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Better city better life:
Sustainable human settlement
Seetha Kodagoda
World Habitat Day is usually celebrated by 18
countries. Sri Lanka too celebrates this occasion on October 4, 2010:
Since 1985, the United Nations celebrates ‘World Habitat Day’ on the
first Monday in October, of each year to focus attention on the state of
human settlements and the basic right to adequate shelter for all has
been celebrated on several themes by the UN Habitat. This year the
‘World Habitat Day’ will be celebrated on the theme of ‘Better City
Better Life’. The United Nations has chosen this theme to raise
awareness on quality of human settlements.
The theme of this year’s World Habitat Day ‘Better City Better Life’
offers citizens of cities around the globe an opportunity to reflect on
the problems and challenges faced by their own cities and on how these
problems could be overcome to make these cities more equitable, just and
sustainable.
The Habitat agenda is a global call to action which offers a positive
mission of ‘Better City Better Life’ sustainable human settlements where
all have adequate shelter, a healthy life and safe environment, basic
services and productive and freely chosen employment.
Vision into reality
 Turning
this vision into reality requires co-operative effort on the part of all
members of the society. Governments cannot do it alone. We are all
should get together. The actual job of creating sustainable, healthy,
urban centres requires a wide range of factors, starting with city
officials but cutting through various strata to all aspects of civil
society - the private sector, women and young groups, coalitions of the
elderly, foundations, labour unions, academies of science, professional
and research groups, just to mention a few.
The ultimate objective of operation, maintenance and development of
the urban services and facilities is to provide a decent livable
environment for the communities living in cities.
The better cities have to fulfill broad spectrum of conditions to
bring about the safety and peace for the communities. The notion of
safety immediately reminds generally to physical safety such as crimes,
accidents, health, etc. Other safety aspects such as social, economic,
political, environmental and cultural are perhaps the root cause for
most of the unsafe situations in many cities around the world. The
approach to establish better cities needs to focus attention on both the
physical and socio-economic dimensions of the urban fabric.
Socio-economic aspects
The solutions to bring about safety through physical development to
acceptable levels are an absolute requirement to improve the carrying
capacity of the cities. No doubt that such development efforts assigns
high priority to the socio-economic aspects during the formulation of
projects.
Generally, serious considerations have been given to the
socio-economic dimensions during the implementation of such projects.
However, once the project implementation comes to an end, the activities
related to socio-economic perspectives have not been continued to
consolidate the benefits in a sustainable manner.
This is mainly because of lack of communication and coordination
between the city management and the community and the participation of
the community in the management.
Most of the developments of cities with respect to physical
development have been carried out with the assistance government and
local funds to provide better facilities and safety for the communities.
The emphasis on the sustainability of such development to derive the
desired results has not yet been given serious thoughts by the
responsible authorities.
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Some draw backs in the present system of management |
The present
system is highly politicized and the communities of opposition
parties are not being treated equally.
There is no legitimate or formal system for the people to
participate in management activities and there is little
dialogue between the council and community.
The whole management is non-transparent which leads to poor
accountability of council and the community.
Since the community do not have a structural process to present
their issues and problems individual efforts are warranted
leading to waste of resources for both parties.
If the council and the community reach a reasonable
understanding, both parties could effectively contribute to
development and subsequent operation and management. This will
reduce wastage and provide better service. |
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Proposed participatory management system |
Provide a
forum for the citizens to communicate with the local authority
management in a continual basis.
Provide and opportunity for the local authority to mobilize the
community to implement and manage development, operation and
maintenance activities in an efficient and effective manner.
Improve the revenue base of the local authority through a
partnership process and transparency.
Facilitate the political system to satisfy the needs of the
community with the people’s participation system. |
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Proposed system |
| The proposed
system is designed using the past experience of the past efforts
such as Community Development Council (CDC), Housing Community
Development Committee (HCDC) and farmers’ organizations in the
agriculture sector. The structure consists with a three line
formal structure namely the Community Based Organization (CBO),
Ward Committee or Area Committee (WC/AC) and City Management
Committee (CMC) and an informal group mainly the neighbourhood
group (NG). |
The physical and social developments and subsequent management
demands the participation of the beneficiary to provide better service.
In the areas of safety and development it has been observed that most of
such interventions are being formulated with minimal participation of
the people concerned.
People’s participation
The members of local authorities are elected through an election
process mostly on the basis of political parties. The candidates
interact with the communities during the election period extensively and
also look into community needs to the best of their ability after the
elections.
There is no formal system for the communities to discuss and
communicate their views on the management of local authorities except a
few NGOs, social organizations and political party based branch
officers.
Therefore, resolution of individual and representatives of councils
on an individual basis and through ad-hoc groups organized for that
purpose. Therefore, it could be concluded that the present system of
management, theoretically inadequate to people centred development and
management. Hence certain radical changes are required at this stage to
mobilize communities in a more formal and organized manner.
With the exception of government grants, mostly the urban local
authorities (ULAs) use the resources collected from the residents and
through property taxes, rents, duties, etc. Most of the ULAs are faced
with severe financial crisis due to the shortage of funds to meet the
expenses for basic services. Increase of taxes, rates, rents, etc. is a
very sensitive political issue and there is a natural reluctance from
the councils to improve the revenue through increases of taxes, etc.
People demand for better services quite often without fulfilling
their obligations. Increase in revenue and better services in a vicious
circle. Therefore, building awareness among people on the entire
management system and to inculcate responsibility within community is on
vital importance to overcome this situation.
In building a productive partnership between the community and local
authority management, it is required for both parties to act with
responsibility on the roles to be played by each partner. It is of vital
importance that both should have access to information in decisions
making. Therefore, the transparency in all activities result in mutual
trust between the parties concerned.
The taxpayers should be able to have access to information on
revenue, expenditure, capital investments, operation and maintenance
details, etc. to understand the whole spectrum of issues.
Taxpayers are responsible to pay realistic rates, rents and payments
in time and also help the council in minimizing wastage.
The writer is a Senior Manager NHDA, Town Planner (ITPSL) |
