... "Large and rapidly growing cities have the worst environmental problems"

Large cities do not necessarily have the worst environmental problems. In terms of environmental health, they usually have better standards than most other urban centres in their nation (and most rural areas). Well governed cities have among the world's best quality of life. And there are obvious reasons for why this is so. By concentrating people, enterprises and their wastes - and increasingly motor vehicles - cities can be (and often are) very hazardous places to live and work. As the World Health Organization recognizes, many of the world's most dangerous and life-threatening environments are in urban areas. It is often assumed that cities' environmental problems are made worse by the number of people and their high concentration. But this same concentration provides many potential opportunities:

ECONOMIES OF SCALE AND PROXIMITY FOR INFRASTRUCTURE AND SERVICES: The concentration of population and enterprises in urban areas greatly reduces the unit costs of providing each building with piped water, good sanitation, drains, all-weather roads and footpaths and electricity. This concentration greatly reduces unit costs for many services such as garbage collection, public transport, health care and the provision of schools, pre-school centres and child development centres. It reduces the cost of providing emergency services - for instance fire-fighting and emergency medical services whose rapid response to acute illness or injury can greatly reduce the health burden for the people affected. But even in tenement areas and informal settlements with high population densities, the densities are rarely too high to pose problems for the cost-effective provision of infrastructure and services, especially if provision for these had been made in advance of the settlement's development. What is often more expensive and time consuming is installing infrastructure and services in densely populated illegal or informal settlements, after they have developed. These often grew without sufficient space left for access roads, public space and community facilities and without a site plan which makes it easier and cheaper to install piped water, drains and other infrastructure. But this high cost is not because of high population densities but because provision for infrastructure and services of adequate standard for such population densities was not made prior to the settlement's development. In addition, there are many examples of community-directed programmes that installed good quality infrastructure and services within existing high density settlements at relatively low cost.

Box 3: Environmental economies of urbanization

In general, the costs per household of installing most forms of infrastructure and supplying most kinds of service fall with increasing population density - i.e. economies of proximity. For instance, the cost of installing pipes for water, sewers and drains and for building roads is cheaper because less pipe (and less digging to install it) or less road is needed per house served . For many forms of infrastructure and services, there are also economies of scale because unit costs fall as larger populations are served - for instance, for water treatment plants, schools and many medical services. Providing more specialized medical and educational services, including those for particularly vulnerable or disadvantaged groups, can also become cheaper per person served with larger population concentrations. Higher capital expenditures per person for infrastructure and service provision in urban areas is more a reflection of higher quality provision than higher costs; this only becomes a public expenditure bias towards urban areas if the beneficiaries do not pay the full cost. However, increasing population density can also require that higher standards have to be provided - for instance, well designed and maintained pit latrines can often provide hygienic and convenient forms of sanitation in rural settlements and in urban areas where population densities are not too high - but more expensive systems are usually needed in higher density or larger urban settlements. The costs of infrastructure and services may also rise with city size, if the costs of acquiring land for their provision is a significant part of the total cost. So too will labour costs, if the costs of housing, transport and other necessities rise with city size (which they often do). The need for more complex and sophisticated pollution controls may also rise with increasing population size. For instance, effluents from sewers and storm drains from a small urban centre usually do not need as complex and expensive a treatment system as those from larger cities. There are also the costs to the public authorities of formulating and implementing environmental legislation which may rise with city size (Linn 1982, World Bank 1991).

In discussing the >economies' scale, proximity and agglomeration, it is important to be clear in regard to who benefits (and who does not). Private enterprises benefit from many economies of scale, proximity and agglomeration in urban areas; indeed, one major reason why they choose to concentrate in urban areas is because it lowers their production costs (including infrastructure and finance and access to cheaper and more diverse services and labour). But part of this may arise from the fact that they negotiate highly subsidized infrastructure and services or other subsidies. Part of their cost reductions often arise from their capacity to pay below subsistence wages or to externalize costs - to the detriment of their workforce (sub-standard occupational health and safety standards) or wider populations (through inadequate pollution control and waste management).

REDUCING RISKS FROM NATURAL DISASTERS: Economies of scale or proximity also exist for reducing risks from most natural disasters - for instance in the per capita cost of measures to lessen the risks (e.g. better watershed management or drainage reducing the scale of floods), reduce the risks when they occur (e.g. buildings better able to withstand floods or earthquakes and early-warning systems to allow special measures to be taken) and respond rapidly and effectively when a disaster is imminent or happens (International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies 1998). There is generally a greater capacity among city dwellers to help pay for such measures, if they are made aware of the risks and all efforts are made to keep down costs. However, in the absence of good practice, cities can be particularly hazardous as large (usually low income) settlements develop in hazardous sites (e.g. on flood plains or slopes at risk from landslide) because no other sites are available to them and as the needed prevention, mitigation and response measures are not taken.

WATER RE-USE OR RECYCLING: The close proximity of so many water consumers within cities gives greater scope for recycling or directly reusing waste waters - and the techniques for greatly reducing the use of freshwater in city homes and enterprises are well-known, where freshwater resources are scarce (Rocky Mountain Institute 1991) although it is agriculture, not cities, that dominate the use of freshwater in most nations. Many nations also have a long urban tradition of making efficient use of rainwater or of storing it for use during dry seasons or periods which contemporary patterns of water management have ignored (see for instance Agarwal and Narain 1997 for India).

LAND: Cities concentrate populations in ways that usually reduce the demand for land relative to population. Although valuable agricultural land is being lost to urban expansion, in most nations, the area taken up by cities and towns is less than one per cent of their total surface area. The world's current urban population of around 3 billion people would fit into an area of 200,000 square kilometres - roughly the size of Senegal or Oman - at densities similar to those of high class, much valued inner city residential areas in European cities (for instance Chelsea in London). This is a reminder of how some of the world's most desirable (and expensive) residential areas have high densities - including densities that suburban developers and municipal authorities regard as >too high' even though many such >high density' areas also have good provision for parks, a diverse employment structure and good cultural facilities. The fact that cities also concentrate demand for fresh fruit, vegetables, fish and dairy products also means considerable potential for their production in the area around a city - especially if their promotion is integrated with a city-wide and region-wide plan to protect watersheds, control urban sprawl, encourage urban or peri-urban agriculture and ensure adequate provision for open space. In many cities, this would support existing practices as a significant proportion of the food consumed by city inhabitants is grown within city boundaries or in areas immediately adjacent to the built up areas - often with city wastes also used to fertilize or condition the soil.

REDUCED AUTOMOBILE USE: Cities have great potential for limiting the use of motor vehicles - which also means reducing the fossil fuel consumption, greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution that their use implies. This might sound contradictory, since most of the world's largest cities have serious problems with congestion and motor-vehicle generated air pollution. But cities ensure that many more trips can be made through walking or bicycling. They also reduce travel distances - which is one of the reasons why cities developed. They make possible a much greater use of public transport and make economically feasible a high quality service. Thus, although cities tend to be associated with a high level of private automobile use, cities and urban systems also represent the greatest potential for allowing their inhabitants quick and cheap access to a great range of locations, without the need to use private automobiles.

POLLUTION CONTROL AND MANAGEMENT: Industrial concentration in cities cheapens the cost of enforcing regulations on environmental and occupational health and pollution control. It cheapens the cost of many specialized services and waste-handling facilities - including those that reduce waste levels or which recover materials from waste streams for re-use or recycling.

FUNDING ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT: The concentration of households and enterprises in cities makes it easier for public authorities to collect taxes and charges for public services while in prosperous cities, there is a larger revenue base, a larger demand and a larger capacity to pay for services.

GOVERNANCE: The concentration of people in cities can make easier their full involvement in electing governments at local and city level and in taking an active part in decisions and actions within their own district or neighbourhood.

GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS: For most nations, a high (and growing) proportion of their greenhouse gas emissions are released within cities. If the scale of such emissions need to be reduced to limit climate change and its deleterious consequences, some of the most cost-effective means of limiting each nation's emissions will be found in its cities.

It is the absence of effective city and municipal governance that explains the serious environmental problems evident in so many cities - serious environmental health problems, serious problems of environmental degradation around them. These environmental problems are not inherent to cities. Indeed, for most people, cities provide the best possibility of combining high standards of living and quality of life with less resource-intensive, pollution-intensive consumption patterns. There is also considerable potential for employment generation in most of the measures to ensure more healthy, resource-conserving, waste minimizing cities. There is also convincing evidence that robust economies and a high quality of life can be de-linked from growing resource use, pollution and waste.

FAST GROWING CITIES: The environmental problems that often accompany rapid urban growth are also not inherent to cities or to fast urban expansion. Some cities that have grown rapidly in the last 50 years have avoided most of the problems noted above. For instance, Curitiba and Porto Alegre in Brazil are both among the world's most rapidly growing cities in recent decades yet have high quality living environments and innovative environmental policies. One of these is Curitiba's much admired public transport system based on express busways and feeder buses which has encouraged comparable systems in many other cities. Citizens in Porto Alegre enjoy a life expectancy and many indicators of environmental quality that are comparable to those in West European cities - and also a city government that is well known for its commitment to supporting citizen participation, greater government accountability and good public health and environmental management.

Considerations of urban problems need to be turned from (often inaccurate) generalizations about the problems to more consideration of local governance structures that can address them and the kinds of national and international conventions or agreements that encourage local action to address not only local problems but contribute to the solution of global problems. The need for improvements in urban areas to be rooted in local realities is important from a development perspective and from an ecological perspective. Here too, some powerful myths about where action is most needed have to be confronted.

THE IMPORTANCE OF LOCALLY DETERMINED SOLUTIONS

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... "New national and global policies and institutions are needed to address urban problems"

Many of the discussions about how to deal with urban problems (or environmental problems in general) focus on national strategies and better governance nationally. But most urban problems need local institutions to address them - and that do so in ways that are accountable to local populations. In part, this is because of the phenomenal diversity between the world's 50,000 or so urban centres which make any generalised solutions invalid or of limited effectiveness. While reviews of tables showing urban population statistics for different nations may show some broad trends towards increasingly urbanised societies in much of the world, the scale and nature of such trends and their underlying causes differ greatly from country to country. There are also differences between regions and cities in the same country and over time. Even if globalisation and the legal and institutional changes it brings are an increasing influence in virtually all urban centres, it is important not to forget how unique social, economic, political and demographic structures are influencing urban change within each location. Or how different the impact of globalisation is on each city. Or how undemocratic it is to impose solutions that are not supported and developed with local populations.

Effective local governance is more important in the lives of most urban dwellers than good national or global governance, although ensuring effective government institutions in each city often requires changes in government at provincial/state, national and global levels. And how are national governments and international agencies going to meet their 'global' responsibilities without effective local government institutions as partners? For instance, it is difficult to see how biodiversity can be protected, malaria and other diseases reduced and greenhouse gas emissions kept down, without effective and representative local governments. Most global environmental problems will only be resolved through the aggregate impact of actions undertaken by local governments - yet local governments are rarely given much consideration in global conferences and global action plans. Given the key role of local governments in ensuring that both environment and development goals are met, it is surprising to find so little recognition of local governance in most discussions of sustainable development or deliberations of how to meet global targets such as the Millennium Development Goals. The 'big' issues such as greater equity, greater justice (and protecting human rights), protecting key resources, reducing greenhouse gases, achieving greater democracy, reducing poverty, and managing globalization are often discussed, without considering the local institutions needed to ensure progress in these areas.

In Europe and North America, we have become so used to a web of local institutions that serve, support and protect us that we forget their importance. We do not question the fact that we get water of drinking quality piped to our homes, and sanitation and electricity 24 hours a day and that garbage is collected regularly - with the costs representing a very small part of our income. There are schools and health centres to which even the lowest-income households have access. There are emergency services available to all, when needed. We have local politicians through whom we can make demands and voice grievances. Legislation and courts protect us from eviction, discrimination, exploitation and pollution. There are safety nets for those of us who lose our jobs or fall sick - and pensions for our retirement. There are lawyers, ombudsmen, consumer groups and watchdogs to whom we can turn if we feel that we have been cheated. And all of this is possible because of local government institutions overseen by democratic structures. Even if some services are provided by private companies or non-profit institutions, the framework for provision and quality control is provided by local governments or local offices of national or provincial governments. While coverage for some services may be sub-standard and some groups ill-served, the broad web of provision adequately serves the vast majority of the population.

The problems associated with urban growth in low and middle-income nations can only be addressed through the development of a comparable web of accountable local institutions in cities. Such institutions are also needed to ensure that the investments and interventions of national governments, international agencies and private companies recognise, respond to and are accountable to local needs. This certainly needs national action but much of this is to enable and support competent, effective, accountable local government - and to ensure a more equitable division of public resources among local governments

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