The third session of the World Urban Forum in Vancouver, Canada, held from 19 to 23 June 2006, drew more than 10,000 participants from over 100 countries, making it one of the largest non-legislative United Nations gatherings in recent years. It also marked the 30th anniversary of the UN Conference on Human Settlements that led to the establishment of UN-HABITAT, the agency charged with coordinating the urban agenda within the UN system. By all accounts, delegates agreed that the third session was one of the most successful recent UN meetings, which produced a series of important messages for Governments, municipalities and urban players to take home with them.

UN-HABITAT Executive Director Anna Tibaijuka at the opening ceremony PHOTO © GLOBE FOUNDATION

In 1976, urbanization and its impacts were barely on the radar screen of the United Nations, which was created just three decades earlier when two thirds of humanity was still rural. But those who were meeting in Vancouver back then were only too aware that rapid urbanization was becoming a human settlements problem around the world. They were the generation who still remembered the Second World War, when the first effective UN-led shelter programme was the distribution of blankets to those huddling in the post-war ruins of European and Asian cities. Although the message was blurred partly by the cold war in the bipolar world of 1976, the clarion call of Vancouver rang down the years. Towns and cities are growing at unprecedented rates, setting the social, political, cultural and environmental trends worldwide, both good and bad. If world leaders help reduce urban poverty, they said, it would have a positive impact on the environment.

And so the words a generation ago of Barbara Ward, the author who popularized the term "Spaceship Earth", look as if they could have been written today: "In the world at large, the millions will be born. The settlements will grow-in squalor and violence, or in work and hope. The whole world-linked by its communications, its airlines, its hijackers and its terrorists-has really only one choice: to become a place worth living in or face 'the way to dusty death'. And where else do people live save in their settlements? So where else is the salvation to begin?" Her prophetic statement is borne out by the crux of the message from Vancouver 2006-that sustainable urbanization is arguably the greatest challenge facing the global community in the twenty-first century as "Spaceship Earth" spirals irreversibly into the urban era.

According to UN-HABITAT research, in 1950 one third of the world's people lived in cities and just 50 years later the number rose to one half and will continue to grow to two thirds, or 6 billion people, by 2050. Today in many cities, especially in developing countries, slum dwellers account for more than 50 per cent of the population and have little or no access to shelter, water, sanitation, education or health services. But looking just one year ahead, The State of the World's Cities 2006/7, a report prepared by UN-HABITAT for the Forum, states that 2007 will mark a turning point in history, when for the first time half of the global population will be living in cities. It will also be the year when the number of slum dwellers around the world will reach 1 billion. And with 1 billion people living in slums and thousands joining them every day, we are indeed sitting on a social time bomb that is ticking away quietly in many overcrowded, poverty-stricken corners of a geopolitical chessboard already fraught with new problems in the wake of the cold war.

Key figures from UN-HABITAT give a measure of the urban crisis: Asia accounts for nearly 60 per cent of the world's slum population, with a total of 581 million slum dwellers in 2005, while sub-Saharan Africa had 199 million slum dwellers, constituting some 20 per cent of the world's total, and Latin America had 134 million, making up 14 per cent of the total. At the global level, 30 per cent of all urban dwellers lived in slums in 2005, a proportion that has not changed significantly since 1990. However, in the last 15 years the magnitude of the problem has increased substantially: 283 million more slum dwellers have joined the global urban population. About 156 million people in South Asia, 75 million in Africa and 49 million in Latin America live four or more persons to a room, thus increasing the chances of disease and domestic violence. Diseases arising from poor sanitation kill up to 1.6 million slum dwellers annually, more than the 2004 tsunami death toll. Urban health statistics show that 65 per cent of Indian hospital patients are treated for waterborne diseases. In Africa, slum dwellers spend a third of their income for treatment against these diseases. Source: UN-HABITAT, State of the World's Cities 2006/7

The World Urban Forum produced several outcomes in the form of messages and warnings based on the latest information from cities around the world. First, that the United Nations needs to galvanize as never before its strength in the quest for sustainable urbanization. Another was that the work of UN-HABITAT, as the focal point for implementation of the Habitat Agenda, the Declaration on Cities and other Human Settlements in the New Millennium and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) on water and sanitation and on improving the lives of slum dwellers, has to be backed up by national support for applying these MDGs at street- and neighbourhood levels. In addition, the fact that the world is now witnessing its greatest urban growth and migration into towns and cities, the challenge becomes clearer, if not more daunting. "Many of the migrating millions realize their dreams and build better lives for themselves, their families and their communities", said Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper. "For others, the road to the city leads to poverty, homelessness and tragedy."

In the developing world, UN-HABITAT says growing urbanization has created a range of serious problems, such as on access to clean water, sanitation and shelter, urban poverty, HIV/AIDS and with urban governance. Thus, another fact resonated from the 2006 Vancouver-that the urban population of developing countries is set to double from 2 billion to 4 billion in the next 30 years. Katherine Sierra, Vice-President and Network Head, Infrastructure, at the World Bank and Enrique Peñalosa, former Mayor of Bogotá, Colombia, told the plenary that this meant the equivalent of planning, financing and servicing facilities for a new city of 1 million people every week for the next 30 years.

Critics of the conference said it had failed to produce any clear plan of action. They included the media and some invited guests like Jockin Arputham, President of India's National Slum Dwellers Association, who cited the "time and money" being spent in Vancouver. UN-HABITAT Executive Director Anna Tibaijuka, however, shot back: "A forum like this provides the chance for people to know, to connect with the rest of the world, to know that people care. We raise awareness, and once we raise awareness, we increase the chance for getting concerted action." Indeed, the World Urban Forum brought Governments and municipalities closer than ever before to grass-roots women's organizations, youth groups, representatives of slum dwellers and other non-governmental organizations (NGOs), building on the precedent set by UN-HABITAT for more inclusive international meetings.

Sanitation, hygiene and health are interconnected-Baseco community in Manila, Philippines. PHOTO/© MIKEL FLAMM

A group of South African and Latin American former exiles living in Vancouver were moved to tears when they visited the UN-HABITAT exhibition and saw the squalor represented in the life-size mock-ups of shanty life in Africa, Asia and Latin America. The quest for innovative ideas and practical solutions was underscored in the six dialogues, 13 roundtable meetings and more than 160 networking events. Ministers, mayors, academics, community-based organizations, NGO federations and the private sector swapped notes and shared insights on improving the quality of life in the growing cities of the world.

But the real essence of the 2006 Vancouver meeting came to light when, for example, Ghulam Sakhi Noorzad, Mayor of Kabul, Afghanistan, said he had been able to discuss neighbourhood problems in Arabic with his counterpart from Ndjamena, Chad. And a leader of a women's group discussed the earthquake that had devastated her native Jogjakarta in Indonesia and was able to glean valuable insight from a Sri Lankan psychologist, who had counselled survivors of the Indian Ocean tsunami. Likewise, native leaders from British Colombia consulted colleagues from Nicaragua and El Salvador on how to deal with a new government perceived as less sympathetic to their needs. Another riposte from delegates was that the problems of urbanization and the growing slums, or urbanization of poverty in the developing world, are too varied and too vast for any one solution to fit all. Similarly, the problems have to be tackled individually from the bottom up, in consultation with those most deprived.

In a world of a top-down approach to problems, this is radical. And so yet another important message came out of Vancouver: although local governments provide on average 86 per cent of local services-water, sewage, housing, roads, infrastructure, electricity, etc.-compared to national governments, they only collect 25 per cent of tax revenues. This means, according to Mrs. Tibaijuka in her keynote address, that "our politics must become urbanized". H. Peter Oberlander, a veteran of 1976 and the Senior Advisor to Canada's Commissioner General for the conference in 2006, said that "with the next session in Nanjing (China) in 2008, we have to ensure that the wonderful momentum built up during this week in Vancouver is maintained, that we keep the connectivity."

For more information, visit the World Urban Forum III website (www.unhabitat.org/wuf/2006).