FOUR ENTRY POINTS FOR MORE SUSTAINABLE URBAN DEVELOPMENT IN THE CONTEXT OF RAPID URBANISATION
Think Piece for the Myanmar Urban Development Conference
6-8 May 2013, Yangon
Introduction
The temptation is strong to join the chorus of voices to the effect that Myanmar has a unique window of opportunity to avoid the mistakes committed by other rapidly developing and urbanising countries. I will resist this temptation in part because over 30 years of experience has taught me that many mistakes, especially when it comes to housing and urban development, are made over and over again. One of the reasons is because many of the underlying causes are the same.
While developing country cities differ considerably in their respective urbanisation processes and governance systems, they share many common challenges. For the sake of argument and simplicity, the typical scenario, especially for rapidly expanding primary cities, consists of three facets. On the one hand we have poorly equipped local government and weak housing and planning authorities. They ask politicians for more resources and more time to plan properly. They plead for subsidies for affordable housing and for land and tax reforms. On the other hand we have developers – domestic and foreign – backed by teams of professionals. They offer visions of a modern metropolis with promising financial returns and follow on investment. And, in the middle, we have multi-lateral and bilateral agencies and non-governmental organisations advocating for, broadly speaking, the Millennium Development Goals, people empowerment, gender equality and social inclusion.
What happens?
The best intentions for a more sustainable metropolis often get sidelined. A major contributing factor is competition for land. Land for housing, green space and eco-systems end up competing with land for CBD development, office parks and urban sprawl. Housing is pushed further and further away from jobs and recreation centres thus increasing commuting distances and demand for roads. Prime agricultural land gets converted to human settlement, requiring that food be transported from further afield. Forests, wetlands and rivers disappear, threatening not only bio-diversity but also resilience to floods, drought and other natural disasters that are provoked or abetted by human behaviour.
The end result is a metropolis characterised by congestion and pollution on the one hand, and rising levels of inequality both in income terms and in terms of access to basic services. In worse case scenarios inequality becomes extreme and a significant portion of the urban population ends up living in life and health-threatening slums.
What can be done?
There is no one-size fit-all solution to the challenges facing rapidly growing cities. There are, however, lessons that can be learned from experience, especially from other rapidly urbanising contexts. The following paragraphs look at approaches derived from lessons learned that could prove to be useful in guiding the urban policies and strategies in Myanmar.
Land banking, land use planning and value capture
One cannot emphasise enough the need for proper urban and land use planning. It is key to avoiding chaotic urban development and essential to making the city functional and economically productive. The problem in rapidly growing cities is that planning is almost always a step behind reality. By the time a master plan is completed and made into a binding instrument, it is often surpassed by events, be they social, political or demographic.
Land banking is a potentially powerful instrument to be used in conjunction with land use planning. It does, however, require up front capital investment for land acquisition or large tracts of publicly owned land, and a good dose of patience. The idea is a simple one: public authorities buy land when it is cheap – or hold on to public land as long as possible – and cash in on its added value as the city grows.
While many land banking operations have made public authorities very wealthy, they often perform less well when it comes to the good use of the profits. For land banking to work effectively it needs a clear set of objectives and measurable outcomes. These should be predicated on the use of profits for the public good, with clear targets for low-income housing; slum upgrading; infrastructure and mass transit development; and preservation of green space, wetlands and bio-diversity.
In a rapidly expanding city such as Yangon, the increase in the value of land at the current periphery of the city, if held for ten years or more, should be sufficient to pay for a large portion of the cost of providing trunk infrastructure and mass transit. This in turn further boosts the value of land and land tax revenues, the latter being the bloodline of municipal authorities. Adding ad hoc value capture instruments such as betterment taxes and Tax Increment Financing (TIF) provides further sources of revenue to local authorities thus helping to solve one of the major challenges facing cities worldwide, namely how to finance urban development.
In summary, while land use planning is, in essence, a political and social tool, land banking and value capture provide the economic wherewithal for land use planning to succeed. It provides the financial means by which public authorities can negotiate and partner effectively with the private and community sectors to ensure a more harmonious and liveable city for all.
Planning for informality
When I first started working in Africa some thirty years ago, I discovered that in many countries a home was only considered a house if it was built with stone, brick or cement. Such a building code excluded the vast majority of peoples’ homes in these countries; as it also would exclude most homes in North America which are made out of wood. Thus the single biggest investment that most families make in a lifetime was, in economic terms, discounted to zero. Similar policies applied to the informal economy, inhibiting access to banking, credit, insurance, etc.
To this day, these kinds of attitudes towards informality continue to disenfranchise entire segments of the urban population and prevent people from aspiring to decent livelihoods and work. The end result is a less dynamic and productive city and more chaotic city development. Even the best conceived slum-upgrading efforts represent but an “after thought” and piecemeal intervention within a chaotic urban fabric and cannot redress the urban chaos itself.
For this reason, planning for informality becomes a priority. In economic terms, planning for informality recognises that what people can afford to build today, however precarious, is nonetheless an investment for a better tomorrow – an expression of intent to become a stakeholder and citizen of the city. With appropriate encouragement, most importantly in security of tenure, improvements can be made progressively and in a much more orderly manner. In social terms, planning for informality dissociates the legal status of a house or a community from the right of any citizen to have access to basic services, thus helping to safeguard the health and safety of all citizens. Planning for informality also means that certain rules of the game are to be respected so that empowerment is not perceived as a license to engage in illegal activities or to encroach on land which is required for the common good.
Getting infrastructure and technology options right
My recent involvement with the Urban Infrastructure Initiative (UII) of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) strengthened a long-held conviction for the need of adequately informed decisions regarding urban infrastructure. The initiative involved over a dozen global technology companies providing upstream advice, as an independent consortium of experts, to a corresponding number of cities in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas.
Too often decisions of strategic importance for a city are made without the full knowledge or benefit of what can make a difference in support of more sustainable urban development. Decisions regarding energy, water, waste management, mass transit are made independently of one another rather than as strategic options for shaping the future. This results in the use of outdated and sectoral approaches to what is, in the final analysis, a single water, energy and waste nexus.
Three critical issues that need to be addressed include:
(i) The structural backbone of the city: this involves the defining elements of the city as well as the limits to its growth. The “great cities” of the world share one thing in common: they all have a defining structure of the city and “no go” zones. This defining structure may take the form of the alignment of key monuments and avenues, as in the case of Paris or Washington, or in a grid as in the case of Manhattan, or less visibly, in a metro or rail system such as Moscow or Tokyo.
These structuring elements provide guidance for a city’s growth for decades; of equal importance they help define the personality of a city and its iconic reference points.
(ii) The water-energy-waste mix of the city: Traditionally, water, waste, energy were considered as separate sectors, managed by semi-autonomous or autonomous entities, each responding to a different mandate and performance benchmarks. This is rapidly changing today as “smart” city approaches help us look at the inter-dependencies between these key services and how to optimise performance and outcomes in a more holistic manner. The city of the future will consist of a mix of solutions ranging from the macro to the micro – or neighbourhood – levels.
The so-called “big pipe” solutions that defined urban services in the past will increasingly co-exist with district or neighbourhood level service provision and facilities that enable citizens and their communities to become more regenerative.
(iii) Mobility and transit-oriented development: All major cities in the world face mobility challenges in one form or another. The basic conflict is between the car and the city and the trend in all emerging economies has been to accommodate the car to the detriment of almost everything else. The results are visible: ever higher levels of congestion, air and noise pollution, and social and transaction costs. For rapidly urbanising cities such as Yangon, ensuring accessibility and mobility requires some very rigorous measures and principles. These must permeate all aspects of planning and design that put the pedestrian first, favour collective means of mobility and promote mixed use and mixed income districts and neighbourhoods. Gated communities, suburban shopping malls, office parks and the urban highways that are required to access them are, in the words of Peter Calthorpe “weapons of mass urban destruction”. They destroy the fabric of the city, the social cohesiveness of entire communities and, over time, reduce the liveability and competitiveness of a city.
Participation and dialogue
Building a more sustainable city requires the participation of everyone. Whether the objective is water and energy efficiency, waste reduction, recycling and reuse, or green mobility, lasting solutions will work best when people, business and government work together. Among the numerous examples of how public authorities can engage local communities in participatory planning, participatory budgeting has proven in very diverse contexts and continents to be particularly effective. Participatory budgeting is not just about letting neighbourhoods decide on local priorities for improving their respective living conditions. It is also about neighbourhoods engaging with one another to see how their efforts mesh with those others and with city wide improvements. Participatory budgeting thus becomes a civic education process which anchors democracy at a level where its benefits become tangible and result in visible change.
Last but not least, the world is changing very rapidly and technology and finance are evolving in a continuous manner. Dialogue with the private sector is becoming an imperative if a city wants to take advantage of the latest technologies and explore exciting new business and financing models for infrastructure and basic services. Engaging in policy and strategy dialogue with the private sector should no longer be perceived as a potential conflict of interest. If engaged early enough in the visioning and planning stages it should be perceived as a means of learning from experience, namely what has worked best where, how and why.
Concluding remarks
The intention of this paper is to stimulate the conversation between different stakeholders in the course of the Myanmar Urban Development Conference. I, for one, definitely look forward to hearing from others so that we can further our common quest for a more sustainable urban future.