BUILDING INCLUSIVE CITIES Webinar2

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Building Inclusive Cities to explore the ideas for Urbanism and programming on the growing concerns within the informal sector and the economic issues in our cities

BUILDING INCLUSIVE CITIES
Featuring: Pedro Ortiz, Senior Consultant of Metropolitan Management and Planning for
IGO’s (International Governmental Organisations)
Moderator: ElsaMarie DSilva, Red Dot Foundation
Prathima Manohar, The Urban Vision
On April 3, 2020, ElsaMarie DSilva, Founder & CEO of Red Dot Foundation(Safecity) and Prathima Manohar, Founder of The Urban Vision, both alumni of Stanford Centre of Democracy Development and Rule of Law’s (CDDRL) Leadership Network for Change with Skill Virtual World Forum hosted a webinar on Building Inclusive Cities to explore the ideas for urbanism and programming on the growing concerns within the informal sector and the economic issues in our cities.
An urban planner Pedro Ortiz, senior consultant of Metropolitan Management and Planning for IGO’s (International Governmental Organisations), lent perspective to the discussion regarding different ideas/methodologies to tame urban growth in a sustainable manner to make our cities more resilient and humane.
The discussion highlights the following themes:
CHALLENGES
● The current economic ideologies are making us more unequal and have produced wage
stagnation, more workers in poverty, more inequality. An antagonism between those who want efficient economic growth and those who need basic amenities of life exists.
● The dichotomy between concentration of economies of scale and social equity is the conflict in the cities.
● Change of governments after completion of their tenure hinders the planning of projects.
● We see the 74th amendment act of Indian Constitution has not been implemented effectively due to lack of coordination among the different levels of government and has led to an imbalanced development.
● Cities have developed as counterparts to the hinterland using the natural resources unsustainably due to the failure of administration systems managing them.
RECOMMENDATIONS
● To acknowledge this conflict we require an efficient government where we have 40-50%
segments of indivisible goods and follow the principle of subsidiarity.
● In order to make our cities equally accessible to all and to solve the struggle of competition and equity, we need our governments to invest in the social sector.
● Planning is for the long term and is beyond one’s mandate limit. It should be done together with the opposition Parties that someday will rule, and this way it won’t face a setback.
● In India, we have a federation of states, so it is the states that have to be more involved in the management as they have more to invest whereas the local administrations should be able to represent both public and private interests. Hence, we need a transparent and hierarchic dialogue between different levels of government and a matrix dialogue among different departments and agencies of the state.
● We need planning from environmental assets like for capital (Nature) investments we should spend the dividends and not the core capital, and we can increase our environmental capital by investing it which is very cheap.
The full session can be viewed here -https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBI1ArXeuQM