Mangel an mutigen Konzepten

What is your personal vision on urban development worldwide until the year 2030?

The present crisis in environmental politics today is precisely the lack of bold concepts that address the challenges of poverty, energy, biodiversity, and climate change within an integrated vision of human rights, which implies a revision of the current paradigms of urban development.
In cities of the global South, which concentrate most of the urban population today and will increase its share of it in the coming decades, the dominant territorial planning paradigm is a perverse combination of car-centrism with territorial exclusion of the poor.
This kind of development have produced an explosive horizontal expansion, accompanied by degradation or sheer destruction of vital natural services, and contributed to increasing proportion of slums and precarious settlements in the cities. One of every three city dwellers lives in a slum. The growth of slums in the last 15 years has been unprecedented. Today there are approximately 998 million slum dwellers in the world. UN-HABITAT estimates that if current trends continue, there will be 1.4 billion by 2020. It is clear that those who suffer most from the increasing signs of climate change are the poor.
Taking that into account, rather than working at a micro-level (for example developing alternative technologies and passive energy housing) it is necessary to review local and global paradigms in the field of urban environment. In this respect a socially integrated city could be a reply to climate change, addressing the very machinery that undermine all possible development gains, increasing  human poverty and vulnerability.

You are the UN special rapporteur on adequate housing. Would you like to rebuild Sao Paulo in certain respects, and how?

In Sao Paulo, a permanent conflict between those who advocate a “city for all” and those who favoured the city as a source profit is underway for many years. One of the faces – and a central theme - of this struggle is the access to affordable and adequate housing for all citizens and the idea of a heterogeneous city with respect to ethnicity and income. The main strategy to achieve that in my view is repopulating downtown and those urbanized areas that have lost population over the last decades with non-profit housing.
A very important component of this strategy is to restrain automobile use and increase public transportation as well as to promote non motorized means of transportation. But it is also a very important component to review existing planning practices in based on private lots and to focus more and more on high quality design and maintenance of public spaces. Another important challenge to Sao Paulo is to include all slums inhabitants as full citizens, respecting their rights and desire to stay and improving their settlements towards adequate housing conditions. All the strategies mentioned above are only possible with political mobilization, civic participation and democratic control over planning and urban policies decision making processes.