“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

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

India is home to one-fourth of the world’s poor. Credit: Neeta Lal/IPS

By Neeta Lal
NEW DELHI, Feb 14 2015 (IPS)

Despite being one of the world’s fastest expanding economies, projected to clock seven-percent GDP growth in 2017, India – a nation of 1.2 billion – is trailing behind on many vital social development indices while also hosting one-fourth of the world’s poor.

While the United Nations prepares to wrap up a decade-and-a-half of poverty alleviation efforts, framed through the lens of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), by the end of this year, the international community has its eyes on the future.

"A focus on accelerating sustainable, inclusive and balanced growth is key to poverty eradication." -- Ranjana Kumari, director of the Delhi-based non-profit Centre for Social Research (CSR)
The coming development era will be centred on sustainability, driven by targets set out in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Home to one-sixth of the world’s population, India’s actions will determine to a great extent global efforts to lift millions out of destitution in the coming years.

Experts say its patchy progress on the MDGs offers some insights into how the country will both assist and hold back global development efforts in the post-2015 era.

Earlier this month the U.N. released a report lauding India’s efforts to half the number of poor people living within its borders to the current 270 million since the country joined hands with 189 U.N. member states to draft the MDGs 15 years ago.

While making strides in poverty reduction, India is also on track to achieve gender parity at the primary, secondary and tertiary levels on the education front by the year’s end though it lags significantly on the goal of empowering its women.

“The proportion of women working in decent jobs outside agriculture remains low; their participation in the overall labour force is also low and declining in rural areas; women in farming are constrained by lack of land ownership; and women are poorly represented in parliament,” the U.N. report stated.

The report recommends a continued emphasis on increasing both growth and social spending. However, experts point out this will be a significant challenge against the backdrop of India’s new Hindu nationalist government slashing social sector spending by about 30 percent in the supplementary budget.

Wretched poverty persists

The allocation for the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), an initiative to provide employment to all adult members of poor Indian families for five dollars per day, is now the lowest it has been in five years.

Despite robust economic growth, scenes of destitution are visible all throughout India, a nation of 1.2 billion people. Credit: Neeta Lal/IPS

By the end of last year, state governments had reported a drop of 45-percent in funds allocated by the Centre, from 240 billion to 130 billion rupees (3.8 million to 2.1 million dollars) – the sharpest decline since the scheme’s inception in 2005.

India needs to balance its economic growth while tackling poverty as the latter can considerably erode the progress achieved from high GDP numbers, say economists.

“Removing poverty is clearly the most important of the goals as it has clear linkages to the other MDGs,” Delhi-based economist Parvati Singhal, a visiting professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University, told IPS.

“It needs to be central to the post-2015 development agenda. Higher income resulting from growth is the best panacea for poverty […],” Singhal elaborated.

According to Sabyasachi Kar, associate professor at the Institute of Economic Growth, with the University of Delhi, a major reason for continuing poverty in India is the country’s below-par industrial growth, which scuppers job creation.

“Programmes like NREGA and food-for-work programmes are at best safety nets that will keep people from starving. We need robust growth in the industrial and manufacturing sectors to generate employment and alleviate poverty while raising incomes permanently.

“Effective domestic resource mobilisation and incentivising the private sector to invest in sustainable green technologies will also help to tackle poverty,” the economist added.

Though Asia’s third largest economy has shown good progress in achieving its poverty reduction target, the malaise has ironically become more visible.

The sight of homeless construction workers, beggars, rag pickers, child labourers – the ensemble cast of India’s apparently prospering megacities – reflects its harsh underbelly.

According to a report entitled ‘Effects of Poverty in India: Between Injustice and Exclusion’, “The spectacular growth of cities has made poverty in India more visible and palpable through its famous slums.”

U.N. data shows that 93 million people in India live in slums, including 50 percent of the population in its capital, New Delhi.

Meanwhile, the megacity of Mumbai, home to 19 million, hosts nine millions slum-dwellers, up from six million just 10 years ago.

Dharavi, the second largest slum in Asia, is located in central Mumbai and is home to between 800,000 and one million people, crammed into just 2.39 square kilometres of space.

Investing in women and children: crucial for development

Public health in India is also an area of concern, with the country trailing in the realms of infant and child mortality as well as maternal health.

According to the World Bank India accounts for 21 percent of deaths among children below five years of age. Its maternal mortality ratio (MMR) – the number of women who die during pregnancy, delivery or in the first 42 hours of a termination per 100,000 live births – is 190. Countries like Ecuador and Guatemala fare better than India, with MMRs of 87 and 140 respectively.

Addressing these issues will be a considerable challenge as India is home to 472 million children or about 20 percent of the world’s child population, while nearly 50 percent of its population is comprised of women.

Health activists are advocating for greater capital investment in public health. India currently spends an abysmal one percent of its GDP on health, half the sum allocated by neighbouring China.

Even Russia and Brazil, two other nations in the BRICS association of emerging economies of which India is a part, invest 3.5 percent of their respective GDPs on health.

“A focus on accelerating sustainable, inclusive and balanced growth is key to poverty eradication,” Ranjana Kumari, director of the Delhi-based non-profit Centre for Social Research (CSR), told IPS.

The activist feels that growth and development should not only be measured in GDP terms but also in terms of per capita income and per capita spending.

“Right now, there is inequitable distribution of wealth in India. Money is concentrated in the hands of a few while the masses struggle to get two square meals a day. This inequity needs to be addressed as there’s no conflict in the growth of social justice and GDP growth; both ought to work in tandem for success.”

Speaking at the launch of the U.N. report on India last week, Shamshad Akhtar, under-secretary-general of the U.N., advocated for a new sustainable agriculture-based green revolution, which could contribute to ending hunger not only in India but across South Asia at large.

With eight percent of India’s population engaged in agriculture, amounting to some 95.8 million people, sustainable development will be impossible without lifting India’s farmers out of poverty, researchers contend.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

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.