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Sustainable Communities

Ashok Khosla, June 1996

Thousands of villagers migrate every day into the cities of the third world. Many, if not all, come there in search of jobs. Any community - big or small - where work and income are not largely bound to the land is a town or "city". The lights of most cities are bright enough to attract people from hundreds of miles around. Add to the immigrants the young adults who have grown up in the city, and the need for jobs can become quite enormous. The cities of India alone need to create more than ten million jobs every year.

The evolution of the city's economy and environment, and the long term well-being of its citizens, depend on how many and how sustainable are the livelihoods it generates. And this, in turn, depends on the access people have to living space, workplaces and the means to move between them.

To what extent are the jobs being created in today's city genuine livelihoods? And to what extent do they fulfill the livelihood needs of all its people?

Cities are qualitatively different from rural settlements. Villages are characterised by rudimentary infrastructure and limited ability to create non-farm jobs, either in the industrial or service sectors. Even small cities and towns have a critical mass of economic activities and monetised interdependencies that can absorb a wide variety of vocations and skills. Rapidly growing cities, like most cities in the third world, have special characteristics that open opportunities for the creation of large numbers of sustainable livelihoods.

Such cities offer a range of possibilities for remunerative work in a wide variety of sectors. Small and medium industries need large numbers of skilled and semi-skilled workers and provide jobs that are fairly remunerative and relatively secure. Micro-industries and other informal sector occupations provide even larger numbers of jobs which are particularly suitable for new immigrants.

The city offers far more opportunities for moving up the social ladder than does the traditional social system of the average village.

Technology choice and the adoption of certain designs, standards and approaches determine the nature of jabs that will be available in any sector. The capital cost of creating a workplace impacts the rate at which jobs can be generated in a given economy. The infrastructure and other support systems also critically determine the value and distribution of jobs in the city. In particular, these factors together are responsible for the diversity of work opportunities available to people and strongly influence the access to jobs by women and other specific groups that are ordinarily marginalised in the formal economy.

The future of the city lies in the kinds of livelihoods it is composed of. For the third world city, new kinds of livelihoods are urgently needed. For reasons of financial and physical resource limits, these cannot be borrowed unchanged from the North. The way forward will require much creativity and innovation, both for the development of locally appropriate technologies and for the design of effective institutions. Undoubtedly, such a future will depend on how quickly we can create sustainable communities.

The question is, thus, no longer how can we create jobs in cities, but rather how can we create sustainable communities that are capable of creating adequate numbers of sustainable livelihoods to meet he needs of all their citizens. The answer will surely need a wider recognition that many of the best interests of the city, from its own point of view, are better served by increasing investments in its hinterland instead of, as at present, only an itself. Above all, it will require creation of a broad range of opportunities for developing enterprises, from the small to the large, in communities.that range from the very small to the very large.

To achieve this, we now need to design new mechanisms to devolve governance to the community level; to establish market based instruments to liberate the entrepreneurial energies of people and adequate community oversight to ensure that both government and business act in the best interest of the citizen. And this in turn will need innovative institutions to provide support, both to local governments and to enterprises, in such crucial areas as technology, marketing, finance and overall management. Given the rapid transformations that will necessarily occur in the third world, a major effort will be needed for providing training support to help people adapt to ever-changing jobs.

Fortunately, the city - and the sustainable community of the future - as the crucible for innovation and the birthplace of entrepreneurship is in a better position than anyone else to solve its own problems provided it now makes the conscious decisions needed to build its capacity to do so.

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