Jorge Enrique Hardoy

Environmental problems in an urbanizing world : finding solutions for cities in Africa, Asia and Latin America

Cities can provide health safe and stimulating environments for their inhabitants without imposing unsustainable demands on natural resources ecosystems and global cycles. A successful city in this sense is one that meets multiple goals. Such goals include: healthy living and working environments for the inhabitants; water supply provision for sanitation rubbish collection and disposal drains paved roads and footpaths and other forms of infrastructure and services that are essential for health (and important for a prosperous economic base) available to all; an ecologically sustainable relationship between the demands of consumers and businesses and the resources waste sinks and ecosystems on which they draw. (excerpt)

Rethinking the Latin American city

A book which admits that Latin American cities are out of control - socially, economically, politically, administratively and culturally - and seeks to adjust scholarly discourse to the realities of contemporary urban phenomena. Experts presents their responses to this situation.

Shelter, infrastructure and services in third world cities☆

For the majority of city dwellers in the Third World, their life is one of poverty, poor health, inadequate diets and very inadequate housing and living conditions. Many cannot be described as true “citizens”; their constitutional rights to elect their government are not respected; their legal rights to the process of law are ignored and their human rights both as individuals and within community organisations to demand a minimum level of services are simply forgotten or suppressed. Their housing conditions improved little (if at all) during much of the 1950s 1960s and 197Os, even in nations which experienced rapid economic growth. Recent reports suggest that conditions have deteriorated seriously in the last few years with the economic crisis, increasing balance of payment problems, mounting debts and cuts in social expenditures. As a recent report noted: “Third World cities have increasingly become centres of competition for a room to rent or space on which a shack may be built, for places in school, for access to potable water, for a bed in a hospital, for space in a bus or train, for space in a square or sidewalk from which to sell merchandise quite apart from the enormous competition for the few stable, adequately paid jobs. An unregulated market for any commodity or service cannot serve those who lack the purchasing power to enter such a market. And since such a high proportion of the city population lack the income to afford a legal house or health services or indeed sufficient food, in the absence of government action to guarantee their entry, they have only two options. Either they do without, or, as in the case of housing, they have to resort to grossly inadequate and usually illegal solutions . . . How can we change the processes by which cities get built so as to help their inhabitants earn more adequate incomes and promote community participation which is at the root of healthy participatory democracy? How can cities be built which facilitate social exchanges, which make basic services and adequate accommodation available and accessible to all and which are less expensive to build, maintain and manage? And how can this rethinking of the Third World city (and the role of government in the

Third World cities and the environment of poverty.

During the last hundred years there has been an unprecedented growth worldwide in urban populations. Underlying this trend has been the development of an increasingly integrated and city-based world economy. As national economies and peoples livelihoods become less dependent on an agricultural base, cities replace farms, villages and transient seasonal settlements as the main location of human activity. World production, trade, and communication take place within an increasingly interlinked network of cities. The labour force associated with these activities must live nearby, so residential areas are in or close to such cities. Only a tiny privileged elite can work in these centres and commute from houses in quiet suburbs or rural areas

Urbanization in contemporary Latin America : critical approaches to the analysis of urban issues

This volume contains a selection of the papers that have been presented at a series of seminars held in London since 1977 and organized jointly by the Development Planning Unit at University College the Institute of Latin American Studies the Architectural Associations Graduate School and the International Institute for the Environment and Development. The focus of the papers is on urbanization in Latin America and the general approach is a structuralist political-economic one. The papers include a general review of urbanization in Latin America over the past 2000 years and a series of case studies of urban problems in various cities and countries. The general conclusion of these studies is that change in Latin America is unlikely to come from liberal-minded governments introducing technical modifications into existing procedures but from a redistribution of power and resources within countries.

Pre-Columbian cities

Introduction Preface 1. The origins of American civilizations 2. The urban evolution of Teotihuacan 3. Mesoamerican cities after the fall of Teotihuacan 4. The Aztecs 5. Tenochtitlan 6. The Maya 7. Did the Maya build cities? 8. The first stages of urban evolution in South America 9. Tiahuanaco and the urbanistic period 10. The Chimu Kingdon 11. The Inca 12. The Inca society - Cuzco 13. The Inca city 14. North and south Andean cities in South America 15. General conclusions on pre-Colombian city planning and design

The inhabitants of historical centres: Who is concerned about their plight?

The study of the society and the economy in historical centres is one of the most neglected research subjects in Latin America. This is despite the fact that they are living environments whose continuity and vitality are threatened not only by physical decay but also by institutional neglect and socio-econ~~mic oblivion. They constitute, however, a physical habitat for large numbers of people which has been transformed over time and which harbour customs and social forms and organisations quite different from other popular districts. The urban townscape, the size and the residential density of his;orical centres apparently facilitate coexistence and social solidarity. The closely-knit mixture of residcntiai, commercial and artisanal activities formal as well as informal represent civic attitudes and a social articulation which could not be easily found in IICW and more spontaneous forms of popular settlement. Dwellers of squatter settlements are not the only urban groups to expcricnce significant shortages and problems. An older and equally oppressive and poorly maitltained form of popular settlement is represented by the c~~lilI~~~~n lodging-house or slum, a type of substandard housing which prevails in the central districts of many Latin American metropoli and in their surrounding quarters. My own impression is that this type of substandard urban housing is spreading to other urban districts, as an alternative to squatter settlements, in agglomerations which have become too big for workers to reach sources of stable jobs or sporadic incomes. They do not represent and will probably not represent in the future a predominant form of popular settlement. But the psychological and biological impact of a degraded and degrading living environment on its population is also to be seen in the slums of the central districts, even if their rehabilitation and the understanding of their problems seems to be continually postponed. There are also lessons to be learned. For an uninformed visitor. the historical centres look like an older, established and legally built urban environment which they are. But their facades only hide the continuous changes introduced in their dwellings by social groups, many of whom live in extreme poverty, threatened by eviction and permanently harassed by the police, because of the number of informal activities they engage in to survive. This article is based on field work undertaken in 19X0-1982 in several

The sectoral and spatial distribution of multilateral aid for human settlements

It is common knowledge that housing conditions in the Third World are very poor for large sectors of the population and that, in many nations, they are deteriorating. One project within the International Institute for Environment and Development’s Human Settlements Programme has been studying the extent to which the major multilateral aid agencies have been providing funds for housing, services or other settlement-related projects. This project has produced a number of papers describing the lending activities of 15 multilateral agencies operating in the Third World in the settlements field.’ Three of the agencies included in our study, the World Bank Group (WB), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and the OPEC Special Fund, operated in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Others are regional agencies: the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), the Caribbean Development Bank (CDB) and the Central American Bank for Economic lntegration (CABEI) in Latin America and the Caribbean; the Asian Development Bank (AsDB) in Asia; and the African Development Bank Group formed by the African Development Bank (AfDB) and the African Development Fund (AfDF) ~ in Africa. The Islamic Development Bank (IsDB), the Arab Bank for Economic Development in Africa (BADEA) and the Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development (AFESD) support projects in Arab countries. The European Development Fund (EDF) has its origin in an agreement between the European Economic Community and overseas nations and territories which had special relations with EEC member nations. (Today, around 50 independent nations from Africa, Asia and the Pacific have associate status with the EEC; most are former colonies of EEC members in Africa.) Finally, we included the Andean Pact’s financial institution the Andean Development Corporation (ADC) and the Latin American Bank for Savings and Loans (LABSL) which is only active in the housing field since its aim is to support national housing institutions in Latin America. The main purpose of this paper is to clarify which size of settlement is most favoured by multilateral aid backed settlements projects. It is to this that Sections 5 and 6 are addressed. To give the reader some background to this subject, Section 2 gives a brief summary of how and when the agencies began their involvement in housing and settlement-related projects, Section 3 describes the tlistribu-

Housing and health: do architects and planners have a role?

Prepared for James City County by the Virginia Center for Housing Research (VCHR) at Virginia Tech Page 1 of 2 Physical Health Substandard or low-quality housing can contribute negatively to a person’s physical well-being. Rates of children with asthma and bronchitis are highest for those living in substandard homes with mold, allergens, secondhand tobacco smoke, pest infestations and other indoor air pollutants (Mueller & Tighe, 2007; U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, 2014a). Approximately 30% of all asthma cases are caused by environmental factors, rather than genetic inheritance, suggesting that substandard housing conditions are a contributing factor. Older homes, in particular, tend to provide ideal conditions for cockroach breeding grounds and other asthma triggers (Chenoweth, Estes, & Lee, 2009; Jones-Rounds, Evans, & Braubach, 2014; U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, 2014a).

ISoCaRP: exchange of ideas

Abstract The International Society of City and Regional Planners (ISoCaRP) is an international association of environmental planners with some 365 members from 43 countries. It was founded in 1965 from the Standing Committee of Professional Planners of the International Federation of Housing and Planning, which was set up some 10 years earlier. The Society is closely linked with the Federation.