At UN World Urban Forum, a tale of two cities with common way forward

It was a tale of two cities – one battered into rubble by war, the other at the cutting edge of technology – as the United Nations World Urban Forum reached the half-way mark of its weeklong session aimed at averting poverty and despair among a global population that is expected to double to 4 billion people in the next 30 years.

Yet despite the vast gulf between Kabul, Afghanistan, and Vancouver, Canada, host city of this third Forum, a plenary meeting moderated by the Vice-President and Network Head for Infrastructure at the World Bank, Katherine Sierra, showed there are common ways of facing challenges, though it will demand public-private sector partnerships as well as the backing of the cities’ residents.

“These 2 billion new urban inhabitants will require the equivalent of planning, financing, and servicing facilities for a new city of 1 million people every week for the next 30 years,” Ms. Sierra said.

“However these will not be nicely planned, new cities at all, but rather, without smart interventions, the unplanned and unrecorded expansion of existing slum settlements - poorly located with new ghettoes, often on the urban periphery. Poverty will deepen, and despair will grow,” she told the Forum, sponsored by UN-HABITAT, the world body’s Human Settlements Programme.

Afghanistan’s Minister of Urban Development Mohammad Yusuf Pashtun said that after 25 years of war, its cities had been destroyed, many of them literally flattened on a scale unimaginable to people outside the country.

But the urban crisis, he added, should also be seen by Afghanistan’s political and business partners as an opportunity for national and international investment, a reservoir of cheap skilled and unskilled labour, with cheap local construction materials, a place where new partnerships would generate job opportunities for millions of people.

Pat Jacobsen, Chief Executive Officer of Translink, Canada, explained how Vancouver used partnerships to fund its transport infrastructure as a modern Pacific gateway city, an example being the new $5-million rail service linking the city with neighbouring Seattle in the United States. Partnerships were being used to help find the funding.

In the 1960s and 1970s Vancouver funded its public transport system mainly from the public sector, but today, over 70 per cent of funding comes in user fees and fuel taxes. Ms. Jacobsen said 1.2 billion Canadian dollars of private sector capital had been used to build new infrastructure. A main problem is the fact that public officials are not used to working with the private sector, and both sides have different perceptions of each other, she said.

But the benefits of these new partnerships have paid off enormously and their biggest supporters are their stakeholders – the users of the public transport system, she added.