The Challenge of Environmental Management in Urban Areas

THIS CONTAINS AN edited selection of papers originally presented at a conference on The Challenge of Environmental Management in Metropolitan Areas, jointly organized by the Development Planning Unit (DPU), University College London and the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, in 1997. The purpose of the conference was to go beyond debates about approach and policy options to look at actual environmental management practice in urban areas. The papers focus more on the city than the metropolitan area or the level of the neighbourhood or community, and are grouped into three sections: policy, management, and organization and politics.

The first section explores the importance, nature and conditions of policy making for urban environmental management. An introductory paper on policy and politics in urban environmental management is followed by a range of empirical studies, some more general than others, on issues as diverse as the definition of an action plan for Calcutta, India; water supply in Madras, India; the formulation of environmental planning in Cape Town, South Africa; the creation of green spaces in Santiago, Chile; waste management in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; and health conditions in urban areas.

The second section looks at the management of the urban environment. It includes a chapter on what it means to manage the urban environment, followed by seven case studies on: air pollution in Sao Paulo, Brazil; sustainable urban development and the urban poor in Rio de Janeiro; solid waste management in Copenhagen, Denmark; the social "nature” of floods in Buenos Aires, Argentina; solid waste management in Colombo, Sri Lanka; the approach to environmental management under the Accra Sustainable Programme, Ghana; and urban environmental planning and management in Thailand.

The final section looks at issues of organization and politics, identifying some of the underlying problems encountered when attempting new approaches to urban environmental management. This includes an introductory chapter examining a range of political and organizational factors that help shape the practice of environmental management in cities, and is followed by eight case studies, two looking at the issue of new environmental localism and the Local Agenda 21 process in the United Kingdom. Another paper looks at local–international partnerships in metropolitan environmental management in Latin America. Two papers from South America cover decentralization, local autonomy and metropolitan influence in Salvador, Brazil and research–management as an approach to solving environmental conflict in metropolitan areas in the Manizales–Villamaría conurbation in Colombia. A paper, which draws especially from the Australian state of New South Wales, looks at local–central government relations and flood hazard management. There is also a paper on legal instruments and the politics of environmental management in Istanbul, Turkey, and one on community-based environmental management in urban Tanzania.