Sustainable Development & The City - Part 1: The Hidden Face of New Urbanism

For the first time in human history, more people live in cities than in rural areas. By 2050, predicts the United Nations, nearly 70% of the world will be city dwellers.

For a variety of ecological reasons, this can be a potentially good thing, potentially putting the sustainable into development as Dr. Eric W. Sanderson points out in his book Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City.

"An analysis of the Human Footprint map indicates that 83-percent of the earth's land surface is influenced by people (and that without considering climate change or air pollution, which nevertheless touches the remaining 17 percent - areas we dubbed the "The Last of the Wild")... The problem with today's human footprint isn't that there are cities; rather it is the vast unrelenting extent of humanity's influence. Cities done well can be just what nature needs..."

What is often glossed over, however in this analysis of humanity's future, is that of this 70-percent of urban inhabitants a shocking two-thirds, or roughly 46-percent, will live slums - those shanty towns on the edges of cities that often lack decent sanitation, housing, access to education, or way of propelling oneself out of poverty.

We have to do better.

Slums emerge for a variety of reasons, but they are often linked with a lack of opportunity in rural areas (often because IMF policies emphasize building up cities), and a lack of opportunities in urban areas to deal with this influx of laborers who often possess the wrong skills for their new environment. Without steady employment, people erect housing where and when they can. In Brazil, in Cambodia, in Nicaragua it is not uncommon for entire families to take up residence in the one location both rich in resources and limited in competition for space - the regional dump. In communities that lack comprehensive recycling or in some cases any form of consolidated trash pick up at all, they are able to eek out a mean existence sorting through detritus for metals, plastics, anything that can be sold to industrial recyclers. The children - and yes, there are children - often do not go to school. When they become old enough - four or five is old enough - they too begin sifting through garbage exposed to the pathogens and neurotoxins that are the norm in modern waste. They reach 8, 9, or 10 having lived a lifetime and already turn to glue sniffing or other cheap intoxicants to blunt the realities of day to day living.

It is not as simple as removing people from the slums. In Managua, Nicaragua efforts at relocation have found that often people return to the dumps for a variety of reasons. Even Chile, often trotted out as Latin America's great economic success story, still had as of January of this year over 50,000 children living in shanty towns.

If our future lies within cities - and increasingly the evidence suggests that it does - then it's important that we make sure these cities meet the needs not of an elite but of the average person. It does not appear, based on our current course, that we are prepared to do that.