David Satterthwaite

International Institute for Environment and Development · Human Settlements Group

Why is there so little data on who faces poverty and where they live?

Global monitoring efforts do not provide a clear picture of the challenge of managing human waste at the city scale. Where cities do not provide universal access to publicly managed sanitation systems, households and communities find their own solutions resulting in a patchwork of approaches to removing human waste from places where people live. In...

In this lecture, we address the question on whether and how transport can serve and support other local and global agendas in urban areas. There are important contributions that a well-functioning city transport system can make to a range of goals—including improving housing (and lowering housing costs), reducing poverty (including increasing incom...

Goals and pathways to achieve sustainable urban development have multiple interlinkages with human health and wellbeing. However, these interlinkages have not been examined in depth in recent discussions on urban sustainability and global urban science. This paper fills that gap by elaborating in detail the multiple links between urban sustainabili...

Goals and pathways to achieve sustainable urban development have multiple interlinkages with human health and wellbeing. However, these interlinkages have not been examined in depth in recent discussions on urban sustainability and global urban science. This paper fills that gap by elaborating in detail the multiple links between urban sustainabili...

This paper highlights the major challenges and considerations for addressing COVID-19 in informal settlements. It discusses what is known about vulnerabilities and how to support local protective action. There is heightened concern about informal urban settlements because of the combination of population density and inadequate access to water and s...

Approximately 1 billion people currently live in informal settlements, primarily in urban areas in low- and middle-income countries. Informal settlements are defined by poor-quality houses or shacks built outside formal laws and regulations. Most informal settlements lack piped water or adequate provision for sanitation, drainage, and public servic...

What follows here is the Panel’s call for a global urban science. This call takes the three elements of this phrase in a different light from the often popular and at times unnuanced use if the terms. It is ‘global’ in a cosmopolitan sense as pertaining to and reaching out worldwide, irrespective of socio-economic status to the variety of urban con...

Many African towns and cities face a range of hazards, which can best be described as representing a “spectrum of risk” of events that can cause death, illness or injury, and impoverishment. Yet despite the growing numbers of people living in African urban centres, the extent and relative severity of these different risks is poorly understood. This...

This paper underscores the need for detailed data on health and disaster risks for sub-Saharan African cities, particularly for their informal settlements. Systems that should contribute to the information base on health and health risks in each locality are rarely functional. In most cities, there is a lack of data on health risks, health outcomes...

Global urbanization promises better services, stronger economies, and more connections; it also carries risks and unforeseeable consequences. To deepen our understanding of this complex process and its importance for global sustainability, we need to build interdisciplinary knowledge around a systems approach. Urban Planet takes an integrative look...

This paper was prepared as a background paper for the International Scientific Conference on Cities and Climate Change in Edmonton in March 2018. It describes how one of the greatest challenges for climate change adaptation is how to build resilience for the billion urban dwellers who are estimated to live in what are termed informal settlements. T...

The main urban issue that sub-Saharan Africa is facing is rapid growth in its urban population without the urban governance structures in place that can meet their responsibilities and manage the change. This has created very large deficits in infrastructure and service provision which exposes much of the urban population to high levels of risk. Wi...

Inequalities in exposure to environmental health risks in homes, workplaces and the wider city are well understood, even if often poorly documented in low- and most middle-income nations. This is also the case for inequalities in health outcomes - for instance inequalities in years of life lost/premature death rates (especially for infants, childre...

There is a growing interest among national governments and international agencies in the contribution of urban centres to sustainable development. The paper outlines the new global agendas to guide this: the Sustainable Development Goals, the Paris Agreement and the New Urban Agenda. It then sets out the key challenges and opportunities facing urba...

This paper responds to the article by Daniel Hoornweg and Kevin Pope, on predictions for the world’s largest cities in the 21st century, in this issue of Environment and Urbanization. It recognizes the value and importance of this article in highlighting the very large likely scale of urban population growth up to 2100 and in initiating a discussio...

Climate change is acknowledged as the largest threat to our societies in the coming decades, potentially affecting large and diverse groups of urban residents in this century of urbanization. As urban areas house highly diverse people with differing vulnerabilities, intensifying climate change is likely to shift the focus of discussions from a gene...

An index from 2001 needs updating to reflect how policies championed by US President-elect Trump threaten global ecological sustainability

In the fi rst paper in this Series we assessed theoretical and empirical evidence and concluded that the health of people living in slums is a function not only of poverty but of intimately shared physical and social environments. In this paper we extend the theory of so-called neighbourhood eff ects. Slums off er high returns on investment because...

Massive slums have become major features of cities in many low-income and middle-income countries. Here, in the fi rst in a Series of two papers, we discuss why slums are unhealthy places with especially high risks of infection and injury. We show that children are especially vulnerable, and that the combination of malnutrition and recurrent diarrh...

InPress

Frustrated by the impenetrability and length of the latest draft of The New Urban Agenda and by the absence of support for the engagement of urban poor organizations, we developed an alternative version in one page

This article describes why we set up the journal Environment and Urbanization with a focus on the global south, and on authors from the south. It now has over 10,000 subscribers, helped by schemes that allow free subscriptions to institutions in the south. The journal has always sought to engage with and publish practitioners as well as academics,...

Cities on a Finite Planet: Transformative responses to climate change shows how cities can combine high quality living conditions, resilience to climate change, disaster risk reduction and contributions to mitigation/low carbon development. It also covers the current and potential contribution of cities to avoiding dangerous climate change and is t...

This paper reviews progress towards the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) for water and sanitation in urban areas. Drawing on UN data, it shows the disastrous performance of many low- and middle-income nations in relation to the goal of halving the proportion without drinking water sources piped on premises and improved sanitation between 1990 an...

No-one can accuse the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of lacking ambition. If all their commitments are actually met, we will have a sustainable, equitable, inclusive, resilient…. world by 2030. My Institute can pack up – what we have been striving for for the last 42 years will be delivered. But how can such a transformation be possible with...

One of the key insights of pioneer works on housing in cities in the Global South was that there was a range of housing types in each city through which low-income groups built, purchased, rented or occupied accommodation. These needed to be understood if policies for improving conditions were to be effective. Some of the pioneer works also discuss...

All urban dwellers need safe, quick, easy access to clean toilets, day and night – without fear, without a long walk, without a long wait in line, and without the need to plan ahead or to spend more than they can easily afford. They should be able to count on privacy, cleanliness and the means to wash anus and hands quickly and conveniently, which...

This paper reviews progress in the Millennium Development Goals for water, sanitation and “significantly improving the lives of slum dwellers.” It describes how the achievements to date in these three areas are actually much less than what is reported – and how deficiencies in data collected contribute to a considerable exaggeration of progress.

This blog highlights the disconnect that exists between the commitments made by national governments at international conferences and the finance that is actually available to the (mostly local) institutions that can meet them. Local governments and local civil society get little attention in the discussions on Financing for Development conference...

Urban areas can be among the world’s most healthy places to live and work – but also among the least healthy. This Topic Guide is a summary of what is known about the environmental impacts of urban areas with a particular focus on urban pollution and on good practice in reducing it. Urban pollution encompasses the exposure of urban populations to p...

Populations and assets, in African cities, small and large, are among the most vulnerable to disaster risk globally. Climate change and demographic shifts add urgency and uncertainty. This paper outlines priorities for research responding to this challenge. We argue for integrative approaches that can capture multi-hazard risk and include hazards f...

Introduction 8.1.1. Key Issues Adaptation to climate change depends centrally on what is done in urban centers, which now house more than half the world’s population and concentrate most of its assets and economic activities (World Bank, 2008; UN DESA Population Division, 2012). As Section 8.4 emphasizes, this will require responses by all levels o...

The draft Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that are intended to guide the post-2015 development agenda have many ambitious goals and targets. They seek both to meet needs, such as greatly reducing poverty, and to address regional and global ecological goals, including avoiding dangerous climate change. But they do not outline the changes needed...

This blog reviews how well the IPCC's Fifth Assessment addressed the links between urbanisation and climate change - and the needed responses both in terms of adaptation and in terms of mitigation http://www.iied.org/ipcc-urbanising-planet

There is an emerging consensus that urbanisation is critically important to international development, but considerable confusion over what urbanisation actually is; whether it is accelerating or slowing; whether it should be encouraged or discouraged; and, more generally, what the responses should be. This Working Paper reviews some key conceptual...

This working paper describes the role of federations and networks of slum/shack dwellers in developing effective responses to their needs through partnerships with local governments. It has a particular interest in the role of Community-Based Engagement and Monitoring in this. It draws on interviews and discussions with civil servants, politicians...

Yet another global study has understated the scale and depth of urban poverty, by failing to appreciate the differences between rural and urban contexts.

Abstract This paper considers the very large differences in adaptive capacity among the world’s urban centres. It then discusses how risk levels may change for a range of climatic drivers of impacts in the near term (2030–2040) and the long term (2080–2100) with a 2°C and a 4°C warming for Dar es Salaam, Durban, London and New York City. The paper...

The focus of this lecture is on whether and how transport can serve and support other local and global agendas in urban areas. There are important contributions that a well‐functioning city transport system can make to a range of goals – including improving housing (and lowering housing costs), reducing poverty (including increasing income‐earning...

http://www.developmentprogress.org/blog/2014/01/14/how-should-we-measure-quality-life-urban-centres

can be downloaded at http://ipcc-wg2.gov/AR5/report/final-drafts/

According to WGI, it is very likely that the number and intensity of hot days have increased markedly in the last three decades and virtually certain that this increase will continue into the late 21st century. In addition, it is likely (medium confidence) that the occurrence of heat waves (multiple days of hot weather in a row) has more than doubl...

The draft Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that are intended to guide the post-2015 development agenda have many ambitious goals and targets. They seek both to meet needs, such as greatly reducing poverty, and to address regional and global ecological goals, including avoiding dangerous climate change. But they do not outline the changes needed...

This has a summary of two books by these authors: Urban Poverty in the Global South, Scale and Nature published in 2012 and Reducing Urban Poverty published in 2013 by Routledge, London. This chapter also has a paper on Urban Social Safety Nets: Country Case Studies by John Taylor and The Urban Poor in India by Naresh Saxena

Wherever living standards are high, local governments have played, and continue to play, a major role in their achievement – often the primary role. This can be seen in the wide range of responsibilities they have for infrastructure and services. They also generally have key roles in ensuring health and safety in buildings and enterprises, in disas...