Livable cities | urban struggles for livelihood and sustainability

The poor cities of the developing world are often vibrant hubs of global economic and cultural activity, but they are also ecologically unsustainable and, for ordinary citizens, increasingly unlivable. Three-fourths of those joining the world’s population during the next century will live in Third World cities. Unless these cities are able to provide decent livelihoods for ordinary people and become ecologically sustainable, the future is bleak. The politics of livelihood and sustainability in these cities has become the archetypal challenge of twenty-first-century governance. From Bangkok to Mexico City, levels of air and water pollution are rising. Getting to work takes longer and longer. Affordable housing is an endangered species and green space is shrinking. The large cities of the Third World are becoming “world cities,” increasingly important nodes in the financial and productive networks of the global economy, but they are not providing livelihoods and healthy habitats for ordinary people. They are also degrading environmental resources inside and outside the urbanized area itself at a rate that cannot be maintained. Without new political strategies aimed at increasing livability, the future is bleak.

The coin of livability has two faces. Livelihood is one of them. Ecological sustainability is the other. Livelihood means jobs close enough to decent housing with wages commensurate with rents and access to the services that make for a healthful habitat. Livelihoods must also be sustainable. If the quest for jobs and housing is solved in ways that progressively and irreparably degrade the environment of the city, then the livelihood problem is not really being solved. Ecological degradation buys livelihood at the expense of quality of life, with citizens forced to trade green space and breathable air for wages. To be livable, a city must put both sides of the coin together, providing livelihoods for its citizens, ordinary as well as affluent, in ways that preserve the quality of the environment.

Sustainability is also contingent on the city’s relation to its hinterland. In the long run, cities must be judged not just in terms of the quality of life provided to urban dwellers, but also in terms of the ecological relation between city and countryside (cf. Buttel 1998, 7). Just as livelihood should not be bought at the expense of quality of urban life, likewise cities must sustain themselves without imposing an unbearable ecological footprint on surrounding territories. If they are to be sustainable, cities must not soak up resources, such as groundwater, at a rate faster than they can be replenished or deposit the waste generated by urban production in a way that fouls the rural hinterland. Finally, of course, ecological sustainability implies intergenerational justice. Cities that provide livelihood and quality of life through practices that rob future generations of the same measure of well-being are not really livable. Real urban livability is the equivalent of “sustainable livelihood security” in rural areas (Chambers 1987).

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