Jeb Brugmann
- Why don’t real cities reflect urban ‘best practice’? Unlike military strategy, public health strategy, etc, ‘urban’ may have planning, design etc, but much less of a strategic component. Cities which have adopted a strategic approach have achieved great things: witness the resurgence of Barcelona, Chicago, or the rise of Curitiba. Rather than tailoring their incentives to the building industry, they reshaped the market to meet strategic objectives, and fostered a local development industry around their own plans.
Alain Bertaud
- On ‘land shortage’: city mayors often complain about land shortage, but “I’ve only ever seen a real land shortage once—in Male, capital of the Maldives—which is built on a 3km2 island and they’ve built on all the available land already. Everywhere else, the ‘shortage’ is man-made”. The high land prices which are generated by artificial constraints on land development are the main determinant of the informal housing sector. Look at the effects of artificial constraints in Seoul, Karachi, or London—they drove up land prices. In particularly perverse cases, artificial constraints are combined with low FARs and high minimum plot sizes, which mean people must consume more land than they want to!
- However, there’s also the other extreme, where for example Cairo expanded land supply too much, and in the wrong place. For example, the ‘10th Ramadan’ new town was built 65 kilometres from the centre of Cairo. You can see there now the great infrastructure and roads, but that it’s pretty empty of land development. The informal sector meanwhile got it right, and expanded close to the existing city.
- Meanwhile, why on earth do we use the word ‘sprawl’ both for Atlanta—which has a density of 6 persons per hectare—and for Mumbai, which has 400 per hectare? There are problems in both, but of a totally different order of magnitude.
- On informal housing: note that there is no novelty in ‘getting the private sector involved’ in the informal housing sector... Private developers are already the ones building for the informal sector and urban poor! “I’ve never seen the government building for the informal sector.. The houses may look like it!—but it’s not!”
David Satterthwaite
- It’s worth dwelling on the observation that most urban centres in Africa have no sewers. They have no sewers. That’s no surprise when you look at the funding situation: recently he was talking to a neighborhood councillor in Dar es Salaam in an area of 800,000 population, which has an annual sanitation department budget of $3,000. But the solution isn’t just increased funding: there aren’t yet good enough institutions to know how to use it either.
- The World Bank must find ways to work with local governments, shack dwellers federations, etc—the big money must find its way to those with the most ingenious people doing something about it.
Marianne Fay (working on the World Development Report 2010, on climate change)
- There’s a misconception that greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions increase as people move to cities: remember that it’s actually the middle class lifestyle (not urban living itself) which generates GHGs. Cities themselves actually limit GHGs, since people are closer together and need to use transportation less, there are economies of scale in buildings, etc.
- In order to support this argument, they ran some regressions with %urbanisation as a coefficient on GHG emissions. Actually it seems to have a zero effect. “I’m a little disappointed: I thought it was going to be a negative effect. So...we’ll play around with the regression a bit.” [joke]
Eduardo Moreno, UN-HABITAT:
- Not all slum dwellers are equal. Remember that a slum dweller in Cairo can actually be better off (in terms of income, health etc) than a non-slum dweller in Luanda or Lagos, because of the way that slums are defined in terms of water & sanitation access and housing quality.
- HABITAT’s recent State of the World’s Cities report found that 10-12% of cities in the developing world hava declining population. And this is likely to increase. So there’s a need for policies for urban decline as well as urban growth. Sometimes this ‘decline’ is just because people are moving to the suburbs, outside city administrative boundaries, but still.
Tim Campbell
- Where do city governments get their policy ideas from? How do they learn? According to his web-based survey, the most important means—more than inhouse seminars, consultants’ advice, training courses, or reports—is city-to-city exchanges. So, these are really not ‘junkets’ but instead opportunities to see how others are doing it. [However, it wasn’t clear from his descriptive statistics whether differences in the ratings given to these various methods were significant or not, especially given some bunching.]
Andrew Norton, World Bank
- Urban governance is a front-line in promoting citizenship—citizens begin to see themselves as participants rather than beneficiaries.
David Dowall, USC
- Finds it astonishing that so many urban people in the Bank [and, presumably, in international development organisations in general..] focus on slums and slum-upgrading rather than housing markets in general. It’s distortions in housing markets which are generating the structural defects which cause slums!
Billy Cobbett, Cities Alliance
- ‘Slum prevention’ is a misnomer because it’s unrealistic. What you’re really aiming to do is help governments prepare for slums, or to prepare for better slums, which will be upgraded over time.
- “If 80% of your city is slums, it means you don’t have a ‘slum problem’, you have a city problem, and hence the whole system which is causing it needs to be rethought, from top to bottom.”
- One of the keys is to get the private sector investing in its own future, and that means on-budget commitments form the municipal administration. “When a mayor says they’re committed to action on slums, we don’t look at the last speech, we look at what’s on budget”—what is the administration doing, regardless of external donor commitments?
George Peterson
- Dexia—which was previously the largest subnational lending institution in the world—has now withdrawn from lending outside France and Belgium owing to heavy losses. Some of the details of loans they made before this portfolio shrinkage are totally astonishing: for example, the interest rates of loans to Lyon in France were tied to the price of a barrel of oil! It could have been even more bizarre: at one stage the idea was discussed of linking loan interest rates to the price of a barrel of champagne! As Junaid Ahmed then quipped, “You wouldn’t see that in an Islamic banking system..”
- There are some lessons for municipal finance:
- Simplicity of loan structure: go for fixed-rate, long-term loans
- Develop a specialized municipal credit market, perhaps using special lending institutions, on a low-risk low-return model.
- Develop domestic credit markets too, so you’re not dependent on external credit, and not subject to foreign exchange risk.
