A couple wait on an overturned garbage bin to be rescued by boat during the Chennai flooding of December 2015. Credit: R. Samuel/IPS

By Jency Samuel
CHENNAI, India, Oct 19 2016 (IPS)

“The rain was our nemesis as well as our saviour,” says Kanniappan, recalling the first week of December 2015 when Chennai was flooded.

“Kind neighbours let us stay in the upper floors of their houses as the water levels rose. The rainwater was also our only source of drinking water,” he added.“Urban planners value land, not water.” -- Sushmita Sengupta of the Centre for Science and Environment

Kalavathy, another resident, isn’t very familiar with the links between extreme weather events and climate change. All she knows is that in December, her house was completely submerged in 15 feet of water. Now, after working night shifts, she gets up at 4am to pump water, supplied by the administration during fixed timings.

The simple lives of Kalavathy and her neighbours, who live in row houses behind the 15-foot-high wall built on the embankment of Adyar River, seem to revolve around water. Either too much or too little.

Chennai, the capital city of the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, literally became an island in December 2015. The airport was inundated. Trains and flights had to be cancelled, cutting off the city for a few days from the rest of India.

The Chennai floods claimed more than 500 lives and economic losses were pegged at 7.4 billion dollars, with similar figures for all flood-affected Indian cities.

Urban flooding in India and other countries is one of the issues being discussed at the Habitat III meeting in Quito, Ecuador this week. The Indian government has also released a draft for indicators of what a “Smart City” would look like.

Extreme weather events

Incessant rains also left Chennai  inundated in November. “The average rainfall for Chennai in November is 407.4 mm, but in 2015 it was 1218.6 mm. For December, the average rainfall is 191 mm, whereas in December 2015 it was 542 mm, breaking a 100-year-old rainfall record,” said G.P. Sharma of Skymet Weather Services Pvt Ltd.

While the extreme rainfall that Chennai experienced was attributed to El Nino, scientists predict that with climate change, extreme weather events will increase. “There will be more rain spread over fewer days, as happened in Chennai in 2015, Kashmir in 2014, Uttarakhand in 2013,” says Sushmita Sengupta of the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), a Delhi-based research and advocacy organisation. This concurs with the IPCC fifth assessment report that predicts that India’s rainfall intensity will increase.

Poor urban planning and urban flooding

According to India’s National Institute of Disaster Management, floods are the most recurrent of all disasters, affecting large numbers of people and areas. The Ministry of Home Affairs has identified 23 of the 35 Indian states as flood-prone. It was only after the Mumbai floods of 2005 that the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA), a government body, distinguished urban floods as different from riverine floods. The cause of each is different and hence each needs a different control strategy.

The Chennai city administration was ill-prepared to cope with the freak weather, in spite of forecast warnings from Indian Meteorological Department. Jammu & Kashmir had neither a system for forecasting floods nor an exclusive department for disaster management when it was hit by floods in 2014. While a different reason can be attributed for the flooding and its aftermath for each of the Indian cities, the common thread that connects  them is extremely poor urban planning.

As per a report by Bengaluru-based Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS), in 1951, there were only five Indian cities with a population of more than one million. In 2011, this number rose to 53. To cater to the increasing population, the built-up area increased, roads were paved and open spaces dwindled.

But an IIHS analysis shows that the built-up area has been increasing disproportionately compared to population growth. Between 2000 and 2010, Kolkata’s population grew by about 7 percent, but its built area by 48 percent. In the same period, Bengaluru’s built area doubled compared to its population, indicating the commercial infrastructural development.

Disappearing urban sponges

The open spaces that disappeared, giving way to concrete structures, are primarily water bodies that act as sponges, soaking up the rainwater. Increasing population also led to increased waste and the cities’ water bodies turned into dumping grounds for municipal solid waste, as was the case with Chennai’s Pallikaranai marshland. They also became sewage carriers like the River Bharalu that flows through Guwahati, Assam.

“Urban planners value land, not water,” says Sengupta.

A 1909 map of Chennai shows a four-mile-long lake in the centre of the city. It exists now only in street names such as Tank Bund Road and Tank View Road. T.K. Ramkumar, a member of the Expert Committee on Pallikaranai appointed by the Madras High Court, told IPS that in the 1970s, the government filled up lakes within the city and developed housing plots under ‘eri schemes’, eri in Tamil meaning lakes.

In fact eris are a series of cascading tanks, where water overflowing from a tank flows to the next and so on till the excess water reaches the Bay of Bengal. But the marsh and the feeder channels have been blocked by buildings, leading to frequent floods. NDMA suggests that urbanisation of watersheds causes increased flow of water in natural drains and hence the drains should be periodically widened. Not only are the water courses not widened, but heavily encroached upon.

Encroachment of water bodies is a pan-India problem. The water spread of all its cities have been declining rapidly over the years. “Of the 262 lakes recorded in Bengaluru in the 1960s, only ten have water. 65 of Ahmedabad’s 137 lakes have made way for buildings,” says Chandra Bhushan of CSE. Statistics reveal that the more a city’s water spread loss, the more the number of floods it has experienced.

Way forward

After the Chennai floods, the government-appointed Parliamentary Standing Committee demanded strict action against encroachments. It directed the Tamil Nadu administration to clear channels and river beds to enable water to flow, to improve drainage networks and to develop vulnerability indices by creating a calamity map. The Committee’s direction applies equally well to all the cities.

The Indian government has allocated 164 million dollars to restore 63 water bodies under its Lakes and Wetlands Conservation Program. But urban flood statistics reveal that the efforts need to be speeded up.

Yet in the Draft Indian Standard for Smart Cities Indicator, there is no indicator to measure the disaster preparedness and resilience of a city.

“Catchment areas and feeder channels should be declared ecologically sensitive and should be protected by stringent laws,” says Sengupta.

As for Chennai, “The retention capacity of Pallikaranai should be enhanced by suitable methods after hydrological and hydrogeological studies says,” said Dr. Indumathi M. Nambi of the Indian Institute of Technology.

She adds that the Buckingham Canal should be connected to the sea to facilitate discharge during floods. Plans are afoot to demonstrate this with the cooperation of industries and NGOs.

The plans are sure to work as Jaipur has created a successful public-private partnership model. Mansagar Lake, which had turned into a repository of sewage, received 70 percent funding from the central government for restoration. The state government raised the balance with the help of the tourism industry by allocating space for entertainment and hospitality spots, successfully restoring the lake.

The restoration of water bodies and flood mitigation measures will need to be site-specific, taking the extent and topographical conditions of catchment area, existing and proposed storm water drains, status of embankments and bunds of water bodies and permeability of soil conditions into account. But with such measures and political will, experts believe the safety of inhabitants and urban resilience can be accomplished.

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

Israeli settler home in the middle of Sheikh Jarrah, a predominantly Palestinian neighbourhood in East Jerusalem, following the eviction of a number of Palestinian families. Credit: Mel Frykberg/IPS

By Mel Frykberg
RAMALLAH, West Bank , Oct 12 2014 (IPS)

A deliberate Israeli policy to Judaise East Jerusalem has forced thousands of Palestinians out of their homes and created a chronic housing shortage in the occupied part of the city.

Simultaneously, Israeli settlers have been encouraged by the Jerusalem Municipality to settle in the growing number of settlements mushrooming in East Jerusalem neighbourhoods, all illegal under international law.

The municipality has employed a number of strategies to ensure a Jewish majority so that the city remains under Israeli control indefinitely while preventing Palestinians from establishing East Jerusalem as the capital of a future state.

“Since 1967 the Israeli government has pursued a declared policy of maintaining a 72 percent majority of Jews over Palestinians in the city,” according to Jeff Halper of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD).The municipality [of Jerusalem] has employed a number of strategies to ensure a Jewish majority so that the city remains under Israeli control indefinitely while preventing Palestinians from establishing East Jerusalem as the capital of a future state

“Towards that end it has not allowed Palestinians to build new homes, creating an artificial shortage of some 25,000 housing units in the Palestinian sector, while Palestinians are not able to access most of the Jewish neighbourhoods.

“This induced shortage raises the price of renting or buying, and since 70 percent of Palestinians live under the poverty line, they are forced to move outside the Jerusalem borders to acquire affordable housing where they can be stripped legally of their Jerusalem residency,” explains Halper.

“Such are the political machinations behind the seemingly justified policy of demolishing ‘illegal’ homes, a key element of a broader policy of ethnic cleansing,” he adds.

The International Peace and Cooperation Centre (IPCC) – a Palestinian non-governmental organisation specialised in urban planning and community development – issued an East Jerusalem Housing Review 2013 report describing some of the obstacles Palestinians face in trying to build new homes or extend current homes.

“House construction is severely stifled by deficiencies in the planning and, to a lesser extent, delivery systems, both of which have been derailed by Israeli policy makers,” stated the report.

“Building legally, by obtaining a permit through the planning system, is impossible within the majority of land in East Jerusalem. The permit system rigidly maintains requirements that cannot be met as a result of the planning and infrastructural deficiencies.”

According to IPCC, these include “insufficient outline and detailed master plans, inappropriate zoning of urban areas as low density or ‘green’ land, insufficient physical infrastructure, including road, sewage and water networks and the near total absence of registered land.”

Most of the land in East Jerusalem (92 percent) is unregistered, making it impossible to obtain building permits.

The IPCC report said that “development is further stifled by institutional shortcomings such as the unavailability of suitable housing loans, insufficient capacity or willingness of the private sector to plan and deliver large housing projects, the limited amount of suitable development land for sale and its extraordinary cost.”

As a result, Palestinians have been forced to build without the requisite permits. Over 70 percent of new construction from 2001 to 2010 was undertaken without building permits, with informal dwellings comprising between 42 and 54 percent of all housing.

Average room density is 1.9 people per room, making it 90 percent higher than in Jewish West Jerusalem.

While the Israeli authorities have set strategies concerning the Judaisation of East Jerusalem, Israeli settlers have been using other methods to slowly take over.

Muhammad Sabbagh is a resident of Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem who, together with other Palestinian activists, is involved in a long, ongoing battle with Israeli settlers over home ownership and possible eviction.

His extended family is part of a group of 28 Palestinian refugee families who live right next to several Israeli settlement homes.

These Palestinian families were allocated land by the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) and the Jordanian government in 1956 when the West Bank was under Jordanian rule. The Jordanian government had said that after three years the Palestinians would be given the homes.

However, following Israel’s occupation of the territory in 1967 Israeli settlers tried to evict the Palestinians claiming they had documents proving ownership of the homes from the late 1800s during the Ottoman Empire.

The case went back and forth to the Israeli courts until an agreement was reached that the Palestinians could stay for the next 90 years if they agreed to pay rent.

When some of the families refused to pay the rent on the basis that the homes belonged to neither the Israeli government nor the settlers, they were evicted in the middle of the night by heavily armed soldiers and police.

Subsequent court action and original Turkish documentation proved that the settlers’ documents were forged and that the homes had never belonged to the Jewish community several hundred years ago as the settlers had claimed.

Further evictions have currently been frozen by the Israeli courts on the basis of the documents being forgeries but Sabbagh says that is insufficient.

“We are now fighting to have the homes returned to us as their legal owners and so that the families who were evicted can return home.”

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Slum populations in the developing world have increased from 650 million in 1990 to 863 million in 2012. Credit: Naimul Haq/IPS

By Kalinga Seneviratne
SINGAPORE, Jun 5 2014 (IPS)

With over 20,000 international participants, a triple summit wrapping up today in Singapore is generating an abundance of ideas on sustainable cities.

Combining the World City Summit, Singapore Water Week and the CleanEnviro Summit into one mega-event (at one venue), the country has brought together urban policy-makers, environmentalists, water experts and business people to discuss the future of urban planning, even as U.N.-Habitat warns that the number of city dwellers could double by 2050 to nearly 6.5 billion people.

“Unless we make a concerted effort to change the way we live and operate, the world is on course to enter uncharted, potentially dangerous territory,” warned Choi Shing Kwok, permanent secretary of Singapore’s ministry of the environment and water resources, addressing a Business Forum at the World Cities Summit here this week.

One of the major themes on the table has been the issue of environmental sustainability and the urgent need for better communication between local government authorities and community members to create more transparent and participatory governance at the grassroots level.

“Unless we make a concerted effort to change the way we live and operate, the world is on course to enter uncharted, potentially dangerous territory." -- Choi Shing Kwok, permanent secretary of Singapore’s ministry of the environment and water resources
Few can miss the significance of Singapore as a location for the triple-header: an island nation of four million people, it is now among the world’s top three richest countries in terms of gross domestic product (GDP), clocking roughly 274.7 billion dollars in 2012, according to the World Bank.

A highly advanced developed nation with sound environmental policies, the Southeast Asian country is always proud to showcase its journey from a third world to a first world country within a single generation as a model for others to emulate.

In a nod to his government’s decision to host the gathering for the second year running, Kwok told the 130 mayors present at the conference, “Governments have an important role to play in steering national development through good public policies and by working with people and private sectors to shape their countries’ future.”

The U.N. estimates that 96 percent of urban growth in the next three decades will take place in developing countries, many of which are already straining to effectively manage their bulging metropolises.

Slum populations in the developing world have increased in number from 650 million in 1990 to 863 million in 2012. More than half of these slum dwellers reside in Asia.

Asia is also expected to shoulder the lion’s share of the burden of city planning, being home to 56 percent of the world’s largest cities, including seven of the top 10 megacities (with populations of over 10 million people).

Most officials are agreed that tackling the challenge of urban growth will require a multi-sector approach that mobilises electronics and technology in the service of poverty reduction and environmental sustainability.

Bindu Lohani, vice president of knowledge management and sustainable development at the Asian Development Bank (ADB) believes that, in order to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), emphasis must be placed on developing “local governments as the delivery agents of basic services.”

He added that municipal governments in the developing world face enormous challenges due to a lack of autonomy in urban planning, and limited avenues through which to raise financial resources.

China has made strides in overcoming these obstacles, according to Qiu Aijun, deputy director-general of China’s Center for Urban Development.

She drew attention to three rural towns – Longgang, Baigou and Huixian – that have developed into cities in the past 10 to 20 years because the Chinese authorities eliminated multi-tiered approval systems and adopted one localised system for processing community development projects and businesses.

“As grassroots governments did not have approval rights, we reformed laws to give them those rights. Instead of needing eight different chops [approval stamps] to start a business, you now need just one,” she explained.

Several of the mayors in attendance at the summit advocated using social media as a tool in building a sustainable future.

Among them was Ridwan Kamil, mayor of Bandung, Indonesia’s third largest city, who interacts with the community through Twitter, where he currently has 545,000 followers; he has also convinced city officials and other departments to create their own social media accounts.

“In future, a majority of the city’s programmes will be run collaboratively, where citizens participate in improving the quality of public services,” Kamil stressed during a forum discussion earlier this week.

Clover Moore, lord mayor of Sydney, echoed his sentiment, arguing that mainstream media’s focus on negatives could be easily overcome by embarking on smart social media campaigns.

“People don’t want change, [so] we need to take people through change,” argued Moore at a panel discussion entitled ‘Way Forward’. Her campaign to make Sydney a more bike-friendly and pedestrian-friendly city, she said, took years of communicating with the community before people changed their ways.

Others stressed that new forms of communication must be deployed in tandem with the building of solid infrastructure.

As Anibal Gaviria Correa, mayor of Colombia’s second-largest city, Medellin, pointed out, extending public transport systems to the most marginalised suburbs helped to reduce the soaring crime rate in what was once considered the world’s most violent urban center, with a homicide rate of 380 per 100,000 in 1991.

“This allowed the city’s poorest residents to access education, jobs and public spaces, helping in social upliftment, and building a more inclusive society,” he noted. Though still high, homicide rates in Medellin fell by 50 percent between 1990 and 2000.

Waste management was another major issue under the microscope here this week, particularly for the governments of Asian countries, many of which lack effective recycling, treatment and disposal systems.

For instance, only 14 percent of Indonesia’s wastewater is treated, while that number falls to 10 percent in the Philippines, nine percent in India and just four percent in Vietnam.

According to the Asian Development Bank, 23 percent of the population (roughly 850 million people) in the Asia-Pacific Region practice open defecation, causing water and ground pollution and leading to the outbreak of diarrhoeal diseases.

A mere 10 percent of solid waste generated in Asian towns and cities winds up in poorly managed landfill sites.

In an interview with the conference newspaper ‘Solutions’, Chen Hung-Yi, of the Environmental Protection Administration of Taiwan, said that governments should introduce financial incentives for people to generate less waste and thus reduce reliance on landfills.

“In Taiwan, households and businesses are charged for garbage collection, while recycling is free,” Chen said, arguing that such a system will soon prompt people to take more responsibility for their solid waste.

South Korea and Japan have adopted a similar system, though China is yet to follow suit, even though the country is the world’s leading generator of municipal solid waste, creating 150 million tons annually.

The United Nations estimates that cities will generate more than half the rise in greenhouse gas emissions over the next 20 years, highlighting the urgent need for communication and action on smart urban planning.

(END)