World Urban Forum

So far this topic has not attracted much attention in the eDebate. However, it would seem to me that infrastructure development can be a key element since it provides the double benefit of making cities productive and providing jobs. However the link between infrastructure creation and job creation is not automatic. City governments invest enormous resources in infrastructure development and at the same time claim that unemployment is the number one problem they are facing, particularly youth unemployment. What therefore can be done to increase the job creation potential of these infrastructure investments?

The disables { or vulnerables} should be consider in whatever investment or infrastructure to be created in the cities, this will give them more hope for the future also to make them have sense of belonging, in the area of good job, home, play center etc. If this is done, it will prevent disable poeple standing on the street begging

Thanks for this point. Planning infrastructure for people with disabilities is extremely important, and constructing and retro-fitting such infrastructure can also create many new employment opportunities.

Speaking more generally, there are many lost opportunities to create new jobs through the use of labour-intensive techniques for urban infrastructure development, housing and slum upgrading. It would be great is participants could share experiences in the area of labour intensive infrastrutcure investments!

When using infrastructure to spawn job creation, cities must take care not to invest in infrastructure only for firms, but to also invest in infrastructure for those households who will not be employed by a firm. Too often cities who want to attract jobs offer firms endless benefits, including provision of infrastructure amenities. The firms, and its employees, benefit, but those residents who are unemployable, do not. In many cases the private sector steps in to provide urban amenities (electricity, water, bus) to the general public, at a higher cost than these same services provided by the government.

The solution lies in equitable planning, where cities provide firms infrastructure at a scale and scope that the general community can also benefit from. And there are written agreements that ensure all households have access to these services, not simply households associated with the firm.

City infrastructures should take equitable criteria into consideration. Government, city councils, developers should ensure housing, shopping, recreational arcades are fairly distributed or located , accessible and beneficial to all. Luxurious,middle class, low income,mixed residential and shopping neighborhoods.

Thanks Steve for this topic, I was hoping to glean some things from the contributions of others but I suppose I can share a few thoughts too. I agree with you that the link between infrastructure creation and job creation is not automatic, but I believe that providing good infrastructure could serve as a catalyst for the informal sector (especially where the population is entrepreneurially endowed). . I also think the context will determine to what extent infrastructure development could stimulate job creation as I do not believe it is a “one cap fits all” scenario. It was said that infrastructure investment stimulated job creation in southern California a couple of years ago. I remember living and working in Abuja, Nigeria in the early 90s, the city was still literally a “big construction site” and the basic infrastructure (road network, electricity telephone lines, water, functional public spaces, etc.) was not as stretched as it is presently. An informal sector which depended on this grew and thrived and was said to have played a prominent part in sustaining the real economy when the then military government faced sanctions
I, however, wonder what the meeting point (if there is any) between urban planning, inclusivity, politics and economy looks like and what issues may be addressed by such an interface. Thanks.

Of course if infrastructure is developed, it will create jobs. This is a bit obvious.

In the Netherlands, there is a very interesting project, called SprintCity. This is a serious game, developed to bring together stakeholders and learn about the implications of investing in infrastructure and in spatial development around rail stations. By playing the serious game (containing real life data) players can directly see the implications of the investments on factors such as job creation, but also mixed-use and population growth - so this is a very interesting tool in estimating the outcomes and returns of investments in infastructure.
More information is to be found here:http://www.deltametropool.nl/nl/sprintcity_english
I'm curious wheter there is a similar tool in other countries that can assess and harness infrastructure investements.

Thanks to all for the interesting posts. Let me make a few quick comments.

1. With respect to Anna's comment on the importance of infrastructure not just for private firms, but also for households, I fully agree. Particularly for low-income areas and for those working in the informal economy, the home is often the workplace (in fact this is the title of a joint UN-Habitat and ILO publication) and infrastructure investments supporting low-income areas, can have a powerful impact on job creation.

2. Thanks Uche for your comments and, although I have no answers to provide, I believe that employment can and should be integrated into urban planning as a specific goal. There is some work ongoing which provides methodologies and tools for employment impact assessments, including the use of social accounting matrices.

3. And this brings me to Bourdon's comment. Of course it may be obvious, a no-brainer, that infrastructure and employment are linked. But what is far from obvious, is how to optimize job creation from infrastructure investments. There are many alternative approaches for infrastructure, and the ILO has shown that labour-intensive infrastructure investments can provide cost-effective means of creating additional jobs from a given amount of infrastructure investments. In some cases, job creation can be increased over three fold. For more information on employment-intensive investment, see: http://www.ilo.org/emppolicy/areas/employment-intensive-investment/lang--en/index.htm

Finally thanks so much Yvonne for information on the SprintCity project. I am interested to know if there are other examples for simulating employment impacts. Some studies have been carried out with respect to the US Stimulus Funds (the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act - ARRA) . I am listing some of these publications below:

Annex 1: Publications assessing the employment impacts of infrastructure spending in the US economy
American Public Transportation Association (APTA). 2009. Changing the Way America Moves: Creating a More Robust Economy, a Smaller Carbon Footprint, and Energy Independence. Washington, D.C.: APTA. Spring.http://www.apta.com/research/info/online/documents/america_moves_09.pdf

Josh Bivens, John Irons and Ethan Pollack, “Tools for Assessing the Labor Market Impacts of Infrastructure Investment,” EPI Working Paper no. 283, Economic Policy Institute, Washington, D.C. USA, April 7, 2009.

Council of Economic Advisors, Executive Office of the President, Estimates of Job Creation From the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, May 2009. May 2009.

Heintz, Robert, James Pollin, and Heidi Garrett-Peltier. 2009. How Infrastructure Investments Support the U.S. Economy: Employment, Productivity and Growth. Amherst, Mass: Political Economy Research Institute. January. http://www.peri.umass.
edu/236/hash/efc9f7456a/publication/333/
Mattera, Philip, and Greg LeRoy. 2003. The Jobs are Back in Town: Urban Smart Growth and Construction Employment. Washington, D.C.: Good Jobs First. November. http://www.goodjobsfirst.org/pdf/backintown.pdf

Polin, Robert. “Infrastructure Investments and the Obama Recovery Plan,” New Labor Forum 18(2): 96-99, Spring 2009.

Pollin, Robert, Heidi Garrett-Peltier, James Heintz, and Helen Scharber. 2008. Green Recovery:
A Program to Create Good Jobs and Start Building a Low-Carbon Economy, Center for American Progress and Political Economy Research Institute,
http://www.peri.umass.edu/fileadmin/pdf/other_publication_types/peri_report.pdf
Reconnecting America. 2008. Jumpstarting the Transit Space Race: How the New Administration Could Make America Energy-Independent, Create Jobs, and Keep the Economy Strong. Washington, D.C.: Reconnecting America. October. http://reconnectingamerica.org/public/download/jumpstartingtransit

Romer, Christina and Jared Bernstein. 2009. “The Job Impact of the American Recovery and
Reinvestment Plan,” http://otrans.3cdn.net/45593e8ecbd339d074_l3m6bt1te.pdf

Surface Transportation Policy Project. 2004. Setting the Record Straight: Transit, Fixing Roads and Bridges Offer Greatest Job Gains. Washington, D.C.: STPP. January. http://www.transact.org/library/decoder/jobs_decoder.pdf

Lets stop beating around the bush. Labour intensive techniques will not work without a heavy support from the government. Private enterprises will only use such techniques when they generate more profits than capital-intensive ones, and for this there is no need to promote labour-intensive techniques, they will be used anyway. Lets agree that employment creation is critical and that there should be a price tag on unemployment. People should be paid to dig holes and then paid again the fill them up, for the sake of employment generation / livelihoods. This goes right against the private sector rationale, and there is simply no way to generate full employment and social justice in the free market economy. Lets stop beating around the bush.

I have strong views on this subject, but as your Moderator, I would love to see others step up and comment on this posting. I cannot agree more that employment creation is critical, and that there should be a price tag on unemployment. However, does that mean that people should be paid to dig holes and fill them up again? Cannot labour-intensive public works, in some cases, produce useful, cost-effective and high quality infrastrcuture and at the same time be profitable for small-scale labour-based private contractors, such as those being trained by the ILO. By saying so, does that mean one is beating around the bush?

I am attaching few slides which provide comparative costing and other economic impact indicators which compare labour-intensive with equipment intensive rural road construction in Lesotho, Zimbabwe and Cameroon. However, there are also experiences in urban settings, using labour-intensive methods for slum upgrading schemes.

I also encourage participants to look at experiences on urban housing and employment in Addis Ababa which have been posted under the Housing and Employment topic.

Steven, exactly where can I find the experiences on urban housing and employment in Addis Ababa which have been posted under the Housing and Employment topic? Where is this "housing and employment" Thanks.

Hi Edmundo,

The exact title of the topic is:

Integrated urban Housing program as strategy to alleviate urban poverty through urban job creation, posted by: MEKONEN WUBE ERMED of the Municipality of Addis Ababa on 14 May 2012.

The link is: http://www.worldurbanforum.org/productive-cities/integrated-urban-housing-program-as-startegy-to-allevaite-urban-poverty-through-urban-job-creation

Mekonen would certainly appreciate more information on your own work on housing and employment and links to other Municipalities.

Thanks, Steve. Here are two references for Mekonen. I can also provide others, if he wishes:

. "Labour Conditions for Construction: Building cities, decent work & the role of local authorities"
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/book/10.1002/9781444306446

. "Shelter, employment and the informal city in the context of the present economic scene: implications for participatory governance" http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0197397500000187

Dear Steve and Ed Werna, thank you very much for the discussion. I would like to thank both of you for the references. i would be happy if i get more .
Ed , i have tried to read your profile and you have an excellent experience regarding job creation in urban areas.

As Steve mentioned i have posted the topic integrated urban Housing program as strategy to alleviate urban poverty through urban job creation. it is our experience of job creation in housing sector. We have also working on road improvement and job creation. it is a kind of
Cobblestone road paving which is a simple and replicable technology; it has an ability to create thousands of jobs for men and women . More than 20 towns in Ethiopia, including Addis Ababa, have now institutionalised cobblestone road construction by integrating it with public employment creation.
Today in Addis Ababa , more than 18,000 individuals have become direct beneficiaries from the sector and saving up to 75000 USA Dollars. However this is fully engaged by the government and there are many incentives to participate the unemployed people in the project. My question to you . it is from our experience, If public employment program "with incentive" were not around in developing countries, what would be the fate of the young unemployed people in the city? and how can we survive in the city where there are enormous unemployed people exist in the city? i am very much worried about this unemployment issues. Should government continue to play the role of creating employment by subsidy,incentive etc? let us discuss

Thanks for your answer to my comment, Steve. One question: construction is normally a "boom and bust" sector. It is of course all right to use housing and other construction activities to generate employment. But what happens when such activities come to an end? It is difficult to make them continiuous forever. What to do with the masses of people who worked in such activities and then become unemployed during a bust cycle?

Thanks for your comments and questions, Mekonen. Interestinlgy, last Wednesday I gave a presentation at GIZ's Symposium "Work in cities: Decent jobs for all?“. And during the session there was also a presentation exactly about "Labour intensive infrastructure development – the cobblestone initiative in Ethiopia"! About your question: "If public employment program "with incentive" were not around in developing countries, what would be the fate of the young unemployed people in the city?" Provision and/or upgrading of housing, other buildings, roads, parks, etc. is a constant activity in cities and towns. Governments have promoted this (albeit at different levels) continously, and not only with specific incentives. Taxes can be used for such activities. And grants or loans. The private sector should also be encouraged to invest with its own financial means, and this happens often. But the question of generating full employment is a big one, and many contributions in this e-dialogue have helped to point the way forward.

Hello all participants in this vital discussion on urban infrastructure. I am sorry (for myself) for not having participated on this topic before, due to heavy commitments over the past two weeks on other work. But, if the debate is still open, I would like to contribute a couple of thoughts.

Urban infrastructure upgrading/renewal has always been a significant way of creating jobs during recessions as a way, not only of improving the functioning of cities but also injecting money that gets the local economy moving. This is central Keynesian economic policy and has been used regularly by the World Bank and some government for this reason. I am also a fan of labour-intensive jobs – even if the government has to lean on contractors to use this mechanism.

But this is not my main contribution. Rather it is the issue of ‘greening the urban environment’: that in the past there have been serious distortions in where the available money has gone into urban infrastructure construction. Far too much has gone into transport and especially roads, subsidising middle classes in their car-driving habits and with pitifully little going into sidewalks to give the poor at least some comfort in their getting around the city, lacking cars and with uncomfortable and heavily polluting informal ‘public’ transport. This has been called (I think with justification) socialism for the rich and laissez faire for the poor.

Far less should have been spent on transport, with policies of restricting cars and promoting better public transport and generally favouring mobility and accessibility for the poor – in the process also improving air quality in cities and reducing the demand in (increasingly scarce) energy resources. Singapore was always the shining example of how to manage urban transport with Curitiba – now emulated all over the world – as a good runner-up.
But the worst problems in southern cities have had to face is, of course, the systematic under-investment in sanitation and, unfortunately, the culture of attempting to follow the example of the cities in the rich countries. What is meant here is that sewer systems and solid waste transport and dumping in peripheral areas have been deemed to be (too) expensive and have in general been poorly managed. In the North we invented these systems for economic and sanitary reasons, abandoning pre-existing economies of the re-use of human and other organic waste and wastewater.

Now, with ‘nexus thinking’ which I referred to on other parts of these HABITAT e-debates, it is being realised that in-situ treatment of wastes, generating biogas and using human wastes, through ‘ecosan’ technologies that supply fertiliser and water for urban and peri-urban agriculture is the way to go. This is truly a revolution in urban sanitation that could also create massive numbers of jobs and be the correct way to solve the festering problems of inadequate urban sanitation in so many southern cities – adding also to the alleviation of the growing problem of urban malnourishment. As yet, very few people have started down the road of rethinking.

Maybe Ed Werna already mentioned his commissioning a Manual on Formulating Projects and Studies Concerning Labour Issues in Greening the Sectors of the Built Environment that goes into these questions – and many more concerning the greening of the built environment. Try to get hold of this which you might fin to be a great read!

Dear Ed, thank you very much for your response. I have tried to refer the GIZ's Symposium "Work in cities: Decent jobs for all?“. How can i get the documents discussed in the Symposium?

you have already answered my questions but my point is in most developing countries there are incentives to participate or to involve people in the work and these people are unemployed. In my view this will not continue. People should invent work by themselves to survive but if we always provide them work ,they will be dependent on government and at the end they will be an instrument a burden for investment.

Dear Adrain, am happy you are now contributing on this dialogue. you have mentioned that urban environment improvement can create job. can you elaborate it with some reference because i am now consulting on this type of project. Our environment needs to be clean ,livable for its residents. There is also a principle "environmental justice" "people must speak for themselves" about an environment defined as "the place where we live, where we work, and where we play,"

some of the serious environmental problems are solid waste , waste water, air pollution etc. However through job opportunity, we can make our environment clean. This day waste are wealth even human wastes. In my city micro and small enterprise are organized to collect house to house solid collection as the same time they are sorting wastes to be recycled. If you work in large scale, we can create more jobs. As you cited, there are also a possibility to create renewable energy like bio gas. Let us discuss? CAN ENVIRONMENT IMPROVEMENT CREATE JOB?

Thanks to Mekonen, Bourdon, Ed and Adrian for these latests posts, and I am happy to see the discussion on infrastructure and employment taking off.

First, Adrian, yes, the debate is still open and will remain so until the World Urban Forum in September, but I will now prepare a report on the debate thus far, so future posts may not be reflected in my report. However, if this is a useful forum for ongoing exchange, contacts and future work, let it continue! My view is that participants can and should use it as a forum to implement the ideas and strategies being posted.

Secondly, I am intrigued by Mekonen's queries - and Ed's response - concerning the need for ongoing government intervention and the need for subsidies and incentives to ensure job creation (especially for youth). I am not sure if you mean that such programmes will not be sustainable or break even if they are not subsidized - or if rather you mean that the unemployed should receive incentives in order to participate? In the former case, I refer back to ILO's work which demonstrate that in many cases, labour-intensive infrastructure development not only creates more jobs but can also be undertaken at the same or even lower costs than equipment-intensive infrastructure. What are your experiences in Ethiopia? Do you have costing data on the stone paving (cobblestone) projects? Whereas this may be more costly than traditional tarmac surfacing, when future maintenance costs are integrated, stone paving can often be less expensive.

With respect to Bourdon's boom or bust comments, I agree with Ed in that: "Provision and/or upgrading of housing, other buildings, roads, parks, etc. is a constant activity in cities and towns." Therefore infrastructure development can be planned to be an ongoing and not just temporary source of job creation. Also, I encourage participants to refer to the literature on "employment of last resort" schemes where such programmes can in fact counteract "boom or bust" cycles by being a countercyclical sources of job creation. For more on this, see:

www.economistsforfullemployment.org

Adrian & All: I referred to the Manual mentioned by Adrian on my comment entitled "Greening the urban environment and the labour nexus". The Manual is presently available in draft form and will be published soon. For those interested in the publication, please remind me in a couple of months via the Urban Labour Network www.urban-labour.net.

Thanks Steve for your updated summary and Mekonen for your follow-on. Thanks also Ed for the reminder about having posted information on the Manual (I am afraid this debate has become so extensive that I get lost is visiting the various fragments and am sure that I miss important things!)

Whilst in general I think the debate has produced some extremely good and useful material, that there is nevertheless - at least in what I have read - a certain lack of strategic thinking. One entry point is the notion that part of the solution to the issues we face is ‘environmental improvement’. In my long experience in this field, the whole use of ‘environment’ as a topic means ‘wouldn’t it be a nice idea if...’ and then things simply don’t get done. We have seen more than one reference to ‘greening the built environment’ and planting more trees, again reducing serious issues to ‘a bit of urban beautification’.

I have used the term ‘nexus thinking’ a couple of times in the debates. Please refer to the European Commission Report on Development 2011/2012, which is on this theme and also the outputs of the Bonn2011 Nexus Conference. Both can be found in the internet (Google) under these titles. Essentially they are loud and clear about the emerging problems of water and energy supply and food security (the term ‘nexus' here means combining solutions to all three through integrated planning and government intervention).

The point is that these are NOT ‘ENVIRONMENTAL’ ISSUES BUT ISSUES IN DEVELOPMENT – and in this context ‘greening the urban environment’ (maybe the wrong terminology, giving the wrong signals?) is an urgent matter of intervention to stem the growth in scarcity/deficiency of essential resources and in the case of energy to stem the production of greenhouse gases/global warming.

The debates we have had said significant things about urban farming, which is an essential contribution to improving food security and hence a core nexus issue. But little has been said about how to reduce the need for water and above all energy before the price becomes unmanageable and cuts lead to cities becoming unworkable and unliveable in.

Then let’s think a little more about ‘local economic development’ – generally seen as a nice idea to create local jobs, but difficult in the face of (neo-liberal) globalisation. Maybe we should, however, be thinking about this in terms of the future. Globalisation is a basic cause of the lack of local employment. Everything can be produced cheaper in China so China is becoming rich at the expense of those who don't have the capital and skills and organisation to compete. But this way of economic organisation uses a lot of energy in manufacturing with machines and all the transport of stuff around and around the world. The fact that in Africa the informal economy is mainly street sales is a function of nobody producing anything anymore.

This is not only impoverishing, it is also disempowering and as energy prices rise, things won’t be imported any more because of the rising expense of machine production and global transport. This is good insofar as it will open the opportunity for local manufacturing again (just as, for instance, the sanctions imposed on South Africa at the time of apartheid actually stimulated local production!) but how long will it take to generate the skills necessary to do things locally again, to rebuild the local economy and at the same time re-orient the (re)construction of local infrastructure to address the nexus problematic? Surely we should already focus seriously on how we can address these problems, rather than waiting for them to crash down upon us.

In my last contribution I wrote a little about what a nexus approach to life might do in terms of the re-use of urban organic waste and wastewater, linking this to urban agriculture. This was to indicate that nexus initiatives could create considerable work – and be empowering in bringing local resource management back into local hands as well as making considerably better use of resources.

I realise this is all some way from where the debate is at – as I have had almost no response to any of the substantives things I have tried to contribute. I hope, nevertheless, they stimulate some thinking about what lies ahead and how we should be preparing ourselves in ways that will create better lives and not that we simply let the ‘unsustainability’ of what is going on collapse over our heads.

Dear Steve, this is a response to your comment of 6 June. Yes, on the one hand there is a lack of infrastructure for urban development. On the other hand, there is shortage of employment. Combining both is a win-win situation. I am sure that Mayors are aware of this, and would love to improve city infrastructure and at the same time generate employment. This would lead to their re-election, or becoming MPs, pehaps Ministers. But there is a shortage of funds to implement these activities.There is still lack of infrastructure on many urban areas, in tandem with unemployment. Is there a magic bullet? How to provide the all necessary infrastructure and in the process generating full employment (ideally with a focus on labour-intensive techniques), if there is not enough funding available? With no appropriate funding, the discussion becomes rather academic. Lets face it, it is very hard to provide all the necessary infrastructure for cities and towns and to provide full employment. I re-emphasise that the free market economy has strong limitations to provide this. There is simply no way to generate full employment and social justice in the free market economy. It is an structural issue. We need to discuss alternatives. Although I could not read 100% of the comments in this e-debate, I found at least one alternative idea, put forward by Adrian Atkinson: the return to local economic development (anti-globalization) and the focus on a community-based economy, with a modest approach to consumption. This could do the trick, and provide full employment. The discussion of alternatives to a globalized free-market economy is an important issue to be discussed in this e-debate. Again, combining infrastructure development and employment generation is OK, but it has shown to have strong limitations, given the recurrent levels of urban poverty. Something is missing and/or wrong. Lets discuss alternatives.

Hello Bourdon: concerning your worry that the money might not be there for the kinds of urban infrastructure projects that might make a difference - and create more jobs, I think you will like this quotation from a recent World Bank publication (World Bank (2011) Towards a Partnership for Sustainable Cities – Draft Note. World Bank, Washington DC.):

“... the problem at stake is not so much one of trade-offs between growth and environment, but is mostly a ‘gross misallocation of capital’. If $1.3 trillion (less than 10% of annual investments) were redirected into green investments across ten sectors, growth and poverty reduction would be achievable while promoting a greener and sustainable economy.”

Cities are agent of change and the genesis of national development. It is therefore prudent that they are the magnet pole for investment making them economically attractive for rural dwellers.

In this regard, therefore, location of the infrastructure should the a major factor as it contribute towards urban mobility, productivity and human settlement.

For the people to fully benefit from the investments pumped into their cities, important infrastructures such as market squares, shopping malls, higher educational institutions, harbours, airports and other a-must-attend facilities should be located at the distances from each other (where possible not less than 10km).

This will ensure that the people make maximum use of the spaces in-between them and also avoid overcrowding not to mention reduction in traffic.

In addition to the spatial organization of the infrastructure, investors must be compelled to incorporate training and skill development programme for the youth to ensure sustainable development and management.

This will provide the youth with the needed skill to set up their business and employ others to work for them, thus sustainable poverty reduction.

I thank you all for your responses and contributions. I am still wondering what would be the concrete and doable measures to change the present inadequate situation. For example, Adrian mentioned "gross misallocation of capital". So, how can be this be practically reverted? There are surely interests to keep this capital misallocated.

We seem to know the problems, but still not the solutions. I am still not convinced that the free market economy is the answer to address the situation. I Would welcome responses to prove me wrong.

Dear Bourdon.
This is a response to your comment of 22 June. Infrastructures for urban development and full employment is in fact a combination of a win-win situation and major decision-makers, like the Mayors are aware of this. But we always go back to the basic question: are there basic funds to implement these activities? Example, provinces, cities and municipalities in the Philippines are mandated by law to provide full employment to their constituents and basic services and facilities down to barangay (village) level. Reality is, even in highly urbanized cities, employment and basic services and facilities remain a challenge and a gap in urban and even rural development.

We may want to go back to Oita Prefecture's (Japan) local economic development: one-village, one-product movement (or think locally, act globally) as they focus on a community-based economy. This is not new, I was in Japan back in 1999 to learn about this and indeed, full employment was never an issue then. Local economic development should be a very strong alternative or options to infra investments and job creation.

CDIA has a toolkit on prioritizing infrastructure. I already attached a link in previous discussions.

Slum upgrading and job creation are closely linked with each other.Upgradation brings together (a)community structure at grass root level(b)space which can also be used for home based economic activities(c)employment for on-site informal jobs such as vendors and other services and(d) a platform to provide skill training.
There are several examples in India on these activities particularly among cities Ahmedabad,hyderabad,bhopal etc.We can also involve private sector to promote upgradation as it benefits their employees(thoswe living in slums)or those who provide informal services to their establishments.

Infrastructure investments should be made in a context of city region rather than typical boundries of a city government.In this regard integrated delivery of infrasructure is critical for example transport.It improves connectivityfor smooth movement of workforce.Similarly health,education,recreation,business centres etc. can be expanded in a city region.
In this regard regional authorities play deciding role along with proper coordination with city governments.Indian constitution has a provision of metropolitan /District Planning Committees as per article 243ZE which expects integrated planning.However the progress made on this is far from satisfactory.We have to seriously think -how to activate integrated development of infrastructre in a city region and individually among small and medium towns.

With all due respect, I would like to express my dissatisfaction with this e-debate. I am not pointing fingers to anyone, but am just surprised with the lack of new ideas and creativity. Issues discussed, such as the need to create employment, or employment to young people in particular, the importance of the informal sector, the fact that infrastructure provision creates jobs, labour-intensive techniques etc., are as old as development theory itself, actually older.

What is new, really? What are the new approaches and paradigms in regard to urban labour? What are the state-of-the-art debates on this body of knowledge? What is the direction to which the whole thing is going? Who are the main thinkers and doers? None of these have cleared surfaced in the discussion, really.

To continue focussing that construction generate jobs? That should be labour-intensive? Please... (with due respect).

There seems to be a stagnation of ideas and practices.

My intention in this message is not to offend anyone. But I really had to say what I said.

I hope that a face-to-face meeting at the World Urban Forum, as suggested by this Urban Labour Network, would help us to move ahead.

OK Bourdon, let’s try to get to the bottom of this thing. The difficulty of creating jobs (and, indeed, wealth of any kind) in the South has everything to do with the current global rules of the economic game. ‘Neo-liberalism’ (some even criticise the use of the term as ‘ideological‘ and hence try to get rid of it – even though it really is no more than acknowledging a return to 19th Century liberal notions of how you should run the economy) gives free reign to Capital, ostensibly because that will create wealth that will benefit everyone.
In practice, the early 20th Century is not the early 19th Century. Now the world is dominated by giant trans- and multinational corporations that both openly advocate liberal rules and more surreptitiously influence national and international politics behind closed doors and through the media. Their strategy is to capture markets – nothing contentious about that. But in practice, what this means in most of the South is that any attempt to create businesses that will employ lots of people dies as a consequence of ‘lack of competitivity’.

There are two sides to this: lack of capital to invest in sophisticated means of production - and advertising - and then there are cultural attitudes where many peoples are simply disinclined to live the stressful life that Capitalism demands (and I have every sympathy with them). You URGENTLY need to read two books by Ha-Joon Chang (a Korean professor at Cambridge University) who explains the evolution of the global economy in a very clear way ("Kicking away the Ladder" and "Bad Samaritans"). Essentially he shows how neo-liberal economics is a strategy to keep the rich countries (or their corporations) rich and exclude the rest.

In practice what this means is that even if poor countries manage to put the policies and institutions in place to develop, neo-liberal rules (administered through the WTO) disallow governments to protect fledgling industries and the likelihood of a small country being able to generate either the capital or the skills to launch globally competitive industries whilst competing foreign products can be imported with impunity, is vanishingly small. South Korea did it because they were very determined, were aware of where they might be able to win, in a situation where the Americans were prepared to waive the rules as a consequence of being scared that otherwise South Korea might also go Communist (they needed to show, over against North Korea, that Capitalism is better than Communism). The Chinese are also able to develop a modern economy because they are determined and have very targeted policies and because they have a political and economic weight (internal markets) that enables them to swing it.

The rest just have to suffer the consequences of neo-liberalism that mean that if they are lucky, they will attract some inward investment that will create jobs. In fact this may be unlucky in that these jobs (often involving very exploitative conditions) have few spinoffs and as the capital comes from outside, the technology also comes from outside and the ‘benefiting’ countries don’t really get a look into how they might learn to do it themselves (Malaysia and Thailand have had some success but Vietnam - that came late to the game – has an uphill battle on its hands (lots of inward investment – now even from China - but virtually no indigenous spin-off).

The next problem is that jobs in manufacturing anyway have a downward trend as a consequence of mechanisation and the electronic revolution where more and more is production (including agriculture and mining) is automated. So maybe countries should try to get into advanced services... But this really is as much a question of connections as investment: small Caribbean islands manage to benefit from offshore banking and there are a few niches here but no way can larger countries usurp the rich countries in high-end services; of course low-end services are precisely where these countries end up, with massive ‘informal economies’ as a consequence of the lack of development.
So does this mean that there is no answer? Well, a partial answer: first determine which industries to develop (as did the Koreans and the Japanese before them) and then give the WTO two fingers and go for the development of these industries full-tilt – education and training, institutional development, capital investment... Small economies can never win in that the internal economy is too small to absorb the product of sophisticated industries and once the WTO rules are flouted then other countries are allowed to put tariffs up against the products of the rogue (!) economy. Of course, as is well-enough known, the US has, in sectors that they want to protect, a highly protected economy, but then they determine the rules so they can also break them with impunity...

The other way is to have more modest ambitions. In fact already the majority of southern countries have, per force, modest ambitions: they are simply poor. Most sell their souls by selling raw materials, the income from which allows a small middle class to live ‘modern’. But if the rulers of a country were to have a genuine ambition to provide jobs for everyone – and in the process flatten out the gini coefficient – then it could design an economy to do this and use internal resources to accomplish it (North Korea actually has a very sophisticated economy but one that is politically sealed off from the outside so is unable to sell abroad and grow rich in the way the South has done). The ideological propaganda against such a notion emanating from the whole international system – that it cannot work, that it is necessarily authoritarian (discriminating against the rich), that it is communist (meaning evil beyond measure), etc. - is both strident in the political sphere and pernicious in the way that the international agencies favour some policies and programmes and disfavour others without it ever being made clear where these biases come from and why they are being pursued.

In general we all know this – I am sure, Bourdon you too – but never allow ourselves to look it clearly in the eye. Somehow we, too, are frightened both because our jobs may depend on agreeing with things uncritically and, in the end, because ‘we’, the intellectual and even modestly ‘middle’ classes, will lose out personally if our government adopts development policies that are fair to the poor majority...

Thanks all for your your feedback. Very helpful and instructive. I particularly agree with Adrian. Basically, in the sense that there are (strong) limitations on the neo-liberal economy to created full, gainful and decent jobs for everyone. This is it. Of course infrastructure provision and job creation is a win-win situation in so far as it creates (temporary) jobs, and not really always decent ones. We do need to push for a change in paradigm. I recognize that I have my own limitations to propose a totally new and overarching paradigm, still I wanted to motivate such discussion.

Dear all, these conversations are quite interesting. I'd like to ask whether there is interest in the critical component of constructive private sector participation and meaningful, long-term "impact" investment. I personally believe that these concepts are starting to change development and introduce new actors and resources to cities, including innovative financing tools, social business models to empower communities and mixed public/private approaches to rehabilitating and revitalizing cities. I would love to connect in Naples with anyone who is working at identifying common ground between the needs of the urban poor (and neglected and growing ranks of moderate income households as well!), social businesses and impact investment for urban development.

Dear colleagues,

Please, find bellow information on the training event Fostering Livelihood Strategies in Key Sectors of the Economy in Low-income Settlements to be hosted during the 6th Session of the World Urban Forum-WUF6, in Naples, Italy, on the 5th of September 2012.

Online registrations through the link:
http://www.unhabitat.org/content.asp?typeid=19&catid=672&cid=10075

Please share this email with interested colleagues and peers.

Looking forward to meeting you in Naples!