Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
planning and project implementation. For example, it is clear that manuals of
appropriate technology are urgently needed, as follows:
For setting appropriate minimum acceptable standards for urban infrastruc-
ture/services, for all categories of developments, with “equal attention” to
affluent, poor, and poorest municipal areas
•
For design of urban infrastructure systems (including water supply and waste
management) that are appropriate (which give acceptable levels of service
at affordable cost), with special attention to ensuring adequate O&M, for
all categories of development
•
For conducting EIAs, including follow-up monitoring for all categories of
urban/industrial projects, in sufficient detail to facilitate wide-scale use and
application of the EIA process (similar to engineering design handbooks)
•
For planning and conducting appropriate environmental monitoring pro-
grams, including all aspects of community environment including quality-of-
life and socioeconomic aspects, including institutional and financing aspects,
including periodic evaluation of the monitoring data for use in planning
needed improvements, and including establishment of an appropriate national
environmental database adequate for assessing environmental quality in
quantified terms suitable for use by both environmentalists and economists
•
Essay on Urban Population Growth in DCs
The rural to urban influx is increasing not only because of the economic pressure
but also because of the impact of modern communications (especially TV, the
internet, and cell phone) in alerting the rural people to realize that life in the urban
sector, even if one has no job, will generally be much better than in the rural in
terms of both earnings and quality of life. A World Bank officer who worked in
Calcutta (India) in the 1960s remarked that the homeless people who slept on the
streets (a million at least) were actually “bankable” people. By doing odd jobs,
their income was much higher than their rural cousins, and the sidewalk-urbanites
were sending appreciable monies to their rural relatives every month.
The term
quality life
reminds me of the author's work in the Belgian Congo
(now the Congo Republic) in the 1950s, to assist the Congo's chief engineer and
deputy governor general, on urban sanitary engineering planning. He noted one
day that the black natives who made up most of the population of the capital
(then Leopoldville, now Kinshasa) had immigrated to the city from the “bush”
(the rural areas), attracted by the urban employment opportunities, and that to
his knowledge, not a single one had since returned to the bush. Once the native
tasted the “Wine, Women, and Song” readily available in the urban sector (and
almost nonexistent in the bush), nobody ever left. Later on, working with a
Belgian who was chief engineer for Katanga Province, a visit was made to the
province's maximum-security prison (for hardened criminals) to observe pipe
manufacturing with prison labor. The prison guards were mostly asleep, and the
chief engineer noted that nobody ever tried to escape because life in prison was
