State Of
The World: Our Urban Future 2007
by Worldwatch Institute
Earthscan Publications, London,UK, 2007
250 pp. $270.00
ISBN:978-1 84407-391-7.
Reviewed by Mit Mitropoulos
Brussels, Belgium
mitisa@hol.gr
How could it be that I, in fact, live
a simpler life in downtown Brussels than
many locals do in my Greek village (population:
less than 2000, no. of photocopiers: 2
(one of which in the municipality office),
Internet cafes:0, restaurants: one too
many and counting. The village is now
a three hours drive from downtown Athens
that has just sucked in more than half
of the total population of Greece. With
an ages-old island mentality (accessible
only by boat up to late 1960s), the village
was a time-past choice destination for
those travellers visiting Delphi but thrives
since 1990 on Athens-based weekenders
(and currently also to Athenians frolicking
in Arachova as a wintertime Myconos).
Have I been right in claiming the village
runs for the last 10 years as a one-dimensional
suburb of Athens and that in environmental
economic terms it has been losing out
in accumulated resources we cannot replace,
rather than apparently gaining an easy
income?
State Of The World (SOFTW) raises the
issue for the need to have and share definitions
necessary to carry out comparisons following
the collection of statistical data. One
example is what makes a settlement qualify
as 'urban': Is it the number of citizens
living within a city's jurisdiction, and/or
any high density areas, and/or those economically
directly linked to that downtown center?
Or is it (I would add) the population/servicers
ratio, as with the services phonebook
in Brussels being twice the size of the
one for subscriber individualswhilst
Athenians are four times as many as the
services available to them? And what about
calling London/Brussels/Paris (centers
of information) from Athens (periphery
lacking information), having been more
expensive that any phone calls in the
opposite center-to-periphery direction?
After all, if we are networked Europeans(as
we claim to be, in response to political
hype and marketing), why shouldn't we
live in nodes that function both as center
and as periphery at any timewhich
is my definition for a 'network', see
my positive downtown Brussels experience
for instance? Or why do we accept the
negative experience of a German/Dutch/British
tourist in need (to match healthcare at
home) of telemedicine in the Aegean islands
of Greece (long overdue for the last 25
years)?
As SOFTW tells us: "Despite apparent
differences in politics, economics, and
culture, cities in developing countries
and the industrial world have many problems
in common, often more than they share
with small towns or villages in their
own countries" (p. 189). Quite so,
of course, and how would I like the Worldwatch
Institute (WI) to have provided us with
a few mapping efforts of this reality
still inconvenient to many in their SOFTW
as 'annual report on progress toward a
sustainable society 2007'?
On the cover of the report we have a Dubai
(United Arab Emirates) hotel array of
lifts on their effortless vertical trips
surfing along the inside wall within the
outside skin, whilst the picture below
is of ground level dwellers going nowhere
as stuck in their slums at Kroo Bay, Freetown,
Sierra Leone. It is true that 1-in-3 of
urbanites (now exceeding the rural population
worldwideas it was indeed
anticipated) live in such slums. To give
an idea of the proportion of city people
living in slums, it was reported elsewhere
one year ago that 37.8% goes for the Chinese,
55.5% for Indians, 36.6% for Brazilians,
79.2% for Nigerians, 73.6% for Pakistanis,
84.7% for those in Bangladesh, 23.1% of
Indonesians, and 44.2% for Iranians (keeping
in mind that the percentage for China
actually means 193,8 million people).
90% of these are found in Asia, Latin
America, and Africabut SOFTW
does not differentiate in contrast what
I learned recently: the two former areas
enjoying emerging-markets visibility including
India and Indonesia (besides Hong Kong
and China for Asia) this mid-October,
whilst Latin American art sales at Sotheby's
and Christie's have been reported to run
together up to the $ 50.3m this May past,
as compared to $ 39.3m last year and $21.1m
of just two years earlierthis
in contrast to the cost of wars for Africa
going up to 13 billion Euros, the child
mortality 50% higher than other similar
parts of the world, and with 20% more
illiterates, and 2.5 times less doctors
per patients.
SOFTW this year is focusing on cities.
It presents us with a list of most welcome
case studies and programmed projects to
monitor that are really worth checking
as they fit many a reader's research or
travel agenda: Timbuktu (Mali) and Loja
(Eduador), Los Angeles and Melbourne,
Rizhao (China)and Malmo, Jakarta and Mumbai,
Nairobi and Petra, Lagos, Freetown, and
Brno (Czech Republic). They help us check
on managing tourism, collapsing infrastructures,
environmental injustice, urban transportation,
carbon emissions, reduction of natural
disasters impact, clean water, urban farms,
policing by the people, river management,
solar power, and more.
But on the level of policy agenda, SOFTW
is losing out. The no-need-to-change camp
always believed in man's ingenuity and
fixed keen on new technologies. Similarly,
this year's SOFTW's trust goes specifically
to Urban man's innovationsand
a European Commission's presentation I
am now looking up is backing the argument
up, no questions asked: In that Economies
Of Scale create energy and resource efficiencies.
In consequence, it is urbanization (already
happening and not thanks to our planningand
especially with no-need-to-change, isn't
this fantastic?) is providing us with
a splendid opportunity to provide the
world's poor with decent living conditions
and furthermore to do exactly that whilst
conserving the resources on which we all
depend. Isn't that neat and tidy? SOFTW
goes on to add that after all human development
has been highest in countries with mostly
urban populations. But I would suggest
that the economies-of-scale reference
require a closer look to include both
the Increasing returns to scale as well
as the decreasing ones, and how diseconomies
of scale 'internal' to a firm include
optimum technology production levels beyond
which costs do rise, and bureaucracy increases
with the firm's size. On the other hand,
diseconomies that are 'external' to firms
include pollution and traffic congestion.
I would invite SOFTW to provide each topic
tackled, and invite each writer of a case
study to provide us with: a) the level
of required/exercised change in every
instance, and to b)give us one environmental
economics reference to go by.
Take Fair Trade, meaning that trade should
not be exploitative as an exchange, but
run on the long-term benefit to both parties.
It would mean 1)healthy and safe working
conditions excluding child labour, 2)environmentally
sustainable practices, and 3) prices paid
to small independent producers. SOFTW
mentions FLO (Fair Trade labelling organisations)as
a smooth run, not raising the question
whether we Northern consumers are prepared
to: a)read the Eco-labels, and b) be prepared
to pay a higher price that could result
in fair-trading with the South producing.
This is assuming the issue is left to
the consumers alone; see the marketplaceand
I will skip here the interdependence between
fighting corruption whilst improving governance
in the South, a connection that SOFTW
doesn't make.