Poverty and injustice in cities is growing, says new report
The Worldwatch Institute’s annual report released on January 11 says the gap between
rich and poor in cities from Nairobi to Karachi to New York means that those with the
fewest resources suffer most from pollution generated by the wealthiest

By Kaleem Omar

Sometime in 2008, the world will cross an invisible but momentous milestone: the point at which roughly half the people on the planet - roughly 3.2 billion human beings - will be living in cities, says a report by the Worldwatch Institute entitled ‘State of the World 2007: Our Urban Future’.

“The scale of urbanisation is unprecedented,” said the Worldwatch Institute’s Molly Sheehan at the launching of its annual report on January 11. “We’ve gone from approximately 10 per cent of the world’s people living in cities in 1900 to 50 per cent today - and if we continue on this course we’re expected to top 70 per cent in the next 20 pr 30 years,” Sheehan said.

The report says that the highest rates of urban growth are expected in Asia and Africa. Many Asian and African cities are already groaning under the burden of a huge increase in population over the last 50 years. Continuing migration from the countryside and high rates of indigenous population growth are expected to make the situation much worse over the next two decades, with increasing numbers of people living in shantytowns and slums.

Karachi is a case in point. At the time of Pakistan’s independence in August 1947, Karachi had a population of only about 500,000 and was one of the cleanest cities in South Asia. The influx of refugees from India in the years immediately following partition saw Karachi’s population grow to 1.5 million in 1951 - a 300 per cent increase in only four years.

In the decades since then, migration from other parts of the country and indigenous growth have combined to give Karachi a population growth rate of around six per cent a year - twice the national rate of three per cent a year.

The result, today, is a megalopolis that is bursting at the seams, with a current estimated population of 16 million. Of this 16 million, more than half live in slums euphemistically known as “katchi abadis”. The number of such slum settlements now totals over 400, with more being added to the list each year.

More than 200 million gallons a day of highly toxic untreated sewage now flows into Karachi Harbour through the Lyari River, which now enjoys the dubious distinction of being the most polluted river in the world - having taken over the top slot from England’s Mersey River in the mid-1990s.

Tests carried out in 1996 showed that the waters of Karachi Harbour contained dangerously high levels of mercury, lead, zinc and other toxic substances. Since then, pollution in the harbour has become even worse, posing growing health risks to the city’s population.

The Report notes that 1 billion urbanites - or approximately one-sixth of the world’s total population - currently live in slums - defined as areas where people cannot secure key necessities such as clean water, a nearby toilet or durable housing. According to the report, an estimated 1.6 million urbanites die each year due to the lack of clean water and sanitation. 

The report notes that poor urban neighbourhoods face the worst of two worlds: the environmental health hazards of underdevelopment, such as lack of clean drinking water, and of industrialisation, such as toxic wastes. Yet their residents tread lightly on the planet, using dew resources and generating low levels of waste in comparison with their wealthier neighbours.

The report points out that the combined impact of a growing population and an unprecedented wave of migration from the countryside means that over 50 million people - equivalent to the population of France - are now added to the world’s cities and suburbs each year.

“More than at any time in history, the future of humanity, our economy, and the planet that supports us will be determined in the world’s cities,” the report notes.

The report says: “Urban centres are hubs simultaneously of breathtaking artistic innovation and some of the world’s most abject and disgraceful poverty. They are the dynamos of the world’s economy, but also the breeding grounds for alienation, extremism and other sources of local and global insecurity. Cities are now both pioneers of groundbreaking environmental policies and the direct or indirect source of most of the world’s resource destruction and pollution.”

This modern “tale of two cities,” to borrow the title of Charles Dickens’ famously from book about eighteenth-century London, “is something that every policymaker and citizen needs to understand,” says the report.  “The battles against our greatest global problems, from unemployment and HIV infections to water shortages, terrorism and climate change, will be largely won - or lost in the world’s cities,” the report adds.

In 1950, only New York and Tokyo had populations of more than 10 million. Today there are 20 of these so-called megacities, the bulk of them in Asia and Latin America. But most of the growth on the decades ahead will come in the smaller cities, says the Report.

By 2015, demographers project, there will be 59 cities with populations between 1 million and 5 million in Africa, 65 such cities in Latin America and the Caribbean, and 253 in Asia. As early as 2030, four out of five of the world’s urban residents will be in what we now call the developing world.

“The demographic and political impacts of this transformation will test us,” the report notes. “In China, for example, millions of people are moving to cities each year, and while that nation has done better than most in meeting the needs of new urban residents, the strains are showing. And Africa, the least urban continent today, is the area that is urbanising the fastest - a trend that will undoubtedly put additional social, economic and political pressure on this already stressed part of the world.”

According to the report, the great majority of the population growth in the new urban centres of Africa and Asia is in the unplanned and underserved settlements commonly known as slums. Over a quarter of urban residents in the developing world - more than 500 million people - lack clean drinking water and sanitation, and 1.6 million die each year as a result.

The Report says: “The face of twenty-first century cities is often that of a small, malnourished child living in a vast slum in a city such as Abidjan, Kolkata or Mexico City, not far from the newly built opera houses, gleaming office buildings, and automobile-choked highways that are now common even in poor countries.”

While air quality has improved markedly in many European and American cities in recent years, it has become far worse in most cities in the developing world; China alone has 16 of the world’s most polluted cities. In many cities across the developing world, pollution-related illness is a daily threat.

Some years ago, so the story goes, the committee responsible for the upkeep and maintenance of Quaid’s Mazar in Karachi sought funds from the government to replace some of the Mazar’s marble tiles, which the committee said had been eroded by air pollution. The government official to whom the case was put up was said to have written in the file: “If air pollution in Karachi is eroding the marble, imagine what it must be doing to people’s lungs!”

The ability to meet the needs of the urban poor is one of the greatest humanitarian challenges of the twenty-first century. “It is particularly ironic,” says the Report, “that the battle to save the world’s remaining healthy ecosystems will be won or lost not in the tropical rain forests or coral reefs that are threatened but on the streets of the most unnatural landscapes on the planet” (i.e., the world’s cities).