April 2010 – Page 2 – Ashley Dawson

Yesterday I went to the Regional Plan Association’s conference on “Innovation and the American Metropolis.” The RPA’s interventions in the urban fabric of the New York metropolitan area have been hugely influential, laying out the material and intellectual framework for the development of this, one of the U.S.’s greatest urban regions. Of course, these interventions have not been without controversy, as Marshall Berman’s withering attack on Robert Moses in All That is Solid Melts into Air underlines.

In a first for me, I live blogged the event for Social Text. My account of and reactions to the RPA presentations are available here.

There were many fascinating presentations, but perhaps the most interesting was one by an architect involved in a project sponsored by the Museum of Modern Art called Rising Currents. The goal of this project, which brought together urban planners, architects, ecologists, and civic groups, was to explore a series of creative responses to sea-level rise resulting from climate change, re-envisioning the coast lines of New York and New Jersey around the New York harbor. This is one of the most interesting climate change mitigation projects that I’ve seen, one that suggests it may be possible to make progressive interventions in response to the gathering climate crisis, at least in the short- to medium-term.

In an appearance before the U.S. congress today, Obama administration deputy special envoy for Climate Change Jonathan Pershing testified that America intends to hold the South African government to its pledges to cut carbon emissions. This despite the U.S.’s abstention in the vote on the $3.75 billion World Bank loan to build one of the world’s biggest coal-fired power plants.

This comes on top of the Obama administration’s recent decision to deny mitigation funds to Bolivia and Ecuador in response to their refusal to sign up for the sham Copenhagen accord.

As an article in the Guardian cogently points out, “Pershing’s comments align with the Obama administration’s policy of shifting some of the burden for dealing with climate change from the industrialised countries which have historically caused most emissions to rapidly emerging countries, such as South Africa, India, China and Brazil.” Shifting the burden are the keywords here.

Speaking of South Africa, I also wanted to note an interesting article on the blikkiesdorps or slums created by government clearance programs in advance of the World Cup. As the Olympics in Vancouver demonstrated yet again, sporting mega-spectacles almost always lead to increasing homelessness and diminishing civil liberties. The World Cup in South Africa is unlikely to be any different. Sad really – I was in South Africa during the unsuccessful bid to win the games back in 2000 and remember how decimated people were when the national bid was rejected. I’m afraid that people’s expectations are likely to be quickly deflated.

Last night I attended an orientation session for the New York delegation to the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in Cochabamba, Boliva. The forty-odd members of the delegation were an extremely exciting bunch of grassroots activists, the majority of whom came from the Bronx, although other boroughs were also represented. I’m extremely excited to be attending the conference, and will be blogging about it here and on the Social Text website, where we’ll be debuting a new live blogging feature.

Our NYC delegation seems particularly important to me given the decision taken late last week by the U.S. State Department to deny economic assistance to countries opposing the (virtually meaningless) Copenhagen accord. I say meaningless because the accord was so watered down. The accord takes the heroic step of “recognizing” the scientific case for keeping temperature rises to no more than 2C but contains no commitments to cut emissions to achieve that goal. It’s gutless and meaningless, in other words.

Those who watched the Copenhagen conference closely will remember that the Obama administration tried to ram this fig-leaf of an accord down the throats of vulnerable poor countries by making $30 billion of promised mitigation funds contingent on acceptance of the accord. The resistance of Bolivia and Ecuador to this poisoned apple means that they are now faced with a refusal on the part of the U.S. to dispense aid for the very grave environmental damage caused by the behavior of industrialized countries over the last 200 years. Check out this article for more on the U.S.’s strong-arm tactics. For more on Copenhagen in general, check out the online forum I curated for Social Text.

I hope that the NYC delegation will organize a very public protest against this U.S. policy while we are in Bolivia. We in the (over)developed world bear such disproportionate responsibility for climate injustice. Now the U.S.’s policy has become belligerent as well as mendacious. Time to speak up!

After publishing my last post, I discovered that Democracy Now, always on the ball, did a segment about the World Bank’s loan to South Africa for the Medupi power plant. The segment points out many of the same things that I mention in my post. In addition, the interview also underlines an additional important point: the ANC also has a significant financial stake in the development of the Medupi power plant. This means that issues of corruption also loom large along with the environmental issues that I outlined. Here’s the segment:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Upj2bMddr8E]

The World Bank yesterday approved a $3.75 billion loan for a new coal-fired power plant in Limpopo, South Africa. Named Medupi, the 4,800 megawatt plant will draw on South Africa’s abundant sources of coal to provide power for an increasingly power-hungry nation. It will be one of the biggest coal-fired power plants in the world.

But who precisely will control and who will benefit from this power? What is the World Bank doing funding the fossil fuel industry to the hilt when we clearly have to make an immediate transition to sustainable energy sources?

These questions are particularly germane since the South African national power company, Eskom, took out substantial international loans during the early years of apartheid from 1951-1967 to build power plants that provided some of the world’s cheapest electricity exclusively to large corporations and whites, while saddling the country’s entire population with the significant debts associated with these loans. South Africa is still grappling with the debt of the apartheid era.

Admittedly, as a recent piece by Andrew Revkin on the “energy gap” and the climate crisis points out, access to energy is an increasingly important issue globally . As Revkin argues, the world’s growing population is already marked by yawning inequalities of access to energy supplies that might provide reliable sources of light at night and heat for cooking. Yet little research is being done to develop clean, sustainable sources of power. In fact, almost precisely the opposite is the case: according to a recent report by the Environmental Law Institute, the U.S. spent approximately $72 billion on subsidies for fossil fuels while supporting renewables with only $29 billion during the period from 2002-2008.

The World Bank decision on the loan to South Africa continues such unsustainable trends. Medupi will emit 25 million tons of carbon dioxide per year. Although the South African energy minister Dipho Peters argues that, with 25% of the country still lacking access to power, Medupi will fill a much needed demand. Yet such populist rhetoric obscures the fact that the majority of the plant’s power will benefit large, transnational corporations, many of whom had secret, apartheid-era agreements with the racist regime that completely shield them from costs associated with construction of the plant and repayment of the World Bank loan.

If local people are unlikely to benefit much from the power generated by Medupi, they will inevitably suffer from its dangerous side-effects. As with all coal-fired power plants, local air quality will decline, sulphur dioxide levels will skyrocket, and mercury residue in the area’s water, air and land will increase. According to Earthlife Africa, the plant would also be responsible for diminished access to water and land degradation in what was formerly a predominantly agrarian area. Anticipating these damaging effects, residents of Limpopo filed a complaint with the World Bank inspection team earlier this week, apparently to no avail.

Another justification for the project was articulated by World Bank vice-president for Africa Obiageli K Ezekwesili, who said recently that the project is vital for providing access to energy and fighting poverty. But, as Sunita Dubey from the activist group Groundwork argues, South Africa’s energy crisis is a product of sweetheart deals between Eskom and large corporations, which provide these large firms with some of the cheapest electricity in the world.

The approval of the World Bank loan, a vote from which the U.S., Great Britain, and the Netherlands all abstained from, is a huge defeat for South African and international climate justice movements. It is also a great setback for efforts to promote a shift away from unsustainable energy sources. Although it’s important to acknowledge that the will to power is likely to figure increasingly prominently in a world in which billions of people lack the most basic amenities of modernity, we cannot simply focus on producing more power. The Medupi defeat should underline the urgency of building a stronger global movement for climate justice, one that targets the unsustainable energy policies of institutions like the World Bank in the same way that the global justice movement targeted their unjust structural adjustment policies. Sustained critique of the World Bank’s history of flawed energy sector lending policies – as well as local activism to challenge the adverse impacts of such policies – should be high on the climate justice movement’s list of priorities.

United Nations-Habitat, the agency focused on human settlements, recently released its latest bi-annual State of World Cities Report. The report highlights a number of highly important milestones in human history.

Most significantly, the report notes that humanity passed a tipping point last year, with over half of the people on the planet now living in cities.

In addition, urbanization is now unstoppable according to the report. Anna Tibaijuka, outgoing director of UN-Habitat, is cited in an article in the Guardian as saying: “Just over half the world now lives in cities but by 2050, over 70% of the world will be urban dwellers. By then, only 14% of people in rich countries will live outside cities, and 33% in poor countries.”

Perhaps the most interesting feature of the report, however, is its identification of the endless city. According to the report, that is, mega-cities around the world are agglomerating into mind-bogglingly vast mega-regions. The largest of these is in China, where the Hong Kong-Shenhzen-Guangzhou region is home to about 120 million people. Other endless cities have formed in Japan and Brazil and are developing in India, west Africa and elsewhere.

Such endless cities confirm the projections of Henri Lefebvre in The Urban Revolution. According to the report’s co-author, Eduardo Lopez Moreno, mega-regions rather than countries are now the chief engines of global wealth creation: “Research shows that the world’s largest 40 mega-regions cover only a tiny fraction of the habitable surface of our planet and are home to fewer than 18% of the world’s population [but] account for 66% of all economic activity and about 85% of technological and scientific innovation.”

Although migration from rural areas to cities might make sense given their economic dynamism, endless cities are generating increasing social and environmental problems according to the State of World Cities report. Instead of developing in a compact, energy-efficient, and relatively egalitarian form, endless cities are increasingly sprawling, eating up land and resources in an unsustainable manner. According to the report, urban sprawl is the product of a divided, dysfunctional city.

It should not be so surprising, therefore, that the most unequal cities identified by the report are all in South Africa, with Johannesburg, East London, Bloemfontein, and Pretoria leading the world in inequality. Cities in other parts of Africa, Asia, and Latin America are less unequal primarily because they tend to be more uniformly poor. In the developed world, the U.S. has the distinction of having the most unjust cities, with places like New York and Chicago ranking as less equal than Brazzaville in Congo-Brazzaville and Managua in Nicaragua.

This trend towards increasing inequality, segregation, and fortification is one of the greatest challenges we face collectively. Authors such as Mike Davis have shown us the dystopian reality in Planet of Slums. In the face of such trends, we urgently need forward-thinking (dare I say utopian) proposals for more just forms of urban development. One of the most engaging examples I’ve come across in this regard is the architect Richard Rogers‘ book Cities for a Small Planet. It’s written to be accessible to a general audience and it evades some of the thorny problems of proliferating slums, but at least it’s an attempt to propose solutions to the challenges posed by the endless city. Also suggestive is Ricky Burdett and Deyan Sudjic’s edited volume The Endless City.

The Haitian Declaration of Independence, missing for over two hundred years, has just been found in the British National Archives. According to an article in the New York Times, a graduate student named Julia Gaffield found the document while following up a lead she’d found in the correspondence of a British official in Jamaica who’d been in Haiti during the time of the revolution.

It’s worth taking a look at this original copy of the Haitian Declaration of Independence. The tone of defiance in the face of French imperialism resonates across the centuries. The document is begins with a bold declaration: “Liberty or Death.” This defiance, along with the document’s invocation of the immense suffering already meted out to the Haitian people by 1804, is particularly painful given the steep price that Haiti paid subsequently for such defiance of the world’s foremost imperial powers.

The rediscovery of this document should underline the importance of a socially just effort to rebuild the country following the devastating earthquake of last January.