Cities without Slums - The Millennium Declaration

September 2000, Heads of State and Government at the General Assembly Special Session adopted the United Nations Millennium Declaration. By the year 2015, they committed [WSSD Johannesburg March 2005 re-committed] themselves amoung others to:

• Achieve, by 2020, significant improvements in the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers as proposed in the “Cities without Slums” initiative.
• Ratify the Kyoto Protocol and to embark on the required reduction in emission of greenhouse gases;
• Intensify our collective efforts for the management, conservation and sustainable development of all types of forests;
• Press for the full implementation of the Convention on Biological Diversity and the Convention to Combat Desertification;
  

• Cities without slums
• World Bank

One billion people around the world now live in city slums and their numbers are set to double over the next 25 years. But slums are no more inevitable than they are acceptable. While it may be difficult to overcome relative poverty, it is perfectly possible to ensure that the poor are provided with adequate shelter and basic services.

The history of cities in the developed world proves the point. During the nineteenth century urban centers all over Europe and America exploded into major metropolitan areas. London went from a population of 800,000 in 1800 to over 6.5 million in 1900. Paris grew from 500,000 to over 3 million. And by 1900, the population of New York was 4.2 million.

The urban poor in all these cities lived in appalling conditions. With the advent of the mass media, their cause was taken up by many illustrious journalists and authors – such as Dickens, Mayhew and Zola – who engaged politicians and professionals to help change the policies of their time.

Demographic shift
Now, over a hundred years later, some 50 per cent of the world’s population live in urban areas. Europe, North and South America and the Caribbean have stabilized with about 75 per cent of their populations living in cities and towns – but UN-HABITAT’s report projections expect the still predominantly rural Africa and Asia to go through a major demographic shift. One third of the 3 billion inhabitants of the world’s cities and towns, are now slum dwellers. And if present trends continue, there will be 2 billion of them by 2030.

The Commission for Africa report, Our Common Interest – for which I was one of seventeen commissioners – recently highlighted urbanization as the second most important challenge facing Africans, after the HIV/AIDS pandemic. The reasons are obvious enough. Africa is expected to stop being a rural continent by 2030, with an estimated 51 per cent of its people living in urban areas. Already a staggering 71 per cent of the urban population in Africa lives in slums – so business as usual is a recipe for long-term disaster and conflict.