By 2015 Asia will have 12 mega-cities each with over ten million people.  One in three urban Asians lives in a slum.  As urbanisation accelerates, this number will rise unless Asian governments and the international development community prioritise housing and infrastructure development. 

A paper from Homeless International describes urbanisation trends in Asia, identifies shortcomings in urban planning and provides examples of good practice to reduce urban poverty and exclusion.  The paper focuses on the experience of poor urban people, who are encouraged to live and work in cities to provide cheap labour on which city economies are built.  Few arrangements are made, however, to ensure that they can live safely and affordably, and benefit from the city’s development.

Cities are engines of growth – Mumbai alone generates a sixth of India’s Gross Domestic Product.  Demand for urban land is intensifying.  A combination of speculation, market forces, urban beautification and infrastructure projects have made land a valuable commodity that can be sold for commercial development or middle-class residential use; poor urban people are least well-equipped to compete for land in this environment.  They are increasingly forced to live in hazardous or marginal locations, far from places of work and government services.  In South Asia alone, more than 150 million people lack secure tenure in urban areas.  A common policy response to mounting pressures has been to forcefully evict poor communities to free up land, but without offering adequate and well planned alternatives.

The author describes what can be achieved through partnerships:

• In the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, an Urban Poor Development Fund has provided a forum for different groups to pool financial and non-financial resources and balance commercial development and the needs of poor urban people.
• In 15 cities in the Philippines, communities have carried out ‘danger zone surveys’, and have been urging the authorities to safely relocate poor people living in hazardous locations.
• In Thailand, the Community Organisations Development Institute (CODI) is supporting community-led upgrading of settlements and promotion of secure tenure for 300,000 poor urban households.
• In India, The Community Led Infrastructure Finance Facility (CLIFF) demonstrates an innovative way in which capital funds can support community-led initiatives in multiple locations, in partnership with municipal authorities. 

There is poor integration between national and local development plans.  Eight of the 14 Asian countries with national Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers also have City Development

Strategies (CDSs), but the city level strategies are not directly referred to in the national level strategies.

Homeless International calls on governments and donors to build on successful initiatives to promote sustainable urbanisation and pro-poor growth by:

• generating better, locally-rooted, information about urban poverty
• promoting coordination between institutions involved in city-level, national and sub-national policy formulation
• creating long-term working partnerships involving poor people, with a particular focus upon settlement upgrading
• developing new models of accountable, negotiation-based urban planning and regulation
• fostering learning and interaction between cities, building on successful solutions already established in Asia
• improving capital financing for urban development, partly by encouraging domestic financial markets to provide funds for pro-poor urban development.

Source(s):
‘Urbanisation, Sustainable Growth and Poverty Reduction in Asia’, Institute of Development Studies and Overseas Development Institute, Asia 2015 Conference, by Malcolm Jack, 2006 Full document.

id21 Research Highlight: 24 November 2006

Further Information:
Malcolm Jack
Homeless International
Queens House
16 Queens Road
Coventry CV1 3DF, UK

Tel: +44 (0) 24 76632802
Fax: +44 (0) 24 76632911
Contact the contributor: malc@homeless-international.org

Homeless International, UK

Other related links:
'China on the move: managing rural-urban migration'

'As poverty urbanises, can cities become sustainable, equitable and productive?'

'Pro-poor growth in the city: are City Development Strategies the answer?'

China urban poverty study

Understanding Asian Cities

Housing by People in Asia – Special Issue on Community Development Funds