UN World Habitat Day: Better Cities, Better life-Yes, Cities without Slums!

As we celebrate the UN World Habitat Day on October 4, 2010, we need to reflect on where we have come from and where we are going. Especially on where we are going, we most importantly must choose the right road for “We the Peoples”. Understandably, these “better cities” are meant for us “Peoples,” including slum dwellers. This therefore means that “better life” will not be forthcoming if we still have slums within these “better cities.”

Among the crucial issues we need to reflect on is our own perception of slum dwellers in this context, because this will potentially determine the kind of plan we are bound to put in place toward ensuring that we don’t have slums in those “better cities.” Or, are we not outraged when we see these dehumanizing conditions in which slum dwellers live? If yes, what are we, both collectively and individually, doing about it?

The UN Habitat reports that “a total of 227 million people in the world have moved out of slums since 2000. This means that governments have collectively surpassed the Millennium Development Goal on slums more than two times over.” While this might sound extremely encouraging, we need to remind ourselves that the number is increasing: “…if no collective action is taken, UN-HABITAT projections show that this figure will increase to 1.5 billion” from the current figure of 1 billion. Does this tell us something about MDGs’ Target 7d: Achieve significant improvement in lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers, by 2020? We made a mistake by failing to properly include slum dwellers into the MDGs. If we are supposed “to halve, by 2015, the proportion of the world’s people whose income is less than one dollar a day,” then it means that slum dwellers have been excluded from this important framework as neither the 2020 target date nor the numerical target of 100 million are consistent with this overall goal of the Millennium Development Goal. Clearly, this shows some of the problems resulting from strident voices that, conservatively, tend to equate rural development and poverty reduction. And this explains why the slum dwellers’ goal was moved from ‘poverty eradication’ and placed under ‘environmental sustainability,’ which, by the way, is the last one under this category.

If we are serious about having “better cities” and consequently “better life,” we must accept the fact that slum dwellers constitute poverty. Again, we need to agree that both rural development and rural poverty reduction tend to benefit from urbanization. Within this understanding, we are empowered to aim at the right target, thereby invoking the right tools toward eradicating poverty. At this point we are able to:

· Plan for future urban growth as one of the means of preventing slums from increasing

· Undertake nationwide slum upgrading programs

· Develop policy and institutional capability for sustainability

· Locally involve slum communities in the design and implementation of measures aimed at improving their lives