URBLOG

COPENHAGEN: Maputo and Rotterdam

Rising sea levels: A tale of two cities

When people talk about the impact of rising sea levels, they often think of small island states that risk being submerged if global warming continues unchecked. By 2050 the number of people living in delta cities is set to increase by as much as 70%, experts suggest, vastly increasing the number of those at risk.

AFRICA CALLING

 Africa's mobile phone usage sees record rise after huge investment

Mobile subscriptions in Africa rose from 54m to almost 350m between 2003 and 2008, the quickest growth in the world. The global total reached 4bn at the end of last year and, although growth was down on the previous year, it remained close to 20%.

Urban Population Trends

URBAN POPULATION GRAPH

Orginal Guardian data blog

Urbanization is, to be sure, still manifested in the continues massive expansion of cities, city-regions, and mega-city-regions,   it equally entails the ongoing socio-spatial transformation of  diverse, less densely agglomerated settlement spaces that are, through constantly thickening inter-urban and inter-metropolitan infrastructural networks, being even more interlinked to the major urban centres. We are witnessing, in short, nothing less than the intensification  and extension of  the urbanization process at all spatial scales and across the entire surface of planetary space.

Neil Brenner     ‘What is critical urban theory’ in CITY 13/2-3 June- September2009 p. 205

 

Politics, recession and China in Africa

Will the gains of Africa's economic revival be completely lost?

Will the world recession return African economies to their knees? Not if China has anything to do with it. This is one friendship that stands to flourish through the hard times.

Most Africans play no part in their country's politics, apart from (if they are lucky) voting once every few years. But there is one group that governments have to take into account - the urban poor. These people are vulnerable to the smallest shifts in the cost of living and can take to the streets and cause headaches for those in power. When politics breaks down, they provide the foot soldiers for Africa's wars. When prices of food and fuel shot up last year, riots broke out in several African cities.

What's it like to live in the middle of a population explosion?

'Everyone's sleeping with one eye open' James Meek reports from Lagos, bursting at the seams and soon to overtake Cairo as Africa's biggest city.

The road, lined with banks and churches, ....a dialogue between Christ and Mammon sputters at the expressway's edge. Jesus - The Answer. Zenith Bank. Skye Bank. Mountains of Fire and Miracles Ministry. Gracespring Chapel (Oil of Gladness Ministries Inc). GT Bank. EcoBank. Consuming Fire Christian Ministry.

"Why is the government trying to impose on our cities the developed world model of how a city should look? They're shying away from the fact that our economy is not as advanced as those countries'. ... By the time it comes together, this is what you end up with; this dirty, fragmented city is what the economy can carry for now. If we shy away from that, then we continue to inflict pain on our people."

Digital divide persists but decreasing slightly

ITU’s new ICT Development Index (IDI) compares developments in information and communication technologies (ICT) in 154 countries over a five-year period from 2002 to 2007. The Index combines 11 indicators into a single measure that can be used as a benchmarking tool globally, regionally and at the country level. These are related to ICT access, use and skills, such as households with a computer the number of Internet users; and literacy levels.

Developing countries drive explosion in global mobile phone use The Guardian

Recent papers from African Centre for Cities

Two recent papers from the African Centre for Cities are available to download.

Susan Parnell and Edgar Pieterse: The ‘right to the city’: institutional imperatives of a developmental state

Edgar Pieterse: Towards an Agenda for Action on African Urbanization

Making cities of the South work better purely in terms of becoming economic nodes in the global systems of trade, production and consumption is not going to help the poor in those city regions. But failing to make these emerging global nodes work for all their residents may hinder their global progress. Either way, a radical programme of urban citizenship is required. The fundamental assumptions of how government operates institutionally ....has to be challenged so that rich and poor are equally visible to the state and so that the state is empowered to achieve a transformatory rights based agenda.

UN focus on Africa, India and China

 UNHabitat's  The State of African Cities 2008 proviudes a state of the art guide to issue facing urban communities across the continent.

'A worrying trend with the African urbanization process is that it is a process rooted in poverty rather than an industrialization-induced socio-economic transition as in other major world urban regions. Africa’s escalating urban problems have received less attention than warranted and now, at the dawn of Africa’s urban age, these need to be addressed.'

 

UNHabitat have also launched URBAN WORLD  The inaugural edition covers urban development in India and China, the Olympic impact on the environment

New UN STATE OF THE WORLD'S CITIES report

Harmonious Cities

The report from UN Habitat  adopts the concept of Harmonious Cities as a theoretical framework in order to understand today's urban world, and also as an operational tool to confront the most important challenges facing urbanization and development processes. For the first time, preliminary findings of a global analysis of spatial, socio-economic and environmental dimensions at the city level are presented in order to promote greater understanding of the dynamics and forces that promote harmony in cities. The book also analyses the determinants of urban growth or decline, which can help guide planners in supporting processes that lead to harmonious urban development.

John Vidal in The Guardian

'In a survey of 120 major cities New York was found to be the ninth most unequal in the world and Atlanta, New Orleans, Washington, and Miami had similar inequality levels to those of Nairobi, Kenya and Abidjan, Ivory Coast. Many were above an internationally recognised acceptable "alert" line used to warn governments.

India was becoming more unequal as a direct result of economic liberalisation and globalisation, and that the most unequal cities were in South Africa and Namibia and Latin America. "The cumulative effect of unequal distribution [of wealth] has been a deep and lasting division between rich and poor. Trade liberalisation did not bring about the expected benefits."'

Fear and the city

In July, citizens of ten major world cities were surveyed for the World Social Summit (WSS) to find out how London, Paris, Rome, Moscow, New York, Mumbai, Beijing, Tokyo, São Paulo and Cairo experience fear and insecurity. The report, Fear in the Mega-Cities,  presented to the WSS in Rome  reveals much about the state of global anxiety. 

Frank Furedi in New Statesman