Third World Cities: Sustainable Urban Development, 1

Abstract

Both the World Bank and the UN Development Programme have emphasized growing urban poverty as a threat to political stability in the third world. There are several conflicting ideas and processes that currently affect the theoretical and practical roles of urban management in the 1990s. One idea receiving attention in strategy documents is building local capacity or increasing economic productivity by allowing the informal sector to thrive through the removal of constraints. Yet with the exception of the unsystematic recyling of waste materials by individual households or scavengers there is very little that the informal sector can do for the current crisis in land management and public utilities such as water or sewerage. One major role of urban management is to ensure that the private sector particularly industry does not contribute more than it should to urban environmental problems. The private sector can manage certain profitable services but it rarely takes on the more troublesome burdens of service provision and it sometimes charges exorbitantly for those it does. There may be a place for small community-level organizations in the provision of public utilities to urban residents. Where these organizations have been principally involved in protesting the lack of services there are examples of their actually managing them. The management of Third World cities is complicated by conflicting influences including national and international banks and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Under the guidance of the World Bank the current tendency is for the state to play a limited role in basic service provision usually at the level of the central government. A new concept decentralized cooperation between cities holds promise provided that local control emerges and that efforts are not weighted down by bureaucracy.