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In This Update:
Measuring Housing Affordability for Middle-Income Families Internationally
Sri Lankan Cities: UN-Habitat Best Practices
Gender Equity and Urbanization
Fighting Fires in South African Slums
Mayors Respond to Partial Government Shutdown
Tokyo Metro Deploys Soba Noodles to Combat Congestion
Why Cities?
Journal of Public Space Announces 2019-2020 Journals
In the News and Around the Web
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Housing
Measuring Housing Affordability for Middle-Income Families Internationally
Demographia published its 15
th
Annual International Housing Affordability Survey.
The key point of the survey, writes Alain Bertaud, author of the introduction, is that "unaffordable housing is not an unavoidable fatality linked to economic success."
Authors Wendell Cox and Hugh Pavletich drew this conclusion after they extrapolated data from housing markets in Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Ireland, New Zealand, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and the United States to rate middle-income housing affordability for middle income buyers. With fifteen years of previous housing statistics, the survey provides an excellent opportunity for investigating why and how some cities achieve high demographic and economic growth without abnormal housing inflation.
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Data-Driven Analyses at the United Nations
Sri Lanka: UN-Habitat Best Practices
UN-Habitat applauds the efforts of the State of Sri Lankan Cities Report to develop an integrated policy matrix tool to aid policymakers and identify policies that work across all sectors. The matrix measures city competitiveness, inclusiveness resilience, safety, and sustainability against eight sectoral constraints: urbanization, people and functions, urban economies, housing, municipal services, connectivity, risk and resilience, and governance. UN-Habitat's Best Practices January monthly featured the nine Sri Lankan cities studied in the report and concludes that the data provided by this report is a significant step in promoting cross-sectoral and holistic interventions that recognize those cities as interrelated urban systems.
Gender Equity and Urbanization
In 2018, the UN revised its World Cities Report to reflect new urbanization and sustainable development trends. But, Laura Kirkpatrick at PassBlue argues the report lacks a key component: data on gender. This makes it difficult and even impossible to define and understand the relationship between women's status, urbanization, and economic development. Jeni Klugman at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government asserts: "It is not a coincidence that some of the cities projected to experience the greatest growth overlap with areas where the lowest rankings (are) in terms of security to women." According to Kirkpatrick, this makes the need for aggregated data on women and urbanization especially important
for enhancing the lives of women.
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Informal Settlements and Their Challenges
Fighting Fires in South African Slums
South African start-up Lumkani developed new alarm and insurance systems to help address the frequency and scope of fires in Cape Town slums. Richard Pithouse (University of the Witwatersrand), explains the causes of the fires are intimately tied to housing conditions: "The primary issue is that people are living in shacks...When people are using gas to cook or candles for light in a tiny cramped space, made of highly flammable material, fires are obviously going to happen." While Lumkani co-founder Francois Petousis agrees that, "...the real solution to shack fires is the end of shacks," he hopes Lumkani may provide a much-needed "interim solution" to the more than 5,000 fires that break out in South African slums annually.
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The U.S. Government Shutdown in Cities
Mayors Respond to Partial Government Shutdown
The U.S. federal government's partial shutdown featured prominently at this week's U.S. Conference of Mayors Winter Meeting in Washington, D.C. District of Columbia Mayor Muriel Bowser explained the motivation behind mayoral efforts to curtail the impacts of the shutdown on city residents: "We are all struggling to make sure that the quality of our lives aren't disrupted." One such effort includes a new D.C. Housing Finance Agency program to offer loans for the city's 70,000 furloughed residents. Furthermore, notes Paul Soglin, mayor of Madison, Wisconsin, the shutdown has only exacerbated the existing crisis of affordable housing. Soglin says: "This is becoming a crisis in a number of our cities, which is not going to contribute to the stability of housing, which is a major issue in this country.
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Creative Solutions for Urban Transit
Tokyo Metro Deploys Soba Noodles to Combat Congestion
This week, Tokyo Metro announced a tasty offer to combat transit congestion: it will provide vouchers for free soba noodles and tempura for riders who commute to work before rush hour for ten consecutive days. A 2017 Japanese government survey identified a 199% congestion rate on the metro. The survey classfied a 100% congestion rate as when riders occupy all metro seats, while a 200% congestion rate means that "bodies come into contact with each other and one feels considerable pleasure." Speaking to NPR, Cizuka Seki, owner of the Washington, DC restaurant Izakaya Seki, expressed some optimism in the program: "It's a lot of effort for a bowl of free soba, but people in Japan love coupons and free stuff. It brings a lot of people joy."
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Urban Publications
In conjunction with the University of Pennsylvania's "Year of Why" theme, its Institute for Urban Research asked eleven urban experts: "Why Cities?" The exercise asked the contributors to reflect broadly on the forces behind rapid urbanization, its impact on inclusiveness and sustainability, and similarities and differences in urbanization processes globally. Some of the excellent and thought-provoking reads include Aniruddha Dasgupt's, "Can we Implement Change Fast Enough?", Richard Florida's, "The Rise of the City State," and Joseph Parilla's, "Urban Investment Must Keep Pace with Growth."
Journal of Public Space Announces 2019-2020 Journals and Call for Papers
The Journal of Public Space, an open access journal dedicated to inclusive and democratic public space in cities, partnered with UN Habitat and City Space Architecture to announced the schedule of its 2019-2020 upcoming special issues. The Journal also published a call for papers for its 2019 issues and conferences. Urban themes to be examined include knowledge sharing toward the implementation of the New Urban Agenda, the "entrepreneurial city," public health and well-being, and mapping urban injustices. Its most recent issue deals with art and activism in creative and insightful ways. IHC Global is eager to follow the Journal's new insights provided by intellectually diverse contributors.
Find more information about the Journal of Public Space here and subscribe to their newsletter here.
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In the News and Around the Web
- How Green is China's Belt and Road Initiative?: Kumuda Simpson raises important questions about Chinese environmental degradation in the developing countries that receive aid through its Belt and Road Initiative.
- Heritage and Development in Ho Chi Minh City: Development in Ho Chi Minh City has meant the destruction of some of its historic architecture.
- Understanding UN System Reforms: Ana Maria Lebada, Thematic Expert for 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, explains three major system reforms the United Nations is implementing: development, peace and security, and management.
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The skyline in Ho Chi Minh City
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