Suchergebnisse

Local environments such as cities and neighbourhoods are becoming a focal point for those concerned with environmental justice and sustainability. The Citizens at Risk takes up this emerging agenda and analyses the key issues in a refreshingly simple yet sophisticated style. Taking a comparative look at cities in Africa, Asia and Latin America, the book examines: the changing nature of urban environmental risks, the rules governing the distribution of such risks and their differential impact, how the risks arise and who is responsible The authors clearly describe the most pressing urban environ.

There is an international consensus that urban sanitary conditions are in great need of improvement, but sharp disagreement over how this improvement should be pursued. Both market-driven and state-led efforts to improve sanitation in deprived communities tend to be severely compromised, as there is a lack of effective market demand (due to collective action problems) and severe barriers to the centralized provision of low-cost sanitation facilities. In principle, community-driven initiatives have a number of advantages. But community-driven sanitary improvement also faces serious challenges, including: 1) The collective action challenge of getting local residents to coordinate and combine their demands for sanitary improvement; 2) The co-production challenge of getting the state to accept community-driven approaches to sanitary improvement, and where necessary to co-invest and take responsibility for the final waste disposal; 3) The affordability challenge of finding improvements that are affordable and acceptable to both the state and the community – and to other funders if relevant; 4) The trans-sectoral challenge of ensuring that other poverty-related problems, such as insecure tenure, do not undermine efforts to improve sanitation. Each of these challenges is analysed in some detail in the pages that follow. The report then goes on to examine two community-driven approaches to urban sanitation improvement that have been expanding for more than two decades, one in Pakistan and the other in India. It is argued that a large part of their success lies in the manner in which they have met and overcome the aforementioned challenges. Indeed, both overcame the co-production challenge to the point where sanitary improvement became the basis for attempts to radically improve community–government relations – relations unfortunately also very dependent on other political dynamics. They also systematically tackled other, less institutionally-rooted challenges, such as the lack of local technical skills in building and maintaining improved sanitary facilities.

1. Urbanisation and development : policy lessons from the BRICS' experience / Gordon McGranahan and George Martine -- 2. Brazil's negligent urban transition and its legacy of divided cities / George Martine and Gordon McGranahan -- 3. China's radical urbanisation and brining capital and labour together step by step / Gordon McGranahan. [and three others] -- 4. Russia's planned urbanisation and misplaced urban development / Charles Becker, S. Joshua Mendelsohn and Kseniya Benderskaya -- 5. South Africa's tortured urbanisation and the complications of reconstruction / Ivan Turok -- 6. India's sluggish urbanisation and its exclusionary development / Amitabh Kundu -- 7. Could a more positive approach to urbanisation in the BRICS have facilitated both economic growth and social inclusion? / Gordon McGranahan, Ivan Turok and George Martine.

In developing countries the price of rapid growth is all too often noxious airborne pollution, which annually contributes to a disturbing number of avoidable deaths. In recent decades, however, there has been considerable progress in the epidemiology of air pollution, significant changes in international air pollution guidelines, and the emergence of more systematic approaches to air pollution control. While many of these advances have originated in affluent countries, there have been major developments in other parts of the world.In this book, a distinguished cast of leading researchers in bo

The relationship between urbanisation and development is a vital policy concern, especially in Africa and Asia. This article reviews the arguments and evidence for whether rapid urban population growth can help to raise living standards. The main finding is that the development effects of urbanisation and the magnitude of agglomeration economies are very variable. There is no simple linear relationship between urbanisation and economic growth, or between city size and productivity. The potential of urbanisation to promote growth is likely to depend on how conducive the infrastructure and institutional settings are. Removing barriers to rural–urban mobility may enable economic growth but the benefits will be much larger with supportive policies, markets and infrastructure investments. Cities should use realistic population projections as the basis for investing in public infrastructure and implementing supportive land policies. Governments should seek out ways of enabling forms of urbanisation that contribute to growth, poverty reduction and environmental sustainability, rather than encouraging (or discouraging) urbanisation per se.