Advantage or Paradox?
The challenge for children and young people of growing up urban
This report is one of the UN reports published in 2018 to improve the quality of life and future of children. At a time when the global urban population is expanding by 220,000 inhabitants every day or some 80 million per year this report supports the scale up of urban programming for children to foster equitable and sustainable development. The report notes that an estimated 1 billion people now live in urban slums, and hundreds of millions of them are under the age of 18. Transforming the inequalities experienced by these children and young people into advantages is a key challenge for cities and towns worldwide.
Approximately a decade ago, the world officially became a majority urban planet. Aggregate statistics regularly show that on average, compared to them rural peers, urban children have access to better essential services such as health care and education, water and sanitation, energy and better outcomes. This is in part due to factors associated with the so-called ‘urban advantage.’ On average, urban households earn higher incomes, benefit from improved infrastructure, have improved knowledge and reside in greater proximity to services. A closer look at the evidence, however, suggests that not all urban children are benefiting equally. Unplanned urbanization, which is taking place in many parts of the world, is leading to sprawl and low urban population density, undermining the advantage of proximity that is a key component of the urban advantage. Informality and insecure residential status are leaving many urban households excluded from government-provided services. The quality of urban services for the marginalized and disadvantaged is often poor. Environmental and health hazards, such as air pollution, unprocessed waste and wastewater, pollution and poor air quality can heighten the risk of disease. Urban dwellers living in informal conditions often have a lower resilience to shocks and stressors such as natural hazards (including those exacerbated by climate change) or economic turbulence.
Poverty, previously predominantly a rural phenomenon, is becoming increasingly urban. Based on current trends, by 2030, approximately 60 per cent of the global population 5.2 billion people will live in urban areas. By 2050, that number will increase to 68 per cent, or 6.7 billion people. Asia in particular will experience rapid growth of large megacities. Currently, the world’s three largest cities are in Asia: Tokyo (37.5 million), Delhi (28.5 million) and Shanghai (25.6 million). By 2030, seven out of the 10 largest cities in the world will be in Asia: Delhi, Tokyo, Shanghai, Dhaka, Mumbai, Beijing and Osaka. Many of these cities are at risk of increased flooding due to climate change. almost 90 per cent of the world’s children and adolescents live in Africa and Asia, which are urbanizing rapidly.
Now is the time to step up efforts in this area. The 2015 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the New Urban Agenda that emerged in 2016 from Habitat III (the United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development that takes place every 20 years) both set ambitious goals for the world’s urban areas. By the time of Habitat IV in 2036, a whole new generation of young people will have grown up in urban areas.
Today, approximately 1billion people are estimated to live in slums, the worst form of informal settlement, and hundreds of millions of them are children under 18. Based on current trends, those numbers are likely to triple by 2050. In the absence of new models targeting the urban poor, inequity in child health may widen and an increasing number of urban children will be shut out of overall progress. Scaling up urban programming for children and young people is now a global imperative in all regions.
policies and programmers can be drawn from its results. These include:
1- The urban setting has to become an integral part of programming for
children.
2- Capacities of inclusive urban planning must be further developed on all levels of government – national, regional and local.
3- The development of urban systems has to accelerate to keep pace with ongoing rapid urbanization.
4- Solutions have to be found for the lack of financial resources needed to improve urban systems and to increase equity within urban areas.
5- Better data and better use of existing data are needed to understand the true dimension of urban inequity.
