WORLD ASSEMBLY OF URBAN INHABITANTS

Make our voices heard
Rethinking the city from the grassroots

Mexico City, 2-6 October 2000

Workshops:
Livable, Sustainable, Healthy, Productive and Safe City

Introduction

Our cities are transforming. They gradually cease to be places for human development and community life and become spaces at the service of commercial voracity. The national and transnational economic powers expand and sell their "registered trademarks", without measuring the negative impacts on the living conditions of the inhabitants:

* Poverty, caos and social insecurity increase, as well as the loss of local cultural expressions, values and human relations.
* Natural resources are pillaged; human settlements are broken up; equilibrium is lost in relations and balances between cities; diverse urban problems are reproduced and the basic needs of the population are increasingly unmet, with public goods eliminated by a global model of privatization.
* Government actions are undermined and weakened by the economic dictates of the international financial institutions.

We, inhabitants of the world, have a clear international diagnosis in regards to the neo-liberal tidal wave but we still lack sufficient clarity to adequately confront it. We are unlinked among ourselves, with isolated initiatives and minimal results. We have undertaken a very localized and fragmented resistance-subsistance, without context. Resistance imposed on us by the financial caos, where individualism prevails and the collective is lost. It is imperative to raise one international voice, not only to reaffirm, create and heal these forms of resistance, but also to strike a solid blow against the neoliberal force. We are committed and we assume the responsability to put up a great world-wide resistance front that generates identity and public references to the struggles.

The conception of livable, sustainable, healthy, productive and safe city.

We agreed that to define this concept we must first recognize that all of these attributes are implied in the livable city, but that we must find the interrelations of the aspects that make up the city and how, from each of our social works, we contribute to and advance in the building of a collective ideal.

We understand that the livability of a city and in general of human settlements should comply with the following conditions:
· livability: that all inhabitants have a place to live in dignity.
· sustainability: balance in the relation between human development and the use of natural resources.
· healthy: adequate nutrition and health preservation along with the improvement of living conditions.
· productive: harmony between individual and collective productivity-creativity.
· safe: respectful relations and social protection, and prevention measures that guarantee a proper equilibrium between physical and natural space.

Confronted with all the above, the delegates to this World Assembly of Urban Inhabitants must assume to work the operation of our conclusions with the bases of our organizations. Only organized people with proposals are capable of confronting the neoliberal model which submerges us further and further in poverty.

The defenders of the dominant model forget that we can think and act in an organized manner, and that we have the best of conditions: that of being solidary.

Objective

Our objective is the full realization of human rights, working creatively and responsably from our organizations and insisting on the commitment of the State in the social, economic and cultural development of the city and of popular habitat.

General strategy

Building livable cities requires us to:
1. Recover an integral vision of the city and territory, overcoming sectoral and fragmented visions and practices.
2. Promote participtive planning as an instrument for community, neighborhood and urban improvement.
3. Globalize our social struggle against exclusion, establishing territorial networks (with common ideology, strategies and action plans) that allow a broad alliance.
4. Achieve impact within the national legal frameworks that establish relations and linkages among society, housing, territorial ordering and environment.
5. Promote the creation of national funds with public resources that guarantee balance among housing, urban, social and economic development, and environment.
6. Demand that governments establish public policies that guarantee the fulfillment of human rights, in particular the right to a place to live.
7. Demand that the administration of public funds be carried out under society's watch and that it be observed and followed and its errors denounced.

Operative strategy

At the local level:
A. The members of the organizations must obtain training and formation to be able to participate and be in the decision-making places.
B. The popular economy must be strengthened: the inhabitants must be creators, self-managers, producers and administrators of their own projects.
C. The joint work of the organized people, technical support persons and government, should be a sum of efforts and alliances to strengthen the social initiatives.

At the international level:
A. The alliance among territories and geo-economic and political regions can be a factor towards collective union, that allows the international coordination and improvement of social practices. In this process, Habitat International Coalition (HIC) and the Alliance for a Responsible and Solidary World should unite efforts and assume commitments there derived.
B. We should link our actions to those already being developed in the international field, such as Habitat + 5 and the Campaigns for Security of Tenure and for Democratic Governance promoted by the United Nations.
C. To extend our links among ourselves we should use the technological tools in favor of the people and our organizations.
D. The United Nations initiatives should include the voice and the proposals and participation of the social organizations and NGOs.
E. The international financial institutions must also respond to the proposals of the social organizations.

The proposals

For the livable city:
· The first step in the building of the livable city is inevitably having a place to build, transit and enjoy recreation. Access to serviced urban land obligates National states to undertake the regulation of territorial ordering. For that reason the creation by the states of funds, landbanks and incentives for the repopulation of city centers should be a key postulate for the development of any territorial development plan, as a fundamental basis of the housing projects that we propose.
· Land occupation isn't halted with academic debate or clientelar measures. We must assume political responsabilities to confront this phenomena and not distract attention with penal or punitive measures, which definitely end up harming a legitimate right: the right to remain in the place in which one lives and produces.
· The livable city is only built with intellectual and physical effort and sacrifice, depositing all our energy in generating proposals to transform our reality.
· City and rural development must be conceived in an integrated way.

The sustainable city:
· Rescue the alternative proposals that the social organizations have promoted, accumulated and directed from the political perspective.
· Create integrated networks through experiences developed to promote and disseminate their programs and actions.
· Link our experiences with serious technicians and specialists in the field based on an effective working relationship that makes sustainable cities possible.
· Promote urban agriculture that facilitates the reuse of wastes, water recycling, etc., contributing environmental sustainability conditions to housing.
· Propose that the legal frameworks that govern the care of the environment consider and collectivize the experiences.
· Make the governments responsible to address the sustainability of human settlements.

The healthy city:
· Rescue the right to health, taking off from the community and alternative experiences that the inhabitants of the world have developed.
· Strengthen the organizations that develop health alternatives, promoting the organization of workshops and forums.
· Develop a culture of health and of disease prevention, rescuing the experiences of preventive medicine and attending especially to the most vulnerable sectors (children and mothers).
· Integrate the struggle for a healthy life with the struggle for housing, health and work.
· Promote campaigns so that the television industries of the world contribute resources for health.
· The legal framework on human health should be inclusive: the poor shouldn't be excluded from attention due to their lack of funds to pay for it.
· We must manifest ourselves about the responsability of the governments in health attention.

The productive city:
· We must struggle for employment generation through alternative proposals and generate new productive proposals in our cities.
· Generate social-productive projects for basic goods provision and housing, learning from our micro-experiences to translate them into general policies.
· Search for a new legality for the activities of the informal economy that considers popular interests.
· Promote that the cooperative societies support the popular economy with preparation and training.
· Introduce youth employment policies.
· Create an inclusive economy.
· Decentralize public services, with national, regional and local resources, to counteract the privatization actions.

The safe city:
· Assume a collective security on the part of the inhabitants.
· Raise consciousness that the safe city can not be based on discrimination of any type.
· Rebuild the social fabric with the participation of the organized inhabitants of the city.
· Invent new ways to make our cities safe without recurring to more violence.
· Initiate a real global movement for change, starting with a change of perspectives (the poor aren't violent, they are the victims of multiple agressions).
· Promote new human values and a popular ethic which is distinct from the dominant "liberal ethic": an ethic of solidarity at all levels, including towards victims of violence.
· Promote society's security at the local, national and international levels.
· Advance organizational processes that include risk prevention and disaster mitigation with broad participation of social organizations, academics, and civil and non-governmental organizations.
· Include broad social participation in emergency management plans that should be of public domain and instrumented from the bottom up.
· Include disaster preparedness in formal and informal education programs.
· Work so that the inhabitants abandon the dominant vision imposed from the outside and create a popular critical vision of reality.
· Promote the creation of an international network for disaster prevention, attention and mitigation.
· Demand that natural disasters be analyzed and their prevention rethought taking off from the people themselves, including self-diagnosis of territorial vulnerability and risk.

Conclusions

The exploiters have been more efficient than we have in our small popular power blocks. We must discuss the role we have as a social class and the importance of promoting the formation of the members of social organizations. We the inhabitants should nourish ourselves with knowledge and assume this political role, fulfilling it in a responsible way.

In order to achieve our objectives and proposals we must be able to rely on solid social organizations, with real and alternative proposals to the crisis. The national organizations are insufficient if they don't establish a national, regional and international coordination.

To advance in this perspective, this World Assembly should achieve:

* The creation of national and international coordination networks, based on the geo-political regions. We must think in terms of a planetary alliance that struggles for a solidary world and that makes our cities livable and democratic places. The networks will allow, in the short term, the improvement of national practices and the consolidation of an international strategy to build real alternative popular blocks that struggle for quality of life building livable cities.

* The clear definition of the bases for our formation, organization and discipline. We agree to assume and carry out the perfectionment and training of the social organizations, undertaking our work with greater commitment and creativity, to formulate and develop viable proposals. We are obligated to work to build innovative mechanisms that promote the democratization of the organizations as well as society.

Drafting team: Carlos Escalante, Paul Maquet, Edgardo Muñiz, Georgina Sandoval