Cities by Reader John

Author:Reader, John [Reader, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780802195739
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2007-12-01T05:00:00+00:00

Havana's achievements in urban agriculture are impressive, showing how much a city can do to feed itself and how quickly the benefits accrue once the need is recognised and the means facilitated. But Havana was helped by a factor which other cities in the developing world do not share: its food crisis was not compounded by a constant and massive influx of immigrants. Between 1990 and 2000, Havana's population grew from 2.1 to 2.3 million. Two hundred thousand is a substantial number of extra people, but a large proportion of them came from within the city population itself – from the increasing size of urban families as child mortality rates dropped and people lived longer.

Nairobi's population by contrast grew from 1.4 to 2.3 million during those same ten years; Mexico City added 3 million, growing from 15.1 to 18.1; Lagos had 10.2 million inhabitants in 1990, 13.5 million in 2000 – a massive 3.3 million increase that in itself was greater than the entire population of Lagos twenty-five years before.28 Similar rates of growth occurred in cities throughout the developing world. Of course, some of it came from within the urban populations themselves – as in Havana – but most of the extra people were immigrants with little or no pre-existing means of support in the cities.

Furthermore, Havana was not the only city to suffer under the new world order that came with the end of the Cold War. The so-called Structural Adjustment Programmes imposed on developing and debt-ridden countries by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund were intended to wean developing nations away from their aid and dependency cultures, into the realm of economic viability. The programmes made sense in terms of good financial management, but the reality of their application was harsh. Governments were required to balance their budgets, but could do so only by slashing what meagre funds they had been allocating to social needs and services – education, health, and the like. These moves may eventually establish a sound basis for economic growth that will benefit all; in the meantime, though, they have made life for most people even harder than it had been before. Just one example: while the population of Nairobi grew by 51 per cent between 1989 and 1997, wage employment in the formal sector grew by only 15 per cent.29

In all, only a third of Nairobi's working population has a regular job; the rest depend upon what has become known as the ‘informal sector’ for their livelihood. Now recognised as an integral part of the economies of large cities in the developing world,30 the informal sector covers numerous activities, anything from scavenging on rubbish tips and shining shoes to offering a letter-writing service or repairing cars. It can represent a substantial fraction of a city's total economic activity, though it contributes absolutely nothing to city revenues in the way of taxes, licence fees or rates. In Kenya the informal sector has been christened jua kali, Kiswahili for ‘fierce sun’, in recognition of the fact that it typically operates in the open air, unprotected from the elements.

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