Wally N’Dow : Creating a New City and New Hope for the Urban Future

On some counts, Wally N’Dow is the most unlikely candidate to serve as the world’s foremost specialist on cities. The fourth of nine children, he was born 52 years ago in Gambia, Africa’s smallest state and among its least developed. The capital, Banjul, is also the world’s smallest--with only 40,000 inhabitants today.

As a young man, N’Dow studied veterinary medicine at the University of East Africa in Nairobi and the University of Edinburgh. His first job was at the Gambian ministry of agriculture. His first U.N. job involved drought relief in Africa’s Sahel desert. But his career reflects the extraordinary impact of urban trends in the 20th century. When he was born, less than 30% of the world lived in cities. Now, roughly half the world is in cities.

That’s only the beginning of the urban challenge. The population of many cities is now expected to double or triple in a decade or two--mainly due to rural migrations and the higher birth rates of the poor. Neither will provide the resources needed to improve or increase urban infrastructures and services to deal with mushrooming numbers.

And those numbers will become almost unlivable within the next 20 years. A single Indian city, Bombay, will have more than 27 million by 2015--10% of the entire U.S. population today. The 10 largest cities will all hold more than 18 million people, the United Nations reports. The greatest urban growth is also in the poorest areas. Already, housing shortages have left 79% of Ethiopians in the capital, Addis Ababa, either homeless or in chronically substandard housing. More than half the populations in the capitals of Colombia and Indonesia face the same plight.

By 2025, 80% of the world’s urban population will live in developing countries, the United Nations reports. Urban problems will challenge every major aspect of life, from health to food supplies. And smaller urban settings offer no promise of refuge. Most urban growth occurs in small and medium-sized towns and cities.

N’Dow has increasingly been drawn into the crises of the world’s habitats since the mid-1970s--working on food-security issues at the World Food Council and on Third World development at various U.N. agencies. He now travels the world speaking passionately and eloquently on the subject. “We are embarked on one of the most important undertakings of these closing years of the 20th century,” he says, “Our urban problems alone are overwhelming nations and we are running out of time. We desperately need new solutions, new policies and new tools.”

Habitat II, convening this week in Istanbul, is the last of the major U.N. summits this century. The international gatherings that have focused on global issues--from the environment to women, population to poverty--over the past two decades are a victim of cost-cutting. N’Dow feels this decision is a mistake. “Who is going to talk about and think about population issues or women’s rights from now on? NATO?” he said during a recent conversation in Washington.

Married to his high school sweetheart, he is the father of three daughters--who, he says, have also made him a strong advocate of women’s rights.

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Question: What are the problems cities face today?

Answer: Take water: Today there are 1.5 billion people who live in water stress and some of them in acute water shock. They don’t have water. In 80 countries this is the situation; 40% of all mankind is in that category.

Ten million people are dying every year because of this water crisis. Four million are children--who die because water is contaminated or polluted, because of water-borne disease. In some countries, 98% of all sewage is untreated and just spewed into the rivers and water system. Only 5% of sewage is treated before it is put out into the river and lake system in the developing world.

This is true even in many countries with big land masses, like China. China has almost 25% of the world’s population but only 7% of its water and most is in the south. All of northern China is thirsty or dry, posing a great risk for big cities like Beijing. Three hundred cities in China are in water shock or thirsty. It’s the same in northern India, Pakistan, Egypt, the Middle East, all of the Sahel [desert] of Africa, the western United States--Colorado, Texas, Arizona--and Mexico City.

If in the past 50 years nations have gone to war over oil, in the next 50 years we are going to go to war over water. We think the crisis point is going to be 15 to 20 years from now unless massive investment comes in.

We must work so that this water stress in the world is relieved. Not one drop of new water is going to come about. We’re all still using Abraham’s water and the water of the old prophets. Not one drop has been added. [But] human numbers are increasing and industry is expanding and the need to feed people is increasing, especially in dry areas.

Q: What about housing?

A: Across the world, 500 million people are today homeless--including pavement dwellers, people who live under bridges--or are inadequately housed by anyone’s judgment. This is a moral challenge. If we say houses are human health, then we must begin to look at housing as a human right . . . .

Q: It sounds as if habitat issues are becoming security issues.

A: We have to change the definition of human security. The old definition--meaning armies and territorial protection, meaning defending territory in the national context--these no longer guarantee security. We can see inside of countries explosions that are happening daily.

Human security in context of sustainable human welfare is being redefined by the reality we confront. I emphasize housing because one can’t talk about social progress in any situation when people are not housed. One can’t talk about political empowerment of anyone, including women, when people live in physically insecure environments; when they don’t have roofs over their heads, their families can’t enjoy the togetherness or peace required to function as a unit; when their children, because of lack of space or roofs over their head, can’t be properly educated or socialized; when basically you do not have any functioning community because when you don’t have homes you don’t have communities and when you don’t have communities you don’t have participation or a sense of human solidarity, common ends and common objectives.

We are also destroying human settlements faster than we can rebuild them in places like Rwanda, Chechnya and Bosnia. Towns are razed over a weekend that took a century to build.

Q: Are there solutions to these problems? And where are they coming from?

A: The developing of local materials is one answer. This is the trouble in Africa: If you don’t have cement, people say you can’t build a house. This is a fallacy. Governments must engage in exploiting local materials so that the poor can access them.

Burkino Faso is doing very well in this. The government did good research on stabilized mud with only very small amounts of lime or cement. The whole of Ouagadougou is being transformed through this technique. You can even build tall buildings with bricks of stabilized mud--which are proving to be as good and resistant as the cement blocks that people used in the past.

Indonesia is very well forested and is using wood in new ways. They’re using some of their bamboo in the design of very modern and comfortable housing.

Another answer is in Indonesia, where the private sector today is on the front line of participating with government to build homes. There are 2,000 private housing finance organizations, building associations in Jakarta. There’s an explosion of private sector investing in housing. Rather than invest in garments or cars or imports or exports, they’re putting their money at the service of housing because it’s profitable . . . .

Dubai is another place [with answers]. It is a city, albeit with resources, that is well managed, that is operating almost on 21st century lines because they have good leadership, good planning, the best expertise. They are taking care of environment issues. They have technical assistance focusing on how to make the city more livable. They are respecting all the laws of space and greenery. They are providing good water supply. They are investing in infrastructure and services . . . . Dubai has joined the ranks of global cities because of all these efficiencies.

Q: What is the role of government in the urban century?

A: The traditional government attitude and expectation that they are the providers and doers--that is old and no longer tenable. No government has the resources and the issues are too complex. Governments have to get new partners.

When we talk about mastering these new habitats of mankind, the city and the mega-city, there is no one who has greater validity to participate in this process than local authorities--the people who run the cities and towns and hamlets of our world. They have been excluded in the past from making contributions to solutions. But Habitat II is insisting, for the first time, that they come into the game to build this new mandate.

The second partners of importance are the private sector, traditionally left out or brought into the equation as providers of resources or often not engaged deeply in thinking about social responsibility and sometimes seeing their fortunes as separate from the cities and towns. That is wrong because if towns do not work, then the private sector will collapse. We’re saying, “Come in and work with us. There’s a new era being born in which you are a big member of the game.”

The third big actor is civil society itself, by which I mean the non-government organizations [NGO] and community-based organizations--professional groups, youth groups and so forth. There’s tremendous vitality the world over.

If one were to subtract from the world development effort today the contribution of the NGOs, many countries would come to a standstill. Schools would stop functioning in many places. Clinics would stop at village level. A lot of agricultural programs would come to a halt. Why don’t we acknowledge the role they play and show that they make a contribution to shaping the response?

There is a new era struggling to come into being today and it is an era of partnerships.

Q: Should cities emphasize preservation or tearing down and rebuilding?

A: We’re not for tearing down and rebuilding--No. 1, because it’s expensive; and No. 2, because you lose traditional architecture in most places, and No. 3 what do you do with thousands as you rebuild?

The Cubans found an answer. They are rebuilding all areas. The idea centers on a neighborhood architect--like a neighborhood doctor. Where a neighborhood is falling apart after 100 years, there is a neighborhood architect who provides community service. That is smart use of social capital for something ordinary citizens would not be able to afford.

Rehabilitation is the primary emphasis in the world today. Cuba is just one of many countries that can’t afford new building, so rehabilitation is critical.

Q: What takes priority: the quality of architecture or making an environment user friendly?

A: There is a great merit in conserving cultural heritage and the sense of landscape. When people live in a geographic area and consider that this landscape belongs to them, and where there is an identification with this sense of place, the sense of belonging adds to the community sense of self.

If we destroy all the time, even if it is not measurable, there is a sense of bewilderment. People are lost. They lose their sense of cultural identity. For aesthetics and for the psychology of the community, destroying the past is not something this conference encourages.

Q: What contributions can the Habitat conference in preparing for the urban century?

A: We are inventorying across the world the success stories. Our job has been to cull from this and build a global data base that can be accessed in the traditional manner and also with the help of new technology so people can know how to attack their problems.

We are setting up basically a global classroom on how to manage cities better and how to deal with the community problems, from the point of view of the environment, from sanitation, from governance, from financing. We even have it in CD-rom now which we can access and quickly exploit to see how the problems we confront [can be solved].

We also need benchmarks, indicators of success. There are nations today that have no idea how many of their people are homeless, how much crime is in streets. Istanbul is forcing everyone to look at this very carefully. We’re encouraging everyone to build a national program and bring it to Istanbul.

Every nation is taking to this conference a program of activities, where you expect to be, what your situation of the urban centers in your territory are. Not only that. We’re going to be asking everyone to commit . . . so we can look back and hold to account what has or hasn’t been done.

Some nations don’t even have housing policies. If some countries did nothing but have a housing policy or set up a department to deal with homelessness and housing for the use of cheap materials for construction, we would have done a lot and Istanbul will be a success.

We’re pursuing this with almost religious zeal. The world at large has come to recognize that it has to look at things differently if the human project is going to survive--the very project of our world. The struggle over that issue is taking place in the cities. This is where the outcome of globalization as a process will be determined, where economic development will succeed or fail.*