Our planet needs successful cities-cities that are centers of innovation and productivity, cities where every family thrives, cities that realize the promise of low-carbon prosperity.

We are not yet building the cities we need. One in two people live in cities and 2.5 billion more will do so by 2050. Cities produce over 80% of GDP but also 70% of global GHG emissions. Our cities are growing, while inequality widens and livelihoods dwindle. Urban infrastructure is not keeping pace with the surge in residents. With many cities already struggling to meet people's basic needs, global development and climate challenges are increasingly urban challenges. A sustainable future depends on whether cities can transform. Is there a path to transformative change that can make cities more prosperous, more equal, and low-carbon at the same time?

The COVID-19 pandemic has devastated cities, exposing long-present inequalities. The urban poor are much more vulnerable to disease without even simple measures to protect themselves. And it is not only lives lost, but livelihoods. The pandemic pushed millions more people into urban poverty, often with no social safety net. The 2 billion informal workers who pick up waste, do construction, drive minibuses, sell goods on the street, and do domestic work are engines of growth and productivity in many places. Cities cannot function when informal workers are unable to participate fully in the economy. Cities must emerge from this crisis with a deliberate focus on tackling inequality.

The time is now for more sustainable urban development. There is a narrow window to limit global warming and adapt to climate impacts. We need radical shifts in the way we use energy, produce food, manage land, and live in cities. And we must invest much more in building resilience. Trillions of dollars of stimulus spending for COVID-19 recovery has opened a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reset and reshape our economies-but it must be a green recovery. We must invest in more equitable and sustainable cities that are better prepared for the next crisis.

Urban leaders should chart a new path with equity at its core. Historically, cities have been founts of innovation and leadership. A handful of forward-thinking cities have made breakthroughs in recent years. But most cities remain on the path of unequal, unsafe, polluting growth while re-creating known failures. We need to rapidly transform how all cities around the world are built, managed, and experienced.

This synthesis report is the culmination of six years of work from 160+ authors and reviewers across the globe. It offers a roadmap for how to unleash transformative change in cities. We present the best thinking on priority actions and investments that can create prosperity and improve livelihoods for everyone. It is as relevant for Houston or Madrid as it is for Delhi or Lagos.

When we began this research, we asked if cities could thrive by prioritizing the needs of the under-served. The answer is a resounding yes. In fact, we can create the cities we need only if we focus on ending inequality and invigorating livelihoods. But there is no time to waste.

Why This Report Matters

The pandemic has exacerbated existing spatial inequalities and exposed new vulnerabilities. We now need to address systemic inequality in cities head-on, going back to housing, public spaces, basic services, mobility, and connectivity to implement the New Urban Agenda in order to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. This also means providing access to social safety nets and supporting cities to create financial resilience. Such an approach comes with a unique opportunity to invest in low-carbon and climate resilient infrastructure, while promoting multilevel coordination. This well-researched World Resources Report draws from diverse experiences in rapidly changing cities to ground this vision by proposing seven concrete transformative pathways to build a more just, green, and healthy future.

Rapid and growing urbanization, increasingly concentrated in intermediate cities, raises questions of territorial equity and access to urban infrastructure, services, and opportunities. The COVID pandemic has highlighted the important role that local actors can play in providing rapid responses and solutions. We, at AFD, remain committed to supporting cities, alongside our partners such as WRI, in achieving the necessary urban transformations to meet these challenges and improve resilience to climate change. We thank WRI for the excellent report and recommendations and look forward to furthering our collaboration in this domain.

Quality of life in our cities is closely associated with the infrastructure that forms the fabric of daily urban life. WRI's striking report reminds us that globally, a third of city-dwellers have insufficient access to services such as decent housing, transport, energy, water, and sanitation.

The world is facing a climate emergency and it's vital that cities are equipped with the tools to tackle these challenges and address inequalities. The case studies and recommendations of this timely report do an excellent job of supporting that work, to help drive the global transformation we need.

WRI's World Resources Report timeously confronts a world, and more specifically a global South, in a state of recovery from a devastating COVID-19 pandemic which has deepened the significant structural disadvantages which predated it. Poverty and inequality have increased across the board while the impacts of climate change and resource degradation continue to rise. City governments are at the frontline of programmatically addressing these challenges. The seven crucial urban transformations outlined in this report provide a great platform for leaders to critically analyze services offered to the most vulnerable while also attracting the much-needed investment to facilitate inclusive economic recovery and development.

COVID-19 has further exacerbated inequality in every aspect of urban life. People living in confined spaces with limited access to public infrastructure and services and depending on precarious working conditions have been hit harder by the pandemic. The report could not come at a more appropriate time. It addresses the pressing problem of inequality from a holistic perspective and undertakes the endeavour to find integrated solutions. It thus confirms our experience: lack of access to basic infrastructure and services is not only a major development obstacle but a growing impediment for creating climate-friendly and resilient urban space. Solving it requires integrated, multi-level and multi-stakeholder approaches.

Urban transitions are vital for people and the planet. Our cities hold the keys to liveability, sustainability, and the security of jobs and services for the majority of the world's people, but reform is urgent. Almost half of global carbon emissions can be eliminated if cities become carbon-free zones and use their procurement power to demand carbon-neutral production and services. Likewise, they can ensure people's rights and decent work within their boundaries and beyond, but they must be financed and municipal authorities must engage employers, workers, and communities in just transition plans. The World Resources Report lays out a critical roadmap.

This World Resources Report brings together a wide range of insights on pre- and post-COVID urban innovation, into a clear seven-step implementation framework. If local governments, businesses and citizens put their collective shoulders to these wheels, cities across the world could become more equal, prosperous and resilient, accelerating the transformation towards global sustainability.

Life on planet earth has suffered significant impacts on all sectors of the population because of COVID-19. The development of new models and adaptations for more equitable cities will be the best way to integrate and implement change strategies, leading to the transformation of our cities. This will require intelligent governance that provides a path to develop and implement development agendas with a clear vision of the future for cities and communities. The seven transformations provide such a framework. They apply technologies, knowledge, and digital capacity to processes, products, assets, and public policies to improve efficiency, improve quality of life, manage risk, and discover new income-generating opportunities.

Towards a More Equal City does not shy away from the sobering and unvarnished truths about the impact of inequality on our world. However, this report provides tangible reasons to be hopeful about how the strategic development of our cities can be a path toward equality.

This WRI report starkly demonstrates the hidden toll of inequalities in access to public services in cities. Income alone, the report argues, is no longer a sufficient barometer for quality of life. The human, economic, and environmental costs of private vehicles, dirty energy, contaminated water, pollution, and climate risks are inextricably linked to issues of inequality. These challenges can all be tackled together through the research-based solutions and wealth of examples in this report. With the most vulnerable on the frontlines, partnering with communities on the ground to put the solutions outlined into practice must be an immediate priority.

India's urban population is projected to double by 2050 and the quality of this urbanization is critical to ensuring India meets the Sustainable Development Goals. For us, smart cities are livable and sustainable cities with economies that work for all, particularly the most vulnerable. Aligned with this report, I believe that the achievement of these outcomes hinges on effective use of data and technology, innovative financing, able governance, and integrated, climate-sensitive urban planning. The report offers practical knowledge on transforming urban practice on these tenets, with many examples to learn from. Its guidance on improving livelihoods for informal workers and engaging them in the vision for a better city is refreshing. I am glad to see Pune and Ahmedabad included as city case studies and am keen to advance this agenda in our future endeavors.

At a time where cities have become major players in the field of sustainable development, this report helps identify key strategies to respond to the current challenges comprehensively. With a growing share of both people and economic activity in urban areas, low-carbon cities will certainly be key to reducing climate risks. But the way they handle it can exacerbate or minimize inequality. For instance, Africa cannot focus narrowly on climate mitigation alone; they must also find ways to reduce poverty, create decent jobs, and reduce pollution. It is therefore essential to identify low-carbon measures that also deliver real improvements in people's lives.

The battle for a sustainable future will be won or lost in the world's cities. This superb report is a good news-bad news story. It shows how cities can dramatically transform themselves to become low carbon, inclusive, creative, and productive-and that this transition is good for people, planet, and even politics. But the shift isn't happening nearly fast enough. In most cities carbon emissions are still rising, along with inequality and congestion. City, national, community and corporate leaders should seize the opportunities this report offers while there is still time.

Emerging cities, particularly in India, are growing at an unprecedented rate. We must see them as an opportunity for effecting transformative positive change towards low carbon cities. Local, state, and national governments can play an important role with the private sector in delivering clean water and energy, housing, and transport. The right regulation and pricing can help control the waste of natural resources, while improving the health and livelihoods of all urban dwellers. Addressing fundamental issues of poverty and inequality in cities is essential to building resilience. We need a manual for a shift to low-carbon, sustainable, inclusive urban development, and the World Resources Report is that manual.

Chinese cities are undergoing unprecedented urbanization. 99% of the urban residents in Chinese cities have secured the access to clean water, public transport services, and grid connections and we must ensure these core services are available for residents in all new towns or redeveloped urban centers. The per capita housing area in cities has reached 40 square meters and through good spatial planning, we can ensure housing is well connected to services and opportunities for all people. Despite the progress, Chinese cities still confront serious impacts from climate change, urgency for low-carbon transitions to meet the country's 2060 carbon neutrality commitments, and amenity and service gaps for an aging society and emerging middle class. Through the release of World Resources Report, we hope to exchange best practices and lessons learnt with global peers towards a shared equal and sustainable future.

I am not hopeful. I am certain. We know what is causing climate change. Cities are clearly at the frontlines. A warming planet will have increasingly devastating effects on our lives, livelihoods, economies, health and security, disproportionally affecting those that have the least. Addressing inequalities must be central to our actions. We can absolutely avoid the worst and build a better world in the process. This is the single most important decade in human history to take urgent action to tackle inequality at the same level as the climate crisis. Global efforts hinge on how cities will meet this challenge.

Suggested Citation: Mahendra, A., R. King, J. Du, A. Dasgupta, V. A. Beard, A. Kallergis, and K. Schalch. 2021. “Seven Transformations for More Equitable and Sustainable Cities.” World Resources Report, Towards a More Equal City. Washington, DC: World Resources Institute. https://doi.org/10.46830/wrirpt.19.00124.

Highlights

• A different kind of urbanization is unfolding in the global South. Under-resourced cities are growing fast and haphazardly, with large swaths of city dwellers living in informal settlements and working in the informal economy.
• Globally, more than 1.2 billion people-or one in three urban residents-are under-served daily by core urban services (good-quality housing, transport, water, sanitation, and energy). Bridging the “urban services divide” can bring cascading benefits to the entire city and unleash citywide transformative change.
• Inequality is typically measured by analyzing differences in incomes, but this is only one dimension of the problem. Unequal access to essential infrastructure and services can have a much greater impact on lives, livelihoods, and long-term prospects than differences in earnings.
• This synthesis report is the culmination of the World Resources Report series, Towards a More Equal City, and shows how growing cities in the global South can ensure equitable access to urban services and opportunities and, in doing so, build city-wide prosperity and better environmental quality for all.
• We reveal seven crucial urban transformations that are needed in the areas of infrastructure design and delivery, service provision, data collection, urban employment, finance, land management, and governance.
• These transformations require decision-makers to break out of silos, build new coalitions, and embrace new resources, technologies, and policy innovations. Global efforts to fight poverty and climate change hinge on how cities will meet this challenge. The time to act is now.

The Urban Services Divide in the Global South

The coronavirus pandemic has laid bare the growing inequalities in cities between those who have money and options to remain safe and employed and those who do not. It has exacerbated the effects of a long-standing urban services divide, with disastrous consequences. On one side of that divide are city dwellers who have access to crucial urban services and infrastructure; on the other side are those who lack running water and sanitation, electricity, decent housing, transport, and other amenities. For them, even the most basic precautions-such as frequent hand washing and keeping a safe distance from others-are near impossible. Disease and job loss have stalked these communities in ways that most well-to-do urbanites can barely fathom. These communities are often made up of the essential workers who toil to keep cities running. The burdens they face impact the functioning of the entire city.

These inequalities are deepening and spreading, particularly in growing cities of the global South. The majority of city dwellers are already suffering from the consequences of the urban services divide, and that share is rising fast as urban populations increase. Today, more than 1.2 billion people live in urban slums and are among the under-served-representing about one-third of urban dwellers worldwide and two-thirds in low-income countries.¹ Solutions from the past may not apply in these challenging, yet dynamic contexts, so new approaches are needed.

Globally, more than 2 billion people work in the informal economy, which has been decimated by COVID-19, and these workers are not covered by social safety nets.² This represents almost 90 percent of the workforce in rapidly urbanizing countries such as Kenya and India.³ In many cities, unequal access to services and insecure employment force many to struggle daily for life’s most basic necessities and denies them the chance to improve their lives.

Those who are under-served by urban services suffer disproportionately, not only from disease outbreaks but also from threats of all kinds, including economic shocks, environmental degradation, and natural disasters. Even in normal times, the urban services divide does more than exacerbate inequality and punish those who are marginalized and vulnerable. It could lock cities into a cycle of poverty, low productivity, and unhealthy living conditions for the rest of the century and beyond, undermining everyone’s quality of life. Unless leaders can act decisively, these trends will be hard to stop, let alone to reverse.

Scholars have identified pervasive, growing urban social and spatial inequalities as the crisis of our times-one that impacts everyone and must be confronted if we are to meet the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030.⁴ Yet inertia prevails, even as the consequences of ignoring this reality loom ever larger and more ominously.

Richer cities have been able to spearhead a host of innovations to improve services and tackle inequalities in access. But for the vast majority of the world’s cities, these ideas and breakthroughs have not touched most of the 3.4 billion city dwellers in low- or middle-income countries. The tools, frameworks, and methods available to these cities are often inadequate, irrelevant, or, worse, detrimental. Replicating wealthy cities’ experiments or following in their footsteps may be ill-advised. Of more than 4,200 cities in the world (with populations over 100,000 in 2010), most have not figured out a successful way forward. ⁵ They struggle with concurrent needs to increase quality of life, jobs, and resilience and to reduce carbon emissions. Transformative change is urgently needed, and a few cities have shown this is possible, despite challenges.

Our research explores this question: As the world continues to urbanize, how can growing cities in the global South ensure equitable access to urban services and opportunities and, in doing so, generate prosperity and environmental benefits for all? This flagship World Resources Report series, Towards a More Equal City provides answers. Over five years, we developed a knowledge base culminating in a road map for sweeping, durable, and transformative changes in the ways cities are built, managed, and experienced (see Box ES-1). This synthesis report builds on that work and presents new analysis that identifies common threads and effective strategies. The report synthesizes our sectoral research, in-depth case studies, and deep examination of how cities actually change. It documents breakthrough innovations that cities have pioneered and reveals not only which solutions must be our highest priorities but also how to implement them.

The Lived Experience of an Unequal City

Most research analyzes poverty and inequality by measuring differences in incomes, but this is only one dimension of the problem. The way people experience a city is shaped by their access to services and opportunities-whether they have safe and affordable housing, clean water, adequate sanitation, reliable transport, and ways to get the employment, health care, education, and other amenities they need. Unequal access to essential infrastructure can have a much greater impact on lives, livelihoods, and long-term prospects than differences in earnings.⁶

Our research therefore took a new approach: examining urban inequalities by looking at the everyday lives of urban dwellers and the relative burdens they face in accessing core urban services. Figure ES-1 highlights the contrast between better-served and under-served groups. It shows how the urban services divide creates more opportunities for the better-served groups and higher burdens for the under-served in terms of time, cost, and ill health.

Note: This is a conceptual diagram.
a. This figure is based on data from the World Development Indicators (2018b) on only the global population of slum dwellers in urban areas, and is therefore a minimum estimate of the under-served. A slum household is defined as a group of individuals living under the same roof lacking one or more of the following conditions: access to improved water, access to improved sanitation, sufficient living area, and durability of housing. Not only are urban slum populations underestimated, the under-served in cities comprise many low-income people who may not live in slums.

Source: Authors

1.1 The World Is Witnessing a New Kind of Urbanization

The world is urbanizing on a scale and at a pace that are unprecedented in human history. In 1950 fewer than one-third of the planet’s population lived in cities.⁹⁰ Today more than half do, and by midcentury that share is expected to rise to two-thirds. In just three decades, another 2.5 billion people will become city dwellers.

Cities now generate 80 percent of global gross domestic product (GDP). As they have for millennia, cities drive advances in productivity, innovation, and culture. They can offer liberation as well as freedom from a rural life hemmed in by the daily struggle for subsistence. For some, they bring opportunity and a better, more prosperous life.

But today, this is no longer true for many city dwellers. Where urbanization is happening fastest, we are not building the cities we need. Between 2018 and 2050, nearly 90 percent of urban growth will take place in in Africa and Asia.⁹¹ There, and elsewhere in the global South, millions crowd into cities where it is hard just to survive, let alone thrive, and where city governments are least equipped to help them. Core infrastructure is inadequate or crumbling, basic services are lacking, and inequality is deepening. In these fast-growing cities, an urban services divide separates those who have access to clean water, sewer systems, electricity, transport, decent housing, and jobs from those who do not. Most residents are already on the wrong side of that divide. This is robbing them of the chance to improve their lives.

The COVID-19 pandemic has cast a harsh spotlight on this urban services divide, underscoring what has always been true: sharing communal toilets and cramped, overcrowded houses without running water to wash your hands can spread diseases that kill you. It has reminded us that lacking basic infrastructure and services is not just a hardship but also a matter of life and death.

The urban services divide harms everyone

Those who lack basic infrastructure and services suffer disproportionately, not just from disease outbreaks but also from threats of all kinds, including economic shocks and natural disasters. And even in normal times, they pay a stiff penalty. They struggle every day to meet basic needs for housing, water, sanitation, energy, and transport—and what they can get is often inferior to, and more expensive than, municipal services available to others.⁹² They may pay more too, not just as a share of income but also in absolute terms. Lacking services makes them less healthy and productive. Unequal access to essential infrastructure can have a much greater impact on lives and livelihoods than differences in earnings because it determines lifelong outcomes for generations.

The urban services divide does not just harm the poor, however; it worsens everyone’s quality of life (see Box 1). The consequences include clogged streets, polluted water and air, vanishing natural resources, stalled productivity, and corrosive poverty. Unplanned, sprawling development without basic infrastructure leaves residents stripping and burning forests for fuel, sitting in endless traffic jams, and discharging sewage into open pits. Valuable resources are being squandered, and air and water are being polluted and making people sick.

Failing to close this divide could trap cities in a cycle of economic stagnation and environmental degradation for the rest of the century and beyond. Developing and emerging nations need cities to be economic locomotives that can pull them forward. Instead, these cities could actually drain their resources and even threaten their political stability.

Without urgent, decisive action, this situation will only worsen. In low- and middle-income countries of the global South, where the services gap is most acute, decision-makers struggle with scarce resources and mounting pressures to meet immediate needs. The long-term costs of each incremental choice may not be clear. But each decision may shape the built environment for generations, and the wrong choice could embed poverty, deny opportunity, and widen the services divide in ways that become harder to reverse.

The consequences are global

Global efforts to fight poverty and climate change hinge on what happens in these cities.⁹³ In many countries, poverty is shifting from rural to urban areas, a rising share of the urban population is poor, and poverty is deepening, with women and children bearing the brunt. This is particularly striking when factoring in limited access to education and basic infrastructure. ⁹⁴

The struggle to slow climate change hangs in the balance as well. The decisions being made in cities today can lock in high energy consumption and carbon emissions for decades to come. If current trends continue, the cities of the global South will account for more than half of global urban carbon emissions by 2050.⁹⁵ And their populations will face some of the gravest environmental risks and impacts of climate change. Low-lying and coastal cities, especially in Africa and Asia, will be flooded by rising seas and battered by more violent storms, and they will have only minimal capacity to adapt.

The stakes—for our economy, our planet, and our common future—could not be clearer. Unsustainable, unequal cities pose risks for everyone, including corrosive poverty and inequality, faltering productivity, paralyzing congestion, toxic air and water, and natural disasters exacerbated by climate change that put millions of people in harm’s way.

Scholars have identified pervasive, deepening urban social and spatial inequalities as the crisis of our times, which must be tackled if we are to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030.⁹⁶ Many leaders and policy experts recognize that current strategies and practices of city building are not working. Large cities and their political leaders have never received more international attention than they do today.

The 2015 Paris Agreement recognized cities as crucial to curbing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. SDG 11, which 193 countries adopted that same year, commits them to “make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable.”⁹⁷ Yet implementation has been spotty. Fewer than two in five countries that adopted SDGs have explicit national strategies for cities, and only a handful tackle both human development and climate action.⁹⁸

Numerous networks have emerged to help cities share knowledge, create peer pressure, and grow in more sustainable ways, including the C40 Climate Leadership Group, ICLEI, United Cities and Local Governments, and others. The Habitat III conference on cities, held in Quito, Ecuador promoted “a new model of urban development that is able to integrate all facets of sustainable development to promote equity, welfare, and shared prosperity.”⁹⁹ The text from Habitat III—the New Urban Agenda—lays out a vision for cities for the next 20 years.¹⁰⁰ Networks and conferences have showcased problems and solutions, especially for large cities that have the staff and capacity to take part.

However, the fastest-growing cities confronting the gravest challenges—which include most small and medium cities in the global South—have hardly benefited. Between 2018 and 2030, medium-sized cities with populations between 1 and 5 million will see the most population growth.¹⁰¹ Cities with fewer than 10 million people will likely generate three-quarters of global economic growth. That is a larger slice of the global economy than all the megacities in the global North and South make up today.¹⁰²

The fastest-growing cities of the global South will need to simultaneously build infrastructure, fight poverty and inequality, and protect the environment. They will have to contend with the glaring inequality that colonizers helped cement in place when they concentrated infrastructure and services where privileged classes lived and neglected everyone else. Many cities will be hobbled by scant resources and limited planning capacity. Today inertia prevails, taking them further and further into uncharted and hazardous terrain with no clear pathway out.

On top of this, the tools, frameworks, and methods available to guide them are inadequate at best and irrelevant at worst. Most were designed for richer cities—at different stages of industrial, technological, and institutional development—which could count on economic growth and urbanization going hand in hand. For many rapidly urbanizing poorer countries, this no longer holds true.¹⁰³ We are losing the battle to build the cities we need, even as the consequences loom ever larger and more ominously.¹⁰⁴

A radical transformation is needed

Our research explored how this could be achieved. Over the past five years, World Resources Institute (WRI) has studied this question:

As the world continues to urbanize, how can growing cities in the global South ensure equitable access to urban services and opportunities and, in doing so, build prosperity and better environmental quality for all?

The World Resources Report: Towards a More Equal City series provides answers (see Figure 1). It explains the causes and geography of the urban services divide, the lack of planning, and the patterns of urban growth that have fueled it. It looks at the repercussions of leaving under-served populations to fend for themselves. It sheds light on the need for government leadership to address market failures and on how investments in services and infrastructure can pay for themselves many times over. It identifies key sectors that cities should prioritize and strategies for achieving the best results. It lays out a road map for making sweeping, durable, and transformative changes in how cities are built, managed, and experienced and in restoring their power to lead societies to a more humane and hopeful future.

1.2 About THE WORLD RESOURCES REPORT: TOWARDS A MORE EQUAL CITY SERIES

To understand the challenges facing the cities of the global South, our research team developed a new approach and created a new body of knowledge on how cities can achieve durable, transformative change.

First, we analyzed how cities and their economies are projected to grow during the next two decades.¹⁰⁵ We focused on the divergence of economic growth and urbanization, categorizing cities according to their current income, projected population and economic growth, and potential to escape unsustainable patterns of urban development. We found that the cities likely to face the biggest challenges are in Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia, with smaller clusters in Central and Latin America and Eastern Europe (see Box 2). We revealed these findings in the series’ framing paper at the Habitat III conference in 2016, and we turned our attention to the stark contrast between the few who enjoy multiple benefits from access to urban services and opportunities and the vast majority who do not.

Second, we drove the research from the perspective of how people experience the city every day. We documented people’s struggles in seven cities of the global South (several of these cities feature in boxes throughout the text of this report), showing how people’s experiences depend on the services they have or do not have. We found that reliable, affordable services, jobs, and land tenure depend on how cities plan and manage land markets, and that services are key to productivity, especially for vulnerable informal workers and small-scale entrepreneurs. We developed seven detailed papers on transport, water, sanitation, energy, and housing, as well as recommendations for making them more accessible to all. These thematic papers focus on specific approaches and sectoral interventions that cities have implemented to address deep inequalities in access to urban services.¹⁰⁶ They highlight strategies that have worked in cities of the global South and offer insights on key conditions that enabled positive change. Each thematic paper provides ample evidence that more equal cities are possible, and that greater equity can benefit everyone.

Third, we found that equity in access to core services and opportunities is a necessary (but not a sufficient) condition for urban prosperity. Cities need change at a deeper level—in their governance and decision-making processes, power dynamics, institutions, and priorities of political leaders. This change, we argue, cannot be incremental. It must be transformative with sustained, cross-sectoral, citywide benefits. We used seven citywide case studies to uncover how this kind of change was triggered, advanced, and institutionalized in cities that attempted reforms.¹⁰⁷ These case studies do not describe “best practices”; rather, they document processes of change, highlighting the factors and actors that triggered, enabled, or inhibited the change at various points in a long-term process. We start from an assumption that transformative urban change will confront difficulties, setbacks, and false starts.

Finally, this report synthesizes the entire effort thus far, offering lessons from the complete research series and homing in on a set of crucial transformations in mindsets and actions needed for citywide transformative change, with priority actions under each. They are as follows:

• Transformation 1: Infrastructure Design and Delivery—Prioritizing the Vulnerable
• Transformation 2: Service Provision Models—Partnering with Alternative Service Providers
• Transformation 3: Data Collection Practices—Improving Local Data through Community Engagement
• Transformation 4: Informal Urban Employment—Recognizing and Supporting Informal Workers
• Transformation 5: Financing and Subsidies—Increasing Investment and Targeting Funds Innovatively
• Transformation 6: Urban Land Management—Promoting Transparency and Integrated Spatial Planning
• Transformation 7: Governance and Institutions—Creating Diverse Coalitions and Alignment

Figure 1 lays out the architecture of the entire Towards a More Equal City series.

Figure 1 | This synthesis report draws from seven thematic papers and seven city case studies

Source: Authors.

The report is organized as follows: Chapter 2 analyzes the current nature of urbanization, how it diverges from the past, and what distinct challenges it presents. Chapters 3 and 4 examine the urban services divide and how bridging the divide can lead to transformative change in cities. Chapters 6 through 12 offer specific transformations to help foster a more equal city, with priority actions and tables showing roles for key actors to make progress on these. Chapter 13 concludes with a vision and call to action for urban change agents.

2.1 Urbanization Shifting to Low- and Middle-Income Countries

Cities have long been laboratories of political, technological, and cultural innovation, where people with diverse skills and interests can exchange ideas, fulfill individual aspirations, and achieve collective goals. Urban services, amenities, and employment can boost productivity and allow residents to contribute to a thriving civic, economic, social, and cultural life.

Yet this virtuous cycle depends on adequate infrastructure and services.¹⁰⁸ During the 19th and early 20th centuries, urbanization in the global North initially brought disease and poverty, especially in crowded slums with inadequate water and sanitation.¹⁰⁹ By the mid-20th century, many cities in industrialized countries were turning this around by investing in better infrastructure and services. This helped contain disease outbreaks and dramatically improved socioeconomic indicators such as income, life expectancy, and productivity.¹¹⁰ Urban populations exploded while nations grew wealthier.¹¹¹ Vibrant cities, in turn, created value and spurred economic development. Urbanization and economic growth proceeded in tandem.

But there is no guarantee that this cycle will repeat itself. Today urbanization in the global South is unfolding differently. Populations and demand for urban services and amenities are skyrocketing, but many cities can neither raise the revenue nor make the investments needed to respond. There is a real risk that they will be stuck with inadequate infrastructure and services, or caught in a downward spiral, as population growth outstrips cities’ ability to deliver what their residents need.

The world’s urban population is expected to surge from 4.2 billion in 2018 to 6.7 billion in 2050.¹¹² Ninety percent of this growth is projected to take place in Africa and Asia. ¹¹³ Almost all urbanization is expected to take place in low- and middle-income countries, where the urban population will rise by about 75 percent (see Figure 2A).¹¹⁴ Between 2015 and 2030, the largest increases will occur in East Asia and the Pacific (32 percent of the total), South Asia (22 percent), and Sub-Saharan Africa (21 percent).¹¹⁵ The map in Figure 2B, shows the projected percentage change in urban population across regions between 2015 and 2030. Our city categorization shown in Box 2 corroborates this trend. In the cities we classify as struggling, urban populations are expected to grow by an average of 64 percent between 2015 and 2030. Emerging cities are expected to grow by an average of 18 percent.

Both Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia are urbanizing rapidly, but in different ways. From 2000 to 2010, rural-urban migration accounted for just 30 percent of urban population growth in Sub-Saharan Africa, and natural increase made up the other 70 percent.¹¹⁶ By contrast, in Asia, rural-urban migration accounted for almost 60 percent, and natural increase made up just 40 percent.¹¹⁷ Growth will continue there, but more slowly.¹¹⁸

Figure 2A | Urban population growth is concentrated in less developed regions over the next 30 years, primarily in Africa and Asia

Note: For the classification of regions into “more developed regions” and “less developed regions” we follow the United Nations Populations Division, which states that “more developed regions” comprise all countries in Europe and North America, plus Australia, Japan, and New Zealand. The “less developed regions” comprise all countries in Africa, Asia (excluding Japan), Latin America and the Caribbean, plus Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia.

Source: UN DESA, 2019.

Figure 2B | Cities in Africa and Asia will experience the highest population growth between 2015 and 2030

Note: n=769 cities

Source: Beard et al. (2016), based on Oxford Economics (2016).

2.2 Weaker or Unclear Links between Urbanization and Economic Growth in the Global South

In 1960, few low-income countries were highly urbanized. By 2014, this had changed. Many more low-income countries were urbanizing fast, and the relationship between national income and urbanization had weakened (see Figures 3A and 3B).

Figure 3A | Urbanization and economic growth historically have gone hand in hand, but the relationship depends on country factors and has weakened in recent years (1960)

Few low-income countries were highly urbanized in 1960, and the relationship between urbanization and national income was stronger.

Note: The graph shows the relationship between the percentage of the population that is urban and the gross domestic product (GDP) per capita in 1960 for countries of the world. The country classification is based on the 2016 country classification. (RSE = 0.3213, n = 88, p-value: < 2.2e-16)

Figure 3B | Urbanization and economic growth historically have gone hand in hand, but the relationship depends on country factors and has weakened in recent years (2014)

More low- and middle-income countries were highly urbanized in 2014, and the relationship between urbanization and national income was weaker.

Notes: The graph shows the relationship between the percentage of the population that is urban and the GDP per capita in 2014 for countries of the world. (RSE = 0.4652, n = 175, p-value: < 2.2e-16); OECD = Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Across countries, we find that the extent to which urbanization is associated with economic growth may depend on removing barriers to rural-urban mobility and ensuring supportive policies, markets, and infrastructure investments that sustain growing cities (Turok and McGranahan, 2013). Several factors, including geography, history, culture, governance, and institutions, are responsible for the differences in how this relationship plays out between countries, yet there are important lessons to learn from the urbanization trajectories of today’s wealthier nations (Chen et al., 2014).

Source: Beard et al., 2016. Analysis based on World Bank DataBank and World Bank country classification in 2016.

3.1 The Urban Services Divide and Its Consequences

To pursue transformative change that is fundamentally more people centered, cities must depart from business as usual. This means starting with the lived experience of people and using this as the metric of success rather than focusing only on income, carbon emissions, or another narrow metric.

It is for this reason that we focus on the urban services divide—the gap between the “better served,” who have access to good-quality services, and the “under-served,” who do not. This gap lies at the core of rising poverty and inequity in cities (Box 4). Spotty, unequal access to core services is not just a symptom of urban inequality; it is a key cause of it because it widens the gap between “haves” and “have-nots,” increases expenditures, reduces the income people can save, and curtails their opportunities for a better life.

4.1 Avoided Economic Costs from Closing the Urban Services Divide

The consequences of unplanned, unequal, unsustainable urban development stretch in so many directions that they are difficult to measure. They permeate every aspect of life. As detailed above, they include sprawl, congestion, wasted resources, pollution, deepening poverty, hobbled productivity, danger, disease, and accelerating, potentially catastrophic climate change. Closing or bridging the urban services divide can avoid these costs. It can also yield large dividends across sectors and institutions and improve life for a broad swath of the urban population.¹⁷¹ Steps taken compound and build upon one another, with the whole process yielding more than the sum of its parts. These dividends can multiply from avoided economic costs, to quality-of-life benefits, and even to the potential for citywide transformative change (see Figure 11).

Figure 11 | Closing the urban services divide can yield cascading benefits for the entire city

Note: GDP = gross domestic product.

Sources: a. Wee, 2018; b. AfDB, 2012; UN-Habitat, 2013; c. Rentschler et al., 2019; d. WHO, 2018; e. Mitlin et al., 2019; f. WHO, 2012; g. Gwilliam, 2002; Hook and Howe, 2005; h. King et al., 2017; Westphal et al., 2017; i. Beard et al., 2016; j. Das and King, 2019; k. Lwasa and Owens, 2018.

Many wider social and economic costs of the urban services divide mount over time because private markets and actions do not typically account for them. Private actors cannot recognize (or immediately monetize) the benefits that would flow from public investments to narrow the divide and make cities more equitable and sustainable. This is true even when investments in services and infrastructure can clearly pay for themselves many times over. One example is the economic case for extending sewer service to new neighborhoods. Doing this will create customers who will pay for the service. But it also delivers larger, more diffuse economic benefits by sparing people from being sickened by contaminated water.¹⁷² Healthier residents need less medical care and are more productive. These types of payoffs can cascade and multiply in the long term in ways that are hard even to predict or calculate. That makes them risky and hard to justify to shareholders of companies looking for revenues and short-term profits. But research shows that the payoff is huge.¹⁷³

In Sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, low-income households spend about one-third of their income on treating water-related illnesses. Globally, the lack of safely managed sanitation imposes $223 billion a year in health costs, lost productivity, and wages.¹⁷⁴ The scale of this challenge is clear when we consider that slums in cities such as Nairobi may have one toilet for every 500 people.¹⁷⁵ Each dollar invested in water and sanitation generates between $4 and $34 in benefits by saving time, improving health, and raising productivity.¹⁷⁶ Without water-related illnesses hampering people’s productivity, hurting livelihoods, and slowing economic growth (see Box 8), more households would be able to thrive.¹⁷⁷

Waterborne diseases are just one example of the costs of current patterns of urban development. Here are some more:

• Traffic congestion costs up to 10 percent of GDP for large cities such as Beijing, China, and São Paulo, Brazil.¹⁷⁸
• Road accidents consume 5 percent of GDP across low- and middle-income countries.¹⁷⁹
• Power outages lead to lost sales totaling $82 billion per year and additional coping costs of $65 billion per year for backup generators in developing countries.¹⁸⁰
• Water shortages cause urgent and expensive citywide crises. In Jakarta, Indonesia, residents who lacked piped, potable water resorted to digging and extracting too much water from unregulated wells; as a result, the entire city is now sinking as it battles sea level rise and coastal flooding. The city has calculated that it may need to spend over $40 billion on a sea wall around Jakarta Bay.¹⁸¹
• A study conducted for India estimates that sprawled, disconnected, and poorly planned urbanization could cost between $330 billion and $1.8 trillion per year by 2050. That is equivalent to between 1.2 and 6.3 percent of the country’s GDP. India’s urban population is projected to nearly double to 800 million by then.¹⁸² This means that by midcentury, better, smarter urban development could yield economic benefits worth up to more than 6 percent of India’s entire GDP.¹⁸³

The fact that so much economic activity takes place without adequate infrastructure, government oversight, or support takes a toll across the cities of the global South as well. Informal workers account for 50 to 80 percent of urban employment and generate from 25 to 50 percent of the (nonagricultural) GDP of the global South.¹⁸⁴ Yet home-based workers living in informal settlements, street vendors, transport operators, waste pickers, and other informal workers are largely excluded, not just from public infrastructure and services but also often from public spaces and public procurement contracts. This severely constrains their productivity. Power outages, water shortages, and unreliable infrastructure are bad for business. So is being harassed, fined, physically assaulted, or evicted from public spaces, as often happens. This, in turn, constrains output and earnings and makes the supply of goods and services less accessible, reliable, and affordable for everyone.

4.2 Better Quality of Life for Households with Citywide Benefits

Bridging the urban services divide will improve the quality of life in poor neighborhoods but can also improve prosperity, health, and well-being across whole cities. Inadequate sanitation harms even those who live in areas with better service. It can pollute drinking water, contaminate food, and unleash disease-spreading flies. Better sanitation also lifts productivity and incomes.¹⁸⁵

Well-located, affordable housing near employment opportunities mitigates congestion, traffic hazards, and air pollution; benefits business; and helps attract investment and economic development. It also alleviates the pressure to locate housing on high-risk, environmentally fragile land. Makeshift housing precariously situated on hillsides or on or near dump sites regularly leads to landslide tragedies.

Improving transport for under-served populations also improves safety, reduces commute times, improves livelihoods, and protects the environment.¹⁸⁶ Low-income commuters can save upwards of 25 percent of their income with shorter commutes or more affordable options, and this does not account for lost wages due to time spent in long commutes.¹⁸⁷ Better transit options would save time and resources that are drained as millions of residents of sprawling cities sit in idling cars in ever-growing traffic jams. It could prevent disabilities and lives lost to traffic accidents, and it would reduce emissions from a growing vehicle fleet.

Figure 12 shows the difference across countries in the share of income spent on commuting by public transport from the periphery to the city center. Data are drawn from a sample of 200 cities and illustrate how residents in poor cities such as Dhaka, Bangladesh, spend an average of 29 percent of the median per capita income. In rich cities such as Singapore, commuters spend an average of only 3 percent of the median per capita income.¹⁸⁸

Figure 12 | Residents of low-income cities spend high shares of their income on commuting

Notes: Data are from a 200-city global sample with 192 cities reporting values. The data refer to trips from random points at the periphery of a city to the city center (or the central business district, based on the location of the city hall). We assume 60 trips per month on public transport and 7 round trips per week, which is the typical movement of the working poor (Carruthers et al., 2005). Average daily expenditure, expressed as a percentage of the median per capita income, is 10 percent. Beijing is at the average value, Dhaka’s commuting costs are significantly higher, and Singapore has one of the lowest shares of income devoted to commuting. Compared to other developed cities, such as Hong Kong, London, and New York City, the average bus fare (S$0.63) and train fare (S$0.86) in Singapore are much lower on a nominal basis. The findings remain consistent after the average fares are adjusted using the purchasing power parity of the cities.

Source: Authors’ analysis, based on the Land and Housing Survey in a Global Sample of Cities, New York University, Urban Expansion Program, 2016.

Improving access to clean energy has far-reaching benefits as well. Fewer power outages mean less disruption of work, leading to higher incomes and output in both formal and especially informal firms. Electricity consumption per capita is positively correlated with a city’s per capita GDP.¹⁸⁹ Household air pollution from inefficient cooking practices and use of solid fuels causes nearly 4 million premature deaths worldwide every year.¹⁹⁰ Cleaner cooking could dramatically reduce indoor air pollution from fires burning coal, kerosene, wood, and other organic matter. These are a leading cause of lung and heart disease among women and children; close to half of deaths due to pneumonia among young children are caused by household air pollution. In low- and middle-income countries, WHO has found that 98 percent of cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants do not meet WHO’s air quality guidelines.¹⁹¹ 

4.3 The Potential for Citywide Transformative Change

Initiatives that help bring core urban services to under-served groups can set processes in motion that can achieve transformative change—change that is durable, affects many sectors and institutions, improves life for a large swath of the population, and improves economic and environmental outcomes citywide (see Figure 13). We define transformative change as follows:

Change that enhances quality of life for a large segment of the population, affects multiple sectors and institutional practices, continues across political administrations, and is sustained for more than 10 years.¹⁹²

Figure 13 | Equitable access to urban services can catalyze citywide transformative change

Source: Authors.

Focusing on unmet needs in marginalized communities can build the momentum, coalitions, and mechanisms that make broad, durable, transformative change possible and put cities on the path to greater prosperity, sustainability, health, and well-being.

This approach has been adopted in cities around the world. In Colombia, for example, the city of Medellín began improving transport options for isolated hillside communities by building a cable car system. This helped create a coalition of political and private sector leaders interested in citywide change, fueling momentum in other sectors. It led to new schools, new public spaces, and changes to housing policy that legalized informal homes.

However, achieving transformative change is difficult. A city typically needs a strong coalition of leaders and advocates who share a vision and a long-term political commitment and also have the resources needed to take on an urgent problem and implement ambitious reforms. Setbacks and course corrections are common, and each city’s path is unique, but we find that cities can learn from one another’s successes and failures to help usher in their own transformations.

4.4 Diving Deeper into How Transformative Change Occurs

This synthesis report draws on case studies and patterns that emerged from the Towards a More Equal City body of work. The authors distilled lessons from the long-term experiences of seven cities that initiated change in one or more sectors to ensure more equitable access (see Figure 14). Below are summaries and key lessons learned from each:

Figure 14 | A snapshot of Towards a More Equal City case studies—documenting how improving access to services for the under-served created pathways for citywide transformative change

• Ahmedabad, India, introduced the Town Planning Scheme (TPS) to secure urban land for public purposes—specifically to provide services. The program succeeded in negotiating noncoercive land transfers from private landholders for public use. The city was able to obtain land for low-income housing, open spaces, streets, and utilities. The TPS enabled the city to avoid the haphazard, under-serviced expansion that characterizes so many other Indian cities. The program led to the construction of thousands of social housing units and the expansion of a well-planned road network that connects to India’s largest bus rapid transit (BRT) system. The TPS is credited with increasing street density, reducing average trip lengths, and easing road congestion. It was also notable in the way that it accommodated informal settlements in the planning process.
• In Guadalajara, Mexico, the municipal government established Via RecreActiva, a ciclovía (bike path) connecting different parts of the city. In four of the metropolitan area’s nine municipalities, more than 60 kilometers of major streets are closed to motor vehicle traffic every Sunday. Cyclists and pedestrians reclaim roads normally dominated by cars, making them broadly accessible as a public space. The idea came from a coalition of activists and civil society groups. They advocated for Via RecreActiva, and then they expanded their demands to include access to core infrastructure and services with reforms to allow more public participation in decision-making. The Via RecreActiva transformed the way public space is viewed and used in the city and made governance more inclusive. Though it has not reversed systematic inequality, it marked an important move towards prioritizing people over cars in Guadalajara, a trend that cities around the world are embracing.
• In Johannesburg, South Africa, in 2013, the city launched the Corridors of Freedom (COF), an effort to overcome the historic spatial inequality dating back to the apartheid period. COF sought to extend public transport networks to under-served areas and create transit-oriented development along these corridors, including affordable housing for the lower middle classes. The ultimate aim was to link these neighborhoods to better employment opportunities. The city expanded its BRT network to these areas, and the private sector is slowly starting to respond with new, affordable housing along these corridors. This effort was also notable for its success in aligning policy from the national to the local level.
• Kampala, Uganda, is a story of institutional reform and heroic efforts to increase sanitation service in a rapidly urbanizing environment, where the financial resources and local capacity to expand sewer service were nonexistent. The Kampala Capital City Authority and the National Water and Sewage Corporation overcame their historical differences and worked together. They reformed the institutional culture to adopt pro-poor policies, encourage innovation, and improve service delivery. These improvements grew partly out of the city’s partnerships with nonprofits, community groups, and small business and partly out of its support for flexible, innovative approaches to delivering sanitation services. Between 2003 and 2015, the national utility expanded its sewer network only modestly but increased the amount of human waste it was treating more than 30-fold.
• Porto Alegre, Brazil, introduced participatory municipal budgeting and sustained this approach for nearly 30 years. The initiative built on the popularity of the workers’ political party, which first gained political prominence at the municipal level, and later came to national power. Participatory budgeting was remarkable for its use of deliberative democracy principles at the local level to allocate municipal financial resources and for its annual reports on expenditures to strengthen accountability. Under-served communities would identify their urgent needs and propose these priorities for municipal funding. Participatory budgeting mobilized poor communities, improved access to small-scale infrastructure and services, and ultimately redefined what it means to be an urban citizen. This approach to budgeting became a model replicated around the world.
• The transformation in Pune, India, was built upon two sectors: public transport and solid waste management. It was led by a diverse coalition of civil society actors, supported by “open-minded” municipal officials, who were able to leverage supportive national policies. The sustainable transport efforts included India’s first BRT system and pro-pedestrian street design. Progress in the area of solid waste management centered around creatively integrating informal waste pickers into the city’s solid waste management system. This enabled the city to provide door-to-door garbage collection and to segregate, process, and recycle waste. It also launched India’s first fully self-owned waste pickers cooperative.
• In Surabaya, Indonesia, urban transformation grew out of a progressive vision and approach towards the kampung, a local term for informal settlers, the urban poor, and self-built housing and communities. The Surabaya approach represents transformative change because it defies the conventional approach that some governments have taken—that is, to make cities “slum free” by destroying informal settlements and forcibly relocating their residents to the peripheral areas. The approach is participatory and incremental, and it has been sustained over decades. It has allowed poor city dwellers to live in affordable, well-situated housing; preserved a traditional Indonesian urban form; and stabilized the livelihoods and social networks that underpin these communities.

We selected cities from different regions of the global South that had begun transformative interventions in different sectors to close the urban services divide, consulting with experts and practitioners to understand how they did it.¹⁹³ We looked at the opportunities they seized and the constraints they faced in delivering core services more equitably, the roles played by key actors, and the factors that triggered, enabled, and inhibited change over time. We found that transformative change is neither an outcome nor an end state. Instead, it is a dynamic process that requires a constant, sustained, collective effort. It requires the continuous commitment of political leaders working together with coalitions of diverse stakeholders.

When analyzing strategies and conditions that enable transformative change, key patterns emerge. They include effective governance, access to financing, land management, better data, policies inclusive of informality, coordination, and a shared vision (see Table 1, which maps the cases studies to several key issues, a step towards arriving at the transformations presented below).

Governance—in different ways—plays a central role in every single case. This includes changes in laws and administrative procedures, strong leadership that forges a powerful vision and facilitates coalitions, and alignment between and across different levels of government.

Access to finance is another common theme, with enablers ranging from improved (and wiser use of) access to increased finance, well-structured subsidies, and innovative combinations of instruments.

In several cases, land management—with the right data on land records—was crucial to shaping spatial patterns of development to minimize sprawl and incursion into sensitive environmental areas or vital farmlands while ensuring services as the city expands.

Informality emerges as something to be embraced, although not glamorized. Informally provided services should be seen as a vital part of the city; they provide key services to areas under-serviced by formal systems until improved citywide infrastructure systems can reach them. Policies that support informality can sustain livelihoods, encourage innovative approaches, and support much-needed services.

But even when cities do practically everything right, transformative change can be stalled, thrown into reverse, even derailed by forces beyond its control. A major threat to progress is a change in political leadership. New administrations often like to change course or rebrand policies to claim credit for them. In Johannesburg, Porto Alegre, and Pune, subsequent political leaders turned away from the visions and programs that had held out the promise of transformative change. For example, progress on Johannesburg’s transit-oriented development corridors stalled, with investments delayed or canceled, when new political leaders decided to modify and rebrand it. Participatory budgeting (PB) in Porto Alegre suffered a similar fate. It arose when the Workers Party won power and was designed to align with the party’s democratic socialist ideas. It lasted for almost three decades but, over time, national funding for PB waned and political change at both national and local levels led to its suspension in 2018, with less progressive and inclusive fiscal priorities. Coordination can be a challenge, too, especially when a large portion of the funding for major urban infrastructure projects comes from a patchwork of external grants and donor agencies without a longer-term, citywide plan, as seen in Kampala, Uganda, and Pune.¹⁹⁴

4.5 From Vicious to Virtuous Cycles

So far, this report has explained the urgent problems gripping fast-growing cities in low- and middle-income countries around the world, why these trends are accelerating, and why they must be tackled now. It has demonstrated how deepening poverty and inequality, stunted economic development, environmental degradation, and a worsening quality of life directly link to gaping inequities in access to core urban services, such as good-quality housing, water, sanitation, transport, and energy. These burdens weigh most heavily on the poor and excluded, but they harm everyone. Although closing this services gap is difficult, it can generate a multitude of benefits and broader outcomes that help cities meet the SDGs and goals of the Paris Agreement.

Part I of this synthesis report highlighted the daunting challenges in today’s growing cities of the global South, and Part II proposed a new approach for transformative change—an approach centered on closing the urban services divide and harnessing the cascading benefits from doing so. Change is possible, and many cities around the world are already innovating, as the next part of this report will demonstrate. Our unique focus on the services gap in cities offers both an explanation for many of their troubles and a way to escape them. The seven case studies our research analyzed demonstrate how cities can make progress in extending infrastructure and services to populations that have been excluded. They show how, under the right conditions, this can snowball. The knowledge, hope, coalitions, mechanisms, and political momentum marshalled to tackle inequality in one sector can unleash positive change on other fronts. With nations around the world focusing on economic recovery after the pandemic, the next part of this report focuses on an action agenda that can be embraced to emerge from this crisis stronger and build resilience to future crises.

Part III of this synthesis report delves more deeply into how cities can create the conditions necessary to bend their trajectories. These “transformations” build on the key patterns that emerged from our case studies. Evidence shows that prioritizing these transformations can arrest vicious cycles and begin virtuous ones, begin to solve what have been intractable problems, and open up a path to a more humane, just, prosperous, and sustainable future.

This synthesis report shows how cities can halt the downward spiral created by the urban services divide and the burdens it imposes. Through numerous examples, it highlights seven transformations to alter current trajectories and galvanize action to achieve more equal, prosperous, and sustainable cities. Making these transformations can narrow inequities, improve access to services, and yield cascading benefits that reach across sectors and institutions, improving life for a broad swath of the population.

Many cities have demonstrated new solutions and innovative approaches, as we have documented in this report, but although organizations and governments are piloting ideas and trying new approaches in fits and starts—in one sector, one neighborhood—the size of the problem and the momentum behind traditional ways of doing things have been daunting. Five years of research on multiple urban sectors, case study analysis, and stakeholder consultations have resulted in essential lessons about what it takes to reach transformative change. By pulling together lessons learned from cities that have made progress on narrowing the urban services divide and initiated transformative change, we identified seven essential shifts, or “transformations” as we call them (see Figure 15). These are as follows:

• Transformation 1: Infrastructure Design and Delivery—Prioritizing the Vulnerable
• Transformation 2: Service Provision Models—Partnering with Alternative Service Providers
• Transformation 3: Data Collection Practices—Improving Local Data through Community Engagement
• Transformation 4: Informal Urban Employment—Recognizing and Supporting Informal Workers
• Transformation 5: Financing and Subsidies—Increasing Investment and Targeting Funds Innovatively
• Transformation 6: Urban Land Management—Promoting Transparency and Integrated Spatial Planning
• Transformation 7: Governance and Institutions—Creating Diverse Coalitions and Alignment

The knowledge, insights, and guidance they offer are transferable, even though every city’s story—the set of social, economic, and political constraints and opportunities it confronts—is unique. These lessons distilled through our work are broad enough to be adapted to different local contexts and needs. Depending on their level of development and capacity, cities may start with any of these. These transformations are not mutually exclusive, and in the discussion we identify some of the links between them, but each on its own represents a significant shift in mindsets and practice.

 

6.1 What Must Change and Why

Infrastructure design and service delivery fall short, leaving many under-served

Urban infrastructure design and development have long ignored the stark reality that unprecedented numbers of people are crowding into informal settlements devoid of basic services or moving to the disconnected urban periphery. This has trapped many urban dwellers in places where their most fundamental needs are not being met. Coverage is inadequate, service is often poor and costs prohibitively high, and investments are skewed to benefit more well-off populations. Without purposeful change, the fast-growing cities of the global South will find it increasingly difficult to escape this trajectory. They risk continuing to expand in ways that embed poverty and inequality and harm all residents’ quality of life.

The gulf between what is needed and what typically happens stretches across all sectors. In transport, the majority of urban residents in the global South rely on walking, cycling, and public and informal transport; yet practically everywhere, transport infrastructure, plans, and policies have favored private vehicle users.¹⁹⁵ Upwards of 95 percent of road space is typically allocated to cars and trucks (including on-street parking).¹⁹⁶ More and more private vehicles are clogging streets—with few, if any, controls—and disproportionate investment in constructing additional roads and highways serves the needs of the vehicle-owning classes, not the poor.¹⁹⁷ As a result, formal public transport is deficient or nonexistent, and planning often excludes or neglects the needs of pedestrians and cyclists.

Similarly, making electricity available, reliable, and affordable remains a vexing and overlooked urban problem in much of the global South. In recent years, millions of people have gained access to electricity; yet in low-income countries, the average levels of access to electricity in urban areas hovered around 70 percent in 2018. Less than half the urban population in countries such as Sierra Leone, Chad, Liberia, and Niger had access.¹⁹⁸ National-level data on energy access masks much worse conditions in individual cities and the fact that infrastructure is inefficient and electricity supply is often unreliable. Power outages are common, occurring as often as 25 times per month in South Asian cities and every day in African cities.¹⁹⁹ Outages burden informal enterprises and settlements the most. Unreliable electricity supplies force businesses and critical facilities with grid connections, such as hospitals and schools, to use dirty and expensive diesel generators to supplement their power. Likewise, billions of people around the world continue to cook with polluting solid fuels.²⁰⁰

Levels of access to piped city water and sewer systems vary widely across regions of the global South. Primary surveys conducted for the Towards a More Equal City series in 15 cities found that, on average, 58 percent of households had access to piped water citywide, and 46 percent had access to public sewer systems. These access levels fall dramatically to about half the citywide average in an informal settlement in the same cities.²⁰¹ In the 15 cities studied, almost two-thirds of sewage and human waste are unsafely managed. This problem is most acute in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa.²⁰² Even where safer sanitation infrastructure exists in these regions, the up-front costs of installing or connecting to it are often unaffordable for many households.

In some cases, privatizing these public goods in an effort to attract investment and shore up failing infrastructure has made matters worse. It has led to institutional structures, plans, and policies that routinely leave low-income households behind with no consideration of what they can actually afford to pay (further discussed in Transformation 5). For instance, alternative informal or private water services cost 18 times more in Cebu, Philippines, and 13 times more in Maputo, Mozambique, than publicly provided water, and safely emptying a pit latrine in Kampala can cost as much as 8 percent of an average household’s income, incentivizing many to dump directly into drainage channels or rivers instead. Market-based approaches often allow private companies to decide which neighborhoods to serve and which are too risky to recover costs. This explains why they rarely cover low-income areas and informal settlements.

Another reason for exclusionary water and sanitation policies is the legacy of colonialism. This is particularly acute in African cities, where transport, water, and sanitation systems that exist today were introduced during colonial regimes. Coverage was limited to majority-white neighborhoods and excluded the large majority of Africans in surrounding neighborhoods.²⁰³ For example, in cities such as Johannesburg, racial inequities in municipal water and sanitation service charges, financing, and levels of investments are well documented.²⁰⁴

In some cases, the lack of coverage is intentional. Manipulating essential services such as water for temporary, short-term political gain is common in cities across Africa and South Asia.²⁰⁵ In one case, parliament members seeking votes in an informal settlement in Cairo, Egypt promised to provide residents with running water. After the election, the city did install water lines, but it failed to ensure that water ran into them, leaving residents in a limbo of having formal access but without available water.²⁰⁶ Politicians also fear that extending services to neighborhoods without tenure security would bolster claims that tenants have a right to be on the land. Often urban residents in informal settlements have no formal proof that they own their property. Thus, utilities deny them basic services as well, compounding their woes. For instance, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, received a large loan from the World Bank to expand its sewer network, yet the utility would only extend sewer lines to households with documents proving land tenure, such as ownership or lease agreements. With almost half the city being tenure insecure, most households were left unsafely disposing of human waste instead.²⁰⁷

The affordable housing gap is growing

By 2025, the affordable housing gap will affect 1.6 billion people.²⁰⁸ The rising number of people who lack adequate, secure, and affordable shelter demonstrates that existing housing and past policies have been insufficient. As informal settlements have proliferated, cities have often implemented harmful policy approaches, such as slum clearing or relocation to isolated areas. Cities have historically tried to become “slum free” by pushing out slum dwellers and obliterating their communities. Government policies towards informal settlements have evolved over time, and some have ended this practice.

Cities, however, still show a strong bias towards supply-driven, large-scale housing development that caters to higher-income populations. It is clear that this does not work.²⁰⁹ It has failed to provide the quantity and quality of housing needed to adequately shelter and service low-income residents. The application procedures for housing often exclude the poorest, who do not meet income requirements, lack required documentation, or may be the wrong gender to qualify.²¹⁰ Many countries have national policies and subsidies that continue to incentivize mass private sector housing development. Examples include Angola’s My Dream, My Home program; Brazil’s My House, My Life (Minha Casa, Minha Vida); and Ethiopia’s Integrated Housing Development Program.

Even incentives for building affordable housing can misfire, especially if they focus on the price of land and housing, not on the cost—both personal and economic—of commuting long distances to work. Subsidies for housing construction in South Africa and Chile spurred public housing construction in the periphery of cities such as Johannesburg and Santiago, but they discouraged building closer in because they did not cover the expenses of building at higher densities.²¹¹ In cities such as Cape Town, South Africa, and Mexico City, formally built, government-subsidized housing in distant, unserviced locations has created higher costs for households. Ambitious quantitative targets for social housing that are insensitive to location have been an important driver of unserviced urban expansion and have created a mismatch between where houses are built, where people want to live, and where services are available.

Governments have also overemphasized homeownership, which is simply not an option for the very poor or those who cannot qualify for mortgages or subsidies and lack access to credit.²¹² Subsidies benefit people with regular, documented incomes, not the under-served or those who work in informal markets. The overemphasis on ownership also causes other policies to go unconsidered, ones that might promote more housing at all price levels that better meets the needs of the poor.²¹³ People who cannot afford a home or need more flexible housing should have other options, but rental housing is often scarce, especially in the formal housing market, which tends to focus on individual private homes for the highest income brackets.²¹⁴

Although lawmakers in some countries voice support for the right to adequate housing, governments lack the resources, capacity, or political will to meet this glaring need. The problem can be especially severe for ethnic minorities, women, or those without a legal address. Women in many countries face severe discrimination and high barriers when it comes to access to housing and property rights. Laws may bar them from acquiring and owning a house, plot, or flat, and/or getting a loan to build, extend, or improve their housing. Their rights are often inextricably linked to male family members and marital status. All of these barriers rob poor and marginalized people of the chance to live in decent housing near jobs and other opportunities.

Carbon lock-in and vulnerabilities to climate hazards have reached dangerous levels

Global energy use is expected to shoot up by roughly 50 percent by 2050.²¹⁵ The vast majority of this new demand will come from rapidly urbanizing countries, especially in Asia. Urban areas are already responsible for the majority of global final energy use and the associated GHG emissions. For now, GHG emissions from cities in the global South remain far lower than in the global North, but in terms of absolute emissions, the picture is rapidly changing. In 2010, China and developing Africa, Asia, India, and Latin America contributed to about one-quarter of total urban CO₂ emissions from the core sectors of buildings, transport, and waste disposal.²¹⁶ In a business-as-usual scenario, their share of these emissions would more than double to about 56 percent by 2050 (see Figure 16). Business as usual would be catastrophic for human health, the environment, and the planet. For today’s rapidly urbanizing nations, following the global North’s fossil fuel–intensive model of development is not tenable. The risks this would pose are too great (see Chapter 2). Because the life cycle of built infrastructure spans decades, national and local governments must make decisions now about how to build the infrastructure they need without locking in inefficient, carbon-intensive urban development.

Figure 16 | Steep increase expected in CO₂ emissions in developing regions will drive pollution, energy insecurity, and climate risks

Note: CO₂ = carbon dioxide.

Source: Westphal et al. (2017), based on Erickson and Tempest (2014).

Climate change will put people and urban infrastructure in greater jeopardy, and today’s development patterns are making rapidly growing cities more and more vulnerable. Often decision-makers are turning a blind eye.²¹⁷ The dangers loom larger every year. Poorly constructed shelters succumb to heat stress. Droughts deplete drinking water. Floods and sea level rise engulf low-lying areas crowded with informal settlements. Recent research shows that a 2°C increase in global temperature in 2050 will expose 2.7 billion people, or 29 percent of the global population, to moderate or high climate-related risks, with 91 to 98 percent of the exposed and vulnerable population living in Asia and Africa.²¹⁸

Sea level rise and storm surges alone could cost coastal cities $1 trillion each year by midcentury, affecting more than 800 million people.²¹⁹ The hardest hit will be populations with little or no access to core urban services, secure jobs, emergency reserves, or credit.²²⁰ Migrants and people without tenure security, who are crowded into risk-prone informal settlements, may be especially vulnerable. These impacts not only threaten physical infrastructure and people’s livelihoods but also the social networks that foster resilience and quality of life, especially for those living in poverty.

Failing to address backlogs, meet current needs, and plan for looming challenges will have grave consequences. City decision-makers will need to prioritize solutions that can both address the backlog and safeguard infrastructure, especially for the urban under-served.

6.2 Priority Actions

A. Design, improve, and maintain municipal infrastructure to ensure access to services for the under-served

Targeting improvements in quality, coverage, and affordability of municipal services to meet the needs of the under-served can act as a positive multiplier, catalyzing broader changes and cascading benefits.

Our research on each urban sector highlights a number of infrastructure design and delivery recommendations that can bridge the urban services divide. These are discussed below.

In pursuing sectoral priorities, cities that work across sectors in an integrated manner can do more with scarce resources, avoid costly mistakes, and harness synergies across different sectors to deliver services in a more efficient, inclusive way.²²¹ Cross-sectoral collaboration across agencies and integrated planning can help generate the cascading benefits we described earlier. (This is discussed further under Transformation 7.) For instance, investing in improved sanitation services for the under-served can result in citywide improvements in water quality. Planning housing or public transit in a way that reduces commute times for low-income residents can improve productivity, health and safety, and business opportunities. Building on a solid set of sectoral priorities while reaching across silos to address related challenges has helped cities do more with less resources.

Figure 17 | Priority actions for the transport sector

Source: Venter et al., 2019.

Transport

Cities can design safe streets that put the needs of those who walk, cycle, and use public transport before the needs of private vehicles. In São Paulo, when streets were redesigned citywide to accommodate heavy pedestrian traffic and cycling around major intersections, traffic fatalities dropped by almost 32 percent and injuries from crashes fell by 33 percent in just two years (between 2014 and 2016).²²² Cities can also develop an integrated network of multimodal transport services with public transport as the backbone. Medellín showed how investing in multimodal public transport services, including cable cars, can tame congestion and connect poor, peripheral, or hillside communities with jobs in the city center. This cut one-way commute times by as much as three-quarters. For some, commutes fell from two hours to just 30 minutes.²²³ Similarly, in Bolivia, public cable cars reduced travel time between La Paz and El Alto by 22 percent.²²⁴ For these efforts to bear fruit, cities must manage the demand for private vehicles. Latin American cities, including Bogotá, Colombia; Mexico City; and São Paulo, have discouraged private vehicles and incentivized switching to public, shared, and active transport. A wider selection of examples can be found in the thematic paper on urban mobility.²²⁵ Figure 17 highlights interventions in the transport sector that can increase access to jobs and other opportunities for the under-served while increasing productivity and reducing emissions citywide.

Figure 18 | Priority actions for the energy sector

Note: LPG = liquefied petroleum gas; PV = photovoltaic.

Source: Westphal et al., 2017.

Energy

Cities can accelerate the shift to cleaner cooking through the use of modern cooking fuels, such as liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), electricity, biogas, and ethanol. This could save over 550,000 lives lost due to indoor air pollution in urban areas and dramatically improve the health of the urban poor.²²⁶ Cities can also scale up distributed renewable energy solutions such as solar photovoltaic (PV) systems to improve energy access while transitioning to a cleaner future. In 2015 the city of Cape Town introduced a net-metering scheme that allows residents and businesses to install rooftop solar PV systems to save power and sell any surplus energy they generate to the municipal grid system.²²⁷ The cities of Bengaluru and Delhi in India have done the same to encourage the adoption of solar PV since 2014.²²⁸

Options that support the under-served to access solar power include flexible pay-as-you-go (PAYG) models, which alleviate high up-front costs, and community-shared solar, which is a business model that allows people to pool their resources and jointly purchase PV systems. These promising approaches are also key for providing more reliable power to home-based enterprises in informal settlements. As such, affordable and reliable solutions for clean energy access will not only curb air pollution and carbon emissions but also increase opportunities and productivity. Lastly, cities can develop and enforce building codes and appliance standards to increase energy efficiency and help reduce energy costs significantly for the under-served. This brings the additional benefits of improved comfort, health, and resilience to heat waves and other climate impacts. The thematic paper on urban energy access includes numerous examples of these strategies.²²⁹ Figure 18 highlights actions in the energy sector to ensure access to affordable, reliable, and clean energy for the under-served while generating cost savings, health benefits, higher productivity, and reduced emissions.

Water and Sanitation

Cities can improve access to good-quality water and sanitation by eventually extending the formal piped water and sewer networks to serve all residents. Many scholars agree that in the long term, the most equitable solution is universal provision, overseen by the state.²³⁰ In the meantime, cities can use safe technical solutions for intermittent water supply and on-site sanitation in water-insecure areas, which are discussed in detail in the thematic papers on water and sanitation.²³¹ They should prioritize the affordability of good-quality urban water access and safely managed sanitation services for low-income households, for which strategies such as targeted subsidies and flexible payment arrangements have been used. Our research in 15 cities showed that piped utility water was the most affordable option for low-income residents in cities. The cheaper alternatives—obtaining “free” water from often polluted natural sources and illegally dumping human waste—endanger public health. When considering network extensions, city decision-makers should prioritize the most under-served, water-insecure communities.

Colombo has done this. Pro-poor policy commitments made during the 1970s fueled the creation of the Samurdhi Program, which designates and targets improvements to under-served settlements. Today, although almost half of Colombo is made up of informal settlements, 98 percent of the city has access to piped water.²³² Therefore, rather than collecting water from public taps, more households are getting water piped into their homes, improving health and saving time. Upgrading informal settlements in place—when it is safe to do so—is a key way to improve water and sanitation services.

Local conditions can make extending the public water and sewer networks everywhere a challenge. Existing policies that exclude informal settlements and tenants may limit what utilities can do. Settlements clustered on hillsides or lowland areas with high water tables can make installing underground pipes or septic tanks difficult or unrealistic. Thus, some neighborhoods in cities in the global South will need off-grid alternative or complementary solutions (discussed in Transformation 2). Interventions in all sectors must be driven by the goal of increasing access to good-quality services and affordability for low-income households. A wider selection of examples can be found in the thematic papers on water and sanitation.²³³ Figures 19 and 20 highlight interventions to improve access to good-quality, affordable urban water and sanitation services for the under-served, with significant economic, environmental, and health benefits at the household and city level.

Figure 19 | Priority actions for the water sector

Source: Habtemariam et al., 2021; Mitlin et al., 2019.

Figure 20 | Priority actions for the sanitation sector

Notes: NGO = nongovernmental organization; Simplified sewer is a network or a line of sewers that is constructed using smaller pipes, at a shallower depth, and sometimes at a flatter gradient than conventional sewers.

Source: Satterthwaite et al., 2019.

B. Develop well-serviced, affordable housing in accessible locations

Good-quality, well-serviced housing near employment is key to connecting workers to jobs, attracting investment, and stimulating economic development. A home is the physical space where most of these services come together.

Cities can improve housing options for under-served urban dwellers by upgrading informal settlements. Evidence shows that in situ upgrading is preferable to relocation, except when people need to move for their own safety or to serve an overwhelming public need.²³⁴ Upgrading housing in partnership with slum communities helps city leaders harness the typically untapped skills and experiences of these communities, increasing economic productivity, quality of life, and political agency. Adequate measures should be taken to ensure that beneficiaries are neither displaced nor priced out by gentrification.

Cities such as Nairobi and Windhoek are working with community groups to upgrade informal settlements. They are changing land-use regulations to increase infrastructure quality and access and allow for incremental building over time, which is often legally forbidden despite the reality that this construction is happening anyway.²³⁵ Bangkok partnered with community groups and NGOs led by the Community Organizations Development Institute (CODI) to upgrade informal settlements through the Baan Mankong program, creating a model that has scaled up to over 215 cities in 19 Asian countries (see Figure 21). These community-led shelter services and community upgrades tapped into local knowledge, energy, and priorities while combining with government funds and approvals to serve as an innovative model throughout the region.²³⁶

Figure 21 | Community-led slum upgrading efforts in Bangkok have produced well-serviced, affordable housing at scale

A slum settlement in Charoenchai Nimitmai, Bangkok, before and after upgrading efforts that were led by Baan Mankong.

Photo credit: Asian Coalition for Housing Rights.

Figure 22 | Priority actions for the housing sector

Source: King et al., 2017.

In Mukuru, a slum area home to more than 100,000 people, the Nairobi City Water and Sewerage Company, the Nairobi Metropolitan Service, and a coalition of community-based stakeholders are implementing an integrated planning approach to slum upgrading.²³⁷ Such integrated approaches deliver better and more sustainable upgrading rather than disjointed efforts where previous progress is undone when the next sector’s improvements occur. Indonesian cities such as Jakarta and Surabaya upgraded traditional housing via the Kampung Improvement Program over the last 50 years.²³⁸ Residents in Sanjay Nagar in Ahmednagar (Maharashtra, India) used government funds to design their own housing, working with local foundations and experts rather than relying on developer-led redevelopment, creating more practical and attractive options.²³⁹ In Buenos Aires, Argentina, residents in some of the villas, or informal settlements, have worked in their communities, sometimes with the city government, universities, and NGOs, to improve their settlements.²⁴⁰ Community participation has also been a key element of Medellín’s application of the national Comprehensive Neighborhood Improvement Program (Programa Mejoramiento Integral de Barrios), which enabled the city to improve housing and services, spur new construction, and recuperate public and green spaces.²⁴¹ Figure 22 highlights strategies to ensure access to secure, well-serviced, and affordable housing for under-served and vulnerable groups, which is key to their prosperity and well-being as well as to a healthy urban environment.

Yet to meet everyone’s needs, cities need to provide a spectrum of housing options. The types of buildings, the services they offer, how they are financed, and who owns them can vary widely (see Figure 23).²⁴² Supporting a range of rental possibilities in both informal and formal markets would reduce the financial and legal bias towards ownership. Cities can make rental housing more affordable and available for tenants of different income levels by creating formal rental policies, improving legal frameworks to tenants’ and landlords’ rights, avoiding financial biases that exclusively incentivize homeownership, and providing well-structured supply- and demand-side subsidies for renting. Rental housing possibilities include lump-sum rentals, rent-to-own mechanisms, and cooperative housing. In many Asian countries, including India, Korea, and Thailand, lump-sum rentals provide discounts to tenants who pay for one or more years in advance.²⁴³ Rent-to-own initiatives are increasing housing security for low-income households with limited access to credit in Chandigarh, India; Lagos; the province of Antioquia in Colombia; and throughout Chile and Nicaragua.²⁴⁴ The government of Egypt incentivizes housing cooperatives through loan subsidies and lower interest rates.²⁴⁵

Figure 23 | People in cities rely on a spectrum of housing options to meet shelter needs

Note: All types of housing conditions can range from short to long term. Although not represented in the diagram, homelessness is an important issue in some cities in the global South. The dotted line indicates the variability of this characteristic across cities.

Source: King et al., 2017.

Finally, spatial and economic development must be integrated to help distribute housing near employment centers and ensure good access to jobs. Location must be a key consideration in social housing policies, balancing affordability with livable density. Converting under-utilized urban land to affordable housing is an effective way to strike this balance. Close-in, affordable housing can head off urban sprawl in hard-to-service, risk-prone, and ecologically sensitive areas and reduce the cost of connecting homes to infrastructure. Linking investment in social housing and public transport can cut down on congestion and pollution, boost productivity, and improve people’s quality of life by reducing the time and money they spend trying to get around.

C. Adopt a new trajectory with low-carbon and climate-resilient infrastructure

Struggling and emerging cities can chart a new model of development that limits carbon emissions and enhances climate resilience. Although these cities need support on capacity and financing, many proven technical and locally relevant solutions exist. They will need to invest differently in core urban infrastructure for water, sanitation, and drainage. New technologies and strategies make it possible to save money, improve people’s quality of life, and avoid mistakes that have warmed the planet and polluted the environment.

This can be done by accelerating a shift to cleaner cooking, saving money over the long run with more energy-efficient buildings and appliances, and incentivizing energy conservation. Reliable and affordable clean energy offers under-served urban dwellers an alternative to burning diesel and kerosene, which are dirty and expensive but are currently relied on in cities across the global South. Evidence shows that fuel switching and more energy-efficient building could potentially slash GHG emissions in cities by more than 60 percent by 2050.²⁴⁶ Energy efficiency measures can cut energy use by 50 to 90 percent in new buildings and 50 to 75 percent in existing buildings.²⁴⁷ They save on energy costs, reduce the need for new power plants, and provide the greatest potential to reduce GHG emissions. Combining efficient buildings with a greener energy supply generates even more benefits.

As cities grow, incentives and investment for clean energy at scale can produce significant environmental and economic benefits. For example, Brazil encouraged households to shift from cooking and heating with dirty solid fuels such as firewood and charcoal to LPG or natural gas, which are cleaner alternatives. It created a national infrastructure and retail market for LPG production and distribution and provided subsidies to keep it affordable. In the 1960s, only 18 percent of Brazilian households had access to LPG, but by 2010, 100 percent of urban households did.²⁴⁸ Ecuador has taken this policy a step further. Spurred by the fact that the country relies on imported LPG for 80 percent of its consumption and spends $700 million a year on subsidies,²⁴⁹ the government is embarking on a campaign to urge citizens to switch from gas to electric induction stoves. The government is offering long-term, low-interest loans for purchasing electric stoves and installation kits and 80 free kilowatt-hours of electricity per month.

Better public and active transport infrastructure can both cut carbon emissions and improve resilience.²⁵⁰ Researchers estimate that investing in mass transit and active transport infrastructure could potentially reduce GHG intensity in the transport sector by 20 to 50 percent by 2050, below a 2010 baseline.²⁵¹ Another study describes how a transition to clean transport would avert 86,000 deaths caused by air pollution and generate $76 to $224 billion in economic benefits.²⁵² With a focus on the under-served, city decision-makers can ensure that these benefits reach those most in need. For example, they can connect low-income urban dwellers—who increasingly live in minority- and female-headed households—to better jobs while improving the air quality of neighborhoods most exposed to pollution.

Cities will need to fortify themselves against climate impacts such as increased flooding, water scarcity, and heat waves.²⁵³ City decision-makers should construct new buildings and infrastructure to withstand projected climate impacts and must retrofit existing infrastructure for this purpose. More climate-informed infrastructure planning and capital investments can lead to more innovative thinking around what can be done differently in the infrastructure cycle. Protecting built assets from extreme storms, flooding, and heat will reduce maintenance costs, safeguard users and tenants, and increase building and infrastructure lifetimes. In South Africa, for example, Durban is upgrading infrastructure in physically and socially vulnerable areas, such as flood-prone slums, and focusing on watershed restoration. Restoring ecosystems that cities depend on for their water supply improves both quality and quantity, leading to less downstream costs for water treatment.²⁵⁴

When longer-term environmental and social benefits, as well as economic gains and avoided losses, are taken into consideration, the benefits of climate-resilient investments in infrastructure outweigh costs by 4:1.²⁵⁵ In coastal cities, for instance, studies found that the annual cost of global adaptation is one-tenth the total cost of no action.²⁵⁶ These steps are not easy, but they offer major payoffs in future losses avoided, greater economic returns, lower infrastructure maintenance costs, and longer building and infrastructure lifetimes. Table 2 lists the actions and roles required of different actors to move Transformation 1 forward.

 

7.1 What Must Change and Why

Where there are gaps in public services in most growing cities in the global South, alternative service providers step in to fill the void. These providers include private, independent operators (such as minivan drivers or water vendors) as well as community-based organizations and small businesses that find ready markets for needed services.²⁵⁷ Whereas some providers in the service delivery chain may be formal, with legally recognized status and permits to operate, others may be informal. Different aspects of their services span the formal-informal spectrum. For example, water vendors may legally buy water from utilities but then sell it informally at higher prices. Auto-rickshaw drivers in India hold permits for their vehicles but may not work on formal labor contracts.

The services provided by alternative providers may sometimes be more convenient than public services, but they come at a cost that the lowest income groups cannot afford. Still, many poor urban residents often have no choice but to rely on their services. For instance, many global South cities do not provide reliable public transport to many areas, so informal or paratransit services,²⁵⁸ which offer the advantage of flexible and on-demand operations, are the only option for getting around. In many cities, they also offer shared rides to low-income people who split the fare so that it is more affordable.²⁵⁹

In addition to potentially high costs, the quality of these goods and services may be low or uncertain because there is little or no government oversight of operations. Thus, alternative water supplies may be unfit to drink, and alternative energy sources may be dangerous. In the case of alternative transport, for example, governments do not regulate these services or limit who can provide them. This results in severe on-the-street competition, with oversupply depressing profit margins and thereby forcing operators to reduce service or vehicle quality or to behave aggressively.²⁶⁰ Alternatively, providers may collude to raise prices. Informal buses, minibuses, and auto-rickshaws also contribute to congestion and pollution, especially in denser city centers.²⁶¹

In sum, supply gaps in cities, usually filled by the formal or informal private sector, can create health and safety risks and can sometimes drain large proportions of poor people’s income. At the same time, these alternative vendors often provide the only opportunity for many households at the bottom end of the market to access basic urban services. Figuring out how to manage and regulate this diverse set of providers, make service delivery effective, and provide equitable access for all urban dwellers has been a key challenge.

Alternative or “informal” service providers are stigmatized or ignored

Despite serving as lifelines for marginalized urban communities, alternative service providers face hostility, obstacles, and operational challenges. This is especially true when they are seen as encroaching on the rights of conventional operators, and when they operate informally and without legal authority. Cities often respond by banning, restricting, and even harassing informal service providers to stop them from competing for customers or public space. This happens even when informal workers provide vital services. For example, informal waste pickers play an important role by collecting, sorting, and recycling waste in cities, serving the city, the economy, and the environment. A study of three cities found that waste pickers brought significant environmental benefits by recovering approximately 20 percent of all materials that entered the waste stream and reducing GHG emissions.²⁶² Yet in many cities, they often face stigma, harassment, eviction from using public spaces, and confiscation of the waste by city authorities or municipal street cleaners.²⁶³ (We discuss the conditions and contributions of informal workers more in Transformation 4).

Cities may also tend to ignore informal arrangements because they can be a benefit, even if unacknowledged. They require no money or effort from governments that lack the resources and capacity to meet growing demand. They meet otherwise unmet needs and operate almost universally without government subsidies.²⁶⁴ City authorities in the global South have neither the data nor the capacity to oversee and regulate numerous small-scale operators providing a range of services in the city. They often lack the necessary technical information and political will to set standards for service quality or technology or to enforce regulations that safeguard health and the environment. Instead, arrangements and payments for informal service delivery in the global South often rest on handshake agreements between households and small-scale informal providers.²⁶⁵ The government is spared any administrative involvement.

Alternative or “informal” providers are thus often viewed as a problem or are ignored; however, better regulation and performance standards that incentivize more efficient operations could make them part of the solution. Informal service providers are not going away any time soon. They will remain important, even as cities incrementally expand access to public infrastructure and services. Assuming responsibility for the patchwork of alternative, interim solutions that have sprung up in cities across the global South poses challenges. But this informal sector is too huge and vital to be stifled. A major mindset shift is needed for cities to support and regulate these services while recognizing their potential for local innovation and entrepreneurship.

7.2 Priority Actions

A. Integrate alternative services as an intermediate solution to expand access

Cities must build upon existing alternative modes of service delivery, integrating them into a citywide system instead of replacing them. City authorities must harness the vitality and diversity of multiple delivery modes, operated by conventional public utilities, local private entities (small firms, NGOs, individuals), informal and small-scale operators, and community-based organizations.²⁶⁶ In making them part of the citywide system, city authorities have a responsibility to create standards of practice and performance, nudging them to operate better. As cities integrate alternative solutions and incrementally expand public infrastructure, they can set regulations to meet basic standards of service delivery, public health, safety, environmental quality, and affordability for under-served groups. They can consider hybrid service delivery configurations in the short and medium term. Under these, conventional networks should coexist or merge with alternative services within an appropriate regulatory framework that ensures equitable service delivery. It is useful for rapidly growing cities in the global South to consider a ladder of service delivery where different innovative options and technologies help provide good-quality, sufficient access for people at varying levels of income.

While improving citywide infrastructure and services over the longer term, cities may find that more decentralized, alternate solutions may serve demand well in specific locations, such as in low-density or disjointed peripheral areas. For example, formal and informal transport services can complement one another in many places. In the neighborhoods of Johannesburg, where public transport services such as BRT exist, residents wanted help getting to bus stops. They asked for and got three-wheeler tuktuks to pick them up and drop them off. This much-needed first-mile/last-mile service poses no threat to public transport and, in fact, encourages more customers to use it.²⁶⁷

In sectors such as transport, water, and sanitation, the emerging consensus is that the public sector is best placed to undertake the planning, regulation, and oversight of public services, and alternative operators must provide services through some form of organization that is accountable to users and regulators.²⁶⁸ They can be required to meet service quality standards set by the city before their services are officially adopted and scaled to increase coverage. Regulating service delivery requires authorities to show flexibility and willingness to tailor approaches to the local context, engage with alternative service providers, and experiment with new approaches.

In cities with lower technical, political, and financial capacity, it may be more appropriate to upgrade informal services incrementally to improve productivity and service quality without requiring all-out formalization.²⁶⁹ For instance, in the case of transport, gradual fleet renewal programs for informal operators, coupled with funding and institutional support, successfully replaced thousands of old and polluting vehicles in Alwar, India; Dakar, Senegal; and Kathmandu, Nepal.²⁷⁰ Given the scarcity of funding, these actions must be deliberate and creative. For example, operators qualifying for such support may also be given access to infrastructure (such as priority lanes at intersections and terminals) to help improve their operating efficiency without losing the flexibility and demand responsiveness of the informal transit model.²⁷¹

B. Establish and support new partnerships for joint service delivery

Cities can partner with alternative or informal vendors to help reach under-served communities quickly and cheaply. Instead of trying to replicate the development trajectories of cities in the global North, struggling and emerging cities can establish new institutional structures for more organized, efficient, and equitable service delivery. Partnerships with communities and small vendors to create or coproduce new, hybrid formal-informal models of service delivery can accelerate progress without imposing prohibitive costs (see Box 9). In some cases, formalization may be necessary to “integrate” these service providers effectively into the service delivery system and practices so that they can bid and receive payment for government contracts. But it is important to integrate them in ways that are humane and supportive and will improve both their livelihoods and the quality of service. Figure 24 highlights how cities can shift from ignoring to recognizing and integrating these informal and alternative solutions to transform service provision and improve access to services for all.

Note: Citywide impacts are schematic.

Source: Authors.

Partnerships can work on multiple fronts and across sectors. For example, the Slum/Shack Dwellers International (SDI) federations in many cities in the global South comprise community groups in low-income neighborhoods that bring together residents, primarily women, to save, share their resources, and jointly address their collective needs. They combine their own savings and loan funds with funds from external agencies, such as local and national governments, to improve infrastructure and services in their settlements in collaboration with local authorities. These local groups and the larger federations to which they belong engage in many community-driven initiatives to collect data, link to other grassroots groups and social movements, build relations with local authorities, upgrade informal and squatter settlements, improve tenure security, and offer residents new development opportunities.²⁷²

Partnerships can extend water and sanitation services

Utilities in some cities have been working with private water providers to extend access more affordably. Even with access to the piped network, service is likely to be intermittent, so the additional water supply continues to be a critical lifeline. In Hubli-Dharwad, India, the utility has contracted private vendors to install kiosks in urban areas with no piped connections or clean water supply nearby. The kiosks draw and filter water from reservoirs, improving water quality so that it is suitable for drinking.²⁷³ Utilities are also partnering with community-based organizations or water user associations to extend service into informal settlements. In Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, the utility cooperates with small entrepreneurs to resell water at controlled prices to residents of informal settlements.²⁷⁴ In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mercy Corps has worked with the government to rehabilitate and expand the Goma Water Network to reach 150,000 unserved residents while empowering communities to participate in water systems management.²⁷⁵ In Lilongwe, Malawi, and Nairobi, utilities collaborate with community-based organizations and water user associations to oversee and manage service delivery through prepaid water kiosks in some informal settlements.²⁷⁶

Such arrangements give communities a say in how the service is delivered and where facilities are built, and they create local employment opportunities as well. These partnerships have also helped overcome residents’ mistrust of the utility and have convinced more people to pay for services.²⁷⁷

In Kampala, our case study details how the city government successfully partnered with small businesses, community groups, and the national water and sanitation utility to improve fecal sludge collection from pit latrines. It supported the use of affordable, nontraditional technologies while creating new livelihood opportunities for community residents. One example of such a technology is the Gulper, a handheld vacuum pump used to empty latrines and transport the fecal sludge on smaller three-wheeled vehicles to large tanks, where paths are too narrow for large vacuum trucks, which is a common situation in informal settlements.²⁷⁸ Between 2003 and 2015, Uganda’s national utility increased its fecal sludge treatment rate by 30-fold without a large increase in sewer coverage.²⁷⁹

In India, community organizations helped the city of Mumbai to rethink its approach to sanitation. Supported by Mahila Milan (the federation of women slum dwellers’ savings groups), groups of women living in informal settlements or on sidewalks redesigned public toilets so they were managed by the community rather than the local government, providing improved facilities to half a million residents. The Mumbai government financed the toilets’ construction, so the community pays only for operation and maintenance. Residents buy monthly passes that provide access to all household members for less than two dollars per month. People passing through the community can use the toilets for a higher fee. This helps cover maintenance costs and can allow the community to hire a full-time toilet manager to work on-site.²⁸⁰

In Pakistan, a local NGO, the Orangi Pilot Project (OPP), took the lead in improving Karachi’s sewage treatment through community-government partnerships. They built and financed OPP’s model of simplified sewers across informal settlements in Karachi and other cities. OPP ran programs that helped over 15,000 households across 285 communities in Pakistan build these systems in their neighborhoods and connect them to city sewers and sewage disposal points built by the government.²⁸¹

Partnerships can manage solid waste

Cities in Brazil—Belo Horizonte, Porto Alegre, Santo Andre, and São Paulo—were the first to integrate waste pickers and their cooperatives into city solid waste management systems.²⁸² Several cities across Colombia and Argentina have also integrated informal waste pickers into their solid waste management services to support door-to-door recycling, as have Bengaluru and Pune in India.²⁸³ This has unlocked economic productivity as previously informal waste pickers now have better and more secure livelihoods, health insurance, and other benefits, and they provide waste collection services that reduce waste, pollution, health risks, and GHG emissions for the entire city through recycling. Our case study of Pune traces the story of how a waste picker cooperative (Solid Waste Collection and Handling) negotiated a contractual agreement with the municipal government to provide door-to-door waste collection for city households.²⁸⁴

The city of Pune creatively integrated informal waste pickers into its formal solid waste management system, with support from state and national policies and political commitment from the municipal government. Informal waste pickers were seen as making important contributions to door-to-door waste collection as well as to the environmental objectives of segregating, processing, and recycling waste materials. Some cities have invited informal workers to participate in relevant rule-setting and policymaking processes, which has increased their access to public services, public spaces, or public procurement opportunities that allow them to work for the city with reliable livelihoods.

Partnerships can provide transport

Although some cities have banned alternative operators, others have integrated them into new transport systems, with financial assistance to upgrade vehicles and training to build new skills.²⁸⁵ In many cases, transport providers are “semiformal,” meaning they are legally authorized with vehicle permits but operate under informal rules related to daily vehicle leasing and wages.²⁸⁶ Some city governments have helped transport providers better organize themselves, form corporations, and formalize their operators.

Cities can improve access for the under-served by partnering with existing providers of informal transit, bus, rail, and cycling services for a better-connected transport network. This helps develop a more user-oriented multimodal transport network, improving both access and efficiency. Specific strategies include building integrated, pedestrian-friendly transfer facilities for travelers switching between modes; reorganizing minibus and informal transit routes so they better connect to fixed-route public systems; and promoting integrated fare-payment solutions to reduce the cost of transfers for travelers, which can particularly burden low-income commuters.

Approaches to integrate informal transport services have varied across cities. Although there is no single path for this, several short-term measures have reaped benefits for cities, including investing in dedicated infrastructure and transfer locations, changing concessions and service agreements, and training and supporting informal operators. Cities implementing large formal systems, such as BRT, can help incumbent informal operators preserve their livelihoods by forming operating companies and contracting them to run parts of the new formal services (such as the trunk services in Lagos, the feeders providing essential last-mile access in Quito, or a combination of both, as seen in Cape Town and Santiago).²⁸⁷ Over time, they could move towards a competitive tendering regime (as in Bogotá; Lima, Peru; Mexico City; and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil).²⁸⁸ Research in Rio de Janeiro has shown that regulatory reform aimed at distributing route concessions among informal operators on the basis of competitive tendering confers significant benefits, especially to the poor, because of drastically lowered fares.²⁸⁹

Technology can be harnessed to improve productivity further and help knit services together. Mobile apps are already helping passengers travel affordably and efficiently by offering dynamic trip-planning features that consider multiple existing and emerging transport modes in cities. Examples include e-hailing for boda-boda motorcycle taxi services in Uganda, Thailand, and Vietnam or Ola motorcycle and auto-rickshaw services (aimed specifically at lower-income users) in more than 100 cities in India.²⁹⁰ Ola has been innovative in its use of text messaging to get around poor Internet connectivity in India, and it has a technology platform that is available in nine regional languages because few drivers speak English.²⁹¹ Such technologies could enhance the productivity of informal transport operators by better matching supply with demand, especially in locations with poor accessibility.

Supporting and integrating informal transport services with appropriate regulations and investment has improved operators’ productivity, livelihoods and quality of service.²⁹² This has also made cities safer and cleaner.²⁹³ Although it costs money and political capital to regulate and integrate services in this way, the increased efficiency and improved access provided by such an integrated system yields positive outcomes and long-term benefits for the city as a whole, with great potential to unleash private investment and innovation.

Cities will need to build the capacity to collaborate with and effectively oversee a wide variety of informal and alternative service providers. They will need to regulate competition, set quality standards, and incentivize joint delivery of services.²⁹⁴ This will require the following:²⁹⁵

• Creating institutional arrangements to integrate informal, alternative solutions instead of banning or trying to replace them and cutting crucial lifelines for many households
• Aligning incentives that encourage service providers to form coalitions based on clearly defined standards of service provision
• Enforcing these standards of service provision
• Overseeing operations of all service providers
• Segmenting the market by differentiating supply by service levels, providers, and tariffs and demand for services based on people’s needs, ability to pay, and location in the city
• Investing to scale solutions that have proven effective, affordable, and safe
• Developing regulations that protect rather than repress and relocate alternative service providers

Accomplishing these goals will require a shift in the mindset of government officials and urban practitioners. They will need to recognize and value the contributions of alternative service providers, including those in the informal sector, and provide funding and institutional support to help create a more complete service provision ecosystem. Table 3 lists the actions and roles required of different actors to move Transformation 2 forward.

 

8.1 What Must Change and Why

Local, spatially disaggregated data is lacking

Decision-makers may not understand the need for better local data on the availability and quality of urban services, infrastructure, jobs, education, health services, and other necessities. Failure to analyze granular information collected from different parts of the city can mask vast inequities. The socioeconomic indicators needed to track levels of access and quality are not consistently defined or measured, and they are rarely expressed spatially, making it harder to identify under-served locations within the city. Without spatially disaggregated data, cities rely either on nationally collected data, which are then downscaled to the city level based on population or other simple assumptions, or on citywide data, which do not capture or convey the heterogeneity across neighborhoods or disparities within them. Standard satellite-based methods of analysis cannot accurately characterize informal settlements or slums or the absence of services there, and censuses do not typically include such settlements. The majority of remote-sensing studies only document outward growth, ignoring inner-city redevelopment and increasing density.

Poor-quality or unavailable data hinders decision-making

Data gaps at city and neighborhood levels lead to misinformed, ineffective, or incomplete policy responses. Inadequate data make it impossible to diagnose the gaps in access to services across neighborhoods, the externalities these create, and the vulnerabilities of different populations. Importantly, it leads to an inefficient and possibly incorrect allocation of scarce resources. Missing data hampers policymakers’ ability to make crucial decisions amid political pressure and conflicting advice. In struggling and emerging cities, with limited resources for collecting data, citywide surveys are performed infrequently, and they typically lack the detail needed to draw meaningful inferences about vulnerable and under-served population groups (see Box 10). Often, data are not shared across public sector agencies or with other stakeholders because there are no mechanisms or platforms with basic standards for data quality or consistent metrics to allow wider access. Sometimes, city leaders hesitate to share or use data for political reasons.

Studies suggest that official statistics used by governments and international agencies understate the extent of urban poverty in most low- and middle-income nations.²⁹⁶ Similarly, global efforts to monitor access to particular services, such as water and sanitation, underestimate the deprivations that urban dwellers face because they neglect to assess whether the services are of adequate quality.²⁹⁷ Our research shows that data on informal housing, as well as widely used global indicators on access to water and sanitation, underestimate the extent of the urban water and sanitation crisis. This contributes to ineffective planning and management of these services. For example, the Joint Monitoring Programme (JMP) of the United Nations has created universal categories to measure, monitor, and compare progress on water access in connection with the SDGs. However, these categories fail to meaningfully consider water quality, regularity of supply, or affordability, and the data are not detailed or granular enough to identify urban populations at risk (see Box 10). Although the JMP reports that a growing proportion of the global population is gaining access to running water, the share of urban populations receiving piped water has actually fallen since 1990. In 2015, less than half of the urban population in many developing nations was receiving piped water on premises.²⁹⁸

Data on land-use regulations and planning processes across cities categorized as struggling and emerging often fail to track the type of urban growth that is occurring. Our research found that, when remote-sensing data is combined with urban demographic and economic indicators, many lower-income cities are experiencing significantly more outward growth than upward growth. That is, they are sprawling outward at their periphery rather than building more mid- to high-rise buildings within existing city margins.

Better data would provide insights on what drives this often-unmanaged outward growth. These growth patterns have significant implications for providing services across the city, as well as access to both jobs and services for under-served populations. Figure 25 compares levels of access to jobs, education, and health care in the Mexico City metropolitan area within 30 minutes or less on foot or by public transit. It shows the stark difference in access to these opportunities between people living in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods of Mexico City and those living in the poorest areas. Wealth, in this case, is measured by the government’s Urban Marginalization Index, which combines social, economic, demographic and access to services indicators.²⁹⁹

Figure 25 | Access to jobs, education, and health care varies between wealthy and poor neighborhoods in the Mexico City metropolitan area

Note: These maps measure access to services available within a 30-minute ride by public transport or walking combined with the government’s Urban Marginalization Index. Better access is displayed in green, with red representing less access, and dark maroon representing neighborhoods with no coverage. Access to jobs is measured by the total number of formal jobs in each neighborhood from Mexico’s Economic Census, and travel time was calculated using the street grid and public transit map.

Source: Brito et al., 2021.

Cities lack the capacity to manage, share, and use data

Cities may not be able to assemble the data they need without help. Collecting data on levels of access to different services across the city can be extremely challenging. This lack of data is often an obstacle to making improvements or holding governments accountable. Spatial data for access indicators are often missing and must be gathered, mapped, combined with other data, and shared across service-providing agencies to ensure more integrated and inclusive planning. Cities need standards for collecting, sharing, and using representative, good-quality data to inform decision-making. Without such standards, it is difficult to compare conditions across cities and neighborhoods within cities in a consistent way. This makes it hard to understand how exclusion from core services affects people’s quality of life. Gauging the true costs of the services gap, for whole cities, regions, and nations, is difficult as well.

8.2 Priority Actions

A. Use new technologies and partnerships for better data and more granular local insights

New technologies and partnerships now make it possible for cities to bring together the high-quality, disaggregated spatial and socioeconomic data they need to make better decisions, regardless of whether they are rich or poor. An explosion of new insights from various sources is revolutionizing data collection and presents a breakthrough opportunity for under-resourced cities in particular. Tools to do rapid community surveys and gather crowdsourced information, anonymized mobile phone records, electronic transactions, and satellite imagery can generate unprecedented amounts of precise, granular information. “Big data” is proliferating, on traffic flows, cell phone communications, Internet usage, and financial and other transactions. Some of this is available to the public. This data can now be collected cost-effectively, frequently, and at high resolutions of spatial detail and disaggregation across socioeconomic groups.³⁰⁰ Cities can seize this opportunity to utilize different data sources, methods, technologies, and types of data. They can identify activity patterns, job growth locations, and levels of service coverage. Yet while ensuring that the needs of low-income populations are measured, cities must also ensure the protection of privacy for all. Better data creates an opportunity for all cities to become better equipped to diagnose and solve problems.

Ensuring that the data are disaggregated by population group and neighborhoods can help cities understand prevailing inequities. It can help identify gaps in access to services, especially in vulnerable communities and locations. For instance, under SDI’s Know Your City initiative, community-gathered data from thousands of informal settlements across approximately 500 cities is being used to improve conditions and upgrade services (see Box 11). Based on evidence that “inclusive outcomes demand inclusive knowledge and action,” the initiative trains residents of informal settlements in surveying, enumeration, and mapping so that they can bring these data to the attention of decision-makers and lobby for improved infrastructure and services.³⁰¹

The United Nations’ New Urban Agenda and SDGs recognize the importance of more accurate data. Both include commitments to improve the quality of actionable data for cities and development. The Million Neighborhoods Map, a new global tool designed to detect gaps in services in informal settlements, is valuable in helping to identify communities with limited access to street networks, which can be a good proxy for access to other services, such as power, water, sanitation, and other infrastructure (see example of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in Figure 26). Low-access neighborhoods are colored red, whereas those with high access to streets are colored blue. Zooming in on a city on the Million Neighborhoods Map quickly identifies areas most likely to be informal settlements that have sprung up with little planning and possibly little essential infrastructure.

Figure 26 | New technologies help measure the level of access to street networks in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

Source: Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation, Million Neighborhoods Map, https://millionneighborhoods.org.

Satellite imagery combined with aerial photography using drones provides a low-cost way to tackle the otherwise expensive exercise of land mapping. Increasingly, cities in China, India, Rwanda, Tanzania, and some Latin American countries are using these technologies to monitor development patterns, complete land cadasters, enforce land-use regulations, and collect tax revenue.³⁰² Detailed drone images combined with satellite imagery generated over time can help monitor growth patterns, service provision in informal settlements, and the condition of open spaces and environmentally vital areas. This type of data can be very useful to bring transparency in land records and transactions and enable spatial planning (see Transformation 6).

Combining advanced technologies such as satellite imaging and drone surveys with community-gathered data is helping shed light on conditions in informal settlements (see Box 11). Satellite imagery can detect where peri-urban and rural areas are being converted to urban land use—formally or informally—and whether new urban settlements have access to core services. With increasing use of artificial intelligence, satellite imagery is being used to “train” machine learning algorithms to provide citywide land-use maps, maps of vulnerable environmental sites, locations of slums, and more.³⁰³ This has the power to drastically improve planning and policymaking in cities where technical capacity is limited and where even basic land-use maps do not exist or are not updated. However, these data obtained through satellite imagery and artificial intelligence need to be matched with fieldwork in a sample of locations to understand error rates and be checked against and supplemented with information obtained from communities and from ground-level surveys.

Satellite imagery provides only a rough sense of where informal settlements exist. Their type and form (shacks, tin or thatched roofs, mud huts) vary so much that algorithms cannot yet make sense of them in any standardized way. This is why ground truthing through fieldwork is so important, and why satellite imagery must be combined with far more detailed drone surveys and/or data directly gathered by communities. These combined approaches provide powerful new insights on the under-served. For example, a recent seven-year study by researchers to map informal settlements in Bengaluru using satellite imagery and machine learning combined with ground truthing efforts recorded about 2,000 informal settlements in the city, whereas government records showed fewer than 600.³⁰⁴

B. Increase city capacity to collect and effectively utilize data

Credible spatial data disaggregated to identify vulnerable locations and communities and the ability to share such data publicly are key to creating a shared understanding of a problem. National and regional governments can help cities acquire the tools and build the capacity to gather, analyze, and share data while protecting people’s privacy. National and regional governments must invest in building technical capacity in cities and setting standards for consistent data collection, sharing, and use. Sharing data across government agencies within cities and between local, regional, and national agencies can facilitate greater transparency in decision-making and support citizen innovation and engagement. This is especially important if cities are to play a key role in solving problems that are regional in scope, such as curbing air pollution, managing water resources, mitigating climate risks, and conserving biodiversity and green spaces. For example, Figure 27 shows how spatial data can usefully highlight areas in Egyptian and Bangladeshi cities to prioritize for adaptation measures against sea level rise.

Figure 27 | Coastal flooding risks from sea level rise may impact large swaths of built-up areas including in Egypt and Bangladesh

Note: “Urban centers” are cities and large urban areas; “urban clusters” are towns and suburbs or small urban areas.

Source: Center for International Earth Science Information Network (Columbia University), CUNY Institute for Demographic Research (City University of New York), and the Institute of Development Studies, 2019. For the Coalition for Urban Transitions and the Global Commission on Adaptation. Published in Chu et al., 2019.

New technologies coupled with adequate resources and data sharing can give governments and planners unprecedented insight into a wide range of problems and potential solutions. For example, given the growing use of digitized maps to plan major infrastructure projects, it is possible to overlay data on core infrastructure networks (transport, water, sanitation, electricity) with settlement data, allowing stakeholders to analyze the need for future investments to expand service provision. It is also possible to further overlay these service networks with data on job locations, education, health care, transport hubs, and green spaces to identify key challenges facing marginalized populations across the city. Investing in city capacity to develop better data systems can be an extraordinarily productive way to spur innovation and improve decision-making, if city leaders are willing to attack the problems exposed through better data.

C. Coproduce and share data to foster more effective and inclusive governance

Investing in better data has many payoffs over time. It can enhance decision-making, improve quality of life for all sections of the population, increase efficiencies in resource use, help plan for and avoid costs of future risks, and support citizen participation in policymaking processes. Broader participation can improve local and regional governance and support reforms promoting economic development, education and training, public health, economic and social welfare, and resilience. Data collection and monitoring needs to be a continuous capability that governments invest in over time because data are constantly changing. Data sources and outputs must be compatible with each other over time to produce meaningful insights. Keeping up to date data requires partnerships across key data providers, communities, the private sector, local researchers, and universities that bring the data they have access to and help sustain this capability (see Figure 28).

Figure 28 | Data from multiple actors can lead to more effective and inclusive decision-making

Source: Authors.

Democratizing data production and access and integrating useful community knowledge can make governance and planning more inclusive. Beyond generating useful data, shifting to new paradigms of knowledge coproduction can lead to more inclusive outcomes for cities. Engaging community actors to produce and share data can both shed light on inequities and gaps in service and help craft policies to address them. But for this to work, data proliferation is not enough; the data must also be operationally useful. It needs to be organized, analyzed, and shared in ways that can help inform and mobilize support for better regulations and policies. The increasing availability of open data and common standards for data collection are making it easier to share crucial local-level information with multiple actors. Making such data more transparent can help energize citizen pressure and spark innovation for more sustainable growth. Self-enumeration projects conducted by SDI, NGOs, and community groups in Nairobi mapped over 50,000 households in the city, with community organizations collecting, producing, and using data to arrive at a common vision and set of priorities.³⁰⁵ These groups were then able to lobby the city’s water and sewer company to provide convenient water sources. In some of the largest informal settlements, such as Huruma, Kibera, Mathare, and Mukuru, residents were able to successfully challenge the city’s evictions and slum-clearance efforts and negotiate upgrading schemes with landlords.³⁰⁶

In addition to helping communities and citizens to identify and meet needs, data can help them uncover problems. For example, they can monitor development that is illegal and environmentally detrimental, built by private developers without government approvals. Examples include huge gated communities that sprang up in a lakebed on the periphery of Bengaluru. Environmental groups and future residents who invested in the community raised the alarm when they found out it had been built without environmental clearances in a sensitive ecological zone.³⁰⁷ Authorities may know illegal development is happening and ignore it. But making the data visible allows citizens to take action. The right information provides impetus for public action and allows coalitions of stakeholder groups to come together to make decisions around investment, set common objectives, negotiate mutual commitments, and lobby policymakers (see Figure 28). It enables them to monitor, track, and expose the impacts of public policies and private actions on equity and environmental sustainability and to hold decision-makers accountable. Data transparency and sharing can be politically empowering.

Data transparency and mandates to share data across jurisdictions and stakeholder groups can also help local authorities build trust and improve their performance. The Towards a More Equal City case study of Johannesburg describes the development of a comprehensive, publicly available database of landownership records in partnership with private developers and property owners. ³⁰⁸ The database proved valuable for the planning of an urban development zone meant to encourage economic growth and affordable housing in inner-city areas, along with the design of incentives for private developers.

Concerns have arisen in recent years around data privacy, private technology companies exploiting and selling data for profit, and taking the lead in driving the growth of “smart city” initiatives.³⁰⁹ Technology companies are advancing into delivering urban services such as transport (e.g., Uber, Ola, EasyTaxi), managing energy and water infrastructure, and deploying sensors to measure air and water quality, among other smart systems within cities. This can leave public sector agencies with low capacity, scrambling to manage this transition and protect citizens. Some cities have begun setting conditions for the collection, use, and sharing of data generated about citizen needs and choices. For example, São Paulo passed an innovative regulation requiring all transport network companies operating in the city to provide the city with data on trip origins, destinations, times, distances, travel routes, prices charged, and service evaluation by the customer. The data remain confidential and secure and provide invaluable real-time information that the city can use to plan transport services and operate the road network more efficiently, as well as to charge fees from these companies for the use of public streets.³¹⁰ Although São Paulo has established a collaborative lab, MobiLab, involving transport professionals and computer and data scientists to analyze the data, many cities struggle with the technical capacity needed to draw insights from similar big data sources.

Relying on data generated by private companies may present other challenges. Data gathered from people’s smartphones as they move around the city typically miss some of the most vulnerable, who do not own or use a smartphone. Phone data then does not capture the behavior and preferences of those most at risk and are unable to provide any insights on questions of equity. It is important to note that data gathered from any source, even highly accurate data, can be used for a variety of purposes. Some governments have used new mapping and technology to clear slums, further harming marginalized groups rather than looking for ways to help them. It is important that these technologies should be used to include—not to exclude—the under-served. They should support enabling regulations to improve their living and working conditions, and they should be used to promote data transparency.

Our research shows that combining the information provided by a wide set of stakeholders—community groups, universities, NGOs, and the private sector—can help ensure its credibility and bring new insights. Gathering, sharing, and using better data can drive transformative change. It creates an enormous opportunity to respond more effectively to many of the practical problems that cities and neighborhoods face today. Table 4 lists the actions and roles required of different actors to move Transformation 3 forward.

 

9.1 What Must Change and Why

Informal work is the cornerstone of the global South’s economies

Worldwide, 2 billion workers operate in the informal sector, representing more than half the urban workforce in the global South. Informal workers supply many of the goods and services that keep cities running, “holding up the world” like the mythical giant Atlas, yet they are largely invisible to city administrations, and their working conditions remain unsafe and insecure.³¹¹

The informal sector refers to the production and employment that takes place in unincorporated or unregistered small enterprises.³¹² Informal employment is employment without legal and social protection, both inside and outside the informal sector.³¹³ The informal economy encompasses all units, activities, and workers defined as such and the output from them.³¹⁴ These terms are often used interchangeably and imprecisely, yet it is clear that together, informal workers and enterprises form the broad base of the global workforce and economy.

Although most economic theorists predicted that the informal economy would decline as countries developed and urbanized, this has not happened. On the contrary, the informal economy has persisted and is growing and generally thrives in cities alongside robust formal sectors. The poor and women make up a disproportionate share of the informal workforce and may need to take these jobs because they have lower levels of education.³¹⁵ Many informal jobs trap workers in poverty and provide little protection or security.³¹⁶ But although the informal economy is often associated with poverty, it is important to acknowledge its diversity and the fact that some workers choose informal work over other types of formal low-skilled jobs.³¹⁷ For now and the foreseeable future, the informal economy will remain a key factor in the well-being of the urban economy as a whole.³¹⁸

Informal workers generate income, consume goods and services, and create jobs for others. Although the informal economy does not typically generate tax revenues for the city, many governments charge informal vendors for day licenses, permits, and operating fees and levy other kinds of taxes and penalties. Contrary to common perception, informal and formal enterprises seldom operate in isolation and are actually often mutually dependent.³¹⁹

Whether they sew garments, drive minibuses, cook and sell food, pick waste, construct buildings, or run small manufacturing businesses from home (see Figure 29), informal urban workers play an essential role in the economies of the global South.

Figure 29 | Informal workers in India play a significant role in key sectors of the urban economy

Source: Chen and Beard (2018), using data from Chen and Raveendran (2014).

Though it is vast and vital to both the urban poor and the cities where they live, the informal sector has received relatively little attention. Much past research has focused on strategies for boosting formal sector productivity in cities as a pathway out of poverty.³²⁰ The World Bank identifies institutions and regulations, infrastructure and land (which includes urban services), skills and innovation, and enterprise support and finance as the four categories of interventions needed for “competitive cities,” but their study does not explore the role of the informal economy.³²¹ Cities with large informal sectors have also tended to ignore them, push them out of sight, treat them as a liabilities, or get rid of them. Many have barely any data on informal employment, and the interlinkages with and contribution to the formal economy are not widely recognized.³²²

Our research aims to help fill this void. It underscores what a growing number of economists have come to believe: the informal sector is not just a problem to be solved by “formalization” but an opportunity to improve livelihoods and prosperity for all. With the right kinds of support, it can raise productivity and incomes for the poorest workers and generate additional benefits citywide.³²³ Affordable and reliable services are a key component of that support. Currently, informal workers suffer disproportionately³²⁴ from poor access to infrastructure and services,³²⁵ making it more difficult for them to connect to inputs and customers, avoid interruptions, and eke out a livelihood. Being under-serviced multiplies the costs of getting and treating water, managing waste, and generating or buying power. It can hit small, cash-poor operations the hardest. In some African cities, for example, households and small businesses lack access to electricity and water not because the service does not exist but rather because the connections are too costly.³²⁶

9.2 Priority Actions

A. Quantify the contributions and challenges of informal workers

Local officials must collect, analyze, and incorporate into official planning better data on the true extent of informal work and its importance to the city as a whole. Data from Mukuru, one of Nairobi’s largest informal settlements, indicates it has a robust informal economy comprising over 20,000 independent and undocumented small-scale service providers who generate almost $64 million (approximately 7 billion Kenyan shillings) annually. It supports both local livelihoods and the economy of the entire metropolitan region, representing a fifth of the total revenue of the Nairobi City Council for the 2015/16 fiscal year and about 4 percent of the Kenyan government’s annual national budget.³²⁷

Dharavi in Mumbai—often considered Asia’s largest slum—has an active informal economy with about 20,000 small-scale manufacturing units and household enterprises producing leather, textile, and pottery products exported around the globe with an annual turnover of over $1 billion.³²⁸ These enterprises provide livelihoods to slum residents. Reports show that 60 percent of Mumbai’s segregated waste is processed in Dharavi, which is home to almost 30,000 waste pickers, and indicates the vital role this informal settlement, which houses almost a million people, plays in managing solid waste in a megacity.³²⁹

A study on the contribution of urban informal settlement dwellers to India’s urban economy, which was based on surveys conducted in 50 Indian cities and comprising over 5,000 households, found their total contribution to be 7.5 percent of national GDP.³³⁰ The survey looked at a broad set of social, economic, and demographic issues in Indian informal settlements, considering incomes, expenditures, education, and living conditions, including their levels of access to services such as electricity, tap water, and sanitation. Across the 50 cities, one-third to half of all residents lacked one or more of these services, but in some of the lower-income Indian states, 80 percent of slum residents lacked these facilities.

Studies like this clarify two issues. First, not all workers living in informal settlements are “informal.” Some are indeed self-employed or own account workers, but others may be employed in formal or legal businesses but their productivity and quality of life are affected by the absence of basic services in informal settlements. Second, those who are informal workers produce the goods and services that benefit the formal local economy, and as such, their lack of access to services and poor living and working conditions have high shadow costs for the economy, with negative impacts on well-being and economic resilience. Detailed surveys, such as the studies mentioned here, can help assess the value generated by otherwise invisible and uncounted informal workers and enterprises located in informal settlements and then bring it to the attention of decision-makers.

B. Stop the exclusion of informal workers from city life

Cities can begin by acknowledging the legitimate value of informal and home-based workers—not harassing or penalizing them—and by ensuring they are granted the same rights as other workers. These rights include legal recognition, economic and social rights, access to core infrastructure and services, social protection, and better representation in city decision-making (see Figure 30). Legitimacy brings the invisible giant—the large number of informal workers—into plain sight.

Urban governance attitudes have too often been shaped by traditional measurements of labor productivity and economic development, which do not recognize or capture the value of the informal economy in the global South. They obscure its importance to the livelihoods and well-being of all city dwellers. A different formula, one that factors in the value of shared opportunities and resilient livelihoods for all citizens, would change these calculations. Recognizing the informal sector’s importance and better meeting its needs can help achieve its potential.

Figure 30 | Cities can support informal workers in various ways for a more inclusive economy (illustrated by three categories of informal workers)

Source: Chen and Beard, 2018.

In Indian cities such as Surat and Ahmedabad, the Mahila Housing Trust has tried this approach by negotiating with city agencies and leveraging city funds on behalf of informal workers. These funds have been used to upgrade housing conditions and access solar energy technologies to run refrigerators, soldering irons, and sewing machines for home-based businesses. These changes have raised incomes, saved money, and lowered energy consumption.³³¹ In Bangkok, an organization of home-based and other informal workers called HomeNet negotiated with the Bangkok Mass Transport Authority to extend service to the outskirts of the city where most informal workers reside, giving them access to inputs for their products and markets to sell them.³³²

Transformation 2 provides more examples of how cities across Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and India have altered their employment practices to contract previously informal waste pickers and their cooperatives for door-to-door waste collection as part of municipal solid waste management systems.³³³

C. Expand access to public spaces, services, customers, and social safety nets

Legal recognition and full acknowledgment of the rights of informal workers implies a full and fair expansion of the benefits of urban living to include all city residents. Government should:

• Provide core public services such as electricity, water, and sanitation to informal workers to make their home-based and other workplaces more productive
• Grant regulated access to public spaces for informal workers to pursue their livelihoods (while balancing the interests of other users of these spaces, such as pedestrians who need to use sidewalks)
• Allow informal worker organizations to compete for public procurement to increase demand for their goods and services
• Extend social safety nets to informal workers
• Promote access to credit for informal workers and their organizations

Examples from cities across the global South illustrate how these steps can improve informal workers’ earnings, well-being, access to opportunities, and economic contributions.³³⁴ For example, a number of cities have opened more space for street vendors. Informal worker groups and NGOs engaged with India’s Ministry of Urban Development, which led to the adoption of a national law to recognize and protect street vendors and identify designated zones for them to operate.³³⁵ The cities of Bhubaneshwar, India, and Durban have worked with local NGOs and informal worker groups to create designated zones in public areas and improved markets for street vendors, acknowledging their important role in each city’s economy.³³⁶

City governments have also offered procurement opportunities. In India they have begun working with the Self-Employed Women’s Association, a trade union with 1.5 million members, to give self-employed women jobs that provide core public infrastructure services. The partnership is organizing workers and linking them to specific city government departments responsible for sanitation, water, electricity, and housing. Since these cities lack the budgets and investment capital to meet the demand for services, employing these informal workers fills unmet needs, creates employment, fosters more inclusive cities, and saves money that would otherwise have to be spent on hiring city staff to manage service delivery.³³⁷

As COVID-19 has made all too clear, informal workers need social safety nets, just as other workers do.

In response to the pandemic, the World Bank has allocated $1 billion to improve social safety net programs for the urban poor in India, and the Indian government is creating the National Database of Migrant Workers to better target assistance to the numerous migrant and informal workers affected by the pandemic.³³⁸ In 2020, Nigeria committed almost $200 million as part of a survival fund to compensate informal workers, including transit operators idled by the COVID-19 pandemic.

In Lesotho and Vietnam, unemployment benefits have been expanded to workers in the informal sector.³³⁹ Many countries have expanded their cash transfer programs, with most Latin American countries, including Bolivia and Colombia, explicitly including informal sector workers.³⁴⁰ In one case in Brazil, the city of Maricá has gone even further, providing additional payments to those with lower incomes.³⁴¹ Programs like these, which are typically more prevalent in rural areas, also need to cover urban informal workers to protect their lives and livelihoods and, in doing so, protect the economic resilience of cities.

We argue that informality is not an anomaly or a transient phenomenon but rather is the very essence of contemporary urbanization in the global South; therefore, urban policies need to be developed from this perspective.³⁴² Trying to formalize the entire informal sector quickly is not feasible, realistic, or necessarily desirable. National governments should make it easier for informal enterprises and workers to join the formal economy if they want to. National governments can provide legal standing to informal enterprises and self-employed informal workers. Legal standing might require them to pay taxes; yet in return, they would no longer need to pay daily bribes or other fees and penalties to be able to operate. They would gain security and more reliable income. Simplifying complex business registration regulations could at least give informal business operators choices.³⁴³ Studies show that reforming employment practices to make it easier to register a business can boost employment because larger informal business owners will formalize their businesses and smaller business owners and daily wage earners are likely to shift to formal jobs.³⁴⁴

More inclusive cities recognize the legitimacy of informal workers and grant them the rights to which other urban workers are entitled. Acknowledging the current and potential contributions of the informal workforce is necessary for achieving greater prosperity citywide. Table 5 lists the actions and roles required of different actors to move Transformation 4 forward.

10.1 What Must Change and Why

Financing for vast needs is inadequate in the global South

In struggling and emerging cities of the global South, investments in core services and infrastructure could pay for themselves many times over, and the costs of inaction can be staggering. But these cities face a major constraint: money. Low- and middle-income cities can rarely afford to finance such projects on their own. Big-ticket infrastructure projects cost far more than they can collect in taxes. Many of the fastest-growing cities in the world have the smallest budgets per capita to meet the growing demand for public services.³⁴⁵ The urban services divide will continue to grow unless cities make large, up-front capital investments in necessary infrastructure and core urban services; they also must invest differently to ensure that the money reaches those whose need is greatest. Ensuring that the poor and marginalized have equitable access to those services usually adds costs. Even investments that will be more than offset by the multiple health, economic, and environmental cobenefits they provide over the long term may prove out of reach for most cities.

Options are limited. Municipal governments in most low-income countries cannot borrow from international development banks. Private finance has generally not been forthcoming because short-term returns to investors are low or uncertain while financial risks are high. Available capital gets absorbed by safer and more immediately profitable investments that benefit more high-end customers.

Privatization is not a panacea

In recent decades, cash-strapped cities have contracted with private companies to build or repair infrastructure and manage services for a profit, sometimes through public-private partnerships (PPPs). But it is unclear whether any core urban service will become profitable for the provider (in the short and medium term) without significant public investment and subsidies to make services more affordable to customers with low incomes.

During the 1990s a number of private companies began providing piped water to cities in the global North and South. Cities privatized municipal water suppliers because they were starved of resources or because their systems were too poorly maintained to provide the quality and quantity of water needed by urban dwellers (See Box 12). But by 2005 most of these companies were losing money. They were required to connect water lines and service to low-income households that could not afford their fees.³⁴⁶ Private companies may have had the know-how and capital to fix leaking pipes and aging systems, but without subsidies, the water was too expensive for consumers, and privatization failed to live up to the hopes it raised. Privatization also stirred up controversy because many objected to the notion that water could be owned and commodified. Activists and scholars have argued that access to safe, reliable, affordable water is a human right.³⁴⁷ Some believe this also applies to sanitation, energy, and public transport. In the public transport sector, privatization of bus services without strong government oversight and regulation, and poorly structured PPPs, have sometimes led to excessive competition for passengers, poor service and maintenance, more road accidents, and gaps in coverage along less-profitable routes.³⁴⁸ These and other disappointments have pointed to the need for governments to oversee and regulate transit to keep it safe, reliable, and affordable. Enlisting the private sector to build housing can also yield mixed results, with private developers less inclined to target low-income groups than more affluent ones.

Urban infrastructure investments ignore social and environmental costs

Cities appear to make the greatest progress towards providing equitable access to core urban services when those services are provided or at least regulated by the public sector. The benefits can be denied to those who cannot or do not pay for them. But outcomes for the public good, such as cleaner air and water or improved health, are not achievable if most individuals lack access to these systems. In cities of the global South, resource constraints and deficits in the supply of water, sanitation, energy, housing, or transport may deny access to all but the privileged few. This leads to social and economic inequalities that perpetuate across generations.

The methods used to analyze and decide upon these investments often do not capture the true long-term economic and social costs and benefits for the city as a whole, tending to focus on direct monetary costs and benefits. Aspects that are more difficult to measure, such as environmental, social, and distributive costs and benefits, network impacts, and longer-term uncertainty, tend to be incorporated weakly or not at all.³⁴⁹ These methods also often overlook needed maintenance expenditures and their benefits over the life of the investments.

The measures residents must take to provide for themselves when core urban services are lacking illustrate another serious market failure: the tragedy of the commons. Public goods may be exploited for private benefit or used in ways that fail to consider the effects on others. Discharging untreated waste into rivers, stripping forests to burn wood for fuel, digging bore wells that drain aquifers, or driving private vehicles in congested cities, may be a cheap, expedient option for individuals. But the “negative externalities,” the price others and future generations will pay for this, are left out of the equation.

The public sector is uniquely positioned to direct capital to investments based on their true costs and benefits and their ability to best serve the public good, but in cities of the global South, they often lack the capacity and resources to do so effectively.

10.2 Priority Actions

A. Increase national government investment, directing it where the need is greatest

The public sector must take the lead when it comes to financial innovation. Since growing cities have few public resources and need substantial and sustained financial investment in core infrastructure, national governments must help.

National governments have a substantial role to play, for many reasons.³⁵⁰ They are uniquely positioned to finance the large up-front capital investments needed to build and connect infrastructure. They collect almost three-quarters of total public revenues worldwide, dwarfing what cities can raise. They can also tap into funding from banks, multilateral lending institutions, development agencies, and, in some cases, philanthropic organizations. Thus, it is not surprising that cities in the global South often depend on fiscal transfers from national governments. National governments typically transfer funds to regional and municipal governments in the form of grants and subsidies. In countries such as Malta, Peru, and Tanzania, grants and subsidies account for over 80 percent of these revenue transfers.³⁵¹

Even projects that are popular, effective, and successful over many years can falter without sustained national government support. Pulling the rug out from under them can stall or regress transformative change. In Porto Alegre, the PB model successfully mobilized local communities, including the poor, improving access to small-scale infrastructure and services, and increasing citizens’ direct political engagement. ³⁵² Yet the proportion of Porto Alegre’s municipal budget allocated through this mechanism remained modest, always under 10 percent, and especially modest in comparison to the share dedicated to larger investments. Fiscal transfers from the national government were necessary to support the city’s overall budget, including this innovative financing mechanism. In 2018, after national-level support and funding dried up due to national and local political changes, local authorities suspended this otherwise successful program.³⁵³

It is important that fiscal transfers not only be reliable but also adequate to enable effective budget planning and management across all tiers of government. The structure of transfers and the conditions attached to them can determine their impact as well. Requirements for tracking and transparency, as well as aligning priorities between the national program and local needs, can contribute to success. Some transfers can be ongoing for general obligations, but others can be part of larger, more specific policy goals. Examples of the latter include Mexico’s Federal Program to Support Mass Transit (Programa Federal de Apoyo al Transporte Urbano Masivo; PROTRAM) for transport, Kenya’s Water Sector Trust Fund, and India’s Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM) and Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation (AMRUT) for a range of urban services. PROTRAM finances public transit systems to reduce GHG emissions in Mexican cities, with technical assistance provided to improve operations.³⁵⁴ Kenya’s Water Sector Trust Fund provides grants and finances water and sanitation services in under-served areas and also includes capacity building and monitoring as key complements to its financing.³⁵⁵ India’s JNNURM, which ran from 2005 through 2014, city development plans were required, along with state cofinancing, to access federal or national financing of urban infrastructure.³⁵⁶ AMRUT followed under new political leadership in 2015, prioritizing water supply and sewer networks, with requirements for state annual action plans and use of PPPs to leverage government funding.³⁵⁷

National governments are key conduits in channeling funding from international aid agencies and external programs to cities that cannot directly access these funds. Tools are available to help national governments identify programs designed to achieve particular goals. For instance, since 2012, the World Bank’s municipal Program-for-Results (PforR) funding instrument has been helping national governments effectively disburse resources to regional and local governments in low- and middle-income countries.³⁵⁸ It offers guidance on how to direct funding based on results achieved in reaching specific goals, such as protecting the environment or improving access to services for vulnerable groups.³⁵⁹ Resources can be allocated to local programs that support or complement national social or community development programs. Pakistan used this instrument for urban property tax reform. India used it to scale up energy efficiency and rooftop solar programs. Tunisia used it to improve local governance and support for delivering municipal infrastructure, Kenya to establish national safety net programs for poor and vulnerable residents, and Burkina Faso to increase access to water and sanitation. This targeting instrument provides both financing and training to help recipients improve the way they administer and track progress. It can help countries design indicators and risk management procedures and implement good standards for budgeting, accounting, and reporting. The PforR makes up a rapidly growing segment of the World Bank’s lending portfolio, especially in low-income countries of Africa and South Asia.³⁶⁰

Finally, national government financing can scale innovations in urban service delivery. This is essential because private investors and many financing institutions cannot risk investing heavily in relatively new approaches. National governments can also work through their development finance institutions, whether national, regional, or global. Governments often establish their own development financial institutions domestically, such as national banks, investment agencies, and investment funds, and they have votes in multilateral or regional institutions, where they can set rules requiring cofinancing, set terms and conditions, and develop new products and services for different needs.³⁶¹

All these pieces together display the national government’s ability to help create an enabling ecosystem to bring resources to cities. This ecosystem involves good planning that prioritizes inclusion, equity, and sustainability. National governments can align policies, policy instruments, and institutions to create mechanisms that develop quality projects, scale them, and aggregate smaller projects into larger ones of greater interest to private financiers. They also can provide “bridges” to domestic, multilateral, and international funding sources to help implement and monitor those investments.

B. Create well-structured, targeted subsidies for affordability and social returns

Financing for urban services can support transformative change if it ensures service coverage and affordability for all. To accomplish this, subsidies can be targeted to close gaps in specific under-served communities and neighborhoods, reduce the costs of services, and lift the crippling burden that self-provision often places on poor households. Measuring the cobenefits of such targeted subsidies and monetizing them would render this investment more financially viable for investors, but this kind of precise targeting poses challenges for governments across the global South. In some cases, policies designed to lower the cost of services do not reach the poorest of the poor, and they can even widen the gaping divide between those who are well served and those who are not. In all cases, targeting imposes administrative costs, which must be balanced against the benefits that targeting can provide.

Many countries in the global South have used targeting to strengthen their social safety nets and ensure that money goes where it is needed most. Examples include Brazil’s Family Allowance (Bolsa Familia) program starting in 2003 and Chile’s efforts during the 1990s to use means-targeted subsidies for conditional cash transfers. In 2005, Indonesia began an iterative process of cutting fossil fuel subsidies that flowed mostly to higher-income groups while redirecting resources towards pro-poor development, thus reducing the burden on the poor and vulnerable groups.³⁶² Likewise, the Dominican Republic targeted direct cash transfers to the poorest 40 percent when reforming its LPG subsidy in 2008.³⁶³ More recently, poverty maps have been used by the World Bank in Luanda, Angola, to target under-served populations, and more accessible data and map processing should allow such efforts to be expanded.³⁶⁴

Electricity subsidies illustrate the unintended consequences when subsidies are not properly targeted. Governments subsidize electricity in myriad ways, including directly through budget allocations, indirectly through price controls on diesel to run generation plants, and through soft loans or tax breaks for investment. Governments sometimes subsidize grid extension and utility operating costs or impose price controls so that consumers pay less for electricity than the cost of providing it. But price controls can mean that utilities continuously operate at a loss. Those that cannot recover their operating costs have no incentive to add more power lines and customers, especially poor customers who cannot pay even price-controlled tariff rates. Subsidies and price controls are politically popular and are hard to abolish. But their benefits often flow not to the lowest-income groups but to better-off people already connected to the grid.

To connect low-income people to electricity and other core services, cities must focus on key barriers that exclude them, such as up-front costs. A “service drop” fee for hooking up to power lines can cost what a poor household earns in a year. Typically, it has to be paid as a lump sum up front rather than in installments, and households cannot borrow money to cover the costs given their lack of access to credit. For electricity and water services, tariffs are typically lowest for low-income customers, but they are not low enough. When Bolivia needed a loan in 1997, the World Bank required it to privatize its water and sewer systems for the city of El Alto, which were in disrepair and hemorrhaging money.³⁶⁵ The company that took over raised water prices by 35 percent, pushing the cost of a hookup for a single house above $445. Many Bolivians earned about $2.50 a day (about $800 a year), so the connection fee would absorb a large proportion of yearly earnings.³⁶⁶ This may have reflected the actual costs of expanding service, but residents were incensed and protested until the contract was annulled. Governments can use subsidies to lower such fees or to pay companies directly to wire households and connect them to the grid. They can spread out the payments, offer loans, or organize bulk discounts for hooking up many homes in the same neighborhood. They can also provide subsidies to make service and hookups more affordable.

Identifying low-income urban households that need subsidies can be challenging and can impose additional administrative and monitoring costs. Some targeting efforts have been more successful than others. Bengaluru and Nairobi use “incremental block tariffs” to make water more affordable for low-income households. ³⁶⁷ However, the benefits flow only to those who already have running water in their homes. Multiple families or tenants sharing water taps (in other words, poorer households) miss out. Better ways to target those most in need of help might include subsidized or flexible payment arrangements for household connections, shared kiosks, or subsidized pay-per-use systems. Chile introduced direct water subsidies to offset the cost of privatized water and structured the program to funnel the largest subsidies to the lowest-income families.³⁶⁸ Colombia’s water subsidy is targeted to neighborhoods and is based on a six-tier classification system, representing socioeconomic status. This channels subsidies to low-income households while avoiding the costs of collecting detailed household-level economic data for means testing. Although targeting by neighborhoods may misdirect some subsidies, it can provide many of the same benefits with fewer expenses.

Providing a finite quantity of water per person at a below-market cost offers another way to reach the poorest of the poor. The city of Medellín established a “lifeline water tariff” of 2.5 cubic meters (m³) per person per month at a subsidized cost, and Bogotá allows qualifying households to receive 6 m³ per person per month of subsidized water. In Durban (eThekwini metropolitan area), a “free basic water” policy gives households a free monthly water allowance of 9 m³.³⁶⁹ However, tensions between free basic water and alternative water supply models continue because South Africa’s government has introduced the right to water as part of the new constitution while simultaneously trying to maintain a cost-recovery management model. One weakness of South Africa’s approach is that free water is provided only to formal homeowners; informal tenants are excluded from the program.³⁷⁰

In public transport, ensuring access for the lowest-income groups has led to mixed experiences. In Argentina and Brazil, transport services are supplied by private operators who receive government subsidies. But a lack of transparency and competition has resulted in both high subsidies and high fares that the poor still cannot afford.³⁷¹ The high capital and operating costs in this sector make targeted subsidies for low-income groups necessary. By using smart cards and carefully screening beneficiaries, it is possible to minimize leakage of the subsidy to higher-income users who can afford to pay more.³⁷² The city of Bogotá aims its transport subsidy squarely at social welfare beneficiaries through its National Beneficiary Selection System (Sistema Nacional de Selección de Beneficiarios). It provides up to a 60 percent discount on a maximum of 40 trips per month on its integrated public transport network.³⁷³ Early evaluations show that it is used mostly by people on the outskirts of the city with the highest fare burdens, and that the free transfer has increased overall accessibility levels in the city.³⁷⁴ As this shows, transfer policies, routes, and fare levels can be tailored to assist those most in need.

In all cases, the structure of subsidies matters and must be context-specific. Such subsidies are discussed in the sectoral actions under Transformation 1 and in more depth in our thematic papers.

C. Use innovative financing instruments and creative payment schemes

Cities can combine funding from diverse sources—national and local, public and private, domestic and external—to finance investments to improve access. And to ensure investments yield lasting benefits, they must set aside funds for maintenance.³⁷⁵ Cities can also rely on innovative combinations of traditional and less standard revenue streams and instruments. Land value capture techniques (described in Transformation 6) or green bonds can be coupled with more traditional property taxes and subsidies. Partnering with the private sector can also play a role here. Blended finance, pairing commercial and concessional funding, can tap into wider markets to raise the cash needed to build, operate, and maintain infrastructure.³⁷⁶ Innovative mechanisms and combinations are key to capturing value from public investments, generating potential sources of revenue, and fostering private sector involvement. Likewise, engaging local communities, both civil society and the private sector, in planning and allocating investment can allow cities to respond to true needs on the ground.

In financing access to energy and housing, cities face obstacles that include large, “lumpy” up-front costs and shared or uncertain asset ownership. Lumpy costs are fixed costs paid at the outset that do not change based on the quantity produced, such as a housing down payment or deposit and a connection to the electricity grid. Uncertain ownership of land and inadequate legal assurances or resolution processes can make capital investment risky. These raise the risk profile, making financing more expensive.

Blended and innovative financing schemes and structures can help overcome these obstacles. Along with targeted subsidies (discussed above) cities can use innovative, flexible, cost-effective technologies and payment plans to help bring services within reach. They can raise the money needed to help pay for renewable energy and energy conservation projects that require up-front investments but will end up saving money and providing environmental benefits. Thailand, for instance, levies a petroleum tax that raises around $50 million a year to finance its revolving Energy Conservation Promotion Fund. This fund finances energy efficiency programs in factories and buildings by providing capital to Thai banks at no cost. The banks then provide low-interest loans to energy services companies.³⁷⁷ Bangladesh has used a combination of subsidies, microfinance, and concessionary loans to encourage homeowners to invest in solar panels. This program started in 2003, and by 2014 it had led to 3 million systems being installed.³⁷⁸

Nonprofit financing, working together with the private sector, can also help address this challenge. PAYG models for consumer installment finance have helped households that cannot afford high initial lump-sum payments. PAYG has been successfully used to pay for solar lighting and clean cooking in Ghana, Kenya, and Zambia.³⁷⁹ In Uganda, PAYG approaches have made mobile phones affordable. In Ghana, PAYG has enabled customers living in informal settlements who were burning dirty fuels indoors to switch to sharing kitchens powered by cleaner fuels such as LPG.³⁸⁰ Digital data solutions can expand flexibility with PAYG as well, with benefits for both providers and consumers. Digital data can improve trust, transparency, and revenues as information is available to everyone, not just to those with connections. Service problems can be identified more readily, and corrupt “adjustments” become clear to all. When digital solutions were implemented for PAYG water in Niamey, Niger, the city posted improved revenues and increased trust and consumers saved time and money.³⁸¹ M-KOPA, headquartered in Nairobi, is one of the most popular companies offering PAYG systems in Africa. From its commercial launch in October 2012, M-KOPA has connected more than 280,000 homes in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda to solar power, and it continues to connect 500 new homes each day.³⁸² Customers acquire solar systems for a small deposit and then buy daily usage “credits” for $0.50, which is less than the price of traditional kerosene lighting.

For the finance innovations of PAYG to be fully successful, they often must be accompanied by educational efforts to promote behavioral changes along with the payment changes.³⁸³ For example, a household needs to adjust its budgeting and cash management to ensure that money is available when needed, not just for one lump-sum payment. Similar efforts often accompany microfinance as well.

Creative payment, ownership, and financing packages expand access to housing. Through land trusts, communities can collectively purchase land to build homes and meet other ongoing community needs while ensuring that, when their investments raise property values, the profits flow back to the residential community. Collective landownership in Thailand’s Baan Mankong program³⁸⁴ and land trusts in Bolivia, Brazil, and the United States combine innovative finance with creative ownership structures to minimize the challenges of gentrification, thus helping manage demand for finance over time.³⁸⁵ Land trusts are often financed by philanthropy that seeks to maximize community benefit, not financial profit. Chile’s ABC program stands for ahorro (“savings”), bono (“subsidy”), and credito (“loans”).³⁸⁶ The ABC program uses creative schemes for financing housing. It uses residents’ savings as a base, offering loans and providing subsidies to make housing more affordable. Any one of these approaches (savings, loans, and subsidies) alone would be insufficient; it is the combination that allows increased access to housing.

National governments can also promote innovative taxation at the local level, including municipal land value capture policies. These policies enable municipalities to recover increases in land value that result from public investment and other government actions. Cities can capture land value by selling land and building rights, or by levying additional taxes or fees when the public infrastructure spending pushes up property values. They can also finance infrastructure by selling bonds that are backed by future increases in property tax revenue that will be realized when land values appreciate. When adding infrastructure makes it possible to build denser neighborhoods and taller buildings, cities can collect revenue by selling the air rights to build higher than standards normally permit without additional fees. In Brazil, Águas Claras, near Brasília, financed its underground metro line by selling land plots as well as air rights. Between 2006 and 2010, São Paulo raised over $1 billion by selling development rights.³⁸⁷ Bond and air rights sales have helped cities around the world finance the infrastructure they need.

New financing instruments connected to carbon-related emissions and credit instruments provide additional nontraditional financing sources. One example is green bonds. Mexico City issued its first green bond in 2016, with proceeds used for energy-efficient lighting, BRT improvements, and water infrastructure modernization.³⁸⁸ Bogotá’s BRT, Transmilenio, and Delhi’s metro system both have tapped the Clean Development Mechanism’s carbon emissions reduction credits traded on the carbon market.³⁸⁹ Such financing requires that the recipient accurately measure emissions reductions, limiting possibilities because of challenges in measurement, but improvements in sensors should offer new opportunities in the future.

Cities can pay to extend services and infrastructure to marginalized communities by tapping into fees paid by the rich. Ouagadougou uses fees paid by high-income households for sewer service to support safe on-site sanitation for low-income households, create a training program for safe emptying practices, and construct school latrines.³⁹⁰ When money collected from customers, national and local revenue streams, and overseas development is insufficient, cities can consider PPPs. South Africa now has standard criteria and methodologies for overseeing PPPs, reducing risks and clarifying dispute-resolution procedures. These kinds of laws and regulations are important to unleash capital flows and increase investment.

D. Regulate private entities and strengthen oversight capacity

There are times when it is appropriate for the government to contract private entities to build physical infrastructure and deliver services. The high cost and large scale of many infrastructure projects, and the length of time it takes to recoup what is spent, means the cost of some of these systems can dwarf what the public sector has on hand. Governments turn to the private sector for long-term financing, which can include loans, equity investment, and sometimes innovative contracts. These arrangements often give a private company a say in operations, tariff setting, and fee structures. So, to protect the public interest, the government will need to set and enforce regulations to ensure quality and public safety and also monitor the price charged to consumers for the service. Most regulatory authority lies with national authorities, but local officials can engage communities to ensure they are getting services of acceptable quality at prices they can afford.

The issue of the cost to consumers is particularly crucial where the market and service structure favors a single supplier. Piped water and sewers are such natural monopolies. Having multiple providers extending physical lines in an infrastructure network would be inefficient and negate economies of scale.³⁹¹ But single providers can use their market dominance to charge exorbitant prices or deliver poor service. To guard against this, regulators need credible information about the service quality and prices charged.³⁹² Competitive tendering, well administered, can help address this challenge, yet the capacity constraints are significant. Another way to learn what is happening on the ground, especially in low-income communities, is for public regulators to engage with civil society organizations. Negotiating with utility managers and financiers to improve services requires regulators to have sophistication, skill, and experience, along with authority and political will to apply and enforce their decisions. They often require training and capacity building to develop these skills.

For government officials to meet higher technical demands and build more participatory processes, they will need training in both the “hard” technical skills of setting and enforcing regulations and in the “softer” skills of more inclusive planning and consultation processes. Building both technical³⁹³ and process-oriented skills ³⁹⁴ will allow government officials to ensure that finance helps catalyze transformation rather than obstructing it.

E. Incorporate wider social costs and benefits into financial analysis and involve the community

Cities must adopt a longer and wider financial planning horizon that looks beyond short-term financial concerns and factors in broader benefits as well as costs. When calculating the pros and cons of public investments, planners and funders should weigh not just the financing requirements for individual projects but also the cobenefits for urban residents in terms of health and productivity.³⁹⁵ For example, cities can get social benefits worth between 4 and 12 times the cost of improving water and sanitation,³⁹⁶ and cities such as Beijing and São Paulo could save up to 10 percent of GDP by investing in public transit and reducing congestion, road accidents, and dangerous levels of air pollution.³⁹⁷

Better analysis requires new tools, concepts, and ways to measure both explicit and implicit costs and benefits, including externalities.³⁹⁸ Models used need to factor in social and environmental outcomes—such as the costs of environmental degradation, the value of ecosystem services, the health impacts on specific populations, and so on—but often these are left out.³⁹⁹ There are many tools that can help governments estimate the costs and benefits of services over time.⁴⁰⁰ Governments should use them, and make sure that they include social and environmental outcomes. Social and equity impacts can be gauged through distributive cost-benefit analysis. This methodology revealed, for instance, that in Bogotá; Istanbul, Turkey; Johannesburg; and Mexico City, BRT systems benefited the under-served more than the richest strata of society over time.⁴⁰¹ Challenges, however, in accurately monetizing both costs and benefits, even with proxy variables, complicate this type of analysis. Survey data from users can complement these quantitative analyses.

Giving communities a voice in planning infrastructure investment and allocating public spending can build confidence and trust in government and improve service delivery to traditionally under-served areas and populations. In Porto Alegre, PB was an integral part of transformative change in the city. The PB model successfully mobilized local communities, including the poor, helping them choose the investments that would most improve their lives, and building the small-scale infrastructure they needed. It helped pave streets, add sewer and water lines, improve local parks, and build and renovate schools, medical clinics and community centers. It also nurtured citizens’ direct political engagement. Instead of being simply clients, recipients, or beneficiaries of the government, they became part of the process. The PB program built on the strength of civil society, encouraging all communities, including the poor, to set their own priorities, and allocated the money specifically for them to help them achieve their goals.

Newer techniques used either in person or online can also tap community opinion and enthusiasm about budget allocations. Simulation and role-playing games, especially those concerning budgets, can be helpful in getting input from different stakeholders. However, care must be taken to ensure that they do not merely confirm the government position, as was the case recently in India.⁴⁰²

Increased and better-targeted investment to address long-ignored needs is essential for a more equal city. This will not be possible without strong national government involvement, well-structured and targeted subsidies, and innovative financing instruments. It will also require financial analysis and regulatory approaches that consider broader social and environmental costs and benefits. Governments will need to build the capacity to perform these calculations, negotiate with service providers, catalyze additional resources, and use them well. Table 6 lists the actions and roles required of different actors to move Transformation 5 forward.

 

11.1 What Must Change and Why

Urban land markets have a sordid underbelly

Cities across the world struggle with corruption and rapacious behavior in land markets because land is such a valuable asset. Land markets in many cities of the global South are opaque and distorted. The reasons include poor records of landownership, lack of transparency on property transactions, complex land titling regulations, and excessive land value speculation.⁴⁰³ Nonexistent or ineffective land regulations mean public sector stakeholders cannot prioritize the public’s interests, make crucial decisions about what gets built where, harness the benefits of increasing land values, or use this asset to generate the municipal revenue needed to invest in services and infrastructure.⁴⁰⁴ These challenges are magnified where city officials either have no development plan or have no power to implement or enforce one. They may lack the statutory authority or technical capacity to create incentives or regulations to guide building activity.⁴⁰⁵ Opaque and nonparticipatory planning and decision-making fails to take people’s real needs into account and widens inequities (see Box 13 for an example from Bengaluru).

Urban land is highly valuable and therefore a tempting prize for the powerful and well connected. Politicians and large private developers often collude, using insider information to buy land cheaply then steering development to benefit themselves or interest groups that support them. They and their allies (including construction and real estate moguls) strike backroom deals that fuel speculative investment and piecemeal development. City development plans are shunned in favor of maximizing profits. Corruption is ubiquitous. In struggling and emerging cities, the bribes paid by developers for building permits and to get around bureaucratic red tape can amount to half of total construction costs.⁴⁰⁶

Even well-intentioned policies can misfire. Regulations and tax incentives designed to spur denser and infill development may merely enrich landowners or large private developers and prompt them to build more high-end and luxury housing in well-serviced locations.⁴⁰⁷ Scant and unenforced regulation and real estate speculation can make well-serviced urban land unaffordable for most people. Such speculative investment crowds out smaller developers and regular households looking to make investments, and the unaffordability it creates may contribute to the growth of informal settlements.⁴⁰⁸

In addition, when cities do try to upgrade overburdened and inadequate infrastructure, private interests may reap all of the benefits and pay none of the costs. Public investments raise land and property values, but there are often no mechanisms for capturing a portion of this windfall and using it to benefit the public.

Poor land records and uncertain property rights help explain why these problems are pervasive. Murky or missing records of landownership and value prevent well-functioning and fair land markets in many struggling and emerging cities. Overlapping land tenure systems, common in many African cities, create confusion and conflict over landownership and inhibit investment. They also foster exploitative practices, which are frequently seen in transactions between private land developers and individual landowners or farmers in the outskirts of cities. ⁴⁰⁹ Further, the lack of systematic and transparent land value assessment systems creates a black market for property transactions and increases the difficulty of compensating landowners fairly.⁴¹⁰ Many real estate investment transactions fall within the informal economy and are neither trackable nor taxable.⁴¹¹ Without clear land records, it is hard for city governments to negotiate with developers to achieve goals such as allocating urban land for affordable housing, capturing benefits from rising land values, or financing public infrastructure.

The lack of complete and up-to-date records of landownership and transactions is a key barrier to designing effective land regulations, property taxation, and incentive schemes. This is why real estate developers and speculators, instead of local authorities, end up capturing all the benefits from public expenditures on infrastructure that raises property values. Yet putting together accurate records is difficult, and many rapidly growing cities simply do not have the capacity to do so. Based on an analysis of landownership and land-use regulations in 200 cities, we found that in struggling cities, land registration records for the urban periphery, established land-use plans, and the ability to implement or enforce them, may be missing altogether. And even when plans exist, private developers and public agencies may ignore them. The largely outward growth currently under way in these cities is therefore either undocumented or occurring through informal transactions, meaning it is unplanned and occurs in a weak regulatory environment. Emerging cities are only slightly better off.

Low-density growth occurs on cheaper land in the urban periphery

New data gathered for Towards a More Equal City show how struggling and emerging cities with scant financial resources and severe deficits in built infrastructure are growing outward much more than upward. This accelerates the consumption of resources such as land, energy, and water and hampers the delivery of urban public services. As a city’s area expands and its population density declines, the per capita costs of public service provision rise, and so do social costs imposed by congestion, pollution, and urban inefficiencies.⁴¹²

Our research identified a host of risk factors and policy choices that can accelerate outward, sprawling growth. High subsidies for fuel and low costs for private vehicles contribute by reducing the perceived costs of driving long distances.⁴¹³ Restrictive density or building height regulations in well-serviced inner-city areas can push development outward.⁴¹⁴ This outward growth typically occurs in areas on the urban periphery with unclear jurisdiction, involving multiple local (and sometimes regional, state, or rural) authorities that do not coordinate on service provision or land-use planning. As a result, it creates blind spots in some cases and confusion in others in the governance of burgeoning new settlements. Outside city limits, developers also find bargain land prices, lax record keeping, and fewer land-use regulations. This allows them to build many units on large land parcels, achieving economies of scale more easily and profitably than building in more central locations. Rapid, haphazard, unplanned sprawl then compounds the challenge and raises the cost of providing infrastructure and services. And limited control over peripheral areas makes it harder for cities to channel, or draw value from, land price surges and building frenzies.

Perverse incentives add to these problems. Governments sometimes fuel building booms in the urban periphery by promoting investment in housing and special economic zones without regard for location and services. Social housing programs typically evaluate affordability in terms of income and housing costs alone, neglecting the high price of commuting or connecting housing with services. Thus, across Brazil, Chile, Ethiopia, India, Mexico, and South Africa, private developers have built in the urban periphery.⁴¹⁵ Some governments, such as those of India and South Africa, are even building this type of housing themselves. Residents who move to these remote locations suffer because social networks that supported families and livelihoods get broken. They are saddled with long, expensive commutes that cut into their productivity and can eat up whatever they save in housing costs and choke cities with traffic congestion and air pollution. Evidence from African, Indian, and Latin American cities shows that access to multiple urban services, including paved roads, drainage, and good-quality piped water, drops sharply in peripheral areas.⁴¹⁶ For these reasons, residents in a number of cities have abandoned some of these housing developments on the periphery altogether.⁴¹⁷ A national housing program in Mexico reportedly cost $100 billion between 2001 and 2012 and built millions of homes in the distant outskirts of cities (e.g., 40 miles outside Mexico City). Today, a large proportion of these homes, which still lack running water and electricity and are not connected to public transport, sit abandoned.⁴¹⁸

Weak spatial planning can result in mounting long-term costs

The long-term cumulative costs of low-density growth in peripheral areas typically dwarf what cities and households imagine they are saving.⁴¹⁹

Weak spatial planning directly contributes to unmanaged urban expansion, which has far-reaching environmental consequences. Studies predict that, by 2030, global urban expansion will menace biodiversity hot spots and threaten ecosystems far beyond city limits. ⁴²⁰ Fast-growing cities envelop prime agricultural land and compete with food production. They also accelerate GHG emissions, air pollution, and urban heat effects.

Urban sprawl exposes citizens to a variety of dangers that will undermine health and economic productivity. For example, some of the most rapid urban expansion is occurring in low-elevation coastal zones, which are vulnerable to floods, sea level rise, and other impacts of climate change. ⁴²¹ Around the world, unabated and illegal construction on urban floodplains and water bodies in cities is already causing disastrous flooding.⁴²² At the same time, the opposite problem of water scarcity is growing rapidly and creating disastrous ripple effects. Because 60 percent of new developments in cities in the global South are not connected to a central water system, many households rely on privately or self-provided bore wells. In Bengaluru, Jakarta, Mexico City, São Paulo, and elsewhere, indiscriminate, unregulated bore wells have rapidly depleted groundwater and caused the land to subside or sink.⁴²³ Clandestine connections to the municipal water supply are commonplace, leading to overextraction and water stress.

Weak spatial planning has had another consequence: a growth in informal, self-built settlements that are now home to over a billion people around the world. Some settlements, such as those in Kampala and Mumbai, are closer to city centers and jobs. But whether located centrally or in the periphery, what most have in common is what they lack: essential public services and infrastructure, including streets, water, sanitation, and electricity. Housing quality is poor, living spaces are overcrowded, and households, even families who have occupied the same spot for generations, often have no security of tenure. At any moment homes may be bulldozed and valued possessions destroyed. Someone may decide to locate a toxic waste dump next door.

Towards a More Equal City presents new analysis of the links between accessibility (the relative locations of jobs and housing) and the time and money spent on mobility.⁴²⁴ 
It shows that, in the global South, up to half of urban dwellers likely experience restricted access to jobs, leading to either high travel burdens or exclusion from opportunities. Figure 31 categorizes residents of Johannesburg and Mexico City according to their access to opportunities and their mobility expenditures. It illustrates a typical pattern: residents who are under-served by transport options tend to be located on the periphery of cities, which are far from most jobs.

One group categorized as the “stranded under-served,” face such severe access constraints that they travel little or not at all. This group includes many who can only commute on foot or by bicycle as well as those stuck in such poor locations that travel is completely unaffordable. Another group, the “mobile under-served,” do travel, often starting from peripheral suburbs far from economic opportunity. They spend a long time and up to 35 percent of their income on commuting.⁴²⁵ We also identified two other categories: “well-located commuters” and “well-located urbanites.” Well-located commuters are better off in terms of access to opportunities because they may own private vehicles, and well-located urbanites are located either close to jobs or in public transit corridors that provide easy access to the majority of jobs. In both cities, fewer than 1 in 10 people fall in this last category.

Overall, the majority of people in both cities—74 percent in Johannesburg and 62 percent in Mexico City—face higher-than-average costs in terms of both time and money to reach their destinations.⁴²⁶ This analysis is backed up by other evidence. A study of social housing residents living in peripheral areas of secondary cities in Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico found that households pay on average about 40 percent less than they would for a centrally located unit in a low-income area, but their commutes cost twice as much and take three times as long as they do for centrally located households.⁴²⁷ This poor accessibility directly affects people’s productivity and, ultimately, their earnings.

Figure 31 | New analysis shows spatial inequities in access to jobs and mobility expenditures in Mexico City and Johannesburg

Notes: Accessibility is the number of opportunities reachable within 60 minutes; mobility expenditure is the actual amount of time and money spent traveling. This analysis allows decision-makers to consider strategies that increase accessibility while keeping mobility expenditures low by understanding the needs in different locations of a city. It allows them to integrate land-use and transport considerations in their decision-making.

Source: Venter et al., 2019.

This synthesis of the World Resources Report: Towards a More Equal City series argues that to keep cities humming as economic, cultural, and political dynamos, large-scale investments in infrastructure for water, sanitation, housing, transport, and electricity are needed around the world to provide growing populations with essential services. These investments need to specifically improve access for those residents currently being left behind—a situation that has come to greater global attention during the COVID-19 pandemic. This synthesis report is a call to action for all levels of government and civil society.

Our research details how the world has entered a new phase of urbanization unlike any we have seen before. Urban populations are increasing exponentially in low-income countries, inequality is deepening, and the share of poor and informal workers in many urban areas is rising. We have argued that informality is a fundamental feature of contemporary urbanization in the global South, and urban policies and decision-makers have ignored it for too long. Large swaths of the population lack even basic municipal infrastructure and services, burdening them with heavy costs, and hindering their potential to rise out of poverty and contribute to the prosperity of their cities and nations. This is happening throughout rapidly urbanizing low- and middle-income countries, but it is most pronounced in cities where populations are surging, public expenditures are not keeping pace, and per capita incomes are stagnant or falling. Although urbanization and economic dynamism once went hand in hand, that link is now broken in many countries. The toll of inequalities in access to urban services remains high and hidden.

The fastest-growing cities are expanding in ways that squander essential resources, make it more difficult to meet residents’ most basic needs, and make mounting problems even harder to fix. Decision-makers are unable to respond to urgent and conflicting pressures to meet immediate needs and control costs. At the same time, they are making decisions that will shape the built environment and the destiny of urban residents for many generations. In addition, many are operating without the resources and capacity needed to balance these tensions. Short-term solutions often win over longer-term approaches. Simply waiting for economic growth and improved business investment to fix these problems is not a realistic option, despite what some urban scholars have suggested.⁴⁷² And strategies that worked for wealthy countries are no match for the array of challenges lower-income urbanizing countries are grappling with today.

Failure to meet these challenges will have dire consequences. Nations have long counted on cities to create wealth and drive economic development. But the chronic capacity and resource constraints in today’s fastest-growing cities could stall these outcomes. In addition to entrenching poverty and inequality, today’s urbanization threatens to degrade the environment, accelerate climate change, and put many more people in harm’s way. This situation calls for a new vision, different thinking, innovative approaches to urban development, and immediate, decisive action.

13.1 A Vision to Shift the Trajectory

The research on multiple urban sectors and interrelated urban challenges presented in the World Resources Report: Towards a More Equal City points to a way forward. It finds evidence that providing more equitable access to core municipal infrastructure and services with a focus on the under-served can help cities escape the vicious cycle in which many of them find themselves trapped. It explains how some struggling and emerging cities in the global South have pursued this vision, and what helped and hindered them along the way. This synthesis distills the lessons learned and highlights approaches available to any city attempting to accelerate progress towards a more equitable, environmentally sustainable, and economically vibrant future. It offers city leaders guidance on what to prioritize, and where and how to begin. The seven transformations described in Chapters 6 through 12 provide several avenues for action. Cities do not need to do all seven at the same time, and different actors can start at different places. There are multiple entry points to create transformative change. The vision for a more equal city that we articulate in this report can be the trigger for action. In a world starting to emerge from the tragedy of the pandemic, which exposed deep inequities, the urgency to act on this vision cannot be overstated.

Our body of research—the framing paper with the seven thematic papers and seven cases studies—shows how investing in more equitable access to services can provide cascading benefits that ripple across whole cities and improve everyone’s quality of life. More equitable access can conserve fragile ecosystems and precious resources, improve public health, and spur productivity and economic dynamism. It can nurture civic engagement. And when done correctly, the steps to close the yawning urban services divide can reduce burdens on the most vulnerable, while bringing about durable and transformative change.

Each of the thematic papers in the series dives deep into different urban sectors (housing, transport, energy, water, sanitation, land, and the informal economy), highlighting effective ways to prioritize the needs of under-served groups while improving health, well-being, prosperity, and the environment in ways that benefit everyone. Each of the city case studies documents practical solutions—ways that governments can work with local communities, national actors, and external stakeholders to understand the reality of problems on the ground and create interventions that best fit their context. This level of engagement not only identifies needs but also helps to evaluate a range of possibilities for action and generate a shared vision for change. In our case studies, we found hope and reasons for optimism. By mustering political leadership, building coalitions, and seizing moments of opportunity, cities can make real progress.

For instance, we found that cities can alleviate the severe shortage of affordable, accessible, well-serviced housing. Upgrading existing informal settlements and connecting them with services, building more rental units, and converting under-utilized urban land to affordable housing can prevent urban sprawl into risk-prone or ecologically sensitive areas. It can also link city dwellers to jobs and cut down on traffic congestion and air pollution. Similarly, cities can improve zoning, spatial planning, and create incentives for private developers to build in well-connected, close-in locations while increasing the supply of serviced land and generating financing for essential infrastructure. These measures can promote affordable, livable density and ensure that development is more sustainable and humane.

Designing safe streets that cater less to drivers of private vehicles and more to residents who walk, cycle, and use public transport yields multiple similar benefits. It can improve access to jobs, reduce commute times, and lower carbon emissions. Enabling residents to cook their food and light their homes with clean, affordable, reliable, energy is another way to close the services divide and improve the quality of life. Cleaner cooking cuts down on dangerous indoor air pollution. Distributed renewable energy sources and energy-efficient buildings can cut costs, boost productivity, and lower a city’s carbon footprint. Cities can improve access to good-quality water and sanitation by supporting interim alternative solutions that curb water pollution and prevent the spread of waterborne diseases while extending the piped water and sewer network in the longer term.

Acknowledging the importance of the vast informal economy is vital to realizing the vision of a more equal city. The informal market fills the vacuum created where vital municipal infrastructure and services are lacking. It does not always do this well, however. Parallel or informal markets are often unregulated, so the quality and price of urban services can vary widely. Although alternative arrangements may be illegal, costly, unsafe, or exploitative and may impose especially heavy burdens on the poor, they act as lifelines providing essential access to services that are not publicly available. Cities can improve regulation and oversight to harness the benefits and limit the costs of these arrangements, which help people cope. They can provide informal businesses with better services and support, stop harassing them, and recognize their right to exist. Cities have a key opportunity to tap into the immense potential of the informal market, its entrepreneurial energy, and the innovative solutions it offers in some sectors, particularly energy, transport, water and sanitation, and waste management. Doing so can also provide more security and better livelihoods for the more than 2 billion people who now work in the informal economy worldwide. That is 60 percent of the global workforce.

This research highlights powerful examples of cities that have begun implementing some of these shifts in mindsets and practices, with a range of stakeholders working collectively to reduce inequality and drive transformative change. It provides new data and in-depth analysis and suggests questions for future study. It will be important, for instance, to further explore and quantify the costs of inaction—the social, economic, and environmental consequences of the services gap and deepening inequality. More useful information will emerge as more cities, along with their national and external stakeholders, embark on the strategies outlined in this research.

In addition to conducting this research, we have been working to help cities apply the lessons learned. In India and across Sub-Saharan Africa, we have been conducting workshops and engagement sessions, in person and virtually, to help diverse groups of stakeholders explore these approaches and translate relevant findings into action. Box 17 summarizes some conclusions from these workshops as they relate to the transformations identified in Part III.

13.2 Pathways for Transformative Change Will Vary across Cities

The seven transformations outlined in Part III of this report can help cities close the urban services divide and ensure a better quality of life for everyone (see Figure 34). They unpack how prioritizing equitable access to urban services can unleash transformative change, and how the benefits can cascade throughout the city, improving the economy, environment, and quality of life. They illustrate pathways to launch transformative change by reimagining service provision, including the excluded, and creating the right enabling conditions. They point to how cities can design and deliver infrastructure differently to prioritize the under-served majority and expand access by partnering with alternative service providers. They reveal how cities can collect, use, and share granular data to uncover and meet the needs of marginalized communities living in informal settlements or working in insecure jobs because counting, valuing, and supporting these populations is essential if cities are to be more equitable. The transformations also explain the need for innovative financing, better spatial planning, and more effective regulation of land markets, coalitions, and policies aligned to drive change. Each of these transformations can feed into, reinforce, and amplify the others. City leaders may sequence them differently, or adapt them to fit local needs, resources, and possibilities.

For instance, if a city already has an active civil society with a mayor committed to improving services in under-served areas, data collection and coalition building might be the most practical place to start. If a city is already receiving climate-resilience financing from multilateral development banks or foreign aid agencies, then the next piece of the puzzle might be ensuring different parts of the government have aligned policies and a shared vision to drive collaboration, find synergies, and avoid waste and duplication. Cities that lack disaggregated data on the most vulnerable communities and informal settlements may need to begin gathering this data before trying to target investments to aid these communities. Leveraging land and spatial planning effectively is a powerful and vital tool for redirecting growth in ways that serve the public interest and break down spatial inequalities. But this requires both granular community-level data and mechanisms for targeted investment in specific locations of the city.

Making these essential shifts requires decision-makers to break out of silos, build new coalitions, and embrace new resources, technologies, and policy innovations. This means city decision-makers, practitioners, financiers, investors, and other stakeholders may need to adopt a new mindset. City leaders can benefit, first and foremost, from inviting diverse stakeholder groups—particularly those representing vulnerable communities—into the process of creating, implementing, and monitoring solutions. These coalitions can propel and sustain change even when governments shift and political leadership wanes. Coming to terms with informality is another crucial mental leap. The informal economy provides housing, livelihoods, and vital services to millions of people and helps prop up the formal economy, and leaders must begin to work with it rather than against it. Finally, leaders need to recognize cities as integrated systems where decisions made in one urban sector affect outcomes in others. Strategic, long-term, cross-sectoral thinking and planning are vital, as is collaboration across municipalities since actions cities take can affect people far beyond their boundaries.

The summary tables of recommended actions at the end of each transformation chapter spell out how different actors can create the momentum needed for transformative change. They offer a menu of ways to tap the knowledge and influence of diverse stakeholders and suggest steps each can take to advance the necessary transformations discussed in Chapters 6 through 12. We elaborate on the roles that city government (with the different agencies composing it); national government; civil society actors, including NGOs, experts, and researchers; the private sector; and the international community, including development finance institutions, should play to help usher in transformative change. All of these fall within the short to medium term because cities in the global South are growing and making fateful decisions so rapidly that there is no time to lose. Interventions may run into hurdles or take time to show results, but the long-term consequences of failing to act are dire.

Figure 34 | Seven cross-sectoral transformations can achieve a more equal, prosperous, and sustainable city

Source: Authors.

13.3 The Time to Act Is Now

This report was drafted in the midst of an altered reality that could make the dangers it highlights and steps it recommends all the more urgent. The COVID-19 pandemic has devastated cities, overwhelming health care services, bankrupting businesses, and draining revenue that public transit systems relied on. And while cities in wealthy nations have begun to crawl back to life, cities in the global South are facing new outbreaks. Disease and death continue to stalk all communities, but especially those where people cannot self-isolate, turn on the tap to wash their hands, work online at home, or run errands safely in cars. Over 1 billion people who live in informal settlements in the global South—representing two of three people in low-income countries—have no means to stay apart or follow social distancing norms. And millions who work in the informal economy face a cruel choice: keep laboring under conditions that expose them to the virus or face hunger. They lack the social safety nets that would allow them to do anything else.

During a pandemic, access to infrastructure and services can mean the difference between life and death. And even in ordinary times, increased access benefits human well-being in countless other ways. It diminishes poverty, increases equality, and makes cities more sustainable, livable, and resilient. It bolsters productivity and fuels economic growth, supporting national and global goals for a more prosperous future. Closing the urban services divide and ensuring equitable access to services and infrastructure in the ways described in this report will also advance global efforts to protect the natural world and future generations from climate change.

It is not too late to change course. As the pandemic has shown us, practices and mindsets can be changed in a short time. The fast-growing cities in the global South and all over the world can act on the opportunity to build and invest differently. Prioritizing equitable access to core urban services can offer an effective entry point, a blueprint, and a way forward.

ABC ahorro, bono, credito (savings, subsidy, loans)

AMRUT Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation

BBMP Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike

BDA Bangalore Development Authority

BRT bus rapid transit

CODI Community Organizations Development Institute

COF Corridors of Freedom

CO₂ carbon dioxide

GDP gross domestic product

GHG greenhouse gas

JMP Joint Monitoring Programme

JNNURM Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission

LPG liquefied petroleum gas

NGO nongovernmental organization

OECD Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development

OPP Orangi Pilot Project

PAYG pay-as-you-go

PB participatory budgeting

PforR Program-for-Results

PPP public-private partnership

PROTRAM Programa Federal de Apoyo al Transporte Urbano Masivo (Federal Program to Support Mass Transit)

PV photovoltaic

SDG Sustainable Development Goal

SDI Slum/Shack Dwellers International

TPS Town Planning Scheme

UDZ urban development zone

WHO World Health Organization

WRI World Resources Institute

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