Reviewing urban revitalisation strategies in Rio de Janeiro: from urban project to urban management approaches

This paper describes key urban development strategies pursued during the last seven years by the Municipality of Rio de Janeiro, the second largest city in Brazil. It discloses internal processes, organisational restructuring of the municipality and institutional changes geared to increase effective urban management and resource mobilisation required to implement multiple sector programmes and key projects in several locations in the city like Favela Bairro and Rio Cidade Programmes, The Rio Strategic Plan, etc. It is argued that the formation of interdepartmental working groups for better horizontal articulation of policy making and implementation, the creation of the financial and accounting unit, the decentralisation of authority towards sub-municipality levels, and capacity strengthening of its personnel – among other things – have made a positive impact on the performance of local government. The paper further highlights a significant change towards policies of urban consolidation and revitalisation of declined areas of the city supported by heavy public investments and the effort towards broader civil society involvement in municipal projects. Municipal autonomy, problem-solving and result-oriented type of planning and management and organisational change are some of the lessons pinpointed by the paper for a city of that size and complexity.     

The favelas of Rio de Janeiro: A temporal and spatial analysis

A spatial and temporal analysis, at a city wide scale, is given of the main type of informal housing (favelas) in Rio de Janeiro. Rapid change in the number and distribution of favelas and their inhabitants (favelados) over time is seen as the outcome of two opposing sets of factors. Demand-led housing factors, including population growth and variations in levels of poverty in the city, have constantly outstripped the supply side of the housing equation where inadequate housing policies and investment, together with restricted building land have been characteristic. Added to these factors are a set of more specific developments which shape the favela geography, including the timing and location of urban redevelopment, favela eradication and recognition, transport development and access by the favelados to employment sources. Evidence shows that the contemporary distribution of favelas in the city does not conform to spatial models of this urban form, and that any interpretation of the Rio favelas, including their growth, development and diversity, needs to be space and time specific. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Government policies and international migration of skilled workers in Sub-Saharan Africa

Since a central concern of the geography of international migration is to consider how and why stocks and flows of migrants are variable from country to country, the study of skilled international migration must address policies of individual governments towards local and foreign skilled workers. These policies are most evident in immigration and emigration legislation, regulations and practice, but also, less directly but often of more fundamental significance, in policies in education, manpower planning and towards wages and salaries. In Sub-Saharan Africa there is a wide range of experience of recent skilled international migration, driven by direct and indirect policies pursued by individual governments since independence. At an intercontinental scale the deleterious effects of the global division of labour have not merely been passively accepted; within the continent new patterns of skilled-labour migration have been created by increasingly differentiated economic performance and political relationships. A case study of Kenya, a country of small current net immigration of skilled workers, is used to specify some of the processes that establish the relationships between immigration and emigration policies, and how these have been mediated by conditions for skilled workers. The concluding section of this paper sets the general experience and that of the Kenyan case study in the wider context of the role of the state as a factor in the geography of skilled international migration in the Third World.     

Global civil society? The Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development

In the face of mounting environmental degradation and persistent poverty over the previous decade, Johannesburg’s World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) of August and September 2002 inherited a number of unmet accords from the 1992 Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit. Consequently, the United Nations Stakeholder Forum Implementation Conference (IC) was convened to integrate civil society stakeholders into global deliberations on sustainable development and to marshal their forces in the implementation of WSSD accords. Given the importance of the IC as the first civil society forum at a major global summit on environment and poverty, intriguing questions emerge as to its effectiveness in achieving civil society objectives. As a first attempt in exploring this topic, we examine three fundamental aspects of the IC. Specifically, we examine the relative “civility” of the IC forum in terms of (a) fidelity of representation of the community of global environment and development stakeholders; (b) autonomy of the IC agenda from state and institutional interests; and (c) interpretations of space and place as reflected in deliberative processes and outcomes. The paper begins with a review of the civil society literature with a particular emphasis on civil society representation in UN meetings since Rio. The paper concludes with a discussion of IC participation at the Johannesburg summit, and considers implications for future civil society participation in global decision-making forums.     

Urban environmental services and the state in East Africa; between neo-developmental and network governance approaches

Although governments are generally expected to provide environmental services such as sanitation and solid waste collection for their citizens, most (municipal) governments in Sub-Saharan Africa seem hardly able to take up this task. Without ignoring the lack of material resources resulting from poverty, there are other structural causes for this failure as well and related to the role of the state. Since independence, the state in Africa has been debated in political as well as in academic circles and opposing views can still be discerned today. While some promote a strong interventionist state which can effectively enhance development, others consider introducing network governance by involving various societal actors in combination with different levels of government a more promising alternative. After presenting an historical overview, in this paper I will summarize this debate and discuss future options for East African authorities for providing more effective and sustainable urban environmental infrastructures and services.     

“Invisible women" Making the case for supply-led,class-based,gender targeted land redistribution in South Africa

Despite progressive policies and guidelines to ensure gender equity in the South African land reform programme, the achievement to date is less impressive. In agreement with others we view gender related challenges in the land reform programme as the result of (1) inconsistent interpretations of gender equity and (2) uncertainty on how women specifically should be targeted in the land reform programme. The paper proposes to promote gender equity by introducing of a supply-led strategy with class sensitive gender targets within the land redistribution component of the land reform programme. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Anti-poverty politics in Toronto and Mexico City

In recent years, governments at different scales in both North and South have been experimenting with alternative methods of alleviating poverty, and redesigning social welfare regimes. While these changes are not entirely congruent across regimes in North and South, there are interesting points of overlap and intersection. The article lays out three broad alternatives to “roll-back” neoliberalism: intrusive liberalism; inclusive liberalism, and a renewed version of social citizenship. It then lays out how these alternatives have played out in anti-poverty politics in Toronto and Mexico City, two sites where creative strategies contesting neoliberalism have been pursued. While both cities occupy a critical place within their respective political economies, they are not usually compared because of their very different positions in the North American division of labour. Yet, as we argue, they face similar challenges in the form of poverty reduction strategies at the national scale that are based on neoliberal principles that do little to meet the needs of their inhabitants. In response, both cities have provided a site for mobilising resources behind alternative anti-poverty policies, inspired by the principles of social citizenship.     

On the expulsion of rural inmigrants from Greater Khartoum — the example of the Dinka in Suq el Markazi

The magnitude of housing demand and the inadequacy of public housing in most cities of the Third World have led to the emergence of types of housing which, while having different names, are classified as squatter settlements. In Khartoum, the expansion of squatter settlements has mainly been due to political processes that resulted in dramatic urban needs generated by uneven development, widespread migration, demographic growth and income inequalities. In the recent years, however, rural recession, civil war, drought, floods and famine combined to turn the Sudanese capital city into a reception centre for a considerable number of displaced people from areas affected. Here the bulk of the displaced persons found accommodation in huts that they built themselves. The government responded to such a situation by embarking on a large scale deportation programme. Attempts to bargain, resist, or to cope with the political system, on the part of the displaced people, proved to be in vain. Available estimates suggest that at least two thirds of the two or more million migrants who moved to Khartoum during the last sixteen years, have now been forcibly driven back to rural areas.     

Poverty tourism: theoretical reflections and empirical findings regarding an extraordinary form of tourism

During the mid-1990s, a new form of tourism was established in metropolises of several developing countries or emerging nations. This type of tourism consists in visits to the most disadvantaged parts of the respective city. Poverty tours or slum tours are offered on a relatively large scale in the South African cities of Johannesburg and Cape Town, Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, as well as in Indian metropolises, to name some important examples. The target group of these tours consists primarily of international tourists. It is estimated that 40,000 such tourists visit favelas in Rio de Janeiro each year, around 300,000 the townships in Cape Town. This contribution refers to and comments on these developments and insights regarding poverty tourism or slumming, based on empirical research and experiences in South Africa, Brazil, and India. It will be shed light on the phenomenon from an observational-theoretical perspective. It is aimed to open a discussion on the ways poverty tours or slumming observes and simultaneously programmatically charges poverty. And, it will be considered in which way poverty tourism is observed.     

Disaster education for landslide risk reduction: an experience in a public school in Rio de Janeiro State,Brazil

Public policies for reducing the disaster risk associated with landslides in Brazil, based almost solely on the implementation of engineering works to stabilise hillsides, have proved ineffective, with this type of disaster becoming more common and more severe. There is therefore an urgent need to form a culture that encourages the public to participate directly in disaster management and develops community capacity, which requires a broad disaster education programme on formal, non-formal and informal levels. Given the recent approach to the topic, this study aims to contribute to the development of a disaster education methodology for landslides, based on an experience that was coordinated by the authors within formal education. The experience was implemented in a state school in the city of Niterói (Rio de Janeiro State, Brazil) which is recurrently affected by disasters associated with landslides. The issue of disasters associated with landslides was addressed in a one-semester course, using the theory of meaningful learning and a range of pedagogical tools in both theory and practical classes, for a total period of 16 h. The educational activities were preceded by a landslide risk perception survey and teacher training. The study concluded that the course promoted interactive and participatory learning, a connection to the real problem in the field and an affective relationship with the issue.     

Turn up the heat! Contesting energy poverty in Buffalo,NY

Energy poverty – or the condition of households that cannot adequately heat their homes – is produced at the confluence of multi-scalar processes, from regional labor market restructuring, to urban disinvestment, to geopolitical and geoeconomic struggles over extraction. Critical theorization of the concept is in its nascent phase and the notion itself has received relatively little attention in the United States. Our paper aims to address these lacunae by mobilizing an urban political ecology framework to consider a community-based campaign that targeted residential energy conservation funds in Buffalo, New York. We analyze how the community campaign drew upon the “network crisis” of the energy-poor home to frame critical justice demands that foregrounded energy poverty as the product of uneven socionatural development. Through spatial claims and scalar strategies, the campaign highlighted the contribution of neoliberal conservation programs to deepening patterns of uneven development, and demanded redress of disinvestment in urban housing stock through funding of weatherization for low-income households. We argue that contests over urban energy metabolism offer a fruitful area to explore the possibilities of transforming uneven development from below.     

Creative industries, creative class and competitiveness: Expert opinions critically appraised

In the debate on urban and regional competitiveness, it has become fashionable to stress the growing importance of creativity for economic development. Especially scientist-consultants with a keen eye for what politicians and business people want to hear have taken centre stage in this discussion. Each city and region in the advanced capitalist world seems to prefer a label as creative city or region, and all look after the same type of industries and try to produce the same set of conditions, while investing in higher education and research institutes, networking and lobbying institutions, and the promotion of spin-off companies. A vast number of leaders and spokesmen of local and regional (quasi) governments believe that a major thing to do is to become more attractive places to live for creative knowledge workers or the ‘creative class’, as it is euphemistically labelled.However, in academia there is a lot of scepticism with regard to the use of these concepts and their meaning for urban and regional competitiveness. Also citizen movements and NGOs, and some political parties, voice their concern about the extent to which policies that apply these concepts and ideas might only benefit an elite of higher educated, well- paid professionals while at the same time these policies might result in decline of other activities and in social polarisation and poverty as well.In this paper we contribute to the critical discussion through a critical appraisal of local experts’ views on developments in seven European city-regions, first with regard to policies towards the development of creative and knowledge-intensive industries; and secondly with regard to the impact the development of ‘creative knowledge regions’ may have in social and other respects. In contrast to the rather homogeneous yet dominant advice to facilitate ‘the creative class’, in this paper we will argue that a range of parameters related to the firms and regional institutional, geographical and historical contexts promote a much more diversified view on urban economic development.     

Participants in the Fourth World Landslide Forum and call for ICL members,supporters, and associates

The ANNEX to the 2017 Ljubljana Declaration on Landslide Risk Reduction described in the “Preface” section of this issue is the list of participants (by organizations) in the Fourth World Landslide Forum. In this article, emphasis is put on this list of organizations as they are expected to be the key components for the Fifth World Landslide Forum 2020 in Kyoto, Japan. The participants in the Fourth World Landslide Forum 2017 adopted the 2017 Ljubljana Declaration on Landslide Risk Reduction. They further endorsed the concept of the Kyoto 2020 Commitment for Global Promotion of Understanding and Reducing Landslide Disaster Risk. The commitment aims to establish a long-term, wider, and stronger network after WLF5 2020 among three membership categories, namely, the International Consortium on Landslides (ICL) full members/supporters/associates, ICL-supporting organizations (UN and international global organizations) and ICL-supporting governments, and ISDR-ICL Sendai Partnerships 2015–2025. This article introduces three categories of ICL memberships and calls for participation.     

The educational space of global online higher education

This article explores how standards and codes for collaboration in international higher education influence the educational space of global online education and the way it functions within the context of international development aid. Firstly the article discusses the educational space of higher education and the geography of education whereby the aim is to situate global online education within the on-going discourse on standards in higher education, international development aid, and the knowledge economy. The article then examines a qualitative case study of an Internet-based masters programme attended by students from Europe and Africa. A main focus of the empirical analysis is the students’ experience of being geographically immobile while collaborating online internationally, including how this circumstance affected their motivation and participation and the benefits of the programme. In the concluding discussion it is argued that even though online collaboration among students and educational institutions is not entirely equal, common standards created a space in which positions were challenged and practices were changed over the course of online participation.     

Intra-city migration to squatter settlements in Mexico City

The paper describes spatially the zonal movements of residents to three squatter settlements established at different time periods in Mexico City. In addition, moves are related to the dynamics of the low income housing system and previous theories of intra-city squatter migration behaviour are evaluated. The data corroborate the concept that the traditionally accepted pattern of centre to periphery, tenement to squatter settlement movements has altered. Direct movement into the periphery on the part of incoming migrants is increasingly important, and older established squatter areas are the most important suppliers of population in recent invasions. The implications for the distribution and structure of housing opportunities for future low-income populations in Mexico City are discussed.     

Neo-rural populations and their relations with local decision makers in rural Québec: collaboration or conflict?

The socio-demographic recomposition of the countryside is affecting local interactions and power relations. Understanding these relationships remains a challenge, as the studies to date are often limited to conflicts between neo-rural populations (newcomers) and long-time country residents over partial issues, without including decision makers. To go beyond this conflictual and fragmentary perspective, the objective of this article is to present an overall picture of both cooperative and oppositional relations between four groups, namely, newcomers, long-time rural residents, leaders of local organizations and municipal officials, in regard to all the issues that concern them. The data are based on interviews with these various actors in two contrasting rural areas of Québec (Canada). After looking at the newcomers’ mixed assessment of their participation in community life, we concentrate on areas of collaboration and/or conflict between all the actors regarding demographic, economic, sociocultural, political, environmental and agricultural issues. Three main trends emerge, revealing unexpected ways of interacting, complex power relations and antagonistic conceptions of rural spaces and their future development.     

Poverty and citizenship: Sociological perspectives on water services and public-private participation

This article focuses on the arguments used to support private sector participation (PSP) in the provision of water and sanitation services (WSS) since the 1980s. It addresses the following questions: what was the historical evidence informing the claim that promoting PSP would be the best instrument for reducing water poverty? What are the principles that provided the foundation for this claim? And, what has been the empirical record of the resulting WSS policies? It argues that early neoliberal WSS policies since the 1980s were not intended to expand services to the poor. A pro-poor rhetoric was added to these policies since the 1990s, probably as a result of increasing citizen unrest in developing countries and the failure of privatized WSS projects in the Americas and Europe. However, the claim that PSP can provide the solution to public sector failure in extending coverage of essential WSS to the poor has little ground both in the theoretical literature and in the historical record. As could have been expected from the accumulated knowledge about the relationship between market-driven WSS and the poor, the recent experience with PSP projects has been disappointing. In practice these policies not only have failed to extend these essential services to the poor but have also contributed to deepening existing inequalities of power resulting in the weakening of state, local government, and civil society capacities to exercise democratic control over private water monopolies in most developing countries. Reversing this imbalance is one of the crucial challenges ahead in order to achieve the Millennium Development Goals. However, the article argues that the inertial forces set in motion by the neoliberal model of water policy based on market-centred governance of water and WSS remains the crucial obstacle for the achievement of the goals.     

Households’ perceptions of private sector municipal solid waste management services: A binary choice analysis

The increase in the volume of waste materials discharged to the environment and deterioration of environmental quality in urban areas have been an issue of major concern for many governments in developing countries. To improve effectiveness and efficiency in the delivery of waste management services some of the governments have involved the private sector. This study uses binary choice model to examine urban residents’ perceptions regarding solid waste management that involves the private sector and what could be done to improve the waste management services. The data were generated from survey conducted in 238 households in Ilorin in southwest Nigeria. The results show that most of the respondents were not satisfied with solid waste management in the Ilorin. Binary logit model estimates reveal that the respondents’ perceptions regarding waste management were determined by income, travel time to dump site and marital status, as well as awareness of laws regarding waste disposal and activities of sanitary inspectors. For solid waste management in urban areas to be sustainable, it requires participation of the government, private sector and residents. The results generated from this study can help waste management authorities in designing a more sustainable waste management strategy in Ilorin, as well as in other cities that have similar conditions.     

Evaluation of public participation in reconstruction of Bam,Iran, after the 2003 earthquake

In the midst of the ever-increasing natural and human-induced disasters, where many of the preparedness and mitigation measures show inefficiencies, there is narrow margin for decision-makers to make mistakes by misallocating budgets, designing infeasible reconstruction plans, and in other terms, making decisions not in line with the public preferences. In particular, public participation in post-disaster measures seems undoubtedly necessary to reduce the possible economic, social, political, and cultural conflicts around the stressful community after a major disaster. This paper aims at evaluating the role of public participation in increasing the reconstruction phase efficiency through a case study of the reconstruction process in Bam, a southeastern Iranian city, after the 2003 earthquake. It is attempted to identify the major motivators of the public participation through a combination of quantitative and qualitative studies. Statistical data are generated through a set of questionnaires being filled by a number of 200 randomly selected survivors. The numerical results were then discussed through the Focus Group technique sessions to determine the main contributors to the public participation. It is later found that the answers are found among the performance of the reconstruction authorities, financial policies, emotional resiliency of the survivors, public information mechanisms, public satisfaction, the pace of reconstruction, and temporary housing policies.     

Using project food aid to help alleviate urban poverty - experience and issues

As urban poverty in the Third World worsens, an increasing proportion of World Food Programme (WFP) food aid is being used to support poor urban dwellers. WFP food aid has typically been used in three main ways in urban areas: as free relief after disasters (such as floods or earthquakes) have struck urban centres; as part of institutional feeding projects; and as support to urban renewal. While there have been some creative approaches to using food aid to help overcome urban poverty, the benefits have usually only been temporary. It has proved difficult to design food aid interventions for the urban poor that help to overcome the causes of poverty in sustainable ways. The challenge is to use food aid to help make permanent as well as temporary improvements in the lives and livelihoods of the poor.