Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
experience, Ross (2005) describes the creation of the Environmental Audit Committee
as an example of merging accountability structures dealing with specific cross-cutting
issues, such as green government, climate change, environmental protection, education
for sustainable development and finance.
Case study: the Right to the City - a linchpin concept
The 'Right to the City' is a phrase and a concept that has its origins in the radicalism
of the Paris of 1968 and the Marxist sociology of Henri Lefebvre but is now used
very broadly by a range of agencies, including the United Nations. Lefebvre applied
the concept to rethink the spatial structure of the city, the assumptions of liberal
democracy and the social relations of capitalist society. His focus was predominantly
spatial distinguishing between:
•
perceived space
- i.e. how space is experienced in everyday life;
•
conceived space
- i.e. how space is constructed by planners, property developers,
politicians and businesses;
•
lived space
- i.e. space as a potentiality to re-imagine social and political relations
in an alternative way.
Space is central to the way people inhabitant the city - the way they live and
work, how they travel about, how they entertain themselves, where and what they
eat, purchase goods and services, educate their children and themselves, and so on.
For Lefebvre, to claim a Right to the City is to claim to live or experience the city
fully, with dignity, co-operatively and socially. It is far more than simply seeing
urban space as a site of and for making profits, of capital and property accumulation,
of commodification and perhaps human dispossession. The right to the city also
means the right to participate in the decision-making processes that affect how
people inhabit the city, the way space is produced and used, made available and
safe, lived in and enjoyed. The Make Delhi Safe Women campaign has received
widespread publicity since a number of cases of gang rape received global media
coverage and elicit outrage within and outside India. City planners need to make
urban infrastructure women-friendly and planning processes participatory (Lama-
Rewal, 2011). The claim to participate is a claim of social inclusion and as such
has an explicit link to the processes of democracy. As Mark Purcell writes (2008:
96), 'participation both develops citizens' capacity for civic wisdom and produces
wiser, more sustainable public decisions'. These views are expanded on at length in
a wealth of inspiring material discussing various proposals and experiences in Habitat
International Coalition's
Cities for All
(Sugranyes and Mathivet, 2010), which aims
to strengthen the Right to the City as a conceptual and practical tool for creating
a better urban world.
Some of these rights have been codified legally but although legal codification is
sometimes necessary it is probably insufficient to ensure the city is inhabited well.
The Montreal Charter for Rights and responsibilities and Brazil's 'City Statute' -
i.e. the enactment of Federal Law 10.257 - are examples of such codifications
(UNESCO, 2006). The 'City Statute' posits three key principles associated with
Lefebrve's philosophy:
