The construction of long, narrow linear parks, which combines the clean-up of rivers or streams with environmental preservation, riverside reforestation and services for the local population, is one of the “structural” measures that can be seen in Belo Horizonte.

The participation of students and teachers from three neighboring schools stood out in the implementation in 2008 of the Nossa Senhora da Piedad Park in the Aarão Reis neighborhood, home to 8,300 inhabitants in 2010, near the lower section of the Onça River.

Cleaning up the creek that gives the park its name was the major environmental and sanitary measure.

“Sewage from the entire neighborhood contaminated the stream and caused widespread illnesses among the children, such as diarrhea, verminosis (parasites in the bronchial tubes) and nausea,” Maria José Zeferino, a retired art teacher at one of the local schools, told IPS.

The medicinal herb garden in the Primer de Mayo Ecological Park was a demand of the local population in the southern Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte. Creation of the park included the clean-up of a polluted stream and provides a gathering and recreational area for local residents. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

The park, which belongs to the municipality, has an area of 58,000 square meters, a pond, three courts for different sports, a skateboarding area and a paved walkway for the elderly. A total of 143 families and one farm received compensation to vacate the area, leaving many fruit trees behind.

“A clean river was our dream. And the goal of the next stage is to have swimming, fishing and boating in the city’s streams,” said Zeferino.

The Primer de Mayo Ecological Park, in the neighborhood of the same name with 2,421 inhabitants according to the 2010 census, was built during the revitalization of the stream of the same name, covering 33,700 square meters along a winding terrain. The novelty is a medicinal herb garden, a demand of the local population.

“We discovered 70 springs here that feed the stream that runs into the Onça River,” said Paulo Carvalho de Freitas, an active member of the Community Commission that supports the municipal management of the park and carries out educational activities there.

“My fight for the future is to remove much of the concrete with which the park was built, which waterproofs the soil and goes against one of the objectives of the project,” which was inaugurated in 2008, said Freitas.

Long staircases, like the ones in this section of the Pavão-Pavãozinho favela, are the daily slog of residents of the steep hillside slums of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil – a symbol of Latin America's urban inequalities. CREDIT: Fabíola Ortiz/IPS

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Dec 8 2021 (IPS)

The Brazilian megalopolis of São Paulo recorded 932 flooded premises on Feb. 10, 2020. The Mexican city of Tula de Allende was under water for 48 hours in September 2021. In Lima it almost never rains, but the rivers in the Peruvian capital overflowed in 2017 and left several outlying municipalities covered with mud.

Floods have become increasingly frequent in large Latin American cities, probably due to the effects of global warming and also to local factors, such as the extensive areas of concrete and asphalt that have replaced vegetation.

Extreme weather events are aggravating inequality “in a Latin America that has the most inequitable societies in the world,” said engineer Manuel Rodríguez, professor emeritus at the Universidad de los Andes who served as Colombia’s first minister of environment and sustainable development (1993-1996).

“The poorest of the poor live in shantytowns and slums in the areas most vulnerable to environmental risks, on undevelopable land along riverbanks or in the foothills,” where they are tragically affected by floods and landslides, he told IPS by telephone from Bogotá."There is a spatial inequality that results from the low-density expansion model of cities, which pushes low-income families to the periphery, makes access to public transportation difficult and requires long commutes." -- Pablo Lazo

This is especially important in Latin America, the world’s most urban region, where one in five people live in cities.

Thus, in addition to the 932 points of flooding reported to the fire department on Feb. 10, 2020, São Paulo also suffered 166 landslides that destroyed many houses. No deaths were reported on that day, but torrential rains usually claim lives in Greater São Paulo, which is home to 22 million people.

Brazil’s largest city, which spreads among rolling hills and numerous small valleys, has many neighborhoods that have had to learn to cope with flooding in the rainiest summers. This is due to the 300 streams that crisscross the area, most of which are covered by avenues or enclosed in channels that are unable to contain heavy downpours.

A good part of the 1.28 million inhabitants of the “favelas” or shantytowns of São Paulo, according to the 2010 official census, live on low-lying land, often along streams, without sanitation, and they are the first victims of floods. The poor make up 11 percent of the population of São Paulo proper.

In Rio de Janeiro there are also riverside favelas, but the ones built on hillsides or on the tops of hills that separate the city and some neighborhoods are much better known. The risk in these areas is landslides, which have killed many people.

In Brazil’s second largest city, favelas are home to 1.39 million people, 22 percent of the total population, according to the 2010 census.

“The topography allows them to live close to their jobs” so the choice is “between formal employment or living where housing is cheaper,” said Carolina Guimarães, coordinator of Rede Nossa São Paulo, a non-governmental organization that seeks to promote a “fair, democratic and sustainable” city.

This favela is next to a middle-class neighborhood in São Bernardo do Campo, the former capital of the automobile industry on the outskirts of São Paulo. The industry attracted migrants from other parts of the country who, without the jobs they dreamed of, could only build their precarious houses on occupied land on a hillside. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Lima, which has 10 million inhabitants, and other cities in Peru and Ecuador were victims of El Niño Costero, a climatic phenomenon that warms the waters of the Pacific Ocean but only near these two countries, where it also leads to more intense rainfall.

These and other Andean countries also face the threat of melting glaciers that could deprive the population of the Andes highlands of water, said Rodríguez. In the Caribbean, the biggest threat is hurricanes, which are becoming more frequent and more intense.

Greater poverty, more impacts

In addition to the fact that these phenomena hit the poor harder in Latin America, in the world’s most unequal region the poor have fewer resources to overcome the losses caused by the climate crisis, added the Colombian expert.

“Buying a new refrigerator and other appliances damaged each time it floods costs them much more. Poverty is a cause, driving them to disaster, and also a consequence of the disasters themselves,” said Guimarães, a former knowledge management coordinator at UN Habitat, the UN agency for human settlements.

It is a perverse logic.

The real estate business drives up the costs of the best, safest sites complete with infrastructure and services. There are too many at-risk areas where the poor “build their homes with their own hands,” without the support of a public policy that ensures them housing with “access to the city,” she told IPS by telephone from São Paulo.

“There is a spatial inequality that results from the low-density expansion model of cities, which pushes low-income families to the periphery, makes access to public transportation difficult and requires long commutes,” said Pablo Lazo, director of Urban Development and Accessibility at the World Resources Institute (WRI) in Mexico.

WRI Mexico designed the Urban Inequality Index (UDI), a tool for the formulation of public policies, which initially covers 74 metropolitan areas. It measures the public’s access to formal employment and services such as education, health and transportation, as well as food and culture.

This urbanization model also gives rise to shantytowns in risky areas, “a constant pattern that is repeated in Mexico City, whose eastern neighborhoods are built on hillsides, where water runs off very quickly, fueling landslides,” he said in an interview with IPS via video call from the Mexican capital.

Greater Mexico City is home to nearly 20 million people.

Rodríguez said this precariousness “is a widespread phenomenon in Latin America and the Caribbean, where 25 percent of the urban population lives in informal settlements.” Pushed to the periphery, where land is cheaper, but there are no jobs or public services, nor urbanization, the poor prefer slums near the center, he said.

Each one of hundreds of tents in a Homeless Workers Movement camp in 2017 represents a family that dreamed of obtaining a plot of land in the center of the industrial city of São Bernardo do Campo. The land they occupied had unclear ownership, but the attempt did not pan out. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Making inequality even more glaring

“The covid-19 pandemic laid bare the inequalities,” Lazo stressed.

As an example, he said “there were more deaths on the eastern periphery of Mexico City, where inequality is greater. One factor is distance: it takes five times longer to get to the hospital from the periphery than from the center, so many people don’t even take patients to the hospital.”

In addition, without water for hygiene and hand washing, the disease spreads more readily among the poor.

There is also a disparate power relationship between cities themselves. Tula de Allende, a city of 115,000 inhabitants located 70 kilometers north of the Mexican capital, suffered a major two-day flood in September 2021, not only because of the rains.

Mexico City’s water authorities discharged an excess of rainwater and wastewater into the Tula River that could flood the capital and its outlying neighborhoods, to the detriment of the city downstream, where the river overflow displaced more than 10,000 people and left a hospital without electricity, resulting in the death of 16 patients.

Concerted action is needed. A new governance model based on planning and coordination at a citywide level could be the way forward, said Lazo.

In Rio de Janeiro, Aruan Braga, urban policy coordinator for the Favelas Observatory, told IPS that “building a more equitable and democratic city requires including, in planning, low-income areas that sustain the city in day-to-day life but don’t have the right to participate in decision-making.”

Favelas lining hills are the best-known image of Rio de Janeiro, but there is also a large vulnerable population in low-lying, flood-prone areas. One example is the Maré Complex, where some 130,000 people live in 16 favelas.

On the shores of Guanabara Bay and the Cunha channel, so polluted they are like an open sewer, the complex suffers “floods every year,” said Braga, a sociologist with a master’s degree in development policies, who explained that the Maré Complex was built on a large piece of land reclaimed from mangroves and flood plains.

It was built by settlers relocated from more central favelas or from wealthy and beachside neighborhoods five decades ago, in a wave of “expulsion” from favelas that continues today. Maré also grew because it is next to Avenida Brasil, the main access route to the city center, and because it is home to industrial facilities.

View of a favela on a central hill in Rio de Janeiro, Santa Tereza. The upper part is a middle-class neighborhood of intellectuals and artists. The city’s hillsides are home to many favelas known for their high rates of violent crime. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

New policies for a new model

The four interviewees agreed that public policies are needed to make it possible to start reducing urban inequality in Latin America.

Lazo highlighted the need for mechanisms to control the market’s “greed”, such as a requirement that private housing projects include low-cost units.

“In France that proportion is 50 percent,” he said, to illustrate.

Braga said one good possibility for reducing the housing deficit in Rio de Janeiro would be by allocating empty public buildings to social housing. There are many unused state-owned buildings because the city was the capital of the country until 1960.

Movements seeking community solutions, “social urbanism”, urban agriculture and mobilization of the population for a more equitable and inclusive city point to the future, according to Guimarães.

Her Rede Nossa São Paulo has conducted studies on inequality that pointed to a difference of up to 22.6 years – from 58.3 to 80.9 years – in life expectancy between poor and rich neighborhoods in the city.

Bogota is in the process of organizing its territorial planning and there is talk of the “30-minute city”, following the example of Paris, which seeks to ensure that no one has to walk more than 15 minutes to do everything they need, Rodriguez said, describing a new model in Latin America.

A recreation of how New York's Times Square could be transformed as part of the ideas of reversible urbanism which experts are calling for in the wake of the pandemic. CREDIT: PaisajeTransversal.org

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Jun 2 2020 (IPS)

The first priority in the COVID-19 pandemic was to save lives, in an effort to avoid even more devastating economic losses if strict lockdown and isolation were not put in place.

But that priority could be reversed in the wake of the crisis, and lessons that would open up paths for shaping better cities could be discarded.

“The pandemic served to raise awareness of the need to change the urban paradigm,” while at the same time awakening “spontaneous solidarity among networked citizens, many helping neighbours who they previously ignored,” said Carmen Santana, a Chilean city planner who splits her time between Paris and Barcelona, Spain.

Social inequality, already so widespread in Latin America, has been exacerbated now that this region is becoming the epicentre of the pandemic, and is taking its toll in lives."…[T]he greatest contagion has more to do with the flow and circulation of people than with density…Cities that attract many people from many countries, with large-scale global circulation, like London, New York and São Paulo, became hotspots for the pandemic." -- Raquel Rolnik

Also pushing up the death toll is the precarious state of health services, and poor nutrition reflected in undernourishment and in obesity, which was found to increase vulnerability to COVID-19.

The question remains as to whether cities, especially the large metropolises that have suffered the most brutal attack by the new coronavirus, will begin to focus their development on human needs or will continue to follow a dynamic dictated by economic interests that have given rise to dysfunctional systems, according to urban planners that IPS interviewed by phone in different cities.

It is too early to predict what urban transformations will arise, because they depend on how long the isolation and social distancing will last, said Nabil Bonduki, a professor at the University of São Paulo School of Architecture and Urbanism (FAU-USP).

If the epidemic loses momentum or is curbed by a vaccine or drugs in the short term, cities will return to normal with their previous contradictions, he said. But if the current rigid measures against gathering in crowded places in public, or in shows or businesses, are maintained, there will be changes that are still unpredictable, he warned.

“A strong increase in virtual activities is already inevitable, such as business meetings, which have proved to be very productive, remote work and distance learning,” the professor said from São Paulo.

Bonduki, who led the development of São Paulo’s Master Plan as a city councilman in 2013-2014, does not believe there will be a rollback in the search for denser cities, with “occupation of urban voids and underutilised areas, and perhaps larger apartments,” to include office space.

In any case, it is the political powers-that-be that will set the course, although strong pressure from society for greater investment in health and poverty reduction can be expected, he predicted.

His colleague at the FAU-USP, Raquel Rolnik, who served as U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Right to Housing from 2008 to 2014, rejects the widespread belief in a correlation between urban density and the spread of coronavirus.

“Super-dense metropolises like Singapore, Hong Kong and Seoul have not suffered a catastrophe, but have had a relatively low number of victims. In New York, the district of Manhattan, which is very dense, had no more deaths than Staten Island, which is less densely populated,” she said.

A view of a favela in São Bernardo do Campo, an industrial city near the metropolis of São Paulo in southern Brazil. The idea was that shantytowns in Brazil and other countries of the developing South would be easy prey to the COVID-19 pandemic because of overcrowding, but this has not been the case. There are populous slums in Brazil and other countries that have had few cases .CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

She also pointed out that “in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, there are favelas (shantytowns) that have seen outbreaks of COVID-19 while others have not” – an argument that can help combat the stigma faced by these overcrowded neighbourhoods.

“In Brazil and around the world, you can see that the greatest contagion has more to do with the flow and circulation of people than with density,” Rolnik said from São Paulo.

“Cities that attract many people from many countries, with large-scale global circulation, like London, New York and São Paulo, became hotspots for the pandemic,” she said. To this list can be added Milan or Madrid, in the two countries that were epicentres of the pandemic in Europe.

The simplification of the issue is in the interest of groups that build, for example, high-end condominiums on the outskirts of cities, which try to tempt potential buyers with the benefits of living away from the crowded city and the possibility of telecommuting, she said.

These are the same financial interests that drive “non-resilient” cities, which accumulate problems such as “increasingly expensive and smaller housing” and air pollution from mushrooming numbers of cars, said Santana, who described herself as having “a Chilean soul, a French spirit and a Catalonian heart.”

“Real estate speculators” try to make a parallel between crowds that fuel contagion and urban density, which can actually be “healthy and sensitive”, with more humans and fewer cars, she said from Barcelona, capital of the region of Catalonia and Spain’s second largest city in terms of population.

Vehicles take up 50 to 60 percent of city space, she said.

Urban issues are complex and their solutions are not to be found in “pyramidal and linear thinking, but in circular thinking,” said Santana, a partner in the company Archikubik, which describes itself as an “ecosystem of architecture, urban planning and urban landscape”.

A crowd celebrates during Rio de Janeiro’s last carnival, in one of the last festive gatherings in the world before the coronavirus pandemic. No one knows whether carnival and other mass gatherings will be held in 2021 and the next few years. CREDIT: Fernando Maia | Riotur-Public Photos

Her proposals for redevelopment, which she hopes will be better received in the wake of the pandemic, include green public spaces, productive neighbourhoods that include urban agriculture, places of human dignity with housing and public toilets to serve refugees and the homeless, and the “renaturalisation” of cities.

“Animals reappeared in the cities when the cars stopped moving around, generating a new urban ecology and bringing people closer to nature,” she said.

The pandemic encourages reflection on how to reverse “the physical proximity and social distancing” of many in the city. “What is needed is a reasonable density, dense because of multifunctionality, with housing, work, commerce, recreation, culture, services, all in a local mix,” argued Carlos Moreno, a professor at the University of Paris I Pantheon-Sorbonne.

Moreno, a Colombian-French urbanist and scientist and expert in intelligent cities, technological innovation and complex systems, prefers to describe “reasonable density” as “social intensity” with premises that combine economic, ecological and social dimensions.

We must promote the “urban-human encounter” in which people stop being “socially disconnected digital ghosts,” he said from Paris.

The possible increased use of cars would constitute a “triple blowback”, because they emit pollutants, like nitrogen dioxide and fine particles, which make COVID-19 more lethal. According to several studies, the air inside cars is stale and the vehicle subjects its users to “citizen anonymity,” Moreno said.

The urban space is one of coexistence, that generates bonds, but “the car generates neither economic activity nor social bonds,” reflects selfishness and today does not even represent social status, he asserted.

These are urban issues whose debate should intensify ahead of the 27th World Congress of Architects, which was postponed from this year to Jun. 18-22, 2021, due to the pandemic. It is expected to draw about 15,000 participants in Rio de Janeiro.

Postponing the meeting gives the International Union of Architects more time to organise it and to expand the debates, to include discussions of the effects of coronavirus in cities, said Sergio Magalhães, an architect and urban planner who chairs the Organising Committee.

Rio de Janeiro, named the World Capital of Architecture 2020 by UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation), will showcase its nearly five-century-old historic centre, and the impact of the pandemic in a tourist city.

Brazil will also stand out with cities that are badly treated by local and national governments, according to Magalhães, a professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro who is renowned for his role in the upgrading of some 150 of the city’s favelas in the Favela-Bairro (favela-neighbourhood) project in the 1990s.

Brazilian cities are precarious because 80 percent of the homes were built by private individuals themselves, without any financing or support. From 1950 to 2010 about 60 million urban homes were built this way in the country, a popular feat.

Another 40 million will be built by 2030, although the population of the country will barely grow, because the birth rate has declined and families are shrinking, Magalhães explained.

One major problem is urban sprawl, with low density areas that make sanitation and urban services difficult to deliver. The area covered by Rio de Janeiro has grown three times more than the population since 1960, he said.

Julio Esquivel and two children in the La Casita de La Virgen soup kitchen in Villa La Cava stand next to the filter that removes 99.9 percent of bacteria, viruses and parasites, with a capacity of up to 12 liters per hour. The purifier became the starting point for raising awareness in this shantytown on the outskirts of the Argentine capital about access to water as a human right. Credit: Daniel Gutman/IPS

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, Mar 11 2019 (IPS)

“Look at this water. Would you drink it?” asks José Pablo Zubieta, as he shows a glass he has just filled from a faucet, where yellow and brown sediment float, in his home in Villa La Cava, a shantytown on the outskirts of Argentina’s capital.

In La Cava, as in all of Argentina’s slums and shantytowns – known here as “villas” – the connections to the water grid are illegal or informal, and it is very common for homes to be left without service. And when the water does flow, it is generally contaminated.

“If we have money, we buy 20-litre jerry cans for drinking and cooking. If we don’t have enough money, we drink the water we have, although there are entire weeks in which it comes out yellow. I’ve already been intoxicated several times,” Zubieta’s wife, Marcela Mansilla, told IPS, with the resignation of someone who has lived with the same situation for as long as she can remember."The water here comes out with sand and dirt, and it stinks. It's been like this for years and that's why it's common to see kids with pimples, gastroenteritis, diarrhea or worse. In recent years we have had more than 10 cases of tuberculosis and outbreaks of hepatitis." -- Julio Esquivel

At the door of the bare brick house where the couple and their four children live there are some old rusty artifacts, which they picked up in their work as “cartoneros”.

This is the term used in Argentina, for garbage pickers – people excluded from the labour market who every night drag their carts through the streets of the cities and scavenge in search of recyclable materials or other objects that may have some commercial value.

A few meters from where the Zubieta family lives, a community soup kitchen has been operating for 25 years in a single-storey building painted white, where 120 children from La Cava are fed every day and which also functions as a recreational center, with activities aimed at keeping them off the streets.

It is called La Casita de la Virgen and in November 2016, a large blue and red plastic device was installed there, which quickly became very important in the lives of the local residents.

It is a microbiological water purifier designed by a Swiss company that can filter up to 12 litres per hour of contaminated water, eliminating 99.9 percent of bacteria, viruses and parasites.

The equipment, which does not use electricity or batteries and has been distributed in humanitarian crises in different parts of the world, was installed by the Safe Water Project, a social enterprise founded in Buenos Aires in 2015, which promotes immediate and replicable solutions to the problem of access to water.

The residents of La Cava also participate in activities promoted by the company, in which they talk about and discuss their experiences and needs in terms of water, learn about its cycles, and acquire healthy habits to prevent illnesses due to misuse, all of which strengthens their access to water as a human right.

José Pablo Zubieta shows one of the hoses with which the different houses of Villa La Cava make their informal connections to the grid to get water. The service is available a few hours a day but provides contaminated water to this shantytown of 10,000 people north of the Argentine capital. Credit: Daniel Gutman/IPS

The purifier helps ensure clean water to the children who eat in the soup kitchen, who often bring empty bottles or jugs, so they can take home clean water.

The Safe Water Project, which is financed with contributions from companies, state agencies and civil society organisations, is actives in 21 of the country’s 23 provinces and in Uruguay.

Through this collaborative formula, 2,000 families and more than 800 schools and community centres now have access to safe drinking water, reaching around 100,000 people.

“The water here comes out with sand and dirt, and it stinks,” Julio Esquivel, founder and head of the Casita de la Virgen, told IPS. “It’s been like this for years and that’s why it’s common to see kids with pimples, gastroenteritis, diarrhea or worse. In recent years we have had more than 10 cases of tuberculosis and outbreaks of hepatitis.”

“Contaminated water influences health. I’m not a doctor, but it’s easy to see,” adds Esquivel. He is wearing a T-shirt with the image of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, in whose projects to assist the needy he has worked in different cities around the world.

A boy looks at a makeshift drainage channel that runs through Villa La Cava, a slum located in the north of Greater Buenos Aires, in San Isidro, a municipality that blends extreme poverty with luxurious mansions home to some of Argentina’s wealthiest families. Credit: Daniel Gutman/IPS

Esquivel is what is known in Catholicism as a consecrated layman: he took a vow of poverty and solidarity with the poor and today lives in a small house in La Cava, the same place where he was born 53 years ago.

“Before they brought us the filter, I tried to boil the water, despite the high cost of the cooking gas, or to add a few drops of bleach to purify it. The filter was a big change for us,” he said.

La Cava is located in San Isidro, one of the 24 municipalities making up Greater Buenos Aires, which has a population of around 14 million people, over one-third of the country’s population.

In the poor suburbs surrounding Buenos Aires, Argentina’s most complex and unequal area, there are 419,401 families living in 1,134 slums, according to official data from 2016. This number marks a phenomenal growth in 15 years: there were 385 villas in 2001, the year of an economic collapse that left hundreds of thousands of people out of work.

A visitor to La Cava, home to more than 10,000 people on some 18 hectares, gets a quick x-ray of Argentina’s social reality: to get to the villa you must first cross tree-lined avenues flanked by walls that protect large mansions, where some of the richest families in Argentina live.

They of course have access to clean piped water, just like in the neighborhoods of Buenos Aires proper.

In La Cava, however, local resident Ramona Navarro told IPS that “people got used to washing clothes and dishes at night, because during the day the water almost never runs.”

Outside a house are seen a cart and some of the odd objects found by garbage pickers, the informal work on which many of the people of La Cava, a shantytown on the north side of Buenos Aires, depend. Credit: Daniel Gutman/IPS

She and her neighbour María Elena Arispe said that on the hottest days of this southern hemisphere summer, in response to people’s protests, the government of the Municipality of San Isidro sent several trucks one afternoon, which distributed two jerry cans of water to each house – barely a bandaid solution for a situation that is as serious as it is chronic.

The trucks can only drive down the main streets of La Cava, which is full of narrow passageways where children and skinny dogs play in the mud that is formed by the un-channeled drains from the houses.

The lack of clean water and sanitation is a reality that plagues every villa in the country.

In fact, in January, after residents of Villa 21 in Buenos Aires complained about the stench, professionals from the faculty of Community Engineering at the University of Buenos Aires found bacteriological contamination in the water and warned about serious health risks.

That is what motivated Nicolás Wertheimer, a young doctor, to create the Safe Water Project.

“I started working at a hospital in Greater Buenos Aires and when I saw that diarrhea caused by contaminated water was one of the main causes of death among children under five, I wanted to do something,” Wertheimer told IPS.

According to official data, 84 percent of the population of Argentina has access to piped water, but that is no guarantee that the resource is reliable.

“The homes in the shantytowns have the service thanks to informal connections, which generate interruptions in the flow of the network and then often contaminate it,” Wertheimer said.

“In the city of Buenos Aires, the majority of society does not recognise the lack of access to drinking water as a problem. But anyone who has worked in the area of health knows that it is a very serious problem,” said the doctor.

Valeria Barrientos stands in the recreational area of La Containera, the modern complex of 120 social dwellings that was inaugurated in 2017 inside Villa 31, a shantytown embedded in a central area of Buenos Aires. The rooftops of the buildings are covered by solar panels, which guarantee electricity for the residents. Credit: Daniel Gutman/IPS

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, Feb 12 2019 (IPS)

Solar panels shine on the rooftop terraces of 10 neat buildings with perfectly straight lines and of uniform height, an image of modernity that contrasts with the precariously-built dwellings with unplastered concrete block walls just a few metres away, with rooms added in a disorderly manner, surrounded by a tangle of electric cables.

Villa 31, the most famous shantytown in the capital of Argentina, due to its location in a central area of Buenos Aires, is undergoing a transformation process, not without controversy, in which clean energies play an important role.

The State is building hundreds of new homes with rooftops covered by solar panels, which bring energy to a neighborhood where access to basic services has always depended on informal and unsafe connections."The change today is huge, because the new houses have a guaranteed power supply and do not have to pay for the energy. In addition, the surplus electricity can be injected into the grid." -- Rodrigo Alonso

For decades, Buenos Aires city government authorities periodically promised to eradicate Villa 31, which first emerged nearly 90 years ago, and today is a postcard of poverty, which at the same time shows the vitality of thousands of people who carry out commercial and productive activities despite their deprivation anddependence on the informal economy.

But the threats turned into hope in 2009, when a local law was passed that ordered the urbanisation of the Villa, paving streets, giving property titles to the local residents and – in short – turning it into just another neighborhood of a city that historically saw it as a foreign body impossible to hide.

In Argentina, the word for slums and shantytowns is villa. A survey released by the government in 2018 indicates that around the country there are 4,228 villas, home to around 3.5 million people, out of a total population of 44 million.

In particular, in Buenos Aires proper there are 233,000 people – or 7.6 per cent of the population, not counting the working-class suburbs – living in shantytowns.

The urbanisation of Villa 31 is a monumental task that only began to be carried out in 2016 and today is slowly changing the face of a veritable city within a city, which has grown enormously in size in recent years.

According to the latest official data, 43,190 people live there, in 10,076 houses, compared to just 12,204 people livingthere when the severe economic crisis broke out in 2001.

Since then, despite the fact that Argentina experienced several years of economic growth, Villa 31 was the only option found by more and more families who couldn’t afford to buy or rent a house in the formal market.

Solar panels are seen on rooftops of the La Containera social housing complex in Villa 31, and in the background can be seen the towers of the luxurious office area of the Argentine capital. The shantytown has a privileged location within Buenos Aires, next to La Recoleta, one of the city’s most sought-after neighborhoods. Credit: Daniel Gutman/IPS

Villa 31 covers 44 hectares between Retiro, one of the capital’s main railway stations, and La Recoleta, one of the most sought-after neighborhoods in Buenos Aires.

“We came to Villa 31 four years ago, after the building where we lived in the neighborhood of La Boca burned down and we ended up on the street,” Valeria Barrientos, a married mother of four children between the ages of two and 13, told IPS.

Barrientos, whose husband is a truck driver, says it is “a gift from heaven” to have hot water and electricity provided by solar energy, even when there are power outages – especially frequent in Villa 31, where the supply is unstable, and where many homes have irregular, precarious connections to the grid.

Her family has been living in the La Containera section of the Villa since September 2017, which takes its name from the fact that it was a depot for old containers until three years ago. They were offered an apartment there, to be paid over 30 years, because they lived on a plot of land in the Villa where a highway is now being built.

La Containera has three-storey buildings with solar panels to power the thermotanks that heat water for bathrooms and kitchens, to fuel the pumps that raise the water to the tanks, and to provide the homes with electricity.

“We installed 174 solar panels on the rooftops in La Containera,” Rodrigo Alonso, general manager of Sustentator, an Argentine company with 10 years of experience in renewable energy, told IPS.

Alonso recalls that “the first time I came to the Villa I was amazed when I saw the huge bundles of cables running from the electricity poles to the houses. The power is paid by the state, but the houses have very unsafe connections.”

A street in Villa 31, with informal dwellings up to five storeys high and tangles of electric cables unofficially connected to the grid. More than 43,190 people live in the shantytown, according to the Buenos Aires city government, which in 2016 launched an ambitious plan to urbanise the neighbourhood. Credit: Daniel Gutman/IPS

“The change today is huge, because the new houses have a guaranteed power supply and do not have to pay for the energy. In addition, the surplus electricity can be injected into the grid,” he added.

Arrangements to feed the energy generated by the solar panels into the power grid and to obtain a credit from the distribution company are expected to be formalised in Argentina this year, when the Distributed Generation of Renewable Energies Law, approved in 2017 and whose regulations were completed last November, comes into effect.

The solar panels are part of the building and are not individual. Therefore, if in the future there is surplus energy to add to the grid, it will be compensated with a credit for the consortium managing the buildings, which will be subtracted from the charge for energy consumption in the common areas of the housing complex.

Solar panels are also being installed to guarantee energy in the most ambitious project going ahead in Villa 31: the construction of 26 buildings with more than 1,000 homes, on land that belonged to the state-owned oil company Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales (YPF).

These new homes are earmarked for the people whose houses will be demolished for the construction of the highway and other roads, although many local residents are skeptical.

A total of 174 solar panels and 55 solar-powered water heaters were installed on the rooftops of the new social housing complex in Villa 31, in the Argentine capital. Each water heater has a capacity of 300 liters and supplies two homes, based on the estimate of an average of three people per apartment, who use 50 litres of hot water a day. Credit: Daniel Gutman/IPS

“We are concerned that the promises will not be kept and that many families will end up in the street. We are going to defend each family’s relocation,” Héctor Guanco, who has lived with his family in Villa 31 for nearly 20 years, told IPS.

The availability of solar energy makes a decisive difference in a country where electricity tariffs have risen by more than 500 percent in the last three years.

“Going from informality to formality can mean economic pressure that is very difficult to bear, because you have to pay a mortgage for housing, plus taxes and the public services,” Facundo Di Filippo, a former Buenos Aires city councilor, told IPS.

Di Filippo was the author of the law for the urbanisation of Villa 31 and is now president of the non-governmental Center for Studies and Action for Equality.

He is critical of the way in which the city government approached the urbanisation of Villa 31, arguing that “the focus has been on improving the vicinity of an area of Buenos Aires that has a high real estate value, in order to benefit private businesses.”

The new buildings were built with sustainability criteria that are unprecedented in Buenos Aires, as demanded by the World Bank, which provided a credit of 170 million dollars to finance the urbanisation process.

“The walls have both thermal and sound insulation, which reduces energy consumption. In addition, a rainwater collection system was placed on the roofs to irrigate the housing complex’s green spaces,” Juan Ignacio Salari, undersecretary of urban infrastructure for the government of Buenos Aires, told IPS.

“We are also trying to move forward with the World Bank to finance a programme to replace household appliances, because many Villa 31 residents have very old refrigerators or air conditioners, which are very energy inefficient,” he added.

“The people of Villa 31 want to regularise their situation and pay for the services they receive. The state must help them do this,” said the official, who added that the plan is to put solar panels on the new buildings and formally connect the other houses to the power grid.

Unfinished buildings in the Pope Francis neighbourhood, a modern social housing complex, and in the background the Villa 20 shantytown, where some 28,000 people live without basic services, in the south of Buenos Aires. Credit: Daniel Gutman/IPS

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, Oct 24 2018 (IPS)

“We are the people who are excluded from the system,” says Rafael Rivero, sitting in his apartment in a new social housing complex next to one of the largest slums in Buenos Aires. The contrast sums up the complexity of the social reality in the Argentine capital.

Rivero, 66, and his wife, Felina Quita, 10 years older, lived for 38 years in Villa 20, an area of about 30 hectares in the south of the city, a crowded shantytown home to thousands of families who cannot afford regular housing. The neighbourhood has 27,990 inhabitants, according to the 2016 official census.

The plot next door belonged to the Federal Police, who for decades used it as a depot for crashed and abandoned vehicles, which turned it into a source of pollution."It is a big step forward that the authorities have taken the decision to urbanise and are allocating funds to do so. Although the work is progressing slowly, no one is talking about eradicating the villas anymore." -- Pablo Vitale

In 2009, more than a third of Villa 20’s children were found to have high concentrations of lead in their blood, and the courts ordered that the families be evicted.

That task had not yet been completed in 2014, when some 700 destitute families occupied the site. Several months later, in the midst of a social emergency, the occupants agreed to leave and the authorities promised to urbanise the area.

Today the land is the construction site for 90 four-story buildings being built by the city’s Housing Institute (IVC), the agency tasked with the monumental mission of solving the housing deficit of Buenos Aires.

In the Argentine capital proper, 233,000 people or 7.6 percent of the population, live in slums, known locally as villas. This does not count the population of the greater Buenos Aires or the vast low-income suburbs.

The construction project, named the Pope Francis Barrio, for the pope who comes from Argentina, consists of 1,671 apartments and was designed for families to move there from Villa 20. Families began to move in February, and 368 units have already been delivered. The IVC promises to complete the process next year.

“The house we had in the Villa was always getting flooded. Every time it rained, there was more water inside than outside,” said Rivero, who less than two months ago moved to his new home, which has an open plan kitchen, living room and dining room, and one bedroom, since the couple lives alone. There are units with up to four bedrooms, depending on the size of the families.

He’s happy, although he still doesn’t know how he’s going to pay for electricity, water, and municipal taxes. For now, he hasn’t received any of the bills for services, which in the last two years have caused enormous unrest in Argentine society, due to rate increases of up to 800 percent.

Felina Quita (L) and Rafael Rivero, in the kitchen-dining room of the apartment to which they moved in August, after living in a nearby shantytown for decades. They were chosen by the Buenos Aires authorities as beneficiaries of the social housing plan because their house was in an emergency situation due to frequent flooding. Credit: Daniel Gutman/IPS

Rivero told IPS in his home, where everything still smells new, that he came to Villa 20 more than 50 years ago, from the province of Jujuy, in northern Argentina.

“I was a boy and my aunt brought me. When the countryside was mechanised, there wasn’t so much work in sugar cane, many people were left without work and came to Buenos Aires. I’ve worked as a baker, a carpenter, a bricklayer, a waiter,” Rivero said. His wife is a retired domestic worker.

Juan Ignacio Maquieyra, president of the IVC, explained to IPS that “we are working towards the integration of shantytowns” into the city.

“Along with the construction of the Pope Francis neighborhood, we are urbanising Villa 20, which involves opening up streets, building infrastructure and leaving open spaces and courtyards, since one of the most serious problems is overcrowding and lack of ventilation,” he said.

The families chosen to move into the new apartments are those whose homes were in the worst condition or must be demolished to open up streets and urbanise.

Many local residents, however, point out that the construction works to urbanise the Villa are significantly slower than the construction of the apartment buildings.

“The city government did not comply with what it had promised. We are still waiting for the sanitation works. The storm drains mix with the sewers, and when it rains and overflows, we keep stepping on excrement,” Rubén Martínez, a 46-year-old man who grew up and still lives in the Villa, told IPS.

He is one of the members of the Mesa de Urbanización, a group taking part in the urbanisation process.

Martínez echoes what many others suspect: that the Pope Francis neighborhood was built to “hide” Villa 20 from view of another construction in the area – the Olympic Village, housing the athletes of the Youth Games that are being held this month in Buenos Aires.

The entrance to a block of completed buildings in the new Pope Francis neighbourhood, which will have 90 buildings and 1,671 apartments. The residents of the neighboring Villa 20 shantytown in the south of Buenos Aires, Argentina, have begun to be resettled in the new social housing units. Credit: Daniel Gutman/IPS

According to a survey presented by the government this year, there are 4,228 slums and shantytowns in Argentina, 45 percent of which emerged after the severe economic and social crisis of 2001-2002 which cut short the government of Fernando de la Rúa (1999-2001).

Three and a half million people live in the slums, out of a total population of 44 million.

Social conditions are once again growing worse today, as acknolwedged by President Mauricio Macri himself, who is implementing an austerity plan agreed in September with the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

The most complicated situation is found in the suburbs of Buenos Aires, where there are hundreds of villas and child poverty exceeds 50 percent.

This year, the government introduced in Congress a bill agreed with social organisations, to recognise the ownership of their land by the residents of the shantytowns. It was presented as a first step towards the recognition of more rights.

But it is only in Buenos Aires proper that the authorities have begun to take steps towards the integration of the villas.

“Slum-dwellers in Buenos Aires have been demanding urbanisation for decades, but only in recent years has the state recognised that right. The initial impulse came from court rulings,” Horacio Corti, ombudsman for the City of Buenos Aires, told IPS.

The Ombudsman’s Office defends the vulnerable in the local justice system, which in 2011, for example, ordered the urbanisation of the Rodrigo Bueno Villa, which is close to Puerto Madero, a posh waterfront neighborhood.

For Pablo Vitale, of the Civil Association for Equality and Justice (ACIJ), which for 15 years has been working on legal support for community organisations that fight for regularisation of the villas, “it is a big step forward that the authorities have taken the decision to urbanise and are allocating funds to do so. Although the work is progressing slowly, no one is talking about eradicating the villas anymore.”

Vitale, however, told IPS that the urbanisation plans have begun in villas that due to their location could be the most coveted by real estate interests.

“That could indicate that the objective is for the market to end up evicting people, driving out the people who can’t afford the higher costs involved in paying taxes and rates for public services that formality brings,” he warned.

Part of the Administrative Centre built by two private companies between 2013 and 2014, to be the new seat of the government of the Federal District, in Brasilia. The 16-building complex with 3,000 parking spaces is not being used, due to an order by the courts, which are investigating allegations of corruption. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

By Mario Osava
BRASILIA, Nov 21 2017 (IPS)

Two white elephants – a huge football stadium that draws almost no fans and an empty 16-building complex that was to be the new headquarters of the district government – reflect Brasília’s challenges as a metropolis, beyond its role as the capital of Brazil.

The Administrative Centre, where the 15,000 officials of the Federal District (DF), and from foundations and public companies, were to be based, was built in Taguatinga, one of the largest cities surrounding the “Pilot Plan”, another name for the planned city of Brasília, which was inaugurated in 1960, after it was carved out of the jungle.

“It would be good to have the government here, able to get a closer look at the areas where most of the population lives, generating more jobs and benefits for us,” Laura Morais, a young assistant at a hairdressing salon in the centre of Samambaia, a city next to Taguatinga, told IPS.
"It would be good to have the government here, able to get a closer look at the areas where most of the population lives, generating more jobs and benefits for us." -- Laura Morais

Inaugurated on Dec. 31, 2014 illegally, according to the public prosecutor’s office of the Federal District, the centre was left unused, pending the outcome of a judicial tangle yet to be unraveled.

If the idea were to materialise, “it would turn Taguatinga into a hellhole with even worse traffic jams, but it would boost the growth of Samambaia, which has a lot of free space and few businesses,” explained Paulo Pereira, the owner of an optical shop.

“It would also help to decongest Brasília. That is, it would be better for some, worse for others,” he told IPS before complaining about the corruption that has bogged down the project.

Former DF governor Agnelo Queiroz was accused of receiving in 2014 a bribe of 2.5 million Brazilian reais (over 760,000 dollars at present), shared with his deputy governor Tadeu Fellipelli, to promote the construction of the Administrative Centre.

The accusation came from executives of the Brazilian construction company Odebrecht, which partnered with another construction firm, Via Engineering, to build the complex, in a Public-Private Partnership by which the companies would complete the work and would be subsequently remunerated with monthly fees for 22 years.

Odebrecht, Brazil’s largest construction company, which is active in dozens of countries, reached a plea deal with the justice system to cooperate in the corruption scandal that since 2014 has led to the imprisonment of dozens of businesspersons and politicians who offered or received bribes for public contracts, especially oil companies.

Laura Morais smiles in the hairdressing salon where she works in downtown Samambaia, a satellite city of the capital of Brazil. She complains about the lack of leisure and cultural activities in the city, founded in 1989, and in others that surround the Federal District. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

Queiroz and his predecessor, José Arruda, are in prison for another corruption case, the overbilling of the works on the Mané Garrincha stadium, which was expanded to host several of the matches for the 2014 World Cup, which took place in Brazil.

With an initial budget of 210 million dollars, its cost more than doubled, requiring an additional 270 million dollars, according to investigations by the Federal Police.

Corruption has been proven in the construction of many of the 12 stadiums used in the FIFA (International Federation of Associated Football) World Cup, but the one in Brasilia was the most expensive.

Its capacity was raised to 72,788 spectators – ridiculous in a city without a strong football tradition or clubs to justify such an investment. The average attendance at local matches does not reach 2,000 fans, the local football association acknowledges.

Maintaining this gigantic stadium costs more money to the public treasury and generates permanent losses for indefinite time.

The solution would be to turn the stadium into a cultural-sports complex, with “a museum, a library, movie theaters and conference rooms, as well as a shopping center, all related to sports,” suggested José Cruz, a veteran local journalist, with decades covering sports.

“It is not something new, but would just copy what has already been done successfully in Europe,” and in Brasilia there are great sports heroes, such as runner Joaquim Cruz and the ex-Formula 1 driver Nelson Piquet, who would attract public, he told IPS.

The Mané Garrincha football stadium, one of Brasilia’s white elephants, which is currently mainly used for its parking lot, where thousands of buses park for a good part of the day, waiting to take tens of thousands of commuters back to the dormitory cities where they live. Credit: Mario Osava/ IPS

But to do this it would be necessary to outsource or grant the contract to the private sector, because “the State has no structure to manage this type of initiative,” said the journalist.

For the Administrative Centre, the way out would also be seeking another use for the group of buildings between four and 15 storeys high, in an area of 178,000 square metres, in the middle of the most populous satellite cities, such as Ceilândia, Samambaia, Taguatinga and Aguas Claras, which have a combined population of 1.08 million inhabitants, according to the Federal District Planning Company (Codeplan).

A U.S. university, which intends to open a campus in Brazil, expressed interest in the facilities.

But the judicial situation prevents short-term solutions. Odebrecht claims to have invested more than 300 million dollars in the complex and aims to recover the investment through international arbitration.

For the current government of the DF, headed by socialist Rodrigo Rollemberg, it is not viable to change its headquarters at a cost of millions of dollars per month, at a time of economic crisis and fiscal limitations.

One option is to cancel the 2009 contract, in light of the illegalities that plagued the project. In addition to the allegations of corruption, the previous government of Queiroz inaugurated the Administrative Centre on the last day of its term, based on a permit that the courts threw out as fraudulent.

Buildings grow like mushrooms in Samambaia, the second-largest city surrounding Brasilia, which has grown by about 10,000 people each year, at a rate of at least four percent. On the left, the metro rails of the capital’s Federal District, with a capacity much higher than that in use. Credit: Mario Osava/ IPS

Queiroz and the Taguatinga local authorities responsible for the permit and named one day before it was issued, were heavily fined and banned from politics as a result of the fraud.

The scandal overshadows the problems of urban development that the Federal District faces, formed by the Pilot Plan or Brasilia, seat of the national and district government, and its satellite urban municipalities, officially called Administrative Regions.

The population of the Federal District stands at 3.04 million, according to Codeplan’s District Survey of Households, six times the number of inhabitants predicted when Brasilia was built six decades ago.

The Pilot Plan currently is home to just over 220,000 people, but offers the most and best jobs, attracting a massive influx of commuters from surrounding municipalities every morning.

Ceilandia, the largest city in the area, had a population of 459,000 inhabitants in 2015, having grown 13.6 percent in four years. In the city, 28.1 percent of the active population has a job within the Pilot Plan, while 37.3 works in the municipality itself.

Other neighboring cities have somewhat higher rates of inhabitants employed in the heart of the capital, making up the crowds of commuters that move daily to the Pilot Plan and return at night to their dormitory cities.

The thousands of buses that carry the commuters every day are parked from morning to afternoon in open spaces, such as the square in front of the Mané Garrincha Stadium, until the workers finish their shifts and return to the surrounding municipalities.

A subway, with a single 39-km line that branches off into the different municipalities, is the major mass transport project, but only mobilises about 3.5 million passengers a month, with the trains sitting idle outside rush hour.
Bringing jobs to the periphery would not be a bad idea, but transferring and centralising all the local administration to the outskirts may respond more to personal appetites than to the call for better public management, as other examples show, such as Belo Horizonte, capital of the southern state of Minas Gerais.

Alejandro Casas’s electric taxi, which he drives in Montevideo, cost him 63,000 dollars, but he was given a five-year loan and he gets free recharges, as part of an initiative supported by the state-owned electric company and the government of the Uruguayan capital. Credit: Verónica Firme/IPS

By Mario Osava
BELO HORIZONTE, Brazil, Aug 24 2017 (IPS)

The Vaz de Souza’s were so keen on the solar water heater that they made it their mission and business, which prospered with the surge in innovation in their city, Belo Horizonte, recognised as the solar energy capital of Brazil.

In 1998 they founded the Maxtemper company, which has already installed over 40,000 solar water systems in homes, pools, companies and public facilities in the eastern state of Minas Gerais, mainly in Belo Horizonte, where similar suppliers have mushroomed.

“The success was due to the fact that ‘mineiros’ (people from Minas Gerais) are thrifty, careful with their money,” said 62-year-old Cornelio Ferreira Vaz, co-owner of the company. The savings in electricity pays off the initial investment in a maximum of two years, and the equipment lasts two decades, he told IPS.“Buildings used to be passive resource consuming spaces, but with the new concepts and policies they have become active in generating electricity.” -- Rodrigo Sauaia

“It is appealing because of its economic and ecological benefits, for your pocketbook and for nature,” said his wife and partner, 59-year-old Aildes de Souza.

The household system, consisting of a solar collector, water tanks and pipes, costs nearly 1,000 dollars for a family of four or five to provide about 400 litres of hot water a day, he estimated.

It began to be used in the 1970s, but spread after the blackout crisis which led to power rationing measures between July 2001 and February 2002 and drove up its price, in this country of 207 million people.

“Our turnover has multiplied fivefold since then,” said De Souza. Maxtemper secured a contract with the state-owned Energy Company of Minas Gerais (Cemig) to install 14,000 heaters in new houses built by government social programmes.

At its height, the company had 110 employees. That number has been reduced to seven due to the economic recession that has plagued Brazil over the three last years, which forced many companies into bankruptcy. “We survived because there are still consumers seeking to save electricity and money,” said Vaz.

The use of solar radiation, not always taken into account in official reports on energy use, also benefits the entire national power grid, by replacing electric shower heaters, which are widely used in Brazil.

Electric showers consume a great deal of energy and trigger a peak in energy demand in the early evening, when most of the population takes showers, requiring an increased supply capacity.

Five per cent of households in Brazil – 3.4 million – already have solar heated water, according to the Brazilian Association of Refrigeration, Air Conditioning, Ventilation and Heating.

In most gas stations in Brazil, consumers can choose at the pump either gasoline and ethanol fuel, whose price is appealing when it does not exceed 70 per cent of the price of gas, to compensate for its lower efficiency. The fall in gas prices led to a reduction in the use of biofuel and that aggravated pollution in cities such as São Paulo. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

Brazil ranks first in Latin America and fifth in the world in installed capacity of solar power for heating water – an aspect that tends to be ignored by the statistics because electricity is not generated and the solar collectors are somewhat different from photovoltaic panels.

Mexico ranks a distant second in a region that underutilises solar heating, which globally prevented the emission of 130 million tons of carbon in 2016, according to a study by the International Energy Agency (AIE).

The different uses of solar energy allow cities to go from mere consumers and wasters of energy to generators of a part of their energy needs.

Rooftops with photovoltaic panels could provide up to 32 per cent of the world cities’ electricity demand by 2050, the AIE projects in its report Energy Technology Perspectives 2016.

“Buildings used to be passive resource consuming spaces, but with the new concepts and policies they have become active in generating electricity,” Rodrigo Sauaia, head of the Brazilian Photovoltaic Solar Energy Association, told IPS.

Large cities in Latin America stand out in rankings as among the most sustainable or green in the world, but that is in large part due to the consumption of renewable energies, especially hydropower, which is abundant in this region, as a result of national policies.

But city governments have no or little influence on hydropower, with the exception of Colombia, with its traditional municipal utilities, such as the power company in Medellín, which owns 25 hydroelectric plants.

“Brazil has passed a groundbreaking law in Latin America, allowing electricity from distributed generation to be injected into the power grid, said Mauro Passos, head of the Institute for the Development of Alternative Energies (Ideal).

This 2012 measure gave rise to a photovoltaic boom, since it allowed distributed or decentralised generators, small residential or business plants mainly devoted to self-consumption, to sell their surplus, contributing to the social generation of energy.

The National Agency of Electric Power regulator projects that by 2024 Brazil will have over 800,000 households generating their own electricity. “And this is a conservative goal,” said Sauaia.

Currently, there are only 12,520 distributed generation photovoltaic systems connected to the grid, with a capacity of 100 MW; 42 per cent are households.

The headquarters of the Latin American Energy Organisation (Olade) in Quito, which brings together 27 countries in the region, is supplied with solar energy through photovoltaic panels installed on the building, in an initiative to promote the use and generation of solar energy among the country member’s public institutions. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

Belo Horizonte, a city of 2.5 million, is the champion in generation of solar power for water heating, as well as for electricity. Its 210 solar plants include the ones in the Mineirão football stadium and the seat of government of Minas Gerais, which have panels on their roofs.

In addition, the urban waste in a sanitary landfill generates 4.2 MW of power with the gases that feed an electric plant, said Marcio de Souza, an engineer withEfficientia, a company created by Cemig to promote energy efficiency.

Distributed solar generation is a decision by consumers, whether families or companies.

Energy companies, such as Cemig, “only absorb the generated energy”, which is why distributed generation involves aspects such as the investment capacity of families, cost of conventional energy, levels of solar radiation and whether or not there is a favourable climate, Souza explained to IPS.

But the distributors can offer incentives, such as the Photovoltaic Bonus – a 60 per cent subsidy – launched this year by the state Electric Plants of Santa Catarina (Celesc), with a goal for the installation of 1,000 residential plants in the state of Santa Catarina, in southern Brazil.

“Seven minutes after opening up the registration we already had 200 candidates for the Florianópolis quota”, the capital of the state, with a population of half a million, Marcio Lautert, head of Celesc’s Energy Efficiency Projects, told IPS.

“The expense to consumers is amortised in two or three years” with the electricity generated, Lautert said. Many other interested parties will be able to join in 2018 if the first group is successful, he added.

Quito’s system of trolleys with a dedicated lane was celebrated for reducing pollution in Ecuador’s capital. But the buses driven through overhead electric rails have been replaced by diesel motor vehicles, because they cost less. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

But consumption is the area where the municipalities are changing the most, trying to reduce costs, pollution and social problems.

Some examples are vehicles replacing polluting fuels with electricity, LED public lighting, and traffic lights activated with solar panels, which have already been installed in many cities, such as San José, the capital of Costa Rica.

Montevideo, a model of electric mobility

Electric taxis are already circulating in many Latin American capitals, such as Bogotá, Mexico City, Montevideo and Santiago, although the experiment has been flawed in some cases due to a shortage of charging stations and the solitude of the pioneers.

This is not the case in Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay, a country of 3.5 million people.

“I started to look at the numbers and I took the leap,” Alejandro Casas said, explaining his decision to buy an electric taxi in February.

The vehicle cost 63,000 dollars, but he is paying it off with a five-year loan. “The difference in price you pay each month with what you save in fuel. A taxi uses 1,200 or 1,300 pesos (between 41.5 and 45 dollars) of fuel per day – that’s more than 1,200 dollars a month – and with the electric taxi you pay nothing,” he told IPS.

Further down the line he will pay a fee, but it will be subsidised and the first taxi drivers to participate in the initiative told him that they spend less than 73 dollars a month in recharging. “That’s nothing,” said Casas, before pointing out other advantages such as the automatic transmission engine and the comfort of the taxi. “It’s awesome,” he concluded.

“Today, on the street, there are 12 electric taxis in Montevideo. In the following months another 12 will be incorporated, reaching a total of 24,” Fernando Costanzo, manager of the Market Sector of the national power utility, UTE, told IPS.

An UTE substation with four quick chargers, two points in Montevideo, others in the nearby department of Maldonado and promises of new ones along the highway that runs through Uruguay from Argentina to Brazil ensure that drivers – including those who operate the dozens of electric vehicles belonging to UTE – will be able to recharge their batteries.

The government of the department of Montevideo, population 1.4 million, also supports electric taxis by offering licenses at a preferential price, among other measures, as part of a strategic energy plan that promotes clean and innovative sources.

“The aim is to generate an initial critical mass which allows electric mobility to be introduced as a market option, since economically it is more convenient with no need for subsidies,” Gonzalo Márquez, from the Mobility Department of the Montevideo government’sTransport Division, told IPS.

The Montevideo government has contributed around 500,000 dollars to the promotion of electric mobility.

But some Latin American cities have also suffered setbacks. Air pollution in São Paulo worsened when the difference in prices spurred consumption of gasoline to the detriment of ethanol, which is less polluting than fossil fuels. Another example is Quito, where the celebrated trolleys were replaced by diesel driven buses, because they are cheaper.

With reporting by Verónica Firme in Montevideo.

In the Plaza de San Francisco, where the church and convent of the same name stand, fences have blocked off the construction site for the Quito subway for months, as work has been stalled while archaeological finds are assessed. Quito’s historic centre is the biggest in Latin America. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
QUITO, Nov 30 2016 (IPS)

Success can kill, when it comes to cities. Spain’s Barcelona is facing problems due to the number of tourists that it attracts. And the historic centre of Ecuador’s capital city, Quito, a specially preserved architectural jewel, is losing its local residents as it gentrifies.

This paradox was pointed out by Fernando Carrión, president of the Latin American and Caribbean Organisation of Historic Centres (OLACCHI) and a professor at the Latin American Social Sciences Institute (FLACSO) in Ecuador.

“Quito’s historic centre lost 42 per cent of its population over the last 15 years, a period in which it gained better monuments and lighting, and became cleaner,” he said. According to official census figures, the population of the old city dropped from 58,300 in 1990 to 50,982 in 2001 and 40,587 in 2010.“The subway is a good solution, which will reduce the use of private buses that pollute, and will help solve congestion in a city where the traffic passes through the north-south corridor.” -- Julio Echeverría

The effort to revitalise the historic centre was based on a “monumentalist policy,” on the restoration of churches and large buildings, which led to a process of gentrification, driving up housing prices and the conversion of residential into commercial property and pushing out low-income residents, he told IPS.

“I fear that the subway will drive away more people,” exacerbating the tendency, he added.

Two stations of the first subway line in Quito started to be built in 2013 by the Spanish company Acciona. “Phase two”, the construction of a 22-kilometre tunnel and 13 other stations, got underway in January 2016 and is to be completed by July 2019.

The consortium that won the bid is made up of Acciona and Odebrecht, Brazil’s largest construction company, which has built subway lines in several Latin American countries.

Only one station, in the Plaza de San Francisco, will be located in the historic centre. “Projections estimate that 42,000 passengers per day will pass through that station,” that is to say that “with the subway the same number of people will arrive but by a different means of transport,” Mauricio Anderson, the general manager of the Quito Subway Public Metropolitan Company (EPMMQ), told IPS.

Underground transport “will reduce traffic congestion, vibrations and pollution” by replacing cars and buses, he said.

The aim of the new mass transport system is to improve the quality of life of people in Quito, by reducing travel time, generating socioeconomic inclusion of people in the lower-income outlying neighbourhoods, saving fuel, cutting the number of accidents and creating a cleaner environment, according to EPMMQ.

“Each day about 400,000 people in Quito will use this system,” said Anderson. “This will help optimise other services and increase the average travel speed in Quito, which for surface transport is now 13 kilometres per hour, and by subway will be 37 kilometres per hour.”

A dedicated lane system trolley bus and one of its stations, in Ecuador’s capital. Critics of the subway in Quito argue that it would be better for the city to extend and improve the tramways. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

As Ecuador’s capital has an elongated shape, stretching from north to south, the 22-kilometre subway line with 15 stations will enable most of the city’s residents to take the subway or catch a bus that hooks into the system within less than four blocks of their homes or workplaces, according to studies that guided the system’s design.

The subway, with trains that will hold up 1,500 passengers each, “will connect the entire integrated transport system.”

According to 2014 statistics, there were 2.8 million daily trips in the public transport system of the Metropolitan District of Quito, most of them by conventional buses and the Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system, which uses bus-only lanes.

Opponents of the subway argue that by optimising the BRT system, which serves the same north-south route, it could transport more passengers than the subway, with a significantly lower investment.

But “Quito’s surface is saturated, there are no real dedicated lanes and the roads are narrow,” said Anderson, stressing the greater speed and efficiency of the subway, which benefits both passengers and the environment.

Building the subway will cost just over two billion dollars, “that is 89 million dollars per kilometre, a figure that is below the region’s average,” said the manager of the Quito subway.

The project was designed by the Spanish public company Metro de Madrid. A fare of 45 cents of a dollar will cover the first line’s operational and maintenance costs, according to the company.

But Ricardo Buitrón, an activist with Acción Ecológica, said “They will cost much more than that,” noting that building a subway in Quito is complex and arguing that it cannot be cheaper than in Panama, for example, where each kilometre cost 128 million dollars to build.

The Cerro del Panecillo hill, which divides north from south of Ecuador’s capital, seen from the Museum of the City, at the heart of the historic centre. The rugged topography represents a challenge to mobility in this highlands city. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

Besides, with what is being invested in the subway “260 kilometres of exclusive lanes for electric buses plus 40 kilometres of tramways could be created, like the system being built in Cuenca,” in southern Ecuador, he told IPS.

And a 45 cent fare will require subsidies, which he estimated at 100 million dollars annually. In other countries, the operational cost per passenger is over 1.5 dollars, he said.

“Subsidies are inevitable in public transport, but they should contribute to improving the system,” said Buitrón. In Quito, for example, they should bolster the use of electric buses, remedying the setback represented by the replacement of electric articulated buses with diesel-run buses that are more economical, he said.

In Ecuador, diesel fuel is poor quality and heavily polluting, as seen in the black smoke they emit, he said.

“The subway is a good solution, which will reduce the use of private buses that pollute, and will help solve congestion in a city where the traffic passes through the north-south corridor,” said Julio Echeverría, executive director of the Instituto de la Ciudad and former professor of political science in several universities in Ecuador and Italy.

But this responded to a “linear and longitudinal” moment in Quito’s urban development which is long past. Now the city has changed, it is “scattered, fragmented, it stretches toward the valleys and other agricultural areas of great biodiversity,” he said.

Quito, with an estimated total population of 2.5 million, has the largest and least altered historic centre in Latin America, having been declared in 1978 a Cultural Heritage of Humanity site by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco).

Founded in 1534 on a long and narrow plateau on the eastern slopes of the Andes Mountains next to the Pichincha volcano, some 2,800 metres above sea level, Ecuador’s capital has a very well preserved centre with more than 50 churches, chapels and monasteries, and dozens of squares.

The negotiated relocation of some 7,000 street vendors to formal markets in 2003, and a pedestrianisation of the historic centre program carried out in the first decade of the century, bringing art to the squares and streets every Sunday, helped to attract local residents and growing numbers of tourists.

The great impact of building a subway under the old city worries many people. “The subway is not a good thing for the poor; it is faster than the trolley bus, but more expensive,” said 52-year-old Manuel Quispe, who earns a living cleaning shoes in Plaza de San Francisco.

Jorge Córdoba, another shoe shiner in the square, agreed that the subway is faster, but told IPS he believes it will be impossible to build, since “Quito was built on filled-in gullies” and it will be hard to open tunnels. He complained, like Quispe, of the many months that the works have been stalled, blocking half of the square and reducing their already meagre incomes.

One of the concerns about compliance with Habitat III is how to finance the new public works, taking into consideration the considerable investment required. In the image, a photocomposition of European cities in a Habitat III exposition in Quito. Credit: Emilio Godoy/IPS

By Emilio Godoy
QUITO, Oct 27 2016 (IPS)

“We as mayors have to govern midsize cities as if they were capital cities,” said Héctor Mantilla, city councilor of Floridablanca, the third-largest city in the northern Colombian department of Santander.

He told IPS that “citizens not only demand public services, but also infrastructure; and environmentally and financially sustainable construction works are needed.”

Mantilla, who took office in January, participated in the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Housing and Urban Development (Habitat III), held Oct. 17-20 in the capital of Ecuador, which produced the “Quito Declaration on Sustainable Cities and Human Settlements for All,” known as the New Urban Agenda (NUA).

At the summit, organised by U.N. Habitat every 20 years, Mantilla talked about infrastructure needs and management.In 2015, 54 percent of the world population lived in urban areas, a rate that will climb to 66 percent by 2050. The Americas will be the most urbanised region in the world, with 87 percent urban population.

Floridablanca, population 300,000, is part of the Bucaramanga metropolitan area, together with two other municipalities. To address people’s demands, the local administration built two highway interchanges and a paragliding park.

The mayor’s experiences and expectations reflect the concerns of governments, particularly local administrations. In fact, one of the NUA’s major challenges is the environmental and financial sustainability of the infrastructure required to meet the commitments made in Quito with regard to housing, transport, public services and digitalisation.

For Alicia Bárcena, executive secretary of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), the priorities are mobility, water and sewage, adequate housing, resilience, renewable energy, promotion of digitalisation and the fight against segregation and inequality.

“There is a lack of infrastructure. It is not sufficiently integrated. We have two scenarios: the United States with high car use rates, or the European, with smaller cities, where the use of private cars is discouraged,” she told IPS.

Bárcena said that “a certain kind of infrastructure and planning is required” in order for cities to be “resilient”, a concept touted in recent years by international organisations such as the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), defined as the capacity of an ecosystem to absorb environmental stress without undergoing fundamental changes.

In 2015, 54 percent of the world population lived in urban areas, a rate that will climb to 66 percent by 2050. The Americas will be the most urbanised region in the world, with 87 percent urban population. The projected proportions are 86 percent in Latin America and the Caribbean; 74 percent in Oceania; 82 percent in Europe; 64 percent in Asia; and 56 percent in Africa.

Mayor Héctor Mantilla (right) spoke at Habitat III about the infrastructure needs in midsize cities, in his case, Floridablanca, in Colombia’s northern department of Santander. Credit: Emilio Godoy/IPS

The report “Latin America and the Caribbean. Challenges, dilemmas and commitments of a common urban agenda”, released at the Quito summit, observes that, despite the significant expansion in infrastructure in recent decades, the deficit in cities remains one of the main challenges for developing countries in general.

The document, drafted by the Forum of Ministers and High-level Authorities of the Housing and Urban Development Sector in Latin America and the Caribbean (MINURVI), ECLAC and U.N.-Habitat’s Regional Office for Latin America and the Caribbean, points out that Latin America and the Caribbean have an investment rate of two percent of GDP, compared to eight percent of regional GDP in Southeast Asia.

The overall rate of investment in infrastructure “has declined in the last three decades, blaming a reduction in public investment, a marginal increase in private investment and the retraction of multilateral financing.”

In the developing South, large cities face challenges like pollution, exposure to climate change, chaotic growth, traffic congestion, informal employment and inequality.

There have been different attempts to calculate the scale of infrastructure needs. The IDB’s Emerging and Sustainable Cities Initiative estimates a need for 142 billion dollars in priority investments in urban infrastructure.

Meanwhile, the Cities Climate Finance Leadership Alliance (CCFLA) estimates a global need of 93 trillion dollars in investment in low-carbon climate resilient infrastructure over the next 15 years.

The NUA mentions the word “infrastructure” 33 times, although it outlines no means or goals to develop it.

Money is short

A recurring question is where the funding for infrastructure will come from, given that regions such as Latin America are experiencing an economic downturn, after a decade of growth that made it possible to fight poverty and expand public works.

Andrés Blanco, a Colombian expert on urban development and housing with the IDB, proposes several mechanisms, including “land value capture”: capturing the increases in property values for the state. This refers to a municipality’s ability to benefit from the rise in real estate value generated by infrastructure improvements (access to highways, the paving of roads, public lighting, sewers, etc.) or the implementation of new land-use rules (e.g., from rural to urban).

“The main idea is to use this resource to finance infrastructure. But this has not been done, because there is a cash flow problem. The cost is paid by the government and the communities, but only private property owners benefit,” he told IPS.

In three Brazilian cities, the IDB found that investing one dollar per square metre in drinking water pipes increased the land value by 11 dollars, while three dollars per m2 invested in sewage brought up the value to 8.5 dollars, and 2.58 dollars per m2 invested in paving raised the value by 9.1 dollars. In Quito, the transformation of rural to urban land enhanced the value by 400 percent.

In the Ecuadorean capital, the IDB released the report “Expanding the use of Land Value Capture in Latin America”.

In Floridablanca, the local government recovered 30,000 dollars of a total of 175,000, that the owners of 100 plots of land must pay for having benefited from investment in urban improvements.

“The main challenge facing the New Urban Agenda is how to find funding. We as mayors have to prioritise small-scale projects, but we need major infrastructure in outlying areas,” Mantilla said.

For Bárcena, Habitat III leaves an immense financing task. “Land use could be more profitable. States cannot do it alone. For this reason, there has to be a grand coalition between governments, companies, and organisations to make urban and public space more habitable, and to make cities more connected,” she said.

ECLAC, which is carrying out a study on time use in cities, proposes mechanisms such as: public policies on land value capture, to increase revenue collection and guide the way urban infrastructure is developed; the issue of municipal bonds to raise capital for long-term infrastructure projects; and platforms to draw private investment.

The United Nations Environment Programme’s “Global Outlook on Walking and Cycling”, released in Quito, calls for countries to invest at least 20 percent of their transport budget on infrastructure for pedestrians and cyclists, in order to save lives, curb pollution and reduce carbon emissions.

Activists protest during the Resistance to Habitat III social forum held at the Central University of Ecuador, which hosted the gathering held parallel to Habitat III, bringing together 100 NGOs from 35 countries, to debate on how to create cities for all. Credit: Emilio Godoy/IPS

By Emilio Godoy
QUITO, Oct 21 2016 (IPS)

The Third United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development and the alternative forums held by social organisations ended in the Ecuadorean capital with opposing visions regarding the future of cities and the fulfillment of rights in urban areas.

On Thursday Oct. 20, the representatives of 195 countries taking part in the Habitat III conference adopted the Quito Declaration on Sustainable Cities and Human Settlements for All, after four days of deliberations.

The basis of the declaration, also known as the New Urban Agenda, is the promotion of sustainable urban development, inclusive prosperity, and spatial development planning.“If you see the New Urban Agenda as building international cooperation, agreed on by the countries and implemented by municipal governments, which did not take part in drawing it up, it’s heading for a crisis, because there will be clashes.” -- Fernando Carrión

In the 23-page declaration, the states commit themselves to fighting poverty, inequality and discrimination; improving urban planning; and building cities with resilience to climate change.

At the same time, academics and social movements laid out their visions of social development of cities in two alternative social forums held parallel to the Oct. 17-20 summit, criticising Habitat III’s approach to urbanisation and questioning how effectively it can be applied.

“If you see the New Urban Agenda as building international cooperation, agreed on by the countries and implemented by municipal governments, which did not take part in drawing it up, it’s heading for a crisis, because there will be clashes,” Fernando Carrión, the Ecuadorean activist who headed the Towards an Alternative Habitat 3 social forum, told IPS.

During this parallel forum, held at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO), some 140 speakers from 32 nations and 40 organisations from around the region discussed urban rights; the dialogue with local governments and social movements; housing and spatial justice, a term similar to the right to the city.

Habitat III, the cities summit organised by U.N.-Habitat, drew around 35,000 delegates of governments, non-governmental organisations, international bodies, universities, and companies, and gave rise to the New Urban Agenda, which is to chart the course of political action aimed at sustainable urban development over the next 20 years.

After the United States and Europe, Latin America is the most urbanised part of the planet, as 80 percent of the region’s total population of 641 million people live in urban areas.

At least 104 million Latin Americans live in slums; worldwide the number of slum dwellers amounts to 2.5 billion, according to U.N.-Habitat.

This phenomenon poses the challenges of land title regularisation and the provision of basic services, while aggravating problems facing cities like pollution, increasing traffic, urban sprawl and inequality.

“We need to rethink how to organise cities. We have to organise and mobilise ourselves. We’re going to assess compliance by national and local governments, which are key, because many things will depend on their compliance,” Alison Brown, a professor at the University of Cardiff in the UK, told IPS.

Since the first Habitat conference, in Vancouver in 1976, the world has only fulfilled 70 percent of the commitments adopted at the first two summits, while progress has practically stalled since Habitat II in Istanbul in 1996. Credit: HCI

The Quito Declaration drew criticism on some points. One of the main concerns that arose in the debates was about the “post-Quito” implementation of the commitments assumed by the states and social organisations.

The Habitat III accords “cannot generate the urban reforms that we need, such as integral access to land with services. That can only be achieved through struggle. It is local political participation that makes it possible to press for urban reform,” Isabella Goncalves, an activist with the Brazilian NGO Brigadas Populares, told IPS.

She attended the Oct. 14-20 Resistance to Habitat III social forum, which brought together delegates from about 100 social organisations from 35 nations to address issues such as opposition to evictions, the promotion of social housing, and defending the right to the city.

In its final declaration, the social forum called for strengthening the movements defending the right to land and territory and respect for the universal right to housing, and questioned Habitat III for pushing for urbanisation to the detriment of rural areas and their inhabitants.

The Habitat International Coalition criticised the New Urban Agenda’s “narrow vision”, and lamented that Habitat III had forgotten about protecting people from forced eviction and about the need to fight the shortage of housing and to achieve the right to universal housing.

It also urged countries to “regulate global financial transactions; end or limit opaque speculative financial instruments; steeply tax real-estate speculation; regulate rents; enhance the social tenure, production and financing of housing and habitat; and prevent privatisation of the commons, which is subject to attack under the neoliberal development model.”

Academics and social movements want to avoid a repeat of what happened post-Habitat II, which was held in 1996 in Istanbul, and whose implementation lacked follow-up and evaluation.

For that reason, the organisers of Towards an Alternative Habitat 3 agreed on the creation of an observatory for monitoring the decisions reached, biannual meetings, wide publication of the results of research and follow-up on the progress made by cities.

The Quito Declaration mentions periodic reviews, and urges the U.N. secretary general to assess the progress made and challenges faced in the implementation of the New Urban Agenda, in his quadrennial report in 2026.

The decade between the summit in Istanbul and the one held this week in Quito serves as a demonstration of what could happen with the New Urban Agenda.

The Global Urban Futures Project’s Habitat Commitment Index, presented during Habitat III, shows how little has been achieved since 1996.

Between Habitat I, held in 1976 in Vancouver, and Habitat II, the global average score in terms of fulfillment of the commitments assumed was 68.68, according to the Project, a network of academics and activists based at the New School University in New York City, which created the Index based on infrastructure, poverty, employment, sustainability, institutional capacity, and gender indicators.

But since the 1996 conference, the global average only increased by 1.49 points. Latin America and Southeast Asia increased their scores, while North and sub-Saharan Africa showed extremes in both directions, with large increases and decreases in HCI scores.” India made no progress, and China saw a “significant decline” in its score.

With respect to the different dimensions taken into account by the Index, the greatest progress was seen in gender, modest progress was seen in poverty and sustainability, and minimal progress was seen in infrastructure.

“We didn’t manage to get a citizen monitoring mechanism or advisory committee included in the New Urban Agenda,” Luis Bonilla of El Salvador, who is the chief operating officer for TECHO International, told IPS.

“For that reason, we will create a follow-up mechanism. Concrete commitments are needed” within the agenda, he added.

Carrión, a professor at FLACSO and a coordinator of working groups in the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLASCO), said “the attention of many organisations was drawn, and now we will see what can be done from here on out.” For social movements, then, Quito marked the start of a long road ahead.

Construction work on the Chapultepec Intermodal Transfer Station, with the castle in the famous Chapultepec forest in the background. The recurrent complaint of Mexico City residents affected by public works in this city is the lack of consultation, transparency and information. Credit: Emilio Godoy/IPS

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Sep 23 2016 (IPS)

People living in neighborhoods affected by the expansion of urban construction suffer a “double displacement”, with changes in their habitat and the driving up of prices in the area, in a process in which “we are not taken into account,” said Natalia Lara, a member of an assembly of local residents in the south of Mexico City.

Lara, who is pursuing a master’s degree in public policies at the Latin American School of Social Sciences (Flacso), told IPS that in her neighborhood people are outraged because of the irrational way the construction has been carried out there.

The member of the assembly of local residents of Santa Úrsula Coapa, a lower middle-class neighborhood, complains that urban decision-makers build more houses and buildings but “don’t think about how to provide services. They make arbitrary land-use changes.”

Lara lives near the Mexico City asphalt plant owned by the city’s Ministry of Public Works, which has been operating since 1956 and has become asource of conflict between the residents of the southern neighbourhoods and the administration of leftist Mayor Miguel Mancera of the Party of the Democratic Revolution, which has governed the capital since 1997.“There is clearly a lack of planning and vision, the strategy of only carrying out projects with a strictly economic focus is affecting us.There is no interest in building spaces that help improve community life. We are becoming more isolated, people don’t take their kids to play in parks anymore, but go to shopping centers instead, the fabric of the community breaks down. These are serious problems.” -- Elias García

In mid-2014, Mancera’s government announced its intention to donate the asphalt plant’s land to Mexico City’s Investment Promotion Agency, which would build the Coyoacán Economic and Social Development Area there.

In response, local residents organised and formed, in September of that year, the Coordination of Assemblies of Pedregales, which brings together residents of five neighborhoods in the Coyoacánborough, one of the 16 boroughs into which Mexico City is divided.

But the transfer of ownership of the land took place in December 2014, to create a development area including the construction of an industrial park and residential and office tower blocks.

To appease local residents, Mancera proposed modifying the initial plan and turning the area into an ecological park, despite the fact that the soil is polluted and will take many years to recover.

Last May, the mayor announced the final closure of the asphalt plant and its reconversion into an environmental site, although the decree for the donation to the city investment promotion agency was never revoked, and there is no reconversion plan.

This conflict shows the struggles for the city, for how the public space is defined and used, one of the central topics to be addressed at the Oct. 17-20 third United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development (Habitat III) in Quito, Ecuador.

In the upcoming summit organised by U.N.-Habitat, member states will assume commitments with regard to the right to the city, how to finance the New Urban Agenda that will result from Quito, and sustainable urban development, among other issues.

Cities like the Mexican capital, home to 21 million people, are plagued with similar problems.

Elías García, president of the non-governmental Ecoactivistas, knows this well, having worked for three decades as an environmental activist in the borough of Iztacalco, in the east of the capital.

“There is clearly a lack of planning and vision, the strategy of only carrying out projects with a strictly economic focus is affecting us.There is no interest in building spaces that help improve community life. We are becoming more isolated, people don’t take their kids to play in parks anymore, but go to shopping centers instead, the fabric of the community breaks down. These are serious problems,” he told IPS.

The activist and other local residents have witnessed how in Iztacalco a concert hall, a race track for F1 international motor races, and more recently, a baseball stadium were built one after another.

In the process, some 3,000 trees were cut down and many green spaces and local sports fields disappeared.

The last measure taken was Macera’s 2015 decision to revoke the declaration of the Magdalena Mixhuca sports complex’s environmental value, which had protected the facilities for nine year, in order to build a baseball stadium in its place. Local residents filed an appeal for legal protection, but lost the suit last June.

Luisa Rodríguez, a researcher at the public Doctor José María Luís Mora Research Institute’s Interdisciplinary Center for Metropolitan Studies, told IPS that where people live determines their enjoyment of rights, such as to the city, a clean environment and housing.

“The exercise of citizenship is connected to the idea of the city. When a severely fragmented city is built, based on a model that only benefits the few, participation in social institutions like education and healthcare is only partial. Geographical location determines the exercise of those rights,” she said.

There are a number of open conflicts between organised local communities and the government of Mexico City. One high-profile flashpoint flared up in 2015 when the city government intended to build the Chapultepec Cultural Corridor in the west of the city, next to the woods of the same name, the biggest “green lung” that remains in this polluted megalopolis.

In a public consultation last December, the residents of the Cuauhtémoc borough, where Chapultepec is located, voted against the public-private project, which intended to build an elevated promenade for pedestrians, lined with shops, gardens and trees, above the traffic down below.

Instead, the city government is building an Intermodal Transfer Station (known as CETRAMs) at a cost of 300 million dollars, whose first stage is to be completed in 2018. Besides the transport hub, it will include a 50-floor hotel and a shopping center.

The Economic and Social Development Zones (ZODES), which originally were to be built in five areas in the capital, have apparently failed to improve the quality of urban life.

“In spite of the benefits these micro-cities are supposed to offer, the negative aspects of evicting the people currently living in these areas have not been assessed, and they run counter to the concepts of sustainability and strategic management that the government claims to support,” wrote city planner Daniela Jay in the specialised journal “Arquine”.

The last draft of the final declaration of Habitat III, agreed upon in July, makes no reference to the process of building a city based on inclusion and the active participation of citizens, although it does refer to exercising the right to the city and the importance of such participation.

Activists see both positives and negatives in the approach taken by Habitat III. The conference “will reinforce urban laws that focus on building cities, displacing the perspective of native people and local communities. There is no trend towards inclusion,” said Lara.

Activist García demanded that the local people be heard. “They have to listen to the people who are committed to protecting the environment,” he said.

According to Rodríguez, Habitat III offers an opportunity to address urban emergencies. “There are high expectations for governments to start focusing on building cities thinking about the inhabitants instead of the buildings,” she told IPS.

But with or without the conference, the battles for the city in urban centres like Mexico’s capital will continue.

A street in Hornos, a low-income neighbourhood on the west side of Greater Buenos Aires, where local residents are waiting to receive the deeds to their property, as the key to access to other rights and public services that will provide them with a dignified urban life. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

By Fabiana Frayssinet
MORENO, Argentina, Jul 28 2016 (IPS)

Now that the wind no longer blows her roof off and her house belongs to her, Cristina López feels safe in the shantytown where she lives on the outskirts of the Argentine capital. But she and her neighbours still need to win respect for many more rights they have been denied.

She is not complaining because her situation was much more difficult before she and her teenage son moved four years ago to Hornos, a newly emerging neighbourhood in the municipality of Moreno, to the west of Buenos Aires.

She paid rent until the municipal authorities granted her a plot of land where she built a makeshift home. “Since I built it by myself it wasn´t stable, and a storm tore the roof off,” López told IPS. After that, she and her son stayed at the homes of various friends and neighbours.

Her new house was built with the help of Techo (Roof), a non-governmental organisation that promotes decent housing in urban slums and shantytowns throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, with a collaborative effort by local residents and volunteers.“The market for land is an imperfect market that reproduces inequalities in access to land because it is in the hands of a small minority focused on generating profits and not on the common good.” - Juan Pablo Duhalde

In Hornos, home to 200 families, and the adjacent neighbourhood of Los Cedros, where 1,200 families live, Techo Argentina has built 225 small one-family units. Simple and low-cost, they are put together in just two days, with the aim of resolving housing emergencies.

But for the 59-year-old López, who does odd jobs to support herself and her 15-year-old son, the little prefab house has meant the difference between indigence and a dignified life.

“It was a total change. Nothing compares to this. You realise that when you have a house, you start to change your way of life, because you know it’s your own, and although I don’t have the ‘papers’ for this land yet, the house is mine. No one will take it from me,” she said.

The papers she mentioned are the property deed that she is to be issued by the municipal authorities who granted her the plot of land; not having received them yet makes her nervous.

“There´s always some shrewd person who will show up and claim the land is theirs. Until the municipality says ‘this belongs to you’, we won´t feel completely secure,” she said.

López added that in order to stop being a “second-class citizen”, she also needs utilities: running water, sewerage and electricity with a meter “so it isn’t cut off all the time.”

Furthermore, Hornos, 42 km from the capital and over 20 from the county seat, means she is far away from everything. “We have no school or health clinic nearby, no paved roads, and ambulances won´t come here – we need everything,” she said.

Land and inequality

“It is acknowledged that rights are violated in many areas, and slums are the main expression of inequality and the violation of rights,” Techo Argentina regions director, Francisco Susmel, told IPS.

“Without secure ownership they have no guarantee that they won’t be evicted, and that they can go ahead and improve their homes and their surroundings,” he said, adding that it also undermines their right to access to public services.

Among the issues found by a 2013 survey carried out by Techo Argentina in 1,834 slums home to a total of 432,800 families in the biggest cities in the country was the right to land – a problem common to shantytowns around Latin America.

The report says that 64 percent of land in these informal settlements is prone to flooding, 41 percent is located less than 10 metres away from a river or canal, and 25 percent is less than 10 metres away from a garbage dump.

“Land is a factor that conditions inequality because today it is in the hands of a select group of people and isn´t available to the rest of the population,” sociologist Juan Pablo Duhalde, director of Techo International´s social research centre, told IPS.

According to Paola Bagnera, author of the book “The right to the city in the production of urban land”, published by the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO), land is one of the key factors of inequality in the exercise of the right to the city.

“When we´re talking about urban land, we are referring to the basic foundation of the city…where the streets and blocks are laid out, and which requires the presence of grids (water, power and sewage, etc),” Bagnera, an architect who is an expert in urban planning and urban poverty at Argentina’s National University of the Litoral, told IPS.

“The value of land is directly related to location (near or far), provision (or absence) of services and infrastructure, and environmental characteristics (which lead to varying levels of exposure to risk),” she added.

For example, the construction of developments like gated communities in suburban areas in Argentina in the 1990s drove up prices of land on the outskirts of cities that until then was inhabited by the poor and was worth very little.

This has become one of the decisive elements in the habitat of low-income segments of the population in large cities, as they are pushed farther and farther to the outskirts or packed more and more densely into existing slums in the cities themselves, Bagnera said.

She pointed, for example, to slums that grow “upwards” in large cities like Buenos Aires, and to soaring property sale and rental prices in those areas.

“With regard to Latin America, to conditions in the slums, when the market makes decisions about the distribution of land, we are governing ourselves in an inefficient manner with no proper view to the future,” said Duhalde.

The expert said the right to access to urban land should be one of the central issues of debate at the third United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development (Habitat III), to be held in the capital of Ecuador in October, which is to give rise to a New Urban Agenda.

“The market for land is an imperfect market that reproduces inequalities in access to land because it is in the hands of a small minority focused on generating profits and not on the common good,” said Duhalde.

“A variety of institutions are needed, in the government, the social sector, academia, different interest groups, to be part of the equitable distribution of resources, in this case land, which we must remember has a social function. It is not merchandise.”

Bagnera proposes increasing the value of urban land through the incorporation of infrastructure and improvements.

“That means the generation of community organisation processes through housing cooperatives, groups or social organisations that undertake their own processes of urbanisation and provision of infrastructure on collectively-acquired areas of land,” she said.

“And fundamentally with the participation of the state, promoting inclusive policies of access to services, and contributing to the generation of public-private urban planning arrangements,” she said.

These policies “tend to reduce the costs of infrastructure, providing public land, or based on the production of urban land by the state itself,” she added.

“Bajo Autopista”, a slum in the Villa 61 shantytown wedged under an expressway, just a few blocks from Retiro, one of the most upscale neighbourhoods in Buenos Aires. At least 111 million of Latin America’s urban inhabitants live in slums. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

By Fabiana Frayssinet
BUENOS AIRES, Jun 7 2016 (IPS)

For the inhabitants of “Bajo Autopista” (Under the Freeway), a slum built under an expressway in the Argentine capital, “they” are the people who live in areas with everything that is denied to “us” – a simple definition of social inclusion and a metaphor for urban inequality.

Karina Ríos’ roof is the Illia freeway, one of the main accesses to Buenos Aires. The shantytown is at the edge of Villas 31 and 31 Bis, where some 60,000 people live just a few metres away from El Retiro, one of the poshest neighbourhoods in the capital.

Rios gets light and ventilation through the space between the two halves of the elevated expressway, which is the roof for her two dark, damp rooms with bare brick walls where she lives with one of her daughters.“[I]n the past 20 years, the general tendency seen in Latin America was the growth of urban inequality.” -- Elkin Velásquez

“Ambulances won’t come in here unless the police accompany them. That’s because here, as the police say, a ‘negrito’ (poor, dark-skinned person) who dies is just another negrito. For them, we negritos are nobody,” Ríos told IPS.

That’s how her son Saúl, 19, died last year, when he was stabbed in a fight, defending a friend. The knife perforated his liver and spleen, and he bled to death, she said, because he wasn’t “one of them.”

“If the ambulance hadn’t taken so long to get here, my son would be alive today,” lamented Ríos.

As an activist with the community organisation “Powerful Throat”, Ríos represents her neighbourhood now, demanding better living conditions. The main demand is “urbanisation”.

“We slum-dwellers are stigmatised. And it’s because we’re not urbanised, we don’t have decent streets,” she said.

“When we look for work, we don’t say where we live because if you give an address from here, they won’t hire you. ‘Villeros’ (people who live in ‘villas miseria’, the name for slums in Argentina) are all seen as thieves.”

For Ríos, urbanisation means streets have names and are paved. The streets here, most of which are dirt, are muddy and impassable when it rains.

It also means there are clinics. “There is a health post but the doctors only see five patients (a day) because they aren’t getting paid, and they attend the kids outside. They weigh the babies naked outside in this terrible cold,” she said.

Nor are there basic public services. The list of demands is long: “We need sewers, electric power. Fires happen here because everyone is illegally connected, and short-circuits happen and the houses start to burn,” said Ríos.

In Latin America and the Caribbean, with a total population of 625 million, 472 million people live in cities, including more than 111 million (23.5 percent) who live in slums or shantytowns like this one, according to a regional report by U.N.-Habitat and other organisations.

A muddy unpaved street in Villa 31, a shantytown in the heart of Buenos Aires that is home to some 60,000 people. In the background are seen buildings in one of the poshest districts of the capital, just 200 metres away. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

The report, “Construction of More Equitable Cities: Public Policies for Inclusion in Latin America”, states that despite the reduction in income inequality in urban areas in the region since the 1990s, the number of slum-dwellers increased in at least one-third of Latin American cities.

“The first thing the report says is that in the past 20 years, the general tendency seen in Latin America was the growth of urban inequality,” said Elkin Velásquez, director of U.N.-Habitat for Latin America and the Caribbean.

This inequality creates cities of the excluded inside large cities, where access to rights is unequal.

“We should understand ‘the right to the city’ as the possibility and the right of each citizen to have access to high-quality public goods and services in cities,” Velásquez told IPS from the regional U.N.-Habitat office in Rio de Janeiro.

It also includes “access to all possible opportunities for personal development, family development, community development, and of course all of the elements that make optimal quality of life in the city possible,” he said.

But this right is not accessible to the people who live in “Bajo Autopista” or other “favelas”, “cantegriles”, “ranchos”, “tugurios”, “callampas” or “pueblos jóvenes”, among the dozens of terms used for slums in Latin America.

“Them” and “us”, again – the divide between two for-now irreconcilable worlds.

The region is hosting the third U.N. Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development (Habitat III) Oct. 17-20 in Quito, Ecuador, which will seek solutions to combat urban inequality.

“This is another world. They are clearly two very different worlds. Here everyone knows each other, everyone is friends, and when you go out there it’s not just that no one knows you, or that it’s not the same way of life, but out there you live with stigma, discrimination,” said computer technician Ariel Pérez Sueldo.

For this resident of Villa 31, the most pressing need is security or safety, in a broader, more inclusive sense.

“Not just from the police, but in terms of the power lines, the sewers, the streets. There are places where people, to get to their homes, have to wade through knee-deep mud. There are places where power lines hang down, and kids can be electrocuted. Safety also in the sense of having a place that fire fighters and ambulances can get to,” he said.

To include these “excluded cities”, a new appreciation of them is necessary, said Alicia Ziccardi at the Institute for Social Research of the Autonomous National University of Mexico, who is also an expert in social and urban issues in the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO).

“In the case of Mexico City, for example, the ‘colonias populares’ (a term used for slums) are vital spaces full of life where people have managed to have a habitat that is much better, sometimes, than the ones they are given with homes produced by housing policies that force them to live in distant outlying areas without services,” she told IPS.

“I think what is needed now is a new appreciation of self-production,” said Ziccardi, the editor of the book “Processes of urbanization of poverty and new forms of social exclusion; the challenges facing social policies in Latin American cities in the 21st century”, published by Clacso.

In Ziccardi’s view, “the social production of housing means governments have the capacity to make a public version of these neighbourhoods created by the people, because the results will surely be better than when popular housing is turned into a commodity.”

It’s as simple, according to Pérez Sueldo, as “having what everyone has: an address where they can install public services. Just be able to live normally.”

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

In the country’s capital, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff oversees one of the military operations against the Aedes Aegypti mosquito carried out at a national level in the last few days to curb the spread of the Zika virus. Credit: Roberto Stuckert Filho/PR

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Feb 2 2016 (IPS)

Brazil is deploying 220,000 troops to wage war against the Zika virus, in response to the alarm caused by the birth of thousands of children with abnormally small heads. But eradicating the Aedes aegypti mosquito requires battles on many fronts, including science and the pharmaceutical industry.

The Zika virus, transmitted by the Aedes aegypti mosquito, like dengue and Chikungunya fever, is blamed for the current epidemic of microcephaly, which has frightened people in Brazil and could hurt attendance at the Aug. 5-21 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro.

It has also revived the debate on the right to abortion in Brazil, where the practice is illegal except in cases of pregnancy resulting from rape, or when the mother’s life is in danger.

“Immediate measures to provide assistance to the mothers of newborns with microcephaly are indispensable,” said Silvia Camurça, a sociologist who heads SOS Body – Feminist Institute for Democracy. “Almost all of them are poor, and they are completely overwhelmed by this new burden, with no help in the household.

“Imagine a mother with more than one child, without a husband,” she told IPS. “Childcare centres are not prepared to receive children with microcephaly, who are now numerous and whose numbers will grow even more, with the children to be born in the next few months. It’s a desperate situation. Public assistance for these families is urgently needed.”

An increase in the number of unsafe back-alley abortions, which put women’s lives in danger, “is very likely, since many women know that there are no public policies to support them, and the situation is aggravated by the economic crisis and high unemployment,” said Camurça.

Pernambuco, the Northeast Brazilian state where her non-governmental organisation is based, has the highest number of suspected or confirmed cases of microcephaly, a rare birth defect.

As of Jan. 23, the Health Ministry had registered 1,373 suspected cases in the state, of which 138 have been confirmed, 110 were ruled out, and 1,125 are still being examined.

A total of 270 cases of microcephaly have been confirmed in Brazil and 3,448 suspected cases still need to be investigated. There have also been 68 infant deaths due to congenital malformations since October, 12 of which were confirmed as Zika-related and five of which were not, while the rest are still under investigation.

The main symptoms of Zika virus disease are a low fever, an itchy skin rash, joint pain, and red, inflamed eyes. The symptoms, which are generally mild, last from three to seven days, and most people don’t even know they have had the disease.

Brazil is at the centre of the debate on the virus because it is experiencing the largest-known outbreak of the disease, and because the link between the Zika virus and microcephaly was identified by the Professor Joaquim Amorim Neto Research Institute (IPESQ) in the city of Campina Grande in the Northeast – the poorest region of Brazil and the hardest-hit by this and other mosquito-borne diseases.

Explosive spread

On Monday Feb. 1, the World Health Organisation declared the Zika virus and its suspected link to birth defects an international public health emergency.

The WHO said the rise in the disease in the Americas is “explosive”, and predicted up to 1.5 million cases in Brazil and between three and four million cases in the Americas this year.

Spraying against the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which transmits the Zika virus and other diseases, has been stepped up in cities around Brazil. Credit: Cristina Rochol/PMPA

Although WHO Director General Margaret Chan said “A causal relationship between Zika virus and birth malformations and neurological syndromes has not yet been established,” in Brazil there are no doubts that the Aedes aegypti is the transmitter of the new national tragedy.

The government has mobilised the army, navy and air force against the epidemic, and is trying to mobilise the local population as well as state employees who make door-to-door visits as part of their job, such as electric and water utility meter readers.

The aim is to eliminate mosquito breeding grounds – any water-holding containers (tin cans, plastic jugs, or used tires) lying around the country’s 49.2 million households.

Mosquito repellent has been distributed to pregnant women. “But there are already shortages of repellent, and the ones that are safe for pregnant women are more expensive,” and less affordable for poor women, said Camurça.

The activist said another big problem is the lack of information and knowledge about epidemics. In Pernambuco, dengue fever – also transmitted by the Aedes aegypti mosquito – was under control, according to health officials, “but all of a sudden we’re the champions of Zika,” a contradiction that has yet to be explained, she complained.

The first confirmed case of Zika virus in Brazil came to light in April 2015, after which the disease began to spread like wildfire. It is now present in 23 countries of the Americas, according to the WHO.

Epidemiologists say the statistics available on diseases transmitted by the Aedes aegypti are insufficient because reporting the diseases was not mandatory, which led to under-reporting.

Now microcephaly, but not its causes, are reported, and the lack of reliable statistics from the past, and on related infections, make it more difficult to obtain clear data.

Microcephaly has a number of other causes, such as syphilis, toxoplasmosis, rubella, cytomegalovirus, herpes and different infections.

Science is, however, another battlefront that could be decisive in this medium to long-term war. The hope is that efforts to develop a vaccine will be successful, at least to prevent the Zika virus’s most severe effect: microcephaly in unborn infants.

Research forges ahead

The Health Ministry’s Secretariat of Science, Technology and Strategic Inputs has played a key role in research on the Zika virus, encouraging studies in Brazil’s leading health research centres.

The head of the Secretariat, epidemiologist Eduardo Costa, believes Brazil could develop a vaccine, “despite the bureaucratic hurdles to the import of biological material and other inputs necessary to research, delaying it and driving up the costs.”

“It’s Brazil’s responsibility to produce a vaccine, and it’s something we owe Africa,” he told IPS.

Progress has been made in specialised centres, such as the Butantan Institute in the southern city of São Paulo, which is working on a vaccine that offers 80 percent protection against the four strains of dengue and could extend to the Zika virus. “Clinical tests are needed,” which are costly and take time, Costa said.

The Evandro Chagas Institute, of the northern Amazon state of Pará, is also making progress towards a medication that mitigates the effects of the Zika virus. And a University of São Paulo laboratory is researching possibilities offered by genetic engineering.

These Brazilian research centres have ties to universities or pharmaceutical companies abroad, and the resulting medications could be wholly produced in Brazil, in Bio-Manguinhos, the technical scientific unit that produces and develops immunobiologicals for the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz), a leading Health Ministry research centre, said Costa.

Other technologies being tested in Brazil are aimed at curbing the breeding of the Aedes aegypti. One example is the Wolbachia bacterium, which can stop the dengue virus from replicating in its mosquito host. Fiocruz is releasing mosquitos with the bacterium in a Rio de Janeiro neighbourhood to infect other Aedes aegypti mosquitos.

Another initiative involves the release of genetically modified male mosquitos which produce offspring that die before they are old enough to start reproducing. Other studies have involved an insect growth regulator, pyriproxyfen, which disrupts the growth and reproduction of mosquitos.

In addition, new tests are needed to diagnose women with the Zika virus. The tests currently available must be carried out in the few days that the infection is active.

“A post-infection test is needed, to identify the lingering antibodies and offer more information about what the virus does,” Costa said.

Brazil eradicated the Aedes aegypti mosquito in 1954, in a campaign against yellow fever, the disease it spread back then, Costa pointed out. But the mosquito returned in intermittent outbreaks in the following decades, when it began to transmit dengue.

Now eradicating the mosquito is impossible, even for 220,000 soldiers, with the expanded repertoir of viruses it transmits, and today’s much more populous cities, with limited sanitation, endless amounts of garbage and containers of all kinds strewn everywhere. But technology and social mobilisation could at least help curb the mosquito population.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

A view of Gringo beach and, in the background, the city of Bajos de Haina, the Dominican Republic’s main industrial hub and port, and the third-most polluted city in the world. Credit: Dionny Matos/IPS

By Ivet González
BAJOS DE HAINA, Dominican Republic , Dec 15 2015 (IPS)

Rubbish covers the beaches and clutters the rivers, the garbage dump is not properly managed, and more than 100 factories spew toxic fumes into the air in the city of Bajos de Haina, a major industrial hub and port city in the Dominican Republic.

“We’ve only made it into the news as one of the world’s most polluted places,” lamented Adriana Vallejo, a schoolteacher who talked to IPS in the Centro Educativo Manuel Felix Peña, a school that teaches the arts in this city 80 km to the south of Santo Domingo.

Vallejo was referring to the list of the 10 most polluted places on earth drawn up periodically by the New York-based Blacksmith Institute (which has changed its name to Pure Earth).

The Institute’s latest report, from 2013, listed Bajos de Haina in third place, after Dzerzhinsk, Russia, and Chernobyl, Ukraine, which suffered one of the worst environmental disasters in history, caused by the catastrophic nuclear accident in 1986.

“Those up above are not paying attention to the environmental problem,” said Vallejo, referring to the ruling classes and the authorities. “We, from here down below, can do practically nothing.”

According to the “Map of Poverty in the Dominican Republic 2014”, 33 percent of households in this city of 159,000 people are poor.

“Private companies contribute a little to improving things, but only with small gestures, such as facilities at the school that were refurbished by the oil refinery (the only one in this Caribbean island nation). We haven’t seen a real desire for Haina to change,” said the teacher, who has lived here for 25 years.

“When the situation gets out of hand, we hold protest marches,” she said. “The people have had to take to the streets to fight serious problems like burning in the garbage dump, which enveloped Haina in a curtain of smoke.”

The manufacturing, chemical products, pharmaceutical, metallurgical and power plants and the oil refinery emit every a combined total of 9.8 tons of formaldehyde, 1.2 tons of lead, 416 tons of ammonium, and 18.5 tons of sulfuric acid annually.

The mouth of the Ñagá River, whose waters have darkened as a result of industrial waste and which has become more narrow due to the loss of the mangroves lining the banks, in the Dominican Republic coastal city of Bajos de Haina. Credit: Dionny Matos/IPS

The city’s thermoelectric complex produces more than 50 percent of the electricity available for the economy and the country’s 9.3 million inhabitants.

In this city, 84 hazardous substances have been identified, 65 of which are major toxics.

Factories dump waste into the rivers and the sea. And noise pollution is another problem affecting human health.

Scientific studies warn that a majority of local residents suffer from ailments such as asthma, bronchitis, the flu and acute diarrhea.

In this city of 50 square km, the main environmental woes are air, water and noise pollution, problems caused by the open-air dump, and municipal solid waste scattered everywhere.

Where tons of garbage now cover a wide open area, there was a forest 30 years ago, “where I used to wander as a kid,” said high school math teacher Juan Ventura, who took IPS to the dump. “People who used to live around here back then are nostalgic and sad; we miss what was once a natural area that used to be known as El Naranjal.”

“The city’s garbage is brought here, with absolutely no kind of health policies. For decades, they even brought in part of the garbage from Santo Domingo. The only thing they did was burn it, and the entire local population had to breathe the nauseating smoke.

“It’s pathetic that the local authorities have no serious policy for recycling, and some local residents scavenge waste materials on their own, without any protective measures,” he said, pointing to around a dozen men and women sorting through bags of garbage for scraps of material, plastic and metal, to classify and sell them to recycling companies.

One of the women, her hands filthy from scavenging, told IPS that she is involved in this informal activity because of the money she can earn.

The woman, who is originally from neighbouring Haiti, said she makes between 22 and 44 dollars a day collecting plastic that she resells – a considerable sum in a country where the minimum monthly wage is 231 dollars.

The authorities say Haina is suffering from the legacy of years of nearly non-existent environmental legislation.

The neighbourhood Paraíso de Dios or God’s Paradise turned into a living hell during the 20 years that the Metaloxa car battery recycling smelter operated there with no environmental controls or oversight. Local residents in the area where the plant used to operate have extremely high blood lead levels.

For a decade the community put up a battle until Metaloxa was forced to pull out in 1999, when the Public Health Ministry finally took action.

But many locals suffered irreversible damage to their health.

Residents of this city complain that enforcement of the 2000 law on the environment and natural resources is lax.

“There is no respect for the environment,” Mackenzie Andújar, a 41-year-old plumber who lives in the area of Gringo beach, told IPS. “There is no control over factories here; they dump their toxic waste out of chimneys and into the water. The situation in Haina has only gotten worse in recent years.”

The Ñagá River, which flows into the sea at Gringo beach, is filthy and narrow as a result of garbage dumps and deforestation. Plastic bottles, cardboard, old clothes and other trash is strewn over the sand dunes, while children splash in the water. The view from the beach is the furnaces and smokestacks of the nearby factories.

“The locals are uncultured; when a dog or other animal dies, they throw the corpse into the river or on the beach, instead of burying it,” said Andújar.

The environmental crisis, the high population density, the poor living conditions and the lack of services infrastructure make this a conflict-ridden area, according to the 2011 study titled “a socioeconomic and environmental diagnosis on the management of solid household waste in the municipality of Haina”

“The environmental problems in our community are hard to deal with, but we also have social contamination caused by crime and young people’s lack of interest in studying,” said music student Juan Elías Andújar.

“In school they talk to us about ecological issues,” he told IPS. “We have a group called ‘Guardians of Nature’, to raise social awareness and carry out actions like clean-ups of beaches. Haina could change if each person were willing to make an effort.”

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

The U.S. agribusiness giant Cargill’s port terminal on the banks of the Tapajós River in the northern Brazilian city of Santarém, where large cargo vessels dwarf the traditional small fishing boats of the Amazon basin. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

By Fabiana Frayssinet
SANTARÉM, Brazil, Dec 11 2015 (IPS)

River port terminals in the northern Brazilian city of Santarém are considered strategic by the government. But what some see as an opportunity for development is for others an irreversible change in what was previously a well-preserved part of the Amazon rainforest.

In the evening light on the Tapajós River, whose green-blue waters mix with the darker muddy water of the Amazon River in Santarém, it’s not easy to ignore the silos that overshadow what used to be a public beach, where passenger boats and fishing vessels typical of this part of the Amazon jungle state of Pará tie up.

The port terminal of the U.S. commodities giant Cargill began to operate in 2003 as a centre for the storage, transshipment and loading of soy and corn, in this city of nearly 300,000 people.

The cargo ships and convoys of barges carrying grains are headed for the Amazon River and then the Atlantic Ocean on their way to Europe or China, the biggest markets for Brazil’s main agribusiness exports.

This country is the world’s second-largest producer of soy, after the United States, and the biggest exporter. In the 2014-2015 harvest it produced 95 million tons, 60.7 million of which were exported.

Municipal authorities argue that the river port terminals generate jobs and tax revenue, while they drive the construction and services industries, hotels and fuel supplies.

But Edilberto Sena, a Catholic priest who is the president of the Tapajós Movement Alive, holds a very different view.

“Cargill’s arrival has been a tragedy for Santarém,” he told IPS. “When they began to build the port they argued that it would bring jobs, and while they were building it did create 800 jobs. But as soon as it was completed, most of the workers were fired, and now it employs between 150 and 160 people.”

With a current capacity to export five million tons of grain, the port of Santarém was built to ease the congestion in ports in southern Brazil like Santos in the state of São Paulo, or Paranaguá in the state of Paraná.

This port and the transshipment terminal in Mirituba – 300 km to the south of Santarém – have also cut distances by land and sea for the shipment of soy from the neighbouring state of Mato Grosso, the country’s largest soy producer.

The installation was built by the U.S. agribusiness and food company Bunge, which was later joined by Cargill and other transnational corporations.

“These ports make Brazil more competitive,” the director of planning in the Santarém city government, José de Lima, told IPS.

As an example, he pointed out that with respect to the port in Santos, from Santarém to the port city of Shanghai, China, “the distance was cut from 24,000 km to 19,500 km, and going through the Panama Canal will reduce the cost from 159 to 147 dollars per transported ton.”

As of 2020, with an investment of around 800 million dollars, the transnational corporations project that they will export 20 million tons a year of grains through the Amazon basin.

A fisherman carries the day’s catch in the market in the city of Santarém, from the beach now overshadowed by the silos of the river port at the confluence of the Tapajós and Amazon Rivers in the northern Brazilian state of Pará. Credit: Gonzalo Gaudenzi/IPS

Nelio Aguiar, the Santarém secretary of planning, stressed the strategic importance of these ports for the agroexport sector. “Brazil’s GDP is growing, based on agribusiness, which is supporting our economy,” he told IPS.

Most of the cargo arrives by truck, over the BR-163 highway in the process of being repaved, which ends at Cargill’s port terminal.

Currently, during the soy and corn harvest some 350 trucks a day arrive. But Lima estimates that the number will rise to 2,000 a day when other port terminals set to be built in the city are in operation.

That is what worries social organisations and academics who have fought the construction of the port.

“Because the city was not adapted to receive so much cargo traffic, it has caused disruptions and we have seen an increase in the number of accidents due to the intensification of truck traffic,” Raimunda Monteiro, the rector of the Federal University of Western Pará, told IPS.

But despite a number of lawsuits challenging the legality of the Cargill port, construction went ahead with the support of local authorities.

“It destroyed a beach in Santarém and there were also a number of indirect impacts because it attracted more soy producers, who expanded across the Santarém plan. These impacts were not foreseen in the environmental impact study,” Ibis Tapajós, a lawyer who works with social movements, told IPS.

To decongest truck traffic, the city government projects the construction of new access roads and truck parking lots outside of the city.

But there is concern about environmental effects such as contamination of the river and pollution from motor vehicle emissions and from the chemical fertilisers carried by the ships.

“The Cargill port is a clear example of the violation of socioenvironmental rights by large corporations,” said Tapajós.

The construction of at least six new port terminals in Santarém is in the study phase. Two would be next to the Cargill terminal and four would be in the area around Maica Lake.

The most advanced project on the lake – now in the phase of obtaining environmental permits – is to be built by EMBRAPS, a private company.

“Maica Lake is an extremely fragile ecological area,” said Monteiro. “It is at one end of a 50-km series of lakes and canals at the mouth of the Tapajós river and its confluence with the Amazon River.”

The EMBRAPS port is to be built in the Green Area neigbhourhood on the lake, in an area that floods during the rainy season and is without water in the dry season.

There are already signs warning “no trespassers, private property,” and the 480 fisherpersons on the lake are worried about the impact on their activity due to the circulation of the cargo vessels and because a large area will be covered over with soil.

“They’re going to practically privatise the lake,” Ronaldo Souza Costa, the president of the Association of Local Residents of the Perola Neighourhood of Maicá, told IPS. Thirty percent of the fish eaten in Santarém comes from the lake.

“As far as we can tell, there will be a major impact on our fishing, mainly in this area, where we fish in the wintertime. They will mark off no-trespassing areas,” said Raimundo Nonato, the administrator of the Maicá market.
The Santarém city government says the installations will be on dry land and that the companies are not interested in the lake but in the Amazon River, which the waters flow into and which is deep enough for large vessels.

“The entire operation of the trucks will be on ramps. It will not affect the water in the lake at all,” said Aguiar.

But because the local communities have not yet been formally consulted about this and other port projects, fears are growing.

“From what we know, if the ships come near us, our boats will be in trouble because of the big waves, which will be dangerous for our small vessels,” local fisherwoman Telma Almeida told IPS.

After unloading her fish, Almeida casts off and sets out on the Amazon River once again in her small boat. Her silhouette becomes tiny and dim in the shadow of a large cargo vessel.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Children between the ages of five and seven eating lunch in the João Baptista Cáffaro School cafetería in the impoverished Engenho Velho neighbourhood in the city of Itaboraí, 45 km from Rio de Janeiro. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
ITABORAÍ, Brazil, Nov 9 2015 (IPS)

“That law should have existed since the end of slavery, which threw slaves into the street without offering them adequate conditions for working and producing, turning them into semi-slaves,” said Brazilian farmer Idevan Correa.

The law he was referring to, which was passed in 2009, requires that at least 30 percent of the funds that municipal governments receive from the National Fund for the Development of Education go towards the purchase of food produced by local family farmers.

The formula is one of those discoveries that later seem obvious, self-evident, normal.

Besides guaranteeing small farmers an important market for their produce, “it improved the quality of the food,” the mother of two students, Jaqueline Lameira, who represents families on the Itaboraí School Feeding Council, which oversees the quality of school meals, told IPS.

Itaboraí, a municipality of 230,000 people in the southeast state of Rio de Janeiro, 11 percent of whose residents are rural, dedicates more than the required minimum.

Over 40 percent of school breakfasts and lunches served in the municipal schools are made up of food produced by local small farmers, said Inaiá Figueiredo, in charge of nutrition in the city government’s Secretariat of Agriculture, Supplies and Fishing.

That proportion was just seven percent when the current municipal administration took office in 2012, she told IPS.

The food offered in the school meals was diversified, with a larger proportion of fresh produce, including typical local vegetables that are highly nutritious but not widely consumed, she explained, adding that each meal includes at least three kinds of vegetables.

“For dessert there’s fruit, never candy, and the juice doesn’t have sugar, but locally produced honey,” she said.

School cook Penha Maria Flausina opens the bags of fresh fruit and vegetables recently delivered from local family farms in the João Baptista Cáffaro municipal school, which serves 500 primary students in a poor neighborhood in Itaboraí, a city in southeast Brazil. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

“The kids eat everything, they ask for seconds; there’s one who only comes to school because of the meals,” Penha Maria Flausina, the cook at the João Baptista Caffaro School in a poor neighbourhood of Itaboraí told IPS, laughing.

She showed IPS the maize, okra, squash and fresh fruit in the school pantry.

This is the result of a lengthy process that began in 1986 with the First National Conference on Food and Nutrition, further editions of which were held in 2004, 2007, 2011 and in the first week of November 2015 in Brasilia, with 2,000 participants.

The National Council on Food and Nutritional Security (CONSEA) was created in 1993, with representatives of civil society and the government. The Organic Law on Food and Nutritional Security was passed in 2006.

Three years later, under that legal framework, a new law linked the National School Feeding Programme (PNAE) and family farming, after overcoming stiff resistance in the legislature, economist Francisco Menezes told IPS.

“The enormous school meals market, today made up of 45 million students, was dominated by companies, some of them contracted by municipal governments for all of the schools,” said Menezes who, as president of CONSEA from 2004 to 2007, played a key role in the drafting and approval of the law.

“Higher prices and lower quality” are typical when suppliers enjoy a monopoly, he said.

It took the law three years to make its way through Congress, where it was blocked by legislators interested in that market themselves or financed by companies that supplied it, which in the end still had control of 70 percent of sales to school meal programmes, although that is a ceiling that was set.

Forging a new path

But in this huge country of 206 million people, the effectiveness of the law has been irregular. “There are municipal governments that comply with it, others don’t, and there are some in the south of Brazil that achieved 100 percent supplies from family farming,” said Menezes.

But there is also fraud, he admitted.

“Strong” municipal councils inhibit irregularities, but they are also subject to pressure, said the expert. Because of that, “everything depends on family farms organised in associations and cooperatives, so that if one producer fails, other members are there to step in to guarantee supplies,” he added.

But the law is essential, because “it turned the school meals programme into a state policy, making setbacks more unlikely to occur,” he said.

Rural leader Idevan Correa examines one of his new orange trees. He decided to plant an orange grove again thanks to a Brazilian law that requires that at least 30 percent of the food consumed in schools come from local family farms. The municipality of Itaboraí was famous for its oranges until a pest reduced production. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

Correa, the farmer who would have liked the law to have been in place since slavery was abolished in 1888, told IPS it was smart to set the minimum quota for supplies from family farms at 30 percent.

“It’s a first, experimental step; small farmers can’t increase their production overnight, they have to do it gradually,” said Correa, the president of the Association of Rural Producers of the Fourth District of Itaboraí, who inherited a 100-hectare farm that his father received during the agrarian reform process in the 1950s.

He also agrees with the annual limit of 20,000 reals (5,200 dollars) for each farmer’s sales to the municipal government, although that was not ideal for him this year as he could have sold above that quota with his production of maize, beans, potatoes and fruit.

“It’s better this way, more farmers can sell; if the quota were to be expanded a lot, very few would be able to sell,” he said.

“At the start of the current municipal administration, in 2012, only nine or 10 farmers were taking part in the school feeding programme; now that number is 54,” agronomist Ana Paula de Farias, technical adviser to the local Secretariat of Agriculture, Supplies and Fishing in Itaboraí, told IPS.

There are some 300 farms in the municipality, but most of them raise cattle.

Another problem in expanding the number of suppliers for the school meals programme is that many of them do not have the required documents, she explained.

Furthermore, technical assistance was necessary to help farmers begin to grow organic products, or at least to significantly reduce their use of pesticides and herbicides, and to adapt to the specific needs of meals for children, such as guava fruits in small uniform sizes, in order to provide one for each child without having to cut them into pieces.

“The most important lesson in this learning process was planting without agrochemicals,” said Correa. “You learn as you go along, living up to the requirements of the programme. We used to plant more to earn more, since we weren’t in a position to compete with the big companies; now we try for better quality, and we’re more careful, because it’s food for local children.”

Sales to schools gave a boost to local small farmers, even though there is a quota, he said, because the programme pays retail “supermarket prices,” and there are no costs for transportation because the municipal government sends out its own trucks, while in the big agricultural market farmers have to deal with middlemen who pay less and charge to cover their own costs.

Exportable model

Brazil’s experience in linking family farms and school feeding programmes has already been exported to several countries in Latin America and in Africa, including Bolivia, Mali, Mozambique and Senegal.

It is also one of the models used by the Parliamentary Front Against Hunger in Latin America and the Caribbean, an initiative that emerged in 2009 with technical support from the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO).

Brazil’s law will be studied during the Nov. 15-17 Sixth Forum of the Parliamentary Front Against Hunger, to be held in Lima with the participation of legislators from throughout the region as well as guest lawmakers from Africa and Asia.

Brazil’s Food Purchase Programme, based on an earlier law from 2003 and geared towards supplying social assistance networks, has also been replicated abroad, as an example of a public policy that has been doubly successful: in bolstering food security while strengthening family agriculture.

In addition, the area of food security has served to develop a multi-disciplinary approach involving various ministries, such as those of agriculture, health and education, which tend to act in an isolated fashion, said Menezes.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

All of the offices, shops and locales in the modern two-building Enterprise complex are empty. It is one of the many white elephants left in the city of Itaboraí, in southeast Brazil, by the state-run Petrobras’ aborted petrochemical and oil industry megaproject. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
ITABORAÍ, Brazil , Oct 23 2015 (IPS)

Itaboraí still recalls its origins as a sprawling city that sprang up along a highway, not far from Rio de Janeiro. But a few years ago big modern buildings began to sprout all over this city in southeast Brazil, whose offices and shops are almost all empty today.

The number of white elephants, or costly, useless constructions, in this city of 230,000 people was the result of “two huge shocks” caused by the Rio de Janeiro Petrochemical Complex (COMPERJ), Luiz Fernando Guimarães, the municipal secretary of economic development, told IPS.

“The first impact came from the 2006 announcement by then President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2010) of the project, which was to consist of two refineries and two petrochemical plants that would generate 221,000 jobs, according to the Getulio Vargas Foundation,” he said.

The estímate by the prestigious Rio de Janeiro-based think tank was larger than the entire population of the city, which stood at 218,000 in 2010, according to that year’s census.

The complex, belonging to Brazil’s state-run oil company Petrobras, was to cost around 6.5 billion dollars according to initial projections. But it ballooned to twice that, and will now only entail a single refinery with a capacity to process 165,000 barrels a day of oil. Construction of the petrochemical plants and the second refinery was cancelled.

The original announcement and the start of construction in 2008 “turned Itaboraí into an El Dorado, attracting people from across Brazil, as well as many foreigners. Rents skyrocketed, the prices of food and services soared, and the value of land for building housing more than doubled,” Guimarães said.

The employment of some 30,000 workers and the prospect of a surge in industrialisation around the petrochemical complex drew abundant investment, because of the expectation that the city, “one of the poorest in the country, would soon to enjoy great prosperity,” the municipal secretary of finance, Rodney Mendonça, told IPS.

The real estate boom in this city 45 km from Rio de Janeiro led to the construction of modern buildings, including two big hotels – instead of the four that were originally planned.

In just a few years, there were 4,000 new shops and office buildings, said Guimarães, whose office was renamed the Secretariat of Economic Development and Integration. The former oil industry executive is now in charge of relations between the city government and COMPERJ.

The second shock was the decision to reduce the project to a single refinery, which was only announced in 2014. “But the change happened in 2010, and the public was not informed,” the official said. “I knew because several subsidiaries of Petrobras and Braskem (Latin America’s biggest petrochemical company) pulled out of the consortium.”

Bazarzão, which sells building materials and hardware in the city of Itaboraí, in southeast Brazil, saw its sales rise twofold when construction on the Rio de Janeiro Petrochemical Complex (COMPERJ) began. But they later plummeted when Petrobras cancelled the petrochemical side of the project. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

“Imagine, a local university was getting ready to launch a new degree programme in petrochemical technology, with a view to the jobs that would be offered by COMPERJ. When I told him what was happening, the director just about killed me,” Guimarães said.

Not ony were the petrochemical plants and second refinery cancelled, but “construction of the first refinery stalled, and according to Petrobras, financing is being sought to finish it,” he said – even though it is 87 percent complete.

On the 45 sq km acquired for the construction of COMPERJ, Petrobras is forging ahead with the construction of the Natural Gas Processing Unit, which is now employing around 3,000 workers. “But after it is built, only 80 employees will be left to operate it,” said Guimarães.

The city has felt the blow. The shiny new commercial and office buildings are empty, and walking down the streets you see “to rent” or “to lease” signs everywhere, while most shops and other businesses are closed.

“The land of oranges turned into the land of white elephants,” joked Bruno Soares, the manager of a building materials, hardware and appliances store, Bazarzão, on 22 of May avenue, the main street in Itaboraí.

His store did not register as a COMPERJ supplier. Nevertheless, it has suffered the effects. “Our sales have fallen 50 percent since late 2014,” he estimated, although he admitted that they actually returned to the levels prior to the boom that was cut short.

“Business went up and down in five years, too quickly. Other stores closed and neighbouring towns were also hurt,” he said.

“Itaboraí would be a powerhouse in Latin America if the petrochemical complex was doing well, but it all came crumbling down because of the corruption,” Soares maintained.

The entrance to the nearly empty Hellix luxury office building. The local Secretariat of Economic Development in Itaboraí, in southeast Brazil, moved into several of the offices because of the low rent, driven down by the lack of demand after Petrobras drastically cut back its oil and petrochemical industry megaproject nearby. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

That is a common conclusion reached by the public – and not only in Itaboraí – in response to the daily reports on the kickback scandal involving Petrobas projects, including COMPERJ, in which dozens of politicians and construction companies have been implicated.

Valcir José Vieira, the owner of a parking lot in downtown Itaboraí, concurs with Soares. “Between 2006 and 2014 my parking lot was always full – 200 cars a day came in. Today, I receive 100 at the most,” he told IPS.

The decline in the number of cars began in November 2014, and forced him to reduce his fees from five to two reais (1.30 dollars to 52 cents) an hour.

For the city government the disaster is twofold. Tax revenue plunged, while expenditure, which was driven up by the frustrated megaproject and the illusion of progress, continued to increase.

The tax on services, the municipal government’s main source of income, brought in around 64 million dollars a year during the COMPERJ construction boom – an amount that will fall 40 percent this year, according to forecasts by the local Secretariat of Finance.

Revenue from other taxes is also falling, due to the insolvency faced by companies in crisis.

Meanwhile, public spending has not dropped. The influx of workers and their families drawn by the prospect of jobs and prosperity drove up demand for healthcare, schools and other public services.

“The number of people who visited the emergency room of the Municipal Hospital climbed from 500 a day, to 2,000 since 2013,” said Mendonça, the finance secretary. The city government dedicates 30 percent of its budget to healthcare – double what is required by law, he pointed out.

And the administration that left office in 2012 hired 2,000 new public employees through competitive examinations, based on the increased demands and projected new revenue flow. And although the tax revenue dropped, the new civil servants can’t be laid off, because they enjoy guaranteed job stability in Brazil. So that increase in expenditure remains in place.

The two municipal secretaries complained that there was no compensation from COMPERJ for the impacts in the municipality, nor investment to mitígate the damaging effects of the shrinking megaproject.

In the face of these challenges, the city government is seeking alternatives to fuel development. Guimarães is convinced that logistics will be the main future activity in Itaboraí.

The city is located at the intersection of several highways, outside of the congested Rio de Janeiro metropolitan region, and in the centre of an area of oil industry activity – unrelated to COMPERJ – ports, shipyards and various industries, he pointed out.

At the same time, the municipalities affected by the downsizing of the COMPERJ project mobilised to pressure Petrobras to at least resume construction of the first refinery.

Itaboraí is also focusing on boosting small businesses. Guimarães’ Secretariat of Economic Development created a centre for entrepreneurs, aimed at expediting the creation of microenterprises and formalising the ones currrently operating in the informal sector of the economy.

Small firms that refurbish or expand housing, and beauty salons are the most frequent businesses opening at this time. “They rival the evangelical churches,” the head of the centre, Wilson Pereira, told IPS.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Women from the Sucre Association of Urban Producers, who are from poor neighbourhoods on the outskirts of Bolivia’s official capital, with a basketful of ecologically grown fresh vegetables from their greenhouses, which have improved their families’ diets and incomes. Credit: Franz Chávez/IPS

By Franz Chávez
SUCRE, Bolivia, Oct 17 2015 (IPS)

The hands of women who have migrated from rural areas carefully tend to their ecological vegetable gardens in the yards of their humble homes on the outskirts of Sucre, the official capital of Bolivia, in an effort to improve their families’ diets and incomes.

“The men worked in the construction industry, and 78 percent of the women didn’t have work – they had no skills, they washed clothes for others or sold things at the market,” Lucrecia Toloba, secretary of “productive development and plural economy” in the government of the southeastern department of Chuquisaca, told IPS.

Her hair in two thin braids and wearing traditional native dress – a bowler hat, a short, pleated skirt called a pollera, and light clothing for the mild climate of the Andean valleys – Toloba, a Quechua Indian, is an educator who now runs the National Urban and Peri-urban Agriculture Programme in the region.“We organised as women, and now we eat without worry because we grow our food free of chemicals." -- Alberta Limachi

In her modest office, she explains that women are at the centre of the programme, which brings them recognition from their families and communities, diversifies their families’ diets, and offers them economic independence through the sale of the vegetables they grow ecologically in the city, which at the same time benefits from healthy, diversified fresh produce.

Five km away, on the outskirts of the city, women in the neighbourhoods of 25 de Mayo and Litoral, who belong to the Sucre Association of Urban Producers, met IPS with a basket of fresh produce from their gardens, including shiny red tomatoes, colourful radishes and bright-green lettuce.

A total of 83 poor suburban neighborhoods in Sucre are taking part in the project, which has the support of the national and departmental governments and of the .

The initiative has 680 members so far, said Guido Zambrana, a young agronomist who runs the Urban Garden Project.

The lunch we are served is soup made with vegetables grown in their backyard gardens, accompanied by tortillas made with cornmeal mixed with flour from different vegetables. Fresh produce is also grown in greenhouses built throughout the hills of Sucre, 2,760 metres above sea level and 420 km south of La Paz, the country’s political centre.

The women have learned how to grow vegetables and how to improve their family’s food security, Tolaba explained.“We want to reach zero malnutrition,” she said.

In Sucre temperatures range between 12 and 25 degrees Celcius. But in the greenhouses, built by the families with support from the government, temperatures climb above 30 degrees.

Sometimes, the temperatures marked by the thermometers in the greenhouses spike and the windows have to be opened. The greenhouses have roofs made of transparent Agrofil plastic sheeting and walls of adobe. They are built under the guidance of technical agronomist Mery Fernández.

Two of the peri-urban agricultural producers of Sucre proudly show one of their greenhouses, which families from 83 poor suburban neighbourhoods have set up in their yards as part of the National Urban and Peri-urban Agriculture Programme. Credit: Franz Chávez/IPS

The luscious leafy chard and lettuce in the greenhouse of Celia Padilla, who came to Sucre from an indigenous village in the neighbouring department of Potosí with her husband in 2000 and settled in Bicentenario, a neighbourhood in a flat area among the hills surrounding the city.

Padilla, who also belongs to the Quechua indigenous community like most of the women in the association, joined the project with a garden of just eight square metres last year, and is now thinking about building a 500-square-metre greenhouse.

Her husband, a construction worker who does casual work in the city, is pleased with the idea of expanding the garden by building a greenhouse. Their home garden provides the family with nutritional food and brings in a not insignificant income through the sale of fresh produce to neighbours or at market.

With the earnings, “I buy milk and meat for the kids,” Padilla told Tierramérica, holding bunches of shiny green chard in her hands.

Water for irrigation is scarce, but a local government programme has donated 2,000-litre tanks to capture water during the rainy season and store it up for using in drip irrigation.

The chance to improve the family diet generated a good-natured dispute between Alberta Limachi and her husband, who came to this city from the village of Puca Puca, 64 km away.

The couple, who own a 150-square-metre plot of land on the outskirts of the city, had to decide between a family garden or using the space to build a garage. Limachi, one of the leaders of the urban producers, won the argument.

Her enthusiasm is contagious among her fellow urban farmers.

“We organised as women, and now we eat without worry because we grow our food free of chemicals,” she told Tierramérica, after proudly serving a snack of green beans and fresh salad.

One of the farmers on the outskirts of Sucre with her son, sitting proudly on the 2,000-litre water tank donated by the government of Chuquisaca. The tank stores rainwater used in drip irrigation on the organic vegetables she grows. Credit: Franz Chávez/IPS

“I don’t ask my husband for money anymore, and we don’t spend anything on vegetables,” Padilla said, pleased to help support her family. Her garden is well-known in the neighbourhood because she grows lettuce, chard, celery, coriander and tomatoes, and her neighbours come knocking every day to buy fresh vegetables.

A committee made up of associations of farmers and consumers monitors and certifies that the fresh produce is organic and of high quality, José Zuleta, the national coordinator of the Urban and Peri-urban Agriculture Programme, told Tierramérica.

“The women grow their food without (chemical) fertiliser, using organic compost that can return to the soil, which means their production is sustainable,” Yusuke Kanae, an agronomist with the FAO office in Sucre, commented to Tierramérica.

Kanae, originally from Japan, offers the women technical know-how and simple practices such as converting a creative variety of containers – ranging from a broken old football to plastic television set packaging – into improvised pots for growing vegetables.

“Even if it’s just 20 bolivianos (slightly less than three dollars), the women can help buy notebooks and shoes,” said Kanae, to illustrate the importance of the women’s contribution to the household, which chips away at what he described as “sexist” dependence, while putting them in touch with their indigenous cultural roots.

Kanae also supports the introduction of organic vegetables in the city, and has encouraged the owners of the Cóndor Café, a vegetarian restaurant, to buy products certified by the women as organic.

Visitors to the restaurant enjoy substantial dishes prepared with the vegetables from the women’s peri-urban gardens, which combine Japanese and Bolivian cooking, and cost only three dollars a meal.

The manager of the restaurant, Roger Sotomayor, told Tierramérica that he enjoys supporting the family garden initiative. “We want to encourage environmentally-friendly production of vegetables,” he said, stressing the high quality of the women’s produce and the fact that the cost is 20 percent lower than that of conventional crops.

This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

This reporting series was conceived in collaboration with Ecosocialist Horizons

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Nora Pavón and one of her daughters in the informal garbage dump behind their home. The swamp acts as a sewer in Villa Inflamable, in the suburb of Avellaneda on the south side of Buenos Aires. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

By Fabiana Frayssinet
AVELLANEDA, Argentina, Sep 18 2015 (IPS)

Children have been poisoned by lead in Villa Inflamable, a shantytown on the south side of the capital of Argentina. Resettling their families involves a socioenvironmental process as complex as the sanitation works in one of the most polluted river basins in the world.

As soon as you enter Villa Inflamable, which is located right in the Dock Sud petrochemical hub in the Buenos Aires suburb of Avellaneda, you taste and feel chemicals and dust particles in your throat, saliva and lungs.

But in this shantytown, where more than 1,500 families are exposed to industrial pollution in precarious homes built on top of soil contaminated with toxic waste, the children suffer the problem in their blood.

“When she was one, she had 55 µg of lead in her blood. I had to put her in the hospital,” Brenda Ardiles, a local resident, told IPS, referring to her daughter, who is now three years old. Her other daughter, eight months old, is also suffering from lead poisoning.

Her mother-in-law, Nora Pavón, whose four children also have lead poisoning, said “Every night they get nosebleeds, they can’t stand the headaches, their bones hurt, but since there’s no transportation at night I can’t take them to the emergency room until the next morning.”

Lead poisoning in children is defined by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control as a blood lead level of greater than 10 micrograms (µg) per decilitre of blood.

Lead poisoning can cause learning disabilities and other chronic health problems, such as stunted growth, hyperactivity and impaired hearing. Young children are the most vulnerable.

“One of my daughters is in third grade and the other is in fourth and they don’t know how to read. The doctors said the delay was caused by lead,” said Pavón.

Villa Inflamable suffers from all of the environmental problems that plague the 64-km Matanzas-Riachuelo river, which cuts across 14 Buenos Aires municipalities before it flows into the Río de la Plata or River Plate. Of the more than 120,000 families living in 280 slums along the river, 18,000 are set to be relocated.

On one hand are the companies that pollute the river: petrochemical plants, oil refineries, chemical and fuel storage sites, and toxic waste processing plants.

On the other are the problems typical of poverty, such as substandard housing, flood-prone land, clandestine garbage dumps and a lack of sanitation.

“That lagoon is putrid, I don’t know what they dump there,” said Pavón, pointing to a swamp behind her home surrounded by trash, which functions as a natural sewer in the neighbourhood.

Of the five million people living in the river basin, 35 percent have no piped water and 55 percent have no sewage services.

“A lot of kids have diarrhea. The water pipes are polluted and the clandestine connections aren’t safe,” said Claudia Espínola, with the Junta Vecinal Sembrando Juntos, an organisation of local residents that jugs of clean drinking water in Villa Inflamable.

The industrial area in the Riachuelo, with the port in the background, in Buenos Aires. There are 13,000 companies registered by ACUMAR along the riverbank, 7,000 of which are industrial. The agency has identified 1,254 toxic substances. Some 900 factories have presented reconversion plans. Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

In 2008, the Supreme Court ordered the Matanza-Riachuelo Basin Authority (ACUMAR) – created in 2006 – to clean up the area. In 2011, ACUMAR established an integral environmental clean-up plan.

The plan, whose goals include sustainable development, involves the reconversion of factories, the clean-up of rivers and riverbanks, garbage collection and treatment, water treatment and drainage works, and slum redevelopment or relocation.

It covers a total of 1,600 projects to be completed by 2024, including the construction of 1,900 housing units, with a total investment of four billion dollars.

“They offered us another place, but I said no because we are three families, 15 people living in this house. We couldn’t have fit in the other one, even if we worked wonders,” said Pavón, who did accept the offer of a second housing unit, although she complained that there wasn’t room for the children to play.

Many families did not accept the resettlement, for a variety of reasons. Some did not like the houses offered, while others were simply unaware of how serious the contamination was in their neighbourhood.

“Sometimes the houses are small, and many families are used to large lots. Others work or have their businesses in their homes, they’re garbage recyclers, and they don’t know how they could continue to work there,” Espínola told IPS.

Another reason, more difficult to solve, is the rivalry between the football teams of the old neighbourhood and the new one where they are to be resettled, also in the suburb of Avellaneda.

“It’s a longstanding problem between the fans of the Dock Sud and San Telmo clubs, a rivalry that is sometimes violent. It’s a cultural problem that we think we can work through, which we’re trying to do,” she said.

In Villa Inflamable, an environmental health centre now monitors the levels of contamination.

But according to Leandro García Silva, the head of environment and sustainable development in the Defensoría del Pueblo de la Nación, or ombudsperson’s office, which is monitoring compliance with the court-ordered clean-up, a risk map is needed first.

“The health system doesn’t have many tools to act on illnesses arising from environmental questions because the doctor can’t write a prescription for cleaning up the environment. We need to adapt public health tools to this new problem,” he said.

A street in Villa Inflamable, a shantytown in southern Buenos Aires, in the Dock Sud petrochemical complex on the banks of the Matanzas-Riachuelo River. In that neighbourhood, more than 1,500 families are exposed to industrial pollution and toxic waste, which are poisoning their children. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

At the same time, ACUMAR has undertaken ambitious infrastructure projects, like the construction of an 11-km sewage collector and an 11.5-km outfall, with 840 million dollars in financing from the World Bank. The project, which will prevent the direct discharge of untreated sewage into the Río de la Plata, is to be completed in 2016.

ACUMAR director of institutional relations Antolín Magallanes told IPS that the collector is a tunnel on one side of the Riachuelo to carry sewage to two settling tanks in Dock Sud and Berazategui. The tank is already operating in the latter.

“The collector is very important because 70 or 80 percent of the pollution in the Riachuelo comes from sewage. This will almost completely resolves the issue,” he said.

In addition, six waterfall aeration stations will be built to add oxygen to the water, projected by the Argentina’s water and sanitation utility, AySa, and the University of Buenos Aires.

“The clean-up chapter is extremely important; the planned infrastructure works will provide greater sanitation and treatment, above all in sewage effluent and the potable water supply,” said Javier García Espil, coordinator of the Riachuelo team in the Defensoría.

“But if this is not accompanied by environmental management – that is, zoning, monitoring of industries, flood control, and new forms of using this territory – it would be a limited response,” he told IPS.

ACUMAR stepped up inspections in this region, which accounts for 30 percent of Argentina’s GDP.

“We have around 13,000 registered companies, of which some 7,000 are industrial, and we have identified 1,254 pollutants. Some 900 have already presented reconversion plans,” said ACUMAR’s Magallanes.

The Defensoría recognises these advances but says the credit made available for the reconversions and strategic plans has been insufficient.

“The problem is not simply inspecting and adjusting some process, which is necessary but is part of a bigger problem: defining what kind of industries we want in the future – a major pending challenge,” said the García Espil.

“New mechanisms have to be put in place: environmental management with zoning, taking into consideration the capacity of ecosystems, and the complexity of the territory, involving social participation,” said García Silva.

It has been seven years of complex struggle to remedy two centuries of neglect of a river basin which according to Magallanes “has been the historic refuge of millions of people who didn’t have anywhere to go because of social problems.”

Pavón, an immigrant from the northern province of Chaco, summed it up: “I would go back to the Chaco, which is healthier and nicer for raising kids, but there’s no work. I saw on the news that a kid died of malnutrition there.”

She tried to return to her hometown anyway, “to see if the kids’ lead blood levels went down.” But the attempt failed because she couldn’t find work. Between malnutrition and lead, she had to choose lead.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

In the city of Calama, the so-called mining capital of Chile in the northern region of Antofagasta, the marked social contrasts are reflected by the proximity of affluent neighbourhoods of modern homes next to shantytowns of tumbledown wooden huts. Credit: Marianela Jarroud/IPS

By Marianela Jarroud
CALAMA, Chile, Sep 11 2015 (IPS)

The inhabitants of the northern Chilean mining region of Antofagasta have the highest per capita income in the country. But some 4,000 local families continue to live in slums – a reflection of one of the most marked situations of inequality in this country.

“The contrasts in this region are enormous. The miners earn a lot of money, their wages are really high. It’s common to see enormous houses, and hovels just a few metres away,” said Jaime Meza, who lives in the city of Calama.

In the municipality of Calama, where the city is located, there are 37 mining operations. One of them is the Chuquicamata mine, the world’s biggest open-pit copper mine.

The region of Antofagasta has the highest GDP per capita the country, the highest level of economic growth, and the best conditions for achieving development, according to a study by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

Official figures indicate that this region of 625,000 people has an average per capita income of 37,205 dollars a year, nearly eight times the average per capita income of the southern region of Araucanía, which is just 4,500 dollars.

The national average in this country of 17.6 million people is 23,165 dollars.

However, 45,000 people are living in poverty in Antofagasta, including 4,000 in extreme poverty.

In the region, some 4,000 families, representing thousands of people, live in 42 slums.

The city of Calama, known as the “mining capital of Chile”, which calls itself the oasis of the Atacama desert, is located 2,250 metres above sea level, some 240 km from Antofagasta, the regional capital, and 1,380 km north of Santiago.

The city is home to 150,000 people, although the floating population of workers attracted by the mines drives the total up to over 200,000.

In the municipality of Calama, which covers an area of 15,600 sq km, are located four of the eight mines belonging to the state-run copper company, CODELCO, which has majority ownership of the industry and is the world’s biggest copper producer.

The city of Calama describes itself as an oasis hidden in the middle of the Atacama desert, the driest place in the world. It is also a strategic hub of mining in the region of Antofagasta in northern Chile, where copper mining is the main economic activity. Credit: Marianela Jarroud/IPS

A large part of the 57,000 immigrants living in the region, which borders Argentina and Bolivia and is not far from Peru, are in Calama, drawn by the mining industry.

The mix of nationalities can be seen on a day-to-day basis, such as in the waiting room at a public hospital.

“This is definitely a multicultural city,” Dr. Rodrigo Meza at the Doctor Carlos Cisternas de Calama hospital told IPS. “Of all the births at our hospital, 40 percent are to immigrant women.”

In a short tour of the run-down centre of Calama, which stands in sharp contrast to the better-off parts of the city, visitors run into immigrants from Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru.

“It’s harder to find a Chilean than a foreigner on these streets,” said Sandra from Colombia, in downtown Calama.

The foreign labour force is mainly engaged in domestic service, in the case of women, and in professional and technical jobs or manual labour in mining or construction, in the case of men.

A significant number of immigrant women are also involved in prostitution, traditionally a service in high demand in mining towns, where there are many men on their own.

Meanwhile, the profits raked in by the Calama casino grow around 10 percent a year, and the city’s commercial centre receives over 10 million visitors a year.

“A miner with little experience can start out earning nearly one million pesos (some 1,500 dollars) a month, and the wages just go up from there,” Jaime Meza told IPS. He works in a company that provides consulting services in social responsibility to mining companies, which leads him to constantly visit the mines.

But life in this city is expensive. One kilo of bread, a staple of the Chilean diet, costs over two dollars, and typical housing for a middle-class family costs 150,000 dollars. But “there is money and people willing to pay,” a local shopkeeper told IPS.

By contrast, the minimum wage in Chile is just 350 dollars a month, and many immigrants in Calama earn only half that, since they work without any formal job contract or social security coverage.

The inequality is put on display when the mining companies pay their workers special bonuses at the end of each collective bargaining session.

The bonuses are worth thousands of dollars and local businesses simultaneously launch special sales to draw in customers.

“The contrasts in this city are tremendous. The miners line up every Friday to withdraw money and go out carousing, spending it on women and alcohol,” taxi driver Francisco Muñoz told IPS.

“The differences are very extreme,” added Muñoz, who was born in Calama and has lived here all his life.

The taxi driver said the situation got worse about seven years ago, when CODELCO decided to move the Chuquicamata mining settlement from its spot 15 km from Calama to the city itself.

Some 3,200 families were the last to be moved from the installations where the CODELCO workers lived in comfort with all the modern amenities.

The miners moved directly to homes built for them, which defined zoning in the city: to the east, the new upscale CODELCO housing, and to the west and the north, the poorer parts of town.

“The miners bought these houses at preferential prices, and CODELCO gave them a bonus so they could easily afford them. But now they are selling them at exorbitant prices. It’s almost inconceivable to think of buying a house in Calama. An ordinary person can only afford (subsidised) state housing, never one of the houses they are selling,” Meza said.

The inequality in mineral-rich Calama led in 2009 to a wave of protests demanding that the municipality receive five percent of the revenue brought in by copper, the country’s main source of wealth.

In 2014 alone, Chile produced 5.7 million tons of copper – 31.2 percent of global output.

The protests over the longstanding neglect of the municipality continue to this day, under the slogan “What would Chile be without Calama?”

The demonstrations, the latest of which took place on Aug. 27, are “a predictable outburst,” in the view of anthropologist Juan Carlos Skewes.

“That’s good, because what big outburst do is broaden the avenues of participation,” he told IPS.

He added that the protests will undoubtedly continue as long as there is no concrete response to the demands for more equitable distribution of mining profits in Chile – of which Calama sees very little, even though the mines are in its territory.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Shanty town near Cape Town, South Africa. Credit: Chell Hill(CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

By Busani Bafana
LUANDA, Sep 3 2015 (IPS)

Slums are a curse and blessing in fast urbanising Africa. They have challenged Africa’s progress towards better living and working spaces but they also provide shelter for the swelling populations seeking a life in cities.

Rural Africans are pouring into towns and cities in search of jobs and other opportunities, but African cities – 25 of which are among the 100 fastest growing cities in the world – are not delivering the much needed support services, including housing, at the same rate as people are demanding them.

The United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) projects that nearly 1.3 billion people – more than the current population of China – will be living in cities in Africa in the next 15 years."We must encourage, identify ‎and celebrate the continent. Our schools need to train architects and city planners in no other way than to appreciate and promote African architectural culture" – Tokunbo Omisore, past president of the African Architects Association

Africa’s urbanisation rate of four percent a year is already over-stretching the capacity of its cities to provide adequate shelter, water, sanitation, energy and even food for its growing population.

Safe and resilient cities and human settlements is one of the aims of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to be agreed on in New York next month. As the SDGs replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) launched in September 2000, UN-Habitat has largely succeeded in meeting the target of taking 100 million people out of slums by the time the MDGs expired in Asia, China and part of India … but not in Africa.

However, Tokunbo Omisore, past president of the African Architects Association, believes that Africa can solve its slums situation by planning and developing towns and cities that strike a balance in the provision of housing, water sanitation, energy and transport while luring investments to create jobs.

According to Omisore, the problem lies in the fact that so far settlements have been developed for people but not with people, and he asks if Africa wants the humane aspects of its cultural values and heritage reflected in its cities or has to replicate the cities of developed nations to become classified as developed.

“Slums and sprawls demand understanding the reasons and problems resulting in their existence and identifying the class of people living there,” says Omisore.

“African governments focus on the infrastructural development of developed nations without consideration for the human development of our different communities and ensuring creation of employment opportunities which is key to the sustainability of our cities. People make the cities, not the other way around.”

By redefining slums, policy-makers in Africa can work more on understanding the rural-urban links to arrive at African solutions for African problems, he argues, calling for a “campaign of marketing Africa and appreciating what is African.”

Aisa Kirabo Kacyira, Assistant Secretary General and Deputy Executive Director of UN-Habitat. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

“We must encourage, identify ‎and celebrate the continent. Our schools need to train architects and city planners in no other way than to appreciate and promote African architectural culture.”

At a time Africa is grappling with the issue of land tenure, particularly in agriculture, limited and often expensive land in urban settlements is posing the question of whether Africa should build up or build across, and there are those who argue that densification is the answer to Africa’s housing woes.

At the 2nd Africa Urban Infrastructure Investment Forum hosted by United Cities and Local Government-Africa (UCLG-A) and the government of Angola in Luanda in April,  Aisa Kirabo Kacyira, Assistant Secretary General and Deputy Executive Director of UN-Habitat argued that densification is an avenue for the transformation of Africa and its cities.

“If urbanisation should be possible and if we are going to build landed housing without going up, it simply means it will be expensive, but if we have to densify then we need to go up,” said Kacyira.

“Yes, let us stick to our identity and culture, but let us stick to principles that make economic sense. We are not going to have vibrant cities by running away from the problem and spreading and sprawling.”

Kacyira also argued that by planning, reducing desertification and recycling waste, African cities can help reduce their carbon footprint, a key issue on the post-MDG agenda.

Meanwhile, a Kenya housing project could represent a model for the future of

Housing in Africa. Muungano Wa Wanavijiji, a federation of slum dwellers, has partnered with Shack/Slum Dwellers International to provide decent shelter for people living in slums by creating a low cost three-level house called  ‘The Footprint’, which costs 1,000 dollars.

The project has built 300 houses in two settlements this year. Dwellers pay 20 percent towards the structure and are given support to access a microloan covering 80 percent of the cost.

The UCLG-A network which represents over 1,000 cities in Africa, estimates that Africa needs to mobilise investments of 80 billion dollars a year for upgrading urban infrastructure to meet the needs of urban residents.

Edited by Phil Harris   

Girls from the La Nuestra football team wait to start their twice-weekly training in the Villa 31 shantytown in Buenos Aires. They often have to cut short their practice when boys take over the local pitch. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

By Fabiana Frayssinet
BUENOS AIRES, Jul 6 2015 (IPS)

During a women’s football match in a poor neighbourhood in Buenos Aires, team manager Mónica Santino has to stop the game and ask a group of boys and young men not to invade the pitch where they’re playing. This frequent occurrence is just one symbol of a struggle being played out, centimeter by centimeter, on Argentina’s pitches.

“Come on, stop just for a while, we’re leaving soon. Don’t get in the middle of our game,” Santino said, trying to persuade in a friendly way the boys and teenagers who bully their way onto the pitch where the women’s match is going on, in Villa 31, a shantytown of 40,000 people on the northeast side of Buenos Aires, right in the middle of the upscale Retiro neighourhood.

“If it was a men’s match they would never do that, because they would have serious problems. But since it’s girls who are playing…” she commented to IPS one night the La Nuestra team was playing.

Although girls and women make up half of the population of this ‘villa miseria’, as shantytowns are called in Argentina, it hasn’t been easy for them to gain a place on the football pitch, traditionally men’s territory.“Playing football here, the girls have two hours when they don’t have to think about anything else, when they just have fun, and forge ties with other young women. Many things that happen for us are political, they have a revolutionary component, because something is changing.” – Mónica Santino

“They think football and the pitch are for them,” one of the players, 15-year-old Agustina Olaña, told IPS.

When the project began in 2007, they had to mark off the area they were using with cones and stones. Now they practice twice a week.

“It doesn’t seem like such a big deal, but this achievement sends out an extremely important message about gender because football pitches are the most important public spaces in the barrios,” said Santino, a 49-year-old former football player who was the first woman coach in the Argentine Football Association.

“We live in a country where football is the national sport – it explains us as Argentines, it represents us in world championships, but in football women are still second-class citizens,” she lamented.

La Nuestra (Ours) is also an organisation that seeks greater access to football for women, using the sport to empower them, build self esteem and boost gender equality.

The project initially only targeted teenagers. But it was soon overwhelmed by the spontaneous demand from girls and adult women. Of today’s 70 participants, half are between the ages of six and 12, and the rest are over 13.

“For presents, I would get dolls or little balls, but I wanted footballs,” said one of the students, nine-year-old Florencia Carabajal.

“It seems to me that men haven’t learned that we can also play,” said 10-year-old Juanita Burgos, who hopes to become a professional footballer. “The boys used to call me a tomboy. But now they don’t say anything to me anymore. I tell them that if I want to play ball, who are they to say I can’t.”

But her dream is not an easy one for women to reach in Argentina, even though this country won the World Cup twice and has produced legendary players like Diego Maradona and Leonel Messi.

In women’s football, Argentina has never won a global championship. According to Santino, that’s because the big clubs believe “it isn’t a good show, and doesn’t generate money,” which is why Argentina doesn’t invest in women players as other countries do.

“No club has the structure for lower divisions or for girls to start training as players at an early age, which is when you grow as an athlete and get ready to compete,” she said.

“When Argentina has participated in international tournaments, it has been painful, because when we play against teams like those of Germany or the United States, they score 11, 13, 15 goals,” she said.

“Then the brutal criticism starts: that the Argentine jersey can’t be sullied, or that the country can’t be publicly embarrassed that way. But you can see here that we don’t have the infrastructure. Their arguments are really unfair,” said Santino.

“I was fortunate to be on the team, to have played in a world cup, but we really did it on our own, at great sacrifice,” said the La Nuestra coach, 33-year-old Vanina García, who had no choice but to keep working while playing football.

Santino is pushing for the project to be replicated in other barrios, and to that end she draws on her experience as a scout for street soccer for the homeless. She also hopes to create a women’s football club, where the women will not only play but will discuss issues such as sports and gender as well.

La Nuestra emerged from Santino’s work as coordinator of the Women’s Football Programme of the Women’s Centre in the Buenos Aires district of Vicente López. It receives funds from the Buenos Aires city government’s programme for adolescents, and the national government’s children’s affairs secretariat.

“We have managed to do it with the sweat of our brow,” she said.

According to Santino, an activist for women’s rights in sports and a member of the non-governmental Women in Equality Foundation, “this is a pending issue on the feminist agenda.”

“Women are not expected to run, sweat, make an effort,” she said. “They say that if you play football, your body will turn into a man’s body. There’s a widespread idea that all women who play football are lesbians.”

“I believe this involves the same thing as when we’re talking about the right to have an abortion and all the different kinds of prejudice that emerge. It’s a way of controlling women’s bodies, saying what they should look like,” she said.

For Santino, women’s football provides a good excuse to talk about other feminist demands, such as the right to rest and recreation.

“To come to a game, the big burden was the housework,” she said. “They would come after washing the dishes, or taking care of their younger siblings or their own children, starting at a really young age. Things that women are supposed to do. Boys, on the other hand, get home from school, dump their backpacks, and come to the football pitch directly.”

“Playing football here, the girls and women have two hours when they don’t have to think about anything else, when they just have fun, and forge ties with others. For us, a lot of what is happening is political, it has a revolutionary component, because something is changing,” Santino said.

For Karen Marín, 19, who sells chicken and came to this country from Bolivia with her parents when she was eight years old, La Nuestra has offered a way to make friends and become part of Argentine society.

“I suffered from discrimination because I’m Bolivian, and I would draw into myself and just stay in my room,” she said. “One day they invited me here. I’ve never missed a day since. Football helped me with everything, and it especially helped me to be more easy-going and open.”

Despite the difficulties, coach García believes women’s football, which is now practiced in schools and in most neighbourhood tournaments, is more widely accepted.

“I suppose that’s because women have taken on another role,” she said. “In a lot of areas, but in football as well. Women stand up for themselves, and if they want to play football, they play.”

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

The sharp contrast between the poorer communities’ shanties and the skyline of the Makati City financial district underscores the huge income gap between the haves and have-nots. The Philippines’ income disparity is one of the biggest in South-east Asia. Credit: IPS

By Beatriz Ciordia
UNITED NATIONS, Jun 17 2015 (IPS)

With cities increasingly in the spotlight on the international stage, urban planning and development has become a critical issue in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

While slums continue to grow in most developing countries, reinforcing other forms of inequality, urban planning requires a shift from viewing urbanisation mainly as a problem to seeing it as a powerful tool for development, according to the 2015 UN-Habitat Global Activities Report.“The U.N. is fundamentally challenged with its construct of one country, one vote, when most of the implementation of sustainable development will fall to the world's 200 or so largest cities." -- Daniel Hoornweg

Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson says cities have the potential to shape the future of humankind and to win the battle for sustainable development.

“Cities are at the forefront of the global battle against climate change,” he said last week at the Mayor’s Forum of the World Cities Summit in New York.

“The way in which cities are planned, run and managed is crucial. The leadership role of mayors and city governments is therefore of fundamental importance,” he added.

In the last two decades, cities and urban centres have become the dominant habitats for humankind and the engine-rooms of human development as a whole. For the first time in history in 2008, the urban population outnumbered the rural population, marking the beginning of a new “urban millennium”.

Today, more than half of humanity lives in cities. By 2050, around 70 percent of the world’s population will live in urban areas, according to the report.

Poverty, which remains the greatest global challenge facing the world today, is increasingly concentrated in urban areas.

As Eliasson highlighted, close to one billion of the world’s urban dwellers still live in dire, even life-threatening, slum conditions – and this figure is projected to rise to 1.6 billion by 2030. Some 2.5 billion people in the world lack access to improved sanitation, not least in urban areas.

Daniel Hoornweg, a former World Bank specialist on cities and climate change, says that the lion’s share of implementation will fall to cities regardless of what countries agree in terms of the SDGs.

“National governments, when negotiating, need to fully reflect local government capacities as the ‘doing arm of government’. This is less about urban planning than it is about empowerment and assistance to local governments,” he told IPS.

As stated in the 2014 Revision of the World Urbanization Prospects, urbanisation is integrally connected to the three pillars of sustainable development: economic development, social development and environmental protection.

However, international governments and organisations have not respected this triumvirate, going against the 11^th SDG, which aims to make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable.

“Urban planning is still too focused on economic efficiency and growth, leaving aside the goal of upgrading sustainable lifestyles,” Leida Rijnhout, director of Global Policies and Sustainability of the European Environmental Bureau (EEB), told IPS.

“Facilitating a well-functioning and affordable public transport system can be more important than building highways for an increasing number of private cars. Also, preserving local shops (SMEs) and not ‘killing them’ by building big shopping malls is another example of urban sustainability that provides social cohesion,” she added.

The equation is clear: if well managed, cities offer a unique opportunity for economic development and growth, but at the same time, they can expand the access to basic services, including health care and education, for millions of people.

In other words: providing universal access to electricity, water, sanitation, housing and public transportation for a densely settled urban population promotes economically, socially and environmentally sustainable societies.

However, this goal can only be achieved if U.N. member states and U.N. agencies come together to promote sustainable urbanisation and if there’s a connection between the power dynamics of local governments and national governments.

“The U.N. is fundamentally challenged with its construct of one country, one vote, when most of the implementation of sustainable development will fall to the world’s 200 or so largest cities,” Hoornweg told IPS.

According to Hoornweg, the U.N. needs to be reformed in order to get a fair representation of large cities on the international stage – “Countries like Fiji and Vanuatu cannot have more influence than Shanghai and Sao Paulo.”

He says an alternative approach could be establishing a “pragmatism council” of the world’s largest cities –say those that are expected to have five million or more residents by 2050 (around 120 cities).

“Having this council negotiate things like SDGs would not yield binding accords but they would yield a very powerful ‘shadow accord’ that no country could easily ignore,” he told IPS.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

As part of Milan’s drive to promote a sustainable urban food policy, schoolchildren are being encouraged to take home leftovers of non-perishable food, armed with doggy bags bearing the slogan “I DON’T WASTE”. Credit: Municipality of Milan

By Maurizio Baruffi
MILAN, Apr 28 2015 (IPS)

How can we provide healthy food for everyone, without threatening the survival of our planet? This is the fundamental issue at the centre of Expo 2015 – which has ‘Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life’ as its central theme – and a huge challenge for cities. 

More than 50 percent of the world’s population currently lives in urban areas – a proportion that is projected to increase to 66 percent by 2050 – and ensuring the right to food for all citizens, especially the urban poor, is key to promoting sustainable and equitable development.

As the city hosting Expo 2015, Milan has great visibility and an extraordinary political opportunity for working to build more resilient urban food systems. This is a vision that the City of Milan has decided to fulfil by formulating its own Food Policy, and by bringing together as many cities as possible to subscribe to an Urban Food Policy Pact: a global engagement to “feed cities” in a more just and sustainable way.

How we can provide healthy food for everyone, without threatening the survival of our planet, is the fundamental issue at the centre of Expo 2015 and a huge challenge for cities
The food policy, which will be implemented by Milan’s city government over the next five years, is being drafted through a wide participatory process, starting with an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the city’s food system.

This is a complex picture with some bright spots and some shadows highlighting several thematic areas that the food policy should take into consideration: from access to food to the environmental and social impact of food production and distribution, from food waste to education.

Milan has more than 1.3 million inhabitants, but almost two million people come to the city every day for work, study, leisure or, health care.

Through its public catering company Milano Ristorazione, the City of Milan prepares and delivers more than 80,000 meals each day for schools, retirement homes and reception centres. Thus, there is a lot the City can do to enhance and spread good practices – for example, by tackling food waste and improving the sustainability of the food supply chain.

Many projects are already in place. More than one-third of the fruit and vegetables served by Milano Ristorazione is organic, 57 percent is supplied from short distance, and children at school are encouraged to take home a doggie bag with leftovers of non-perishable food.

Every year, families in Milan still waste the equivalent of one month of food consumption, but several non-profit organisations are saving the food surplus from supermarkets and cafeterias and delivering it to more than one hundred of the city’s charities.

Meanwhile, with poverty on the rise as a result of the prolonged economic crisis, civil society and public institutions are working actively to help those in need. Soup kitchens offer around two million meals each year and the City of Milan itself delivers almost 250,000 meals to the elderly and the disabled.

The Office of the Mayor is currently asking citizens, civil society organisations, scholars, innovative entrepreneurs and chefs, among others, to have their say on the issues that the city’s food policy should address. The purpose is to draw up a strategic document that will be discussed in a town meeting in May, when a number of planning panels (Food Malls) will be launched. Their task is to turn the guidelines into pilot projects.

The process will culminate in the adoption of the food policy by the City of Milan and the launch of a number of pilot projects that will address some of the issues outlined in the food policy over coming years.

In the meantime, progress on the Urban Food Policy Pact is proceeding swiftly. The idea of an international protocol on local food policies was launched in February 2014 by the mayor of Milan, Giuliano Pisapia, at the summit of the C40 (Cities Climate Leadership Group) in Johannesburg.

A few months later, Milan and more than 30 cities around the world started to discuss the Pact, exchanging data, goals and best practices through webinars carried out under the Food Smart Cities for Development project financed by the EU Commission-DEAR (Development, Education, Awareness Raising) programme.

It is thrilling to see very different urban areas such as New York, São Paulo, Ghent, Daegu, Abidjan and Melbourne sharing projects, ideas, problems and solutions with a common goal: to build  a network of cities willing to work together to transform their future, placing the issue of food high on the political agenda.

A group of international experts is currently working on a draft of the Pact’s protocol that will be submitted to an advisory council and cities. The task of the advisory council – which is made up of international organisations, such as the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), World Health Organisation (WHO), World Food Programme (WFP) and the European Commission – is to review the pact and ensure that it is consistent with other international initiatives on the similar subjects.

Many cities have expressed their interest in subscribing to the Urban Food Policy Pact – to be signed in October this year on the occasion of World Food Day – and its proponents expect it to be one of the most significant legacies of Expo 2015.

Looking forward, the Pact will also feature at the U.N. Climate Change Conference to be held in Paris in December.

Agriculture and food production are major contributors to greenhouse gas emissions, and our ability to produce food will be highly affected by climate change – building a more resilient world, where the right to food is ensured for everyone, is a process that need to start from cities, and from their ability to develop sustainable policies.

Edited by Phil Harris    

More information about Milan’s Food Policy and the Urban Food Policy Pact can be found at www.cibomilano.org/

Excerpt:

A typical image of the kind of subdivisions that epitomise urban sprawl, Rio Rancho, New Mexico. Credit: "Rio Rancho Sprawl" by Riverrat303 - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rio_Rancho_Sprawl.jpeg#/media/File:Rio_Rancho_Sprawl.jpeg

By Kitty Stapp
NEW YORK, Mar 19 2015 (IPS)

There’s little argument about the basic facts: It’s ugly (think strip malls and big box stores). It’s not very convenient (hours spent behind the wheel to get to work). And it wreaks havoc on the natural environment (lost farmland and compromised watersheds).

So why is “urban sprawl”, the steady creep outward of cities to more rural areas and corresponding heavy reliance on cars to commute anywhere, just getting worse?"A growing portion of middle-income households want to live in more compact, multimodal communities - often called a 'walkable' or 'new urban' neighbourhood - instead of sprawl." -- Todd Litman

Experts like Todd Litman of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute in British Columbia say it’s a matter of what planners call smart growth – or lack thereof.

“Much of the motivation for middle-class households to move from cities to suburbs was to distance themselves from lower-income households that cannot afford single-family homes and automobile transportation,” he told IPS.

“Over time, anybody who could, left, resulting in economically-disadvantaged households concentrated in urban neighbourhoods.”

The list of woes this segregation created is not short, and includes reduced agricultural and ecological productivity, increased public infrastructure and service costs, increased transport costs, traffic congestion, accidents, pollution emissions, reduced accessibility for non-drivers, and reduced public fitness and health.

In fact, a new analysis released Thursday by the New Climate Economy, the Victoria Institute, and LSE Cities finds that sprawl imposes more than 400 billion dollars in external costs and 625 billion in internal costs annually in the U.S. alone.

Poor communities get even poorer, and research shows that this concentration of poverty increases social problems like crime and drug addiction, stacking the odds against inner city children from the very start.

By contrast, says Litman, the study’s lead author, “smart growth consists of compact neighbourhoods with diverse housing and transportation options which accommodate diverse types of households – young, old, rich, poor, people with disabilities – and residents can choose the most efficient mode for each trip: walking and cycling for local errands, high quality public transit when traveling on busy urban corridors, and automobiles when they are truly optimal overall, considering all impacts.

“This type of development tends to reduce per capita land consumption, reduces per capita vehicle ownership and travel, and increases the portion of trips made by walking, cycling and public transport, which provides numerous savings and benefits compared with the same people living and working in sprawled locations,” he said.

Once considered primarily a blight of developed countries, the problem has now gone global, according to UN Habitat.

In Guadalajara, Mexico, between 1970 and 2000, the surface area of the city grew 1.5 times faster than the population. The same is true for cities in China; Antananarivo, the capital of Madagascar; Johannesburg, South Africa’s largest commercial hub; and the capitals of Egypt and Mexico, Cairo and Mexico City, respectively, the agency says.

In Latin America, sprawl has wreaked serious damage on environmentally sensitive areas. These include Panama City and its surrounding Canal Zone, Caracas and its adjacent coastline, San José de Costa Rica and its mountainous area, and São Paulo and its water basins.

“For more than half a century, most countries have experienced rapid urban growth and increased use of motor vehicles,” U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon noted in the Global Report on Human Settlements 2013. “This has led to urban sprawl and even higher demand for motorized travel with a range of environmental, social and economic consequences.

“Urban transport is a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions and a cause of ill-health due to air and noise pollution. The traffic congestion created by unsustainable transportation systems is responsible for significant economic and productivity costs for commuters and goods transporters.”

Reversing this trend now is critical, since projections show that between 1950 and 2050, the human population will quadruple and shift from 80 percent rural to nearly 80 percent urban.

Typical urban densities today range from 5-20 residents per hectare in North America, 20-100 residents per hectare in Europe, and more than 100 residents per hectare in many Asian cities.

One major challenge, Litman says, is the common perception that cities are inefficient and dangerous, when in fact “in many ways they are actually more efficient and safer than suburban communities, and they become more efficient and safer as more middle-class households move into urban neighbourhoods.”

In addition, zoning codes and development policies often discourage urban development and favour sprawl, and transportation policies excessively favour investments in car travel.

“For example, most jurisdictions devote far more road space and funding to automobile transportation than to walking, cycling and public transit, and impose minimum parking requirements on developers which result in massive subsidies for motorists, and it is difficult to shift those resources to alternative modes even if they are more cost effective overall. Resource efficient modes – walking, cycling and public transit – get little respect!”

The good news, he said, is that “a growing portion of middle-income households want to live in more compact, multimodal communities – often called a ‘walkable’ or ‘new urban’ neighbourhood – instead of sprawl. They are willing to accept a smaller house and they want to drive less and rely more on walking, cycling and pubic transit, but they can only do so if zoning codes and development policies change to support that.”

As a positive example, he said, many jurisdictions have ‘complete streets’ policies which recognise that public roads should be designed to service diverse users and uses, including walking, cycling, automobile, public transit, plus adjacent businesses and residents, so planning should account for the needs of pedestrians, cyclists and sidewalk café patron, not just motorists.

“Many cities are doing well on some [projects and policies] but not others. For example, Los Angeles is improving walking, cycling and public transit, but doing poorly in allowing compact infill development. Vancouver has great density near downtown but needs to allow more density in other areas. Portland and Seattle have great cycling facilities, but could have more bus lanes.

“Virtually no city is implementing all of the policy reforms that I think are justified based on economic efficiency and social equity principles,” Litman concluded.

“For example, even relatively progressive cities restrict development densities and require minimum parking for new development, few cities have programs to both increase affordable housing supply and improve livability – e.g., building more local parks – in accessible neighbourhoods, and only a few cities use efficient road tolls or parking fees to control congestion. There is more to be done!”

Edited by Roger Hamilton-Martin

The fenced-in Plaza Francia park in the Buenos Aires neighbourhood of Recoleta. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

By Fabiana Frayssinet
BUENOS AIRES, Feb 5 2015 (IPS)

If cities have souls, the Argentine capital’s is turning more and more grey. Real estate speculation, the fencing in and paving of parks, and the installation of private bars and restaurants in public squares have changed the face of the city. Green spaces with carefully tended flower beds? Today they’re found mainly in the nostalgia brought on by a classic tango song.

Buenos Aires used to be green, and springtime was bursting with colours, thanks to all the flowering trees.

That is what you see in photos from last century, in parks like El Rosedal – the Rose Garden – and in verses from songs like the one immortalised by legendary tango singer Carlos Gardel about “the little path that time has erased…lined with clover and flowering reeds.”

Time has erased the little paths – and the green spaces they crossed. Things have changed so much in the so-called “Paris of the pampas” since the era – 1880 to 1930 – when the city parks, inspired by those in the French capital, were created.

Green spaces per inhabitant in some Latin American cities. Credit: ESCI/IBD

“The soul of Buenos Aires used to be the identity of each neighbourhood, where families would sit in chairs outside, where there was a sense of trust in the streets, where the street, the squares and the entire city were like a continuation of the home…things have been diluted now into a kind of city where everything is sort of the same, pretentious and exclusive,” the writer Gabriela Massuh wrote in an article in “Ñ” magazine in November 2014.

In its State of Latin American and Caribbean Cities 2012 report, U.N. Habitat cites a World Health Organisation (WHO) recommendation that cities should have at least nine to 11 sq metres of green space per capita.

“Concretely, the city needs at least 70 new plazas to reach the number of square metres of green space recommended by WHO,” Massuh, the author of “El robo de Buenos Aires” (The Theft of Buenos Aires – Sudamericana publishing company 2014), told Tierramérica.

According to the U.N. Habitat report, the variety of criteria for defining green space and its irregular distribution in urban areas makes it difficult to calculate the real average.

In 2014, the city government launched the Buenos Aires Green Plan, aimed at mitigating the effects of the damage caused by climate change, reducing temperatures in the city, cutting energy consumption and curbing greenhouse gas emissions.

The plan reported that green spaces in the city proper (which accounts for three million of the total Greater Buenos Aires population of 13 million) covered 1,129 hectares, equivalent to 3.9 sq metres per capita.

Estimates by the Inter-American Development Bank’s (IDB) Emerging and Sustainable Cities Initiative (ESCI), also based on the WHO recommendation, indicate that Buenos Aires is one of the least green cities in the region.

One of the heads of ESCI, Horacio Terraza, said that with the exception of Curitiba in southern Brazil, which has as many green spaces as cities in northern Europe, the Latin American cities studied leave a great deal to be desired in terms of green areas.

The other cities that meet healthy standards with regard to the amount of green space, besides Curitiba (with 51.3 sq metres per capita), are Porto Alegre (13.62) and São Paulo (11.58) in Brazil, followed by Montevideo in Uruguay (12.68), Rosario in Argentina (10.4) and Belo Horizonte in Brazil (9.4).

Ranking of Latin American cities according to green space per capita and square metres. Credit: ESCI/IBD

In Buenos Aires, the deterioration of green spaces began during the 1976-1983 military dictatorship, when city squares were paved over and cement structures were built in parks as a symbol of development.

According to Massuh, this tendency continued after the return to democracy, during the neoliberal years of the 1990s, and again since 2007, when neo-conservative Mayor Mauricio Macri took office in Buenos Aires.

“The method of ‘militarising’ public spaces is very similar to that used by the military to reform green spaces under the pretext of security,” she said.

“Instead of proposing better lighting or greater involvement by local residents in taking care of the squares, the grass turned into cement, paved bike lanes were laid in green spaces – like what is happening in the Palermo neighbourhood, which has turned into an oven in the summer because of the paving over of open ground – and fences have begun to be put up to keep the homeless from using the squares and parks at night,” she added.

According to Massuh, this “clean-up makes green spaces and shade in the summer exclusive, keeping poor people out,” and will not be mitigated by the Buenos Aires Green Plan.

Among other measures seeking to turn Buenos Aires into a green city, the 20-year Green Plan promises to guarantee green spaces “no more than 350 metres away for every local resident,” build 12 parks and 78 squares, refurbish 30 and plant one million trees in 10 years – one for every three inhabitants.

But she said the green plan is contradicted by initiatives like a city project which, although it has not gone ahead due to the protests it triggered, meant to install a garbage truck terminal on seven of the 350 hectares of the Costanera Sur Ecological Reserve on the banks of the Rio de la Plata, considered a major green lung for the city.

Another example was the concession free of charge of 15 of the 20 hectares of Roca Park, “one of the few spaces with creative potential in the city,” to build a truck cargo terminal, which for now has been blocked in court.

The same thing is true of the authorisation for installing bars in squares and parks, which according to the city government increases their value in terms of service to the community.

“That ‘increase in value’ in the squares is a whitewash and it also increases the amount of cement and concrete and involves fencing them in…they don’t even keep the city lakes and ponds clean,” biologist Matías Pandolfi of the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET), told Tierramérica.

“Real estate speculation is our mega-mining or transgenic soy,” added Massuh, citing lawyer and environmental activist Enrique Viale, who describes “urban extractivism” as the expulsion of the population, the concentration of wealth and territory, the appropriation of public spaces, generalised damage to the environment, and the degradation of institutional life.

Pandolfi said that exploitation of urban natural resources hurts much more than the landscape “and is a hazard to the health of the citizens.”

“Through the process of photosynthesis trees absorb carbon dioxide and oxygenate the air. They also help regulate the water and heat cycles in the city,” he argued.

The appropriation of green areas is also reflected, Pandolfi said, by the fencing in of parks. A total of 86, one-third of the total, have already been fenced in, he said.

“To generate ecological awareness, green spaces must look as natural as possible…fencing in a public space, which is a democratic space par excellence, removes that, it’s greatest virtue,” he said.

Parks, said Pandolfi, are “hubs of social life and creators of citizen environmental awareness.”

“That’s why our surroundings have to be as natural as possible. What ecological conscience can be transmitted from a Starbucks or a McCafé installed in a park with fencing around it?” he asked.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

The main street of Añelo, a remote town in Argentina’s southern Patagonia region which is set to become the country’s shale oil capital. In 15 years the population will have climbed to 25,000, 10 times what it was just two years ago. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

By Fabiana Frayssinet
AÑELO, Argentina, Oct 23 2014 (IPS)

This small town in southern Argentina is nearly a century old, but the unconventional fossil fuel boom is forcing it to basically start over, from scratch. The wave of outsiders drawn by the shale fuel fever has pushed the town to its limits, while the plan to turn it into a “sustainable city of the future” is still only on paper.

The motto of this small town in the province of Neuquén is upbeat and premonitory: “The future found its place.”

But for now the town’s roads, most of which are unpaved and throw up clouds of dust from the heavy traffic of trucks and luxury cars driven by oil company executives, contradict that slogan.

“Many eyes around the world are on Añelo, but unfortunately we don’t have a good showcase, to put us on display,” the director of the town’s health centre, Rubén Bautista, told IPS.

“We are living on top of black gold, they take riches out of our soil, but they leave practically nothing to the local population,” added the doctor who, along with three other colleagues, covers the health needs of a population that doubled, from 2,500 to 5,000, in just two years.According to conservative projections, Añelo will have a population of 25,000 in 15 years, including people directly employed by the oil industry, indirect workers, and their families, who have begun to pour into the new mecca for Argentina’s energy self-sufficiency plans.

Añelo, a bleak town on the banks of the Neuquén river surrounded by fruit trees, goats and vineyards, is the town closest to the Loma Campana shale oil field, which is being worked by Argentina’s state oil company YPF and the U.S.-based Chevron.

It is only eight km from the oil field, which is part of new riches that hold out the biggest promise for revenue to fuel the country’s development: Vaca Muerta, a 30,000-sq km geological reserve that is rich in shale oil and gas and has made this country the second in the world after the United States in production of unconventional fossil fuels.

But the black gold is not shining yet in Añelo – which means forgotten place in the Mapuche indigenous language – located some 100 km north of Neuquén, the provincial capital.

The health centre, which refers serious cases to hospitals in the provincial capital, has just two ambulances, while 117 companies from across the planet are setting up shop in and around the town.

According to conservative projections, Añelo will have a population of 25,000 in 15 years, including people directly employed by the oil industry, indirect workers, and their families, who have begun to pour into the new mecca for Argentina’s energy self-sufficiency plans.

“They are people who come to Añelo with the idea of finding a better future…thinking about what unconventional fossil fuels could mean in their lives,” YPF Neuquén’s communications manager, Federico Calífano, told IPS.

YPF alone has 720 employees in the area. The workers come from nearby towns as well as other provinces, and from abroad, brought in by international companies in the construction, chemistry, hotel, transportation and services industries.

The town’s only hotel is full, and camps spring up on any flat area, with containers turned into comfortable temporary lodgings for the workers. Rent for a small apartment is five times what people pay in the most expensive neighbourhoods in Buenos Aires.

“We are building a city from scratch,” Añelo Mayor Darío Díaz told IPS, although he pointed out that even before the shale boom the town was “a strategic waypoint.”

YPF has been exploiting unconventional fossil fuels in the region since the 1980s, but “when their work was done they would leave,” Díaz explained. “This is much more intensive; there will be a lot of work over the next 30 years.”

“The town has infrastructure for around 2,500 inhabitants. It is too small now given the new demand for basic services like water, electricity, roads, and dust emission,” the province’s environment secretary, Ricardo Esquivel, told IPS.

The sound of hammering and pounding is constant. Two workers, who make the 120-km commute back and forth every day from Cipolletti, in the neighbouring province of Río Negro, are working on a new sidewalk. “It’s spectacular.There’s a lot of work here for everyone. More people are needed. The problem is housing,” construction worker Esteban Aries told IPS.

The YPF Foundation carried out an “urban footprint” study which gave rise to the Añelo Local Development Plan. The plan has the support of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and its Emerging Sustainable Cities Initiative.

Carried out together with the local and provincial governments, the plan outlines different growth scenarios with the aim of assessing the risks and vulnerabilities of the area.

It addresses, among other aspects, “what surface area the city should have, how the urban planning process should start, what the diagram should look like, what services are needed – what Añelo is going to need today and in two, three, or five years,” Calífano said.

YPF reported that the work had already begun, including an expansion of the sanitation system, construction of homes for doctors, and a vocational training centre, linked to the needs of the oil industry. Primary healthcare clinics were set up in two trailer trucks – although Dr. Bautista said that’s not enough.

The economic growth has brought heavy traffic. The government is planning a two-lane highway to Vaca Muerta, on the so-called “oil route”, to keep the trucks out of the town.

“The steadily growing number of accidents is overwhelming,” Bautista said. The average has increased from 10 traffic and work-related accidents a month two years ago to 17 today.

“You have to keep in mind that most of the activity has been going on for a year,” said Pablo Bizzotto, YPF’s regional manager of unconventional fuels in Loma Campana, where some 20 wells are drilled every month, which has driven production up from 3,000 to 21,000 barrels per day of oil.

“There are things that we will obviously work out together with the authorities, as we go. This is all very new,” he said.

Agricultural engineer Eduardo Tomada left everything behind in Buenos Aires and invested his savings to open up a restaurant in Añelo, which is now packed with workers.

His cook, local resident Norma Olate, said she was happy because she’s earning more. But she nostalgically remembers when her town was “practically a sand dune.”

Development has brought work, “but also bad things,” the 60-year-old Olate told IPS. “There have been armed robberies, which we didn’t see here before.”

Olate, who has young, single daughters, said she is also worried about “the invasion of men.”

“So many men!” she said, laughing. “I’m not interested anymore, but the girls…there are guys who come and deceive them, a lot of them end up pregnant….that’s bad for the town too.”

Provincial lawmaker Raúl Dobrusín of the opposition Popular Unity party denounced the rise in prostitution, drug trafficking and use, alcoholism and corruption.

“We say the only things modernised in Añelo were the casino and the brothel,” he said ironically.

Dobrusín complained about the government’s lack of “planning” and “control” over these and other problems, such as real estate speculation and prices that are now unaffordable for many people in the town.

Nevertheless, for Mayor Díaz the balance is positive. “We have to take advantage of this opportunity for Añelo to develop as a town and improve the living standards of our people. What worries me is whether we will make the necessary investments quickly enough,” he said.

The province is preparing a “strategic development plan” for Añelo, along with nearby “oil micro-cities”, which will include the construction of an industrial park, schools, hospitals, roads and housing, and increased security.

“We’re not going to build an oil camp in Añelo without a city,” the mayor summed up.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

The heat island generated by São Paulo draws rainfall away from the water sources the city depends on. Credit: Rafael Neddermeyer/Fotos Públicas

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Oct 10 2014 (IPS)

Agricultural losses are no longer the most visible effect of the drought plaguing Brazil’s most developed region. Now the energy crisis and the threat of water shortages in the city of São Paulo are painful reminders of just how dependent Brazilians are on regular rainfall.

Nine million of the 21 million inhabitants of Greater São Paulo are waiting for the completion of the upgrading of the Cantareira system, made up of six reservoirs linked by 48 km of tunnels and canals, which can no longer supply enough water.

For the past four months, the water that has reached the taps of nine million residents of Brazil’s biggest city has come from the “dead” or inactive storage water in the Cantareira system – the water that cannot be drained from a reservoir by gravity and can only be pumped out. These supplies will last until Mar. 15, 2015, according to the state government.

“If rainfall in the [upcoming southern hemisphere] summer is only average, we will have another complicated autumn; and if it rains less it will mean a collapse,” architect Marussia Whately, a water resource specialist with the non-governmental Socioenvironmental Institute (ISA), told Tierramérica.

There is no possible replacement system, she said, because Cantareira supplies water to 45 percent of the metropolitan area, distributed by Sao Paulo’s state water utility Sabesp, while other water sources are also low due to drought and pollution.

Whately said the intensification of extreme weather events, such as this year’s drought in southeast Brazil, preceded by two years of below normal rainfall, is one of the causes of the water crisis in the state.

To that is added poor management, which has mainly sought to increase supply by tapping into distant sources that require infrastructure to transport water long distances, without adequately combating losses and waste, she said. But in her view, the main reason is “the lack of dialogue and social participation” regarding water supply.

Droughts have become more frequent and intense this century. “The first alert came in 2001, when the system was reduced to 11 percent of capacity in August,” said journalist and activist Isabel Raposo, who has lived for 30 years in the Sierra da Cantareira, a forested mountain range north of the city with a huge state park. Water piped in from far away flows through the hills.

“The current crisis could have been avoided” if the large-scale reuse of water had been adopted after the crisis 13 years ago, Ivanildo Hespanhol, a professor of hydraulic engineering at the University of São Paulo, told Tierramérica.

The Jacareí reservoir, part of the Cantareira supply system, has begun pumping inactive storage water to São Paulo, Brazil’s largest city, which is stricken by drought. Credit: Vagner Campos/Fotos Públicas

The five sewage treatment plants in the metropolitan region provide primary processing of 16,000 litres per second. But with further treatment the wastewater could be prepared for a wide range of uses, and could even be made potable, said the renowned expert.

That could increase the total amount of water available in the city by one-quarter – enough to relieve the pressure on the water sources and make it possible to replenish them, even with lower than normal levels of rainfall.

“Unfortunately decision-makers don’t plan, but only manage the crisis,” said Hespanhol, who is confident that the situation will give a boost to “the concept of water treatment and reuse.”

Industrial companies already use these techniques, reducing their water consumption by up to 80 percent and recuperating their investments in under two years, he said. Political will and a “realistic legal framework” are lacking, as well as a better understanding of the issue by the environmental authorities, he added.

The emergency now requires more urgent measures, said Whately, such as reducing waste, which leads to losses of up to 30 percent according to different institutions; incentives for saving water; and better use of existing water resources.

Given the “failure of the current model of water management,” with regulatory agencies lacking authority and basin committees that are ignored, ISA is trying to identify and mobilise concerned experts and institutions to discuss a diagnosis and solutions for the water crisis, she said.

“More than 90 proposals for short-term measures have been presented,” she added.

The 2001 drought led to a power shortage and blackouts that forced Brazilians to reduce electricity consumption for nine months starting in June of that year. The drop in the water level in rivers hurt the hydropower plants, which produced 90 percent of the electrical energy consumed in Brazil at the time.

As a result, the energy sector was restructured, with an expansion of thermoelectricity, which is more costly and more polluting because it uses fossil fuels, but provides a measure of energy security. Hydropower’s share of the country’s installed capacity thus fell to 67 percent.

For that reason, this year’s drought, even though it has been more severe in many basins, did not create an energy deficit, but drove up the price of electricity due to the full use of thermal power plants, generating insolvency problems for energy distributors, which were bailed out by the government, and exacerbating the difficulties suffered by the most energy-dependent industries.

The vast sugarcane fields of the state of São Paulo have also suffered from the persistent drought, which cut short the harvest and aggravated the crisis in the sugar and ethanol industries. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

Even worse, because it affects millions of people, is the water supply problem in São Paulo and the surrounding areas. At least 30 cities have implemented mandatory water restrictions in the past few months.

In Itu, a city of 160,000 located 100 km from São Paulo, local inhabitants have held demonstrations and occupied the city council building in September, to protest supply problems that were worse than what the local water company had announced.

In São Paulo, people in the neighbourhoods supplied by the Cantareira system complain that water has been rationed, without any officially announced measures, for several months. Sabesp, the main water supplier throughout the state of São Paulo, admitted that it had lowered the water pressure in the pipes at night to prevent leaks and waste.

“We had no water for three or four days in August,” said economist Marcelo Costa Santos, who lives in an 18-story building in Alto Pinheiros, a quiet neighbourhood on the west side of São Paulo. He told Tierramérica that the low water pressure made it impossible to pump water up to the higher floors.

And climate change threatens to aggravate the situation. A good part of the rain that falls in southeast Brazil comes from the Amazon rainforest, where deforestation has reduced humidity levels.

It can be inferred that São Paulo is receiving less water from the Amazon, said Antonio Nobre with the National Institute for Space Research (INPE).

Deforestation, the researcher told Tierramérica, also weakens the “flying rivers” – currents of air that carry water vapor resulting from evapotranspiration in the rainforest to the interior of Brazil. Rainfall in the centre and south of the country depends on the Amazon “water pump”.

Another local phenomenon aggravates the situation. The “heat island” formed by the increase in urban temperatures in Greater São Paulo attracts rain away from water sources, said Raposo.

Recent studies found that rainfall is generally more intense in the city of São Paulo than in the nearby mountains that feed the reservoirs of the Cantareira system. Twofold damage is the consequence: cities suffer constant flooding even though it is raining less than necessary, the activist said.

This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes