The sustainability of mega-cities

Delhi fast becoming the melting pot of cultures, where people, profession and culture assimilate and diffuse. In recent years India’s GDP growth has been far above the growth rates of developed nations. The strength of Indian economy is visible in the increase of foreign direct investment and good competitive environment. Despite these favourable developments in GDP growth and FDI, the bucks are not transient to the sustainable development of India’s mega cities. In this paper sustainability of cities is defined as the transformation of growth developments into social well being, quality of life and social achievements of the existing Delhi slum. Deficits in both are especially visible in the residential housing, fundamental infrastructure and well being index. Therefore this paper evaluates the impact of Regional, Governmental and Non Governmental measures to improve the situation of slums of New Delhi

This paper examines the patterns and trends of growth of Harare Metropolitan Region which ideally covers Harare City and its satellite towns of Chitungwiza, Norton, Epworth, Ruwa, and Christonbank together with their immediate peri-urban environments. Urban expansion, triggered by the processes of urbanisation, peri-urbanisation and anti-urbanisation, are defining an ungovernable and difficult situation to manage in the next 20 years or so. The basics that define a sustainable metropolitan region (housing, water and sanitation, public transportation) are at stake. With an appropriate population 5 million inhabitants, the metropolitan infrastructure and existing facilities are failing to cope with the demographic pressure. Two decades ago the state has down-tooled on public programmes in housing and transportation. Harare Metropolitan, like most urban centres in the developing world, has been shattered and buttered several times by the country’s adoption of structural adjustment programmes in the 1990s, a failing economy in the 2000s and, as far back as the 1980s, the challenges of adapting from colonialism. Data from the statistical office and other secondary sources of data aided with interviews from related sectors, have been geo-referenced and ‘modelled’ to reflect the metropolitan growth.

The environmental studies are numerous in Vietnam, but they are mainly technical studies. Therefore we decided to address the issue from the perspective of the households and their views on the environment in which they are living and the solutions to the identified problems. For this purpose we conducted a statistical representative household survey in the two Vietnamese metropolises in 2007 on the theme "Poverty, Migration and Urban Environment: Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City" from which the present results come. Both the household’s environment and the surrounding environment (location of the house, floods, air pollution, noise, drainage, security) are studied here. The conditions experienced by the inhabitants of the two major cities are broadly similar: they are faced with the problems of the big city. However, some specificities of each one are very interesting to notice. Environmental problems concern more the inhabitants of Hanoi; the reason is to be found in the education of the population which is on average higher, but also in the climate which is harder. In any case, the population of both cities gives us here an inventory of the specific environmental problems faced and his views on how to address them.

Indian urban centres face an ironical situation today. The Census of India provides information about different amenities available in the households. Class I Indian cities grew at a faster pace that contributed more than half of total urban population in many states. A composite index of quality of living was calculated using different household amenities like source of drinking water/lighting/ fuel for cooking, toilet facility and house type. The index was calculated at regional/ state, million/mega city level. Northern region of India had better quality of living. North- eastern region was least urbanized region Western region was well urbanized region. Mumbai despite being most populous Indian city did not have high quality of living index. In million city level analysis, the correlation coefficient is found to be significant and satisfactory indicating the relationship is strong particularly in big cities where populations are diversified. At mega city level except year 1991, other two yield significant relationship between population size and availability of household amenities.Quality of living was not positively related with the population of cities. Quality of living is not commensurate with increasing numbers of million cities. Cities having larger populations did not have good quality of living.

Urbanization has greatly altered the distribution of world’s cities. We use the 2011 Revision of the World Urbanization Prospects, the largest time series city database with most consistent definition, to investigate growth trajectories of world’s cities by major area and city size from 1950 to 2010. We found that while the number of cities has been mushrooming from all corners of the world, the greatest number of cities and the largest cities today are increasingly found in the developing world. Trends in evenness of distribution of city by country are also examined. Cities in developing countries have witnessed a faster growth in latest few decades compared to those of developed countries. Larger cities tended to have a universally greater growth rate than smaller-sized cities for six major areas and selected countries. Population of world cities is getting less evenly distributed in terms of the Pareto coefficient. Japan is a developed country with least evenly distributed population in terms of the Pareto coefficient and primacy indexes. With exception for China and India, cities in developing countries tend to less evenly distributed than cities in most developed countries.

Prospects of Indian cities are greatly tied to rural migrants’ ability to transition into productive urban citizens. However, their ability to do so depends not only on economic opportunities but also on the city’s ability to deliver on quality of life indicators. While there is increasing work on micro-level dimensions of poverty and wellbeing in rural developing country contexts, little empirical work examines parallel dimensions in urban areas. This gap is especially pronounced in scholarly work on migrant outcomes, especially in Indian urban destinations. Within this context, I carry out an assessment of rural-urban migrants’ multidimensional wellbeing in India’s capital city, Delhi. The analysis uses two unique geo-referenced data sources that allow for combining socio-economic survey data with neighborhood level indicators of service provision extracted from Delhi GIS. I find that as compared to urban native dwellers, rural-urban migrants are significantly poorer across economic as well as non-economic formulations of wellbeing in Delhi. More importantly, the disadvantage arising from being a rural migrant does not disappear with an increased duration of residence in the city, implying a persistent lack of socio-economic mobility for the urbanizing individuals and important implications for urban inequality in India.

Addressing a paucity of research about industrial adoption of environmentally-benign technologies in Africa and, more generally, in tropical developing countries, we examined the Nigerian pulp and paper industry as a case study. Qualitative interviews with upper echelon executives of Nigerian firms challenge conventional expectations that energy intensive industries in developing markets operate amid highly pollution-intensive conditions, within weak or non-existent formal environmental regulatory frameworks, and with limited institutional capacity. Our findings suggest a strong positive relationship between cleaner technology use and business performance of African industrial firms. Our study also suggests the adoption of classical ‘win-win’ integrated preventive environmental strategy, eco-efficiency and green productivity which improves industrial efficiency and profitability. The firms are shown to have moved beyond end-of-pipe technologies and cleaner technologies and adopted industrial ecology and “zero emission” principles with appropriate reuse of the remaining waste streams turning the production system into a sustainable industrial ecosystem.

The Cows to Kilowatts model pioneered a new model of waste management that treats slaughterhouse effluent at the source and converts harmful greenhouse gases into clean energy through social enterprise. The innovation deploys a cutting-edge anaerobic fixed film bioreactor technology to treat abattoir waste and produce biogas more efficiently than conventional biodigester technologies. This also reduces pollution and greenhouse gas emissions and provides a cheap source of bio-energy and bio-fertilizer.
The bioreactor dubbed “Cows to Kilowatts” is located at Ibadan, the largest indigenous city in Africa. About 1000 heads of cows are slaughtered daily. The 5000m³ bioreactor is designed to capture about 1,800m³ of methane per day and generating about 0.5MW of electricity off-grid for power starved poor communities and with emission reduction of about 0.2MT of CO2 per year.
The captured methane is used to drive gas generators to provide electricity for power starved poor communities. This new waste-treatment model is revolutionizing traditional practice in slaughterhouses, contributing to safer living environments and boasting economic viability for the local economy. Operated as a social business, the profit is being invested into waste-treatment facilities in other locations, further increasing the beneficial impact.

Nigeria is often identified as the fastest moving economy and one of the most advanced ICT market sectors in Africa. In just a few years, Nigeria has become the telecommunication hotspot for both telecommunication operators and equipment suppliers. However, the growth was characterized with unprecedented release of electronic waste from the mobile phone companies into the environment and most of them highly toxic. The research addressed the adoption of environmentally sound management of electronic waste as it relates to mobile phones in Africa. Qualitative interviews were held with upper echelon executives representing firms in the Nigerian telecommunication industries with quantitative analysis using structural equation model. The study suggests the absence of legislation dealing specifically with electronic waste, inadequate infrastructure for waste management, absence of any framework for end-of-life product take-back. However, the generation of electronic waste from may turn out to be a win-win situation and clearly has inherent business opportunities for the developing countries if the adoption of environmental benign technologies and policy is embraced.

In recent years, urbanization has been taking place rapidly and vigorously in Ho Chi Minh City, the largest urban agglomeration in Vietnam. Because of the creation of a multitude of new urban zone development, the resettling of people has become common. Within 10 years, resettlement projects has released tens of thousands slums, cleaned polluted waterways, improved many old infrastructure systems. This paper aims to clarify the impacts of the resettlement on the live hood and social relationships of the relocatees, to analyze how they have coped with new situations and the role of social policy in supporting for relocatees.
The paper make use of both published secondary sources and primary survey. The effective sample size of the survey is 300 households which were selected from resettlement projects. The data were collected through face-to-face interview and semi-structured questions.
Findings show that the resettlement does not just stop at making a segment in-place to another place but also links to a serious of social policy for supporting relocated households. There are certain "immaterial and invisible” changes affected to the life of resettled households.