Conference video day 1

Professor Louk Box, Rector of ISS, opens the two-day conference on the Cities of Extremes as well as the Lustrum Week, celebrating the 55th Anniversary of ISS.

Following Professor Box's introductory speech, Mr Ortiz discusses his experiences when he was a student at ISS in '76-'77 as well as his current position as council member of the City of Quito.

Dr Kees Biekart introduces the main themes of the two-day conference Cities of Extremes.

Title: Claiming a Future from a Problematic Present. Meanings of Urban Citizenship for Slum Youth in Metro Manila

Abstract: Poor urban children and youth (ages 7-17), make up a high proportion of vulnerable residents in Metro Manila's urban informal settlements. Asked to voice their own perceptions of current and future scenarios, they respond with views ranging from optimism to cynicism, or even despair. All too long have they understood the implications of low educational levels, high unemployment prospects, problem-fraught families, dismissive local leaders, and threats to their health, personal safety and residential security. While many children and youth work part- or full-time to help support their families, others face an enforced idleness that may propel a number into gang or criminally related behavior. Government, civil society, and business groups have generated a variety of useful programs, but these remain woefully inadequate considering the scale of need. The extent to which marginalizied young people gain access to meaningful opportunities, improved services, healthy social relationships, effective participation, and solid citizenship rights will significantly influence the contributions they make to city life in the 21st century.

Author: Mary Racelis

Title: Remaking Cities, Many Ways at a Time

Abstract: Cities today abound with ambivalence--where no clear policy directives, historical precedents, and calculations of urban change can provide a definitive sense of what the intersections of multiple temporalities and walks of life will produce. In urban Africa today there are far too Many complicities, dispersals, make-shift arrangements, folded-in enclaves far from the world, cross-border movements far out into the world for the now customary policies of decentralized local governance and local economic development to really work. Too much of the city is constituted by shape-shifting realities, resisting objectification, colonization, synthesis and summary. Yet, visible degradations, dysfunctions, absences, and disorders both conceal and are the platforms for various lines of connection between actions, concerns, imaginations, efforts, materials, and places that make up highly textured spaces of operation-full of constraints and possibilities-through which residents conduct their economic, cultural and spiritual lives. These dynamics occasion new possibilities for an urban politics of deals, and the presentation will concern the platforms and practices of deal-making working with this ambivalence.

Author: Abdumaliq Simone

Title: Slum wars of the 21st century: Understanding the new geography of conflict in Central America

Abstract: This paper suggests that focusing on the geographical evolution of the Central American landscape of violence provides a number of critical insights into its underlying contemporary dynamics. Basing myself specifically on the example of Nicaragua, the Central American country that is historically perhaps most paradigmatically associated with violence, I begin by tracing the evolution of its violence from country to city over the past three decades, before briefly drawing parallels with the rest of Central America. I then theoretically characterise this particular trajectory as a movement from ‘peasant wars of the twentieth century’ (Wolf, 1969) to ‘urban wars of the twenty-first century’ (Beall, 2006), thereby highlighting how although past and present forms of brutality might initially seem very different, present-day urban violence arguably actually represents a continuation – albeit in a new spatial context – of the past conflicts associated with the rural hinterlands. Following this, I move on to discuss how the particular social, economic, and political processes that have contributed to this new geography of conflict in Central America, coupled with the very fact of its changed spatiality, have also led to a general intensification of violence, and once again drawing on the example of Nicaragua – but also making more sustained reference to other countries in the region – I show how this is most evident in the widespread proliferation of youth gangs. These can arguably be said to constitute the vanguard of the new ‘urban wars of the twenty-first century’, but their evolutionary trajectory over the past decade suggests that these generalised ‘urban wars’ are increasingly giving way to more localised ‘slum wars’, thereby signalling a radical shift in the balance of power between social groups in the Central American region. This is powerfully exemplified by the rising inequality and extensive processes of purposeful socio-spatial segregation that Central American cities are undergoing, which I argue effectively amount to a form of ‘urbicide’.

Author: Dennis Rodgers

Title: Extreme thinking about slums and slum dwellers: a critique

Abstract: I wish to confront two sets of recent thinking about slums and slum dwellers. The first is broadly too optimistic and believes that the problem of inadequate shelter can somehow be resolved, at least in the not so distant future. The second is too pessimistic and warns of some kind of apocalypse in the near or not so distant future. Neither line of thought is entirely wrong. The growth of festering slums is not inevitable providing that appropriate policies are undertaken. But, in places, the failure to apply appropriate policies will produce awful shelter conditions and probably major threats to health, to welfare and, even, to political stability. The boring truth is that even in a globalising world much and perhaps most of what happens is determined locally. At heart, the paper will be a warning against over-generalisation; something that journalists are too fond of, but seemingly academics (increasingly?) too. The paper will contest current lines of thinking about, at least: the proliferation of slums, access to land by the poor, infrastructure policies, social and residential segregation, privatization, property rights and slumlords. The paper will also denounce the recent resuscitation of the pejorative word ‘slum’ with all of its negative connotations for the people who live in low-income areas.

Author: Alain Gilbert

Title: Learning from Latin America: the global expansion of participatory budgeting

Abstract: British citizens will be given authority to decide how millions of pounds in public investment should be spent in local communities, under innovative plans for revitalising deliberative local democracy unveiled by the incoming Gordon Brown administration in July 2007. This is the most recent example of the global expansion of participatory budgeting (PB), after being successfully tested in hundreds of cities in Latin America as well as in tens of European, African and Asian municipalities. In a period of less than two decades, since its original evolution in the south of Brazil at the end of the 1980s, PB has become one of the most remarkable innovations in local governance, acclaimed by a broad range of social and political actors from the most diverse social, political and institutional backgrounds. The democratic experiment first developed by a few left-wing municipal administrations in Latin America has evolved into a global ‘best practice’ in citizens’ participation, poverty reduction and good governance, praised by governments and the international development community. Across continents, PB is currently being actively ‘exported’ by the World Bank and other development-oriented institutions, as a new strategy to empower individuals, diminish corruption, and improve the quality of local delivery of public services and implementation of social policies. The paper will examine ongoing policy shifts towards civic engagement in the context of the global dissemination of ideologically ‘sterile’ versions of decentralisation and citizens’ participation. The opening section briefly reviews the recent evolution of PB in Brazil and other Latin American countries, different approaches to participation, and the main open questions being posed by the recent academic and political literature. The second section summarises international trends as regards the concepts of ‘partnerships’, ‘new localism’ and ‘new urban governance’, which appear to have influenced the implementation of newly institutionalised forms of participation such as Porto Alegre’s governança solidária local (local solidarity governance, LSG). The third section analyses how the new participatory structures were conceived, the political actors involved, their objectives and their social, economic and political impacts. The concluding section recapitulates the main problems encountered in the establishment of the ‘new governance’ scheme and discusses its prospects locally and internationally.

Author: Daniel Chavez & Sergio Baierle

Title: Progressive Patronage? NGOs, CBOs and the Limits to Slum Dwellers' Empowerment

Abstract: Initiatives for urban poverty reduction critically depend on slum dwellers’ collective agency. NGOs active in this field consider community-based organizations their natural partners. Ideally, the latter act as representatives of all residents, articulate needs and priorities vis-à-vis intervening agencies, organize contributions in kind and/or labour, and monitor implementation and outcomes. CBOs play a crucial role in strategies for empowering the urban poor as they join NGOs in (or at least provide credibility for) lobbying and advocacy campaigns for shelter, livelihoods and political representation. In some cases, they may be united into citywide, national and even international federations in order to amplify their voice and increase bargaining power. The paper puts some of the assumptions underlying this approach under scrutiny. One issue concerns CBOs’ legitimacy in speaking and acting on behalf of the communities they (claim to) represent – especially of the poorest and most excluded ones, including women, renters, ethnic and religious minorities etc. A focus here has to be the CBO leadership which may be more self-interested than oriented at community welfare. This is especially valid in the case of political leadership, and leaders who are also patrons or brokers. Next we analyze CBO-NGO relations and dynamics, and assess whether we can speak of a ‘partnership’, or if relations can best be seen as un-balanced and asymmetrical in terms of power, money and accountability. Ultimately the context of the urban poor is one of scarcity and competition, and informal, vertical relations are often more promising for gaining access – and thus more rational for an individual to pursue – than ‘horizontal’, collective relations and actions. And finally, as the demand for support by far exceeds NGOs’ capacities they can and have to select beneficiary communities, creating dependency that compounds obvious differences in expertise and access. Based on cases from India, we argue that the NGO-CBO alliance is an asymmetrical and uneasy one. While assessing formal relations between NGOs, CBOs and institutions critical for the poor, the focus is on the informal relations including those within and between CBOs, brokers and political leaders and the NGOs. The paper scrutinizes patronage-like relations between NGOs, CBOs and their constituency, and competition between poor communities that constrains solidarity and cooperation.

Author: Joop de Wit