For the first time ever, half of the world is urbanized - but that’s not the only thing that’s new. More than 90 percent of rapid urbanization is taking place in mid-size cities with populations of up to a million, not the megacities that have been a traditional focus of urban developers, according to the World Bank.
Much of this growth is based in the developing world, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
“If we are not going to focus our resources, policy interventions and institutions on these cities, then they are also going to grow haphazardly. The slums are going to increase, there will be congestion, lack of services and so on,” said Abha Joshi-Ghani, the World Bank’s urban development manager who spearheaded the bank’s latest global strategy on urban development.
The report, Systems of Cities: Harnessing Urbanization for Growth and Poverty Alleviation, was launched in Singapore on Nov. 10 during the World Bank-Singapore Infrastructure Finance Summit, and is expected to guide the bank’s urban sector strategy in the years to come.
Joshi-Ghani, an Oxford University graduate, first joined the World Bank as an infrastructure finance expert. As part of her job, she sought private-sector funding for infrastructure initiatives in developing countries and in 2002, she joined the bank’s urban team and shifted her focus to municipal finance.
Moving from infrastructure to urban issues involved a steep learning curve. While her expertise in management and finance enabled her to understand many aspects of municipal finance and the delivery of city services, Joshi-Ghani had to learn about urban poverty and land regulations and how they impact cities.
Devex caught up with Joshi-Ghani in Washington to discuss the report’s findings and how development organizations and professionals may respond to emerging trends in urbanization.
Partnering with the World Bank on urban-sector projects
Based on your experience and interactions with different partners, what can businesses do to contribute to the sector?
We’re really looking at a lot of public-private partnerships in cities, in climate change. You have businesses like IBM, Cisco, General Electric and GDF Suez who are all looking at smart cities, smart networks. In terms of climate change, we’re looking at that. We’re also looking at energy efficiency in service provision. Service delivery in cities is another area where we feel that businesses can contribute through innovation, in the delivery of water to poorer areas, solid waste services. We have some really interesting examples.
For example in Mumbai, India, we had the local private sector come in and put electricity connections in the slums. They were paid their cost plus profits but it only cost close to $10 per household, because we have these targeted subsidy mechanisms where we could really get the private sector to deliver on services. We find that - and this happens in the developed world as well - cities attract developers to do housing, but they need to provide certain numbers of low-income housing units, and they get certain tax breaks for providing those.
We’re also looking at - and something Washington, D.C., is in process of doing - developing old river fronts for businesses, where it was felt that either it was a brown field that needed to be regenerated, or just local economic development, which we’ve been able to do in many cities in developing countries by attracting businesses, by actually enhancing the services to a particular area. For example, creating a fish market on the port of Yemen, which cleaned up the area [and] put up proper fish shops. The city earns a lot from it, but at the same time, you find that because of the facilities, more businesses are coming and it’s booming. Redevelopment of areas which were lying waste or unused, that’s one area that businesses can come into.
We’re also doing drill-downs of neighborhoods where most businesses don’t locate because they think that there isn’t a thriving economy there. But if you do surveys and economic drill-downs you find that there is sufficient buying power or demand, for, let’s say, a nice large grocery store to go and locate in a poorer neighborhood so that the neighborhood is not just dependent on 7-Eleven and local stores where you only get tinned food and so on. This is just an example of grocery stores, of getting access to poorer neighborhoods through larger grocery stores where they can buy cheaper, eat fresher and eat healthier. This is just an example of how we attract businesses.
What sort of organizations does the World Bank partner with on such projects?
It’s extremely varied. Firstly, we would partner with the recipient of our investment - it could be a city, a state government, a financial institution, a development institution.
We normally do tend to work in partnership with our developmental partners or donors, and that could come at certain levels. We could be partnering with the “Asian Development Bank”:, the African Development Bank, the U.N. Human Settlements Program, the U.N. Environmental Program, to name a few. Also, donor agencies such as the French Development Agency, or GTZ from Germany, DfID from the U.K. At one level it’s that.
On another level, we also work with community-based organizations and non-governmental organizations. We like to work closely with them at the local level because we want to be sure that our projects have community participation, and the community actually has a voice in what we’re doing. We always like to see private-sector partnerships in this. It could be in terms of consultancies, suppliers, or financiers. There are private banks who have come in and co-financed with us.
How do small and local organizations approach you?
I am, specifically, in a central policy unit which doesn’t actually do projects. But in the regions which do projects and lending, there are many ways of approaching us. One is, you can always see which projects are ongoing or are going to be coming to bid. On the World Bank Web site [and on the Devex site, ed.] you can see what projects are going to the board, and if people feel that it’s something they would be interested in, they pick up the phone and call. I think a lot of people will just look at the World Bank Web site and say, “Oh this is something I’m interested in either in offering my services as a consultant, or my firm’s services as a provider of consultancy, finance or something,” and then they get touch with the people here. The World Bank is not difficult to contact at all, and we’re very responsive whenever anybody calls. It’s not that you write an e-mail and it never gets responded.
A lot of them actually get in touch with the borrowing government.
How to start a career in the urban sector
What are some of the hot jobs in urban development?
People who want to work in urban itself, I’d always suggest: Work for a city. It’s an exciting place to work and it’s a microcosm of just about everything. Especially in developing countries, we find that we don’t have enough capacity in cities because they are not able to attract urban planners, architects, municipal engineers and so on.
If you have that skill, work for a city. Then there are lots of think tanks and other NGOs. In Washington, there are so many of them: the Urban Institute, the Brookings Institution, the International Housing Coalition. I would say that if you want to work on urban issues, the place to do it is to go work for a city first.
What are some of the skills that are in high demand?
We want urban economists, urban planners, and more and more, we’re looking at people who can work on urban environment. It’s a cross-sectoral skill but with cities and climate change, we’re looking at environmental engineers and specialists, and definitely people who specialize in municipal finance. We also look for architects.
Which academic programs prepare one for entering the sector?
The majority of people who work in urban are either urban planners or economists who specialize in urban economics, or from an engineering background. Environmental engineering, municipal engineering, civil engineering, and architects - those are the four most popular streams.
The World Bank’s new urban strategy report
What are the goals of the urban strategy report?
A sector strategy would say how a sector has changed within the last ten years. What are the emerging issues and exactly what should we be doing differently? If we never actually evaluated that, or never captured the change and the trends, we couldn’t really be assisting our developing country partners at all. You just see how what was prevalent 15 years, right now seems completely archaic.
What are the highlights and key messages in the report?
For the first time, half of the world is urban. It’s a real benchmark here. And then, most of the urbanization is taking place in developing countries. For specific regions, Asia and Africa would double in the next 30 years. It’s not just the mega-cities, it’s happening in secondary cities. National governments need to look at a system of cities. How do mega-cities, secondary cities and small towns fit in this whole equation?
What is also new is that it has been established through some good research that urbanization is linked to growth and poverty reduction. No country has reached middle-income status without urbanizing. Cities and climate change is a huge new issue for us. We weren’t talking about that in the strategy which came out in the year 2000. It doesn’t change the basic principles. In 2000 we came up with, a city has to be livable, it has to be bankable, it has to be well-managed and well-governed. Those principles will remain. But what we’re saying is that this is an urgent agenda. Cities need to do something, otherwise they will not be able to deliver services, housing to its citizens. There’ll be slums, they’ll not be able to attract businesses and therefore they’ll not have jobs.
How did you go about developing the report?
The process of writing or developing a strategy is a very consultative process. For us it’s not just sitting in our offices here, putting together a team, and saying: Oh, let’s do the new World Bank strategy.
Our first immediate thing is we need to talk to our colleagues in the regions: What are the five or six key issues that you’ve noticed or that you’re dealing with in your set of countries? So that’s a first way of bringing in that information.
A second thing is actually going to the countries themselves, and consulting and talking about it. This is what we’re doing: What do you think? What do you think the World Bank should be looking at? What are the key issues that you would want us to look at?
Thirdly, we go to NGOs, community-based organizations and donor partners and say: What are the issues that you think are there? It’s a really big consulting process.
We have a Web site which has various PowerPoints on what the strategy stands for. At every stage there was something there. We also had an interactive Web site, so you could go on the Web site and say: Well, you may be talking about x, y and z, but I live in Accra and this is what we think is important, and I don’t see that in your strategy. Or: You’re missing an issue. Or: You’re talking about issues which may be pertinent to Latin American countries and not Africa; we have different issues.
It was an interactive process and we spoke at many forums, we went to annual meetings of a cities representative group called Union of Cities and Local Governments. It has about 1,000 to 2000 members, so we went and presented the strategy to them, and consulted with them. We went to programs organized by universities here; we really tried to cover the whole realm.
What would you say were the key challenges in the entire process?
One is, have we consulted enough? Have we left out any important view or constituency? Secondly, how do we distill these messages? And thirdly, how do we put these messages in such a way that we can actually implement and operationalize them? Something can look terrific on paper, but it means nothing when you say: Oh, I’m doing a project and I’d really like to do it according to what the World Bank has put in the strategy, and there’s nothing tangible there.
And then, how do we monitor and evaluate ourselves on how we’re implementing the strategy?
