What is the relation between these two convocations, and what should we expect this year from the World Habitat Day celebrations?
In effect, as noted by the UN in its convocation, the world is suffering an accelerated urbanization process. But the urbanization trend has long ceased to originate in peoples’ hope for a better life.
The devastation, pillaging, despoilment and appropriation of natural resources carried out by large transnational corporations, the imposition of unfair marketing conditions on rural products through free trade agreements, and the deregulation and subsequent reduction of institutional supports for traditional peasants, push to the limit the precarious conditions in which rural peoples live, making it unviable for them to remain in the countryside.
Today we are witnesses to the forced displacement of millions of indigenous peoples and poor peasants who for subsistence reasons are forced to migrate, not only to cities but also directly to the wealthy countries of Europe and North America. It is not a massive flow moved by hope, but rather a desperate struggle, with everything against them, to stay alive.
This is a phenomenon with new characteristics, which is provoking the destruction of rural communities through the massive flight of their youngest and most promising men and women, the profound destruction of their culture, and the disintegration of their families.
It is an every-man-for-himself chaos, which is undermining the traditional social control exercised over common goods: land, water, biodiversity, mineral resources, and popular wisdom, opening the way to their appropriation by transnational corporations, today determined to keep everything for themselves.
Might this be the objective behind the policies derived from the Washington Consensus, the free trade agreements, and the megaprojects driven by the multilateral institutions and their governmental allies?
This massive displacement, further aggravated in some countries by internal conflicts and organized crime, faces new obstacles and difficulties along the way and in its destination.
For those who migrate to cities, the segregated and poorly serviced neighborhoods of city outskirts and the deteriorated slums in city centers are their only options to find a place to live. There they face not only unemployment, rejection, and social discrimination, but even the criminalization of their efforts to earn a living or put a roof over their heads through means considered informal and even illegal, and as intolerable threats to the proper functioning of the market.
Those who migrate abroad confront multiple dangers and violations of their human rights: corruption, assaults, despoilment of their scarce belongings, as well as innumerable risks to their health, physical integrity, and life itself.
Today, those who for decades questioned the Berlin wall now approve construction of one stretching 1,125 kilometers, with the pretext of the fight against terrorism, to impede the access of illegal Central Americans and Mexicans to the United States. Beyond the wall await persecution, discrimination, and very precarious, difficult, and insecure life and labor conditions for those who make it across alive.
These are certainly not manifestations fanned by hope. Those of us from civil society who heed the United Nations call to “remind the world of its collective responsibility for the future of human habitat, therefore can not conform to seeing the city as catalyst of a development of which there are continually fewer and fewer beneficiaries.
The changes unequivocally required to attack the deep causes of these problems and restitute the hope of the rural and urban poor, will certainly not come through initiative of those who today control the economy and the major decisions.
Although the current situation still needs to touch bottom before a world-reaching transformation movement is achieved, we can make progress in the mapping of a broad and inquisitive path, coherent with the collective ideal to build a world for all.
Above all we need to struggle against the regressive and reductionist trends which lead to loss of rights, abandonment of the countryside, individualization of problems and solutions, and focalized attention to a token few affected groups.
A central part of this process must include promotion of inclusive policies, laws and other instruments which stimulate the positive and organized participation of the population in the planning, production and management of their habitat.
We must and we can work together against application on the part of States of contradictory polices, such as recognizing the right to housing while promoting massive eviction of poor residents to beautify and develop the city, for the sake of its global competitive position and the supposed benefit of its inhabitants.
But denouncement and protest are not enough. Today we must couple that work with efforts to influence public policies and propose and develop programs and actions that, in addition to resolving specific needs of inhabitants, open spaces for their autonomous organization and the development of change-oriented self-managed practices.
Vigorous action against discrimination of women and vulnerable sectors in the development of housing programs, and the struggle against urban segregation of the poor, are also strategic fields of work to which we can and must be committed.
Of particular concern is the situation of the women, elderly, and children who are left behind in the rural areas when family breadwinners are forced to leave their lands in search of employment abroad. Urgent work is needed to defend and achieve concrete implementation of the human rights of this abandoned population.
The initiative to produce and promote a World Charter for the Right to the City, assumed by civil networks and social movements in several countries, must be expanded and linked to similar initiatives that promote the human rights of traditional farming and indigenous communities.
Let us commemorate this Habitat Day, and the 30 years since the Vancouver Habitat I Conference and HIC”s 30 years as well, with critical reflection on these issues, and work to advance in the reinforcement and articulation of our diverse processes.
Enrique Ortiz
HIC President
Mexico City
2 October 2006