The Citizens at Risk: From Urban Sanitation to Sustainable Cities

AT ONE LEVEL, this is a book about the challenge of improving environmental health conditions in poor urban settlements. At another level, it is about the challenge of sustainable urban development in a globalizing world. But perhaps most accurately, it is about environmental justice and urban development in a rapidly changing world.

The introductory chapter describes the “greening” of the concept of development, the emergence of the “brown” and “green” agendas for urban environmental improvement and the relevance of globalization to international initiatives in the urban environment field. Chapters 2, 3 and 4 present what the authors call the “urban environmental transition”. What emerges is a picture of urban environmental change that is very complex but which also reflects some relatively straightforward trends: Specifically, the authors argue that for all cities, environmental problems tend to be:
• the unintended outcomes of human activity;
• closely inter-connected;
• prone to both market and public sector failures;
• most damaging to economically and politically disadvantaged groups.
On the other hand, the most pressing environmental burdens change as cities become more affluent:
• in poor cities, the most pressing environmental problems are usually local, immediate and threaten health directly;
• in middle-income cities (especially those that are large and industrialized), the most pressing environmental problems are typically city-scale, often including both ecological and health damages;
• in affluent cities, the living environment is usually comparatively healthy but urban activities and lifestyles account for a large environmental burden, with significant contributions to long term and global problems.

Chapter 2 presents the outlines of this transition, provides some qualifications and draws preliminary conclusions. Chapter 3 focuses on one critical environmental medium, namely water, and Chapter 4 looks in more detail at three specific cities, namely Accra (the poorest and smallest), Jakarta and São Paulo (the largest and most affluent). Chapter 5 summarizes three idealized models of how local environmental improvement ought to be organized, their relative strengths, and whether and how these strengths can be combined. The three models are labelled the planning model, the market model and the local collective action model. The authors note that, to some degree, the public sector has a vested interest in the planning model, the private sector in the market model, and the voluntary sector in the voluntary association model. But low-income
urban dwellers have an interest in how markets, public sector activities and voluntary associations function and combine to help them achieve healthier living environments. This generally supports the claim that partnerships and the co-production of environmental services are desirable, although the authors also note that it is important not to idealize hybrid models.

Chapter 6 turns to three different approaches to local environment assessment, following roughly the same tripartite division introduced in Chapter 5. The three approaches are broad-spectrum surveys, participatory appraisal and contingent valuation. Again, to a first approximation, the broad spectrum survey is a tool of government, participatory appraisal a tool of the voluntary sector, and contingent valuation a tool of market economics. But the case studies summarized in this chapter illustrate how each technique can provide important and often complementary insights, and should not be viewed as tied to particular interest groups. Chapter 7 examines gender aspects of local environmental management in Accra. Affluence, and implicitly class, is the central social distinction employed in this book. There are, however, many other social distinctions relevant to urban development and the environment, of which gender is perhaps the most obvious,