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Pavements of Gold
Urban poverty has been described as one of the biggest challenges facing the world in the 21st century. The figures are stark: in 1950, the number of people living in urban areas amounted to 300 million. At the start of the new century, that figure had multiplied almost ten-fold, to 2.85 billion - or almost half the world's total population. And the flow of rural migrants arriving in the world's megacities shows no signs of slowing down. "It is a trend which cannot be stopped," says Anna Tibaijuka, the new executive director of Habitat, the UN Centre for Human Settlements. With the backdrop of the growing urban slums surrounding Lima, capital city of Peru, this programme examines the enduring magnetism of big cities - and asks whether the migrants who've moved here now feel that city life is the answer to their dreams.
Liliana Miranda, Director of Eco-Ciudad, says that life is more difficult for migrants these days: "They don't have the opportunities that the previous migrants had." There are few jobs, and the people who have already settled tell them to go back home.
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Interviewed in his shabby dwelling on the outskirts of the city, José Diaz Giocochea who came to Lima with his wife and three children, doesn't regret the move. "I left the place I was born to look for a better life and for a better future for my children. So the children could get a profession and have a better life from the one we have had ourselves." He's convinced his children will stand a better chance in their city home - even though they haven't yet found a place in the local school.
On the land, agrarian reform and mechanisation means fewer jobs, says Sheela Patel, Director of SPARC: "You're going to have a situation where the only place for exploring other opportunities is cities."
There is drought in the countryside, too. That's why Maria Guillen Perez came to Lima. On the whole she's better off, but it hasn't been straightforward: "When we're in the countryside we think we'll be better off in the city but when we come to Lima we find out something else: we find that there is no work, that we need to breed animals or sell something - something that will give you a secure income." Maria warns that the city can be as unwelcoming as its landscape: "We arrived here and we just found stones, wild plants and nothing else . . ."But at least in Lima there's electricity, water and further education.
Habitat Executive Director Anna Tibaijuka says that women and children often have a tough time when they move to the cities. "They don't have requisite education, they don't have skills, they're not able to find a job. They don't have necessarily the social networks which normally keep rural communities together..."
As for children, there are over one million on the streets of Lima alone, according to Liliana. Street kids will be just one of the problems on the agenda of the UN's City Summit Review, to be held in New York in June. Miloon Kothari, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Adequate Housing, spells out the dangers: "There are more and more cases of children suffering because they have to constantly live under the threat of the homes being evicted. Where there is no guarantee of being able to go to school, where they have to live in situations where obviously there isn't enough food; and, and there is a constant threat also from the police, from landlords, from other forces in society..."
Peter Marcuse, Professor of Urban Planning, Columbia University, is a strong believer in people's right to adequate housing. "The idea that people can only get minimum quality housing if they can pay for it... I think that's a devastating, negative, evil idea. Housing ought to be treated as something people have as a right. The question of where they live is not really under their control - they don't come voluntarily because they want to live in a favela ... they come to the city looking for a better way of life and I think it's one of the functions of government to help them achieve their goal."
But Ed Glaeser, Professor of Economics, Harvard University, questions whether giving them subsidised housing and land rights, which the rural poor don't have, is really the right thing to do. "You don't want those perverse incentives, you want to create a neutral - a spatially neutral policy that helps the poor everywhere."
Sheela Patel dismisses this argument: "People don't come to the city to go to the toilet or to have a glass of water. They come out of a much more complex basket of needs and aspirations. And they're going to be there."
Ed Glaeser is concerned about the economic distortions introduced by non-democratic governments, and points out that large cities in dictatorships are larger than those in democracies. "Places where the political systems don't protect the rights of people in the hinterland or people in smaller cities - where if you're in the capital you get stuff and you're not in the capital you don't get stuff - this creates a massive distortion to flow to the larger cities." And he argues that megacities do not create poverty - they simply make poverty visible.
Sheela Patel says that children coming to the city will have better health and education, and in the long run that benefits the city. "You can use economies of scale to bring in new quality education or to do improved training. Then you have a whole new human resource which is trained, which then makes that city competitive to host what you call the "fruits of globalisation", which is business coming in."
By the end of this decade most people in the world will live in towns and cities. For most of them, life will improve - even if they don't always like it. As Liliana puts it: "Every migrant will say that, "I am better, I am living better, my children are studying well - but this is horrible. I don't like it! But we have food, I have a job and they are going to school."
TRANSCRIPT
Read the full transcript of Pavements of Gold
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