Environment & Urbanization

This paper considers the very large differences in adaptive capacity among the world’s urban centres. It then discusses how risk levels may change for a range of climatic drivers of impacts in the near term (2030–2040) and the long term (2080–2100) with a 2°C and a 4°C warming for Dar es Salaam, Durban, London and New York City. The paper is drawn directly from Chapter 8 of Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, the IPCC Working Group II contribution to the Fifth Assessment Report. It includes the complete text of this chapter’s Executive Summary. The paper highlights the limits to what adaptation can do to protect urban areas and their economies and populations without the needed global agreement and action on mitigation; this is the case even for cities with high adaptive capacities. It ends with a discussion of transformative adaptation and where learning on how to achieve this needs to come from.

This paper reviews what local governments in more than 50 cities are doing with regard to disaster risk reduction. It draws on the reports of their participation in the global Making Cities Resilient Campaign and its 10 “essential” components, and on interviews with city mayors or managers. These show how resilience to disasters is being conceived and addressed by local governments, especially with regard to changes in their institutional framework and engagement with communities and other stakeholders, also in mobilizing finance, undertaking multi-hazard risk assessments, upgrading informal settlements, adjusting urban planning and implementing building codes. The paper summarizes what city mayors or managers view as key milestones for building resilience, and further discusses their evaluation of the usefulness of the campaign to them. It also discusses how a local government-focused perspective on disaster risk reduction informs our understanding of resilience. This includes how development can contribute much to disaster risk reduction as well as a more tangible and operational understanding of resilience (resistance + coping capacity + recovery + adaptive capacity) that local governments can understand and act on.

This paper reflects on how the city of Manizales, Colombia, is incorporating climate change adaptation into its plans, and how this can build on the foundations of the city’s long-established urban environmental policy (Biomanizales) and local environmental action plan (Bioplan) that have guided urban development and have developed incorporating disaster risk reduction into local development policies and local land use plans. The success is rooted in coherent, multi-level governance, including capacity to integrate disaster risk reduction, climate change adaptation, land use and territorial planning within a holistic view of development that includes the views and capacities of multiple stakeholders. As the process matures, an acknowledgment of weaknesses leads to improved ways of addressing climate-related risks and adaptation challenges.

This paper is a report on one of three related case studies in Latin America and shows the progress in the city of Chetumal, and the larger state of which it is the capital (Quintana Roo), in disaster response, especially with regard to cyclones. It also shows the progress in land use and ecological planning through the development of certain tools, which have changed the approach from one of prohibiting action to suggesting alternatives. Rather than stopping development, the focus has been on taking full account of its impacts and trying to make development compatible with environmental protection. There has also been progress in ecosystem conservation and water management, coordinated between different levels of government and different stakeholders. While much of this has taken place within the formal framework set by government, participatory processes have increased civil society awareness and commitment to environmental issues, and its capacity to participate and take a position, especially during the planning stages.

Throughout human history, people have coped with, and adapted to, their environment. This accumulated capacity at local level is increasingly recognized to be critical in improving resilience and transformation. Nevertheless, city dwellers’ coping and adaptive practices are little known, poorly documented and often not taken into account in the work of municipal authorities and aid organizations. Against this background, this study provides a systematic overview of urban residents’ coping and adaptive practices, presents critical insights into their risk-reducing effects and discusses their role in the development of policies and projects to increase resilience. It shows that coping should not automatically be seen as maladaptive. The success or failure of urban societies in building resilience and moving towards transformation does not necessarily depend on the effectiveness of individual coping strategies but on the flexibility and inclusiveness of coping/adaptation systems at the individual, household and community level (i.e. the combined set of strategies). Therefore, it is crucial to support the ability of urban communities to negotiate their needs and rights in order to increase the flexibility and inclusiveness of these systems and make them more viable in today’s context.

The relationship between “coping” and “resilience” increasingly features in academic, policy and practical discussions on adaptation to climate change in urban areas. This paper examines this relationship in the context of households in “extreme poverty” in the city of Khulna, Bangladesh. It draws on a quantitative data set based on 550 household interviews in low-income and informal settlements that identified the extent of the underlying drivers of vulnerability in this setting, including very low income, inadequate shelter, poor nutritional status and limited physical assets. A series of focus groups were used to explore the ways in which physical hazards have interacted with this underlying vulnerability, as a means to understand the potential impacts of climate change on this particular group of urban residents. These outcomes include frequent water-logging, the destruction of houses and disruption to the provision of basic services. The main focus of the paper is on describing the practices of low-income urban residents in responding to climate-related shocks and stresses, placing these in a particular political context, and drawing lessons for urban policies in Bangladesh and elsewhere. A wide range of specific adaptation-related activities can be identified, which can be grouped into three main categories – individual, communal and institutional. The paper examines the extent to which institutional actions are merely “coping” – or whether they create the conditions in which individuals and households can strengthen their own long-term resilience. Similarly, it examines the extent to which individual and communal responses are merely “coping” – or whether they have the potential to generate broader political change that strengthens the position of marginalized groups in the city.

Delegating state responsibilities for the management of water resources to regional bodies and the provision of drinking water and sanitation to local governments has led to new configurations in urban water governance. Drawing on case studies from four cities in the global South (Guarulhos, Arequipa, Lima and Durban), this article analyzes recent changes in these configurations, with particular attention to the role and power of the municipality in this process. This paper explores to what extent these new configurations reveal a move towards resilience, transition or even transformation. It concludes that there are clear indications of transition in all cases, and in Guarulhos and Durban even some signs of transformation. Given that transformative changes in the legal and institutional framework, and even in values and attitudes, have not yet affected the existing power structures, the question is to what extent these signs of transformation will reach their full potential.

The relationship between the built environment and vulnerability and resilience is a little-studied area of research, and demands an exploration of constraints and windows of opportunity. Given gender roles and the division of labour between women and men within urban poor households, the impacts of climate extremes are likely to be gendered. But conceptualizing gender only in terms of the vulnerability of women can mean overlooking the complex and intersecting power relations that marginalize women and men differently. These power relations are manifested in spatial practices, while spatial relations are manifested in the construction of gender. Thus, the power to make decisions in the built environment based on gender roles, and the nature of gender subordination, rights and entitlements contribute significantly to the capacity to adapt to climate extremes.

In studies of climate change vulnerability, an important constraint relates to the uncertainty of the climate projections that local governments need to estimate precisely the risks and impacts climate events have on different parts of a city. In addition, the lack of “downscaled”, or local, climate information makes it very difficult to compare how individual communities and households adapt to severe and extreme weather events and, more importantly, what actions local governments can carry out to increase resilience in poor urban areas. Based on a conceptual and operational framework developed in recent years by the authors in collaboration with partners in the global South, this paper illustrates how “bottom-up” community asset planning for climate change adaptation can help to address this gap and be mainstreamed into “top-down” citywide strategic and operational planning. The paper describes the process by which community members and representatives of local government, the private sector and NGOs working in the city of Cartagena, Colombia, set up a dialogue space that enables them to identify, negotiate and agree climate change adaptation solutions that are legally, financially, socially and technically feasible.

The growth of informal settlements can intensify the risks of social and ecological harm to their communities and to the wider urban area. The unplanned and poorly serviced character of these settlements raises the probability of disasters occurring. The public sector can increase these risks through indifference and poorly conceived actions or it can help to build resilience through a more constructive and integrated approach. This case study from Stellenbosch in South Africa illustrates how a resilience perspective can highlight the systemic challenges surrounding the growth and management of informal settlements. It emphasizes the interactions between such places and their urban context, and recognizes the negative feedback loops that can exacerbate poverty and vulnerability. It proposes adaptive governance as a framework for building resilience through strengthening local capabilities. This flexible and engaged approach goes beyond “just managing” informal settlements to integrating them in a more positive way into the wider city or town.

Resilience is receiving substantial traction as a concept to inform climate change and development policies and programmes. At the same time, a number of critiques have emerged that question its use as a framing concept for tackling urban climate change. This paper reflects on climate resilience and its critiques through an examination of the Asian Cities Climate Change Resilience Network (ACCCRN) initiative in two cities in India. We illustrate aspects of the resilience critique and, using evidence of transformational aspects of the initiative, we argue that resilience thinking must be coupled with the concept of transformation in order to bring issues of people, politics and power to the fore. In the process, the conceptual strength of resilience can be combined with a more radical agenda that engages with underlying political structures and trade-offs that determine risk and vulnerability.

Labelled as the “last frontier” for international property development, sub-Saharan Africa’s larger cities are currently being revisioned in the image of cities such as Dubai, Shanghai and Singapore, which claim top positions in the world-class city leagues. Draped in the rhetoric of “smart cities” and “eco-cities”, these plans promise to modernize African cities and turn them into gateways for international investors and showpieces for ambitious politicians. Yet the reality in all of these cities stands in stark contrast to the glass-box towers, manicured lawns and water features on developers’ and architects’ websites. With the majority of urban populations living in deep poverty and with minimal urban services, the most likely outcome of these fantasy plans is a steady worsening of the marginalization and inequalities that already beset these cities.

This paper is a response to and a commentary on Vanessa Watson’s paper on “African urban fantasies” in this issue of the Journal, which analyzes new urban master plans developed by international architectural firms and property development companies for many cities in sub-Saharan Africa. Taking Watson’s argument as an opportunity to think about current urban fantasies in Indian cities, this response offers three reflections. The first looks at the scale of renewal in the plans for African cities and argues that they represent a different order to similar imaginations of special enclaves, zones or gated communities that have become common in cities in the global South. The second reads these plans as a yearning not just for particular built environments and the economic lives they represent but also for a controlled and orderly city free of the messiness of democratic politics, guided by the visions of authoritarian city states such as Dubai and Shanghai. The third theme discusses the critical and exclusionary consequences of these plans in cities across the global South, whether or not they are implemented. Implementing them would realize the disconnect between these plans and the actual citizens of the cities they seek to reshape. Yet even if they just remain on paper, these plans play an important political role in shaping aspirations and urban futures, as well as the possibilities of a more inclusive urban citizenship in the present.

This paper reviews and assesses how urban poverty in Zambia is defined and measured by the government, using data from the Jesuit Centre for Theological Reflection (JCTR). It shows the often dramatic differences in the scale and nature of urban poverty, depending on what poverty measurements are chosen and applied. Applying the government poverty line, which takes no account of differences in costs between rural and urban areas, shows the incidence of urban poverty falling from 49 per cent in 1991 to 27.5 per cent in 2010; but a food basket based on what urban households eat is twice the cost of the food basket used in the official poverty line. In addition, as the paper describes, what urban poor households pay for food is often particularly high as they cannot buy in bulk. The official poverty line’s allowance for housing costs is based on what low-income groups spend on housing, not on the costs of the cheapest reasonable quality accommodation. The JCTR estimate for the cost of essential non-food needs is twice that in the official poverty line, and the JCTR review of house prices shows that the cost of “adequate” housing in cities is far higher than the allowance for housing in poverty lines. The paper also discusses other reasons why official poverty lines understate urban poverty, including neglecting the costs low-income groups face for transport, health care and keeping their children in school.

This paper describes the development of the participatory budgeting (PB) process in the rural villages and communities of the city of Chengdu in China between 2009 and 2012. During this period, more than 40,000 PB-funded projects were implemented in more than 2,300 communities. These projects addressed the growing divide between urban and rural development and increased security of land use rights, resulting in large improvements in the day-to-day lives of millions of villagers. But PB in Chengdu also introduced democratic changes at the local level through processes of deliberation and greater democratic autonomy for village residents. This paper describes the mechanisms through which PB operated locally, and discusses how the process has differed from other instances of PB in China, as well as its innovations in international terms. Despite its successes, PB in Chengdu faces some challenges, namely its expansion from village to township level, the permanent need for support from the Communist Party at a high level, and insufficient research and evaluation.

This paper discusses the state and development of three community-based settlement upgrading projects in Metro Manila that have taken place since 2009. These projects are all part of the ACCA (Asian Coalition for Community Action) programme, which is designed to support community-based settlement upgrading initiatives in 15 Asian countries, and was launched by the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights in 2009. The main aim of this article is to highlight the common features of a community-based approach, as integrated by the ACCA programme, within the context of the Philippines and to review its potential and challenges.

Despite an increased focus on entrepreneurship as a means of promoting development, there has been limited discussion of the conceptual and methodological issues related to researching entrepreneurship in low-income countries. Drawing on experiences from Uganda, this paper presents a study of entrepreneurship conducted in a low-income settlement, which combined participatory quantitative and qualitative approaches, highlighting the strengths and challenges of using participatory methods. The paper demonstrates how drawing on a range of participatory methods can contribute to creating more engaging research relationships and generate a deeper and more contextualized understanding of entrepreneurship.