Measuring urban development

It appears as the scholars and academics concerned with the debate of urban development have some underlying assumption that this concept is well understood. They discuss various aspects of urban development without a comprehensive explanation of the urban development’s meaning (e.g. see the work of authors such as Prud’homme et al., n.d;

Rüland, 1992; Palermo and Ponzini, 2010; Polyzos, 2012 on the topic of urban development). Many of the urban development studies are based on the methodological assumption that what is relevant to the concept of urban, is also relevant to the urban development. Though, this connection seems very straightforward, it still requires a deeper inquiry to reconsider this methodological approach in addressing urban development

Urban As a Quality

As a Place/ entity

Change Change

Social

Economic Political

Cultural Technological

Demographic Administrative

Functional Physical/ Built

environment Local forces

Global forces Global forces

Local level

Global level

Chapter 3 Urban Development

32 issues. As there is a lack of understanding of the term urban development in the literature, understandably, little insight is available about how to measure it.

Figure 3.3: Theoretical framework for defining urban development

Source: Own construct

Urban development indicators

The World Bank has introduced a set of 17 indicators under the category of urban development to measure the level of development in the urban places (Table 3.1). This table shows that the presented indicators relate directly to the level of urban development within

33 Table 3.1: Urban development indicators

No. Sr. Indicator Sr.

No. Indicator

1. Improved sanitation facilities, urban (% of

urban population with access) 10. Road sector diesel fuel consumption per capita (kg of oil equivalent)

2. Improved water source, urban (% of urban

population with access) 11. Road sector energy consumption (% of total energy consumption)

3. Motor vehicles (per 1,000 people) 12. Road sector gasoline fuel consumption per capita (kg of oil equivalent)

4. Passenger cars (per 1,000 people) 13. Urban population 5. PM10, country level (micrograms per cubic

meter) 14. Urban population (% of total)

6. Population in the largest city (% of urban

population) 15. Urban poverty gap at national poverty

lines (%) 7. Population in urban agglomerations of

more than 1 million (% of total population) 16. Urban poverty headcount ratio at national poverty lines (% of urban population) 8. Pump price for diesel fuel (US$ per liter) 17 Vehicles (per km of road)

9. Pump price for gasoline (US$ per liter) - -

Source: World Bank (http://data.worldbank.org/indicator)

any bounded place. Further, the World Bank provided country level data for these indicators to give an idea of urban development status. But if we go back to all the discussion which I have re-oriented towards defining urban development, these indicators do not give a broad picture in accordance with the multi-faceted dimensions of urban development. Though the World Bank provides sets of detailed indicators for other relatable dimensions of urban development also, it confines to these seventeen indicators only for explicitly reflecting the status of urban development. These urban development indicators give some understanding of socioeconomic, demographic and indirectly, environmental characteristics of these countries in order to assess their urban development status.

The other problem with these indicators is that there is no composite method or guideline provided by the World Bank for the use of these indicators. For instance, the indicator of motor vehicles (per 1,000 people) suggests that a country having this measurement more as compared to others, would be considered as having a higher level of urban development. But contrary to this, increase in the number of motor vehicles also means a higher PM10 value which implies to increased air pollution. Similarly, an increase in the value of the same indicator for any place also infers higher values for indicators 10, 11, 12 and 17 listed in the Table 3.1. This shows that at one hand, an increase in the number of motor vehicles could be regarded as developmental for any urban place, but on the other hand, it could also undermine the element of sustainability and resultantly, could negatively affect the level of urban development of the same place. This means that there is no guideline available to use these indicators compositely by balancing out the effects of such conflicting dimensions of other indicators.

City Development Index (CDI)

Apart from the World Bank, the UN-Habitat launched an urban indicator programme in 1988 to improve global urban knowledge, which began as a housing indicators programme (Global Urban Observatory, n.d.: 1). As a result of UN-Habitat II Conference in 1996 and in

Chapter 3 Urban Development

34 response to the momentum gaining broader conceptual framework of sustainable urban development, the UN-Habitat developed a City Development Index (CDI) in 1997 to assess the status of urban development in various cities across the globe (ibid.). The urban indicators used for CDI were reviewed during the Istanbul+5 Conference in 2001 and included consideration for newly emerged United Nations (2000) MDGs, 2015 (UN-Habitat, 2004: 3). This resulted in a revision and readjustment of the CDI for various cities. This CDI was an attempt to encompass various concepts related to urban development such as development level, liveability, sustainability, relative disadvantage, equity and poverty in order to exercise a comprehensive indexing method for measuring urban development (UN-Habitat, n.d.: 116). The CDI was measured in a way similar to HDI measurement by the UNDP. The CDI is based on separate sub-indices that are combined to form a composite index whose value ranges from 0 to 100 (ibid.: 117). The sub-indices are city product, infrastructure, waste, health and education. The CDI is considered as one of the most influential index developed for the purpose of measuring and assessing the level of urban development of cities (ibid.: 116). However, the concept of urban defies boundedness, thus it makes difficult to collect and maintain databases for places without defined boundaries, i.e. the urban places, so in order to keep consistency in calculations, cities were taken up as units of inquiry for carrying out this exercise. These global urban indicators have been continuously reviewed with the most current revisions made in 2009 (UN-Habitat, 2009: 4, 7-8). The list of the global urban indicators is reproduced and appended (Appendix 1).

Other sets of available indicators are sustainable development indicators² and sustainable urban development indicators³ which revolve mainly around similar key areas but emphasize on the environmental aspects. But all these indicators are used to measure the level of urban development either at the city level or at the national level and thus require corresponding data sets of same levels. Sets of urban development indicators are not available below the city level to investigate the impacts of practices performed by the individuals on the urban development. Despite having this deficiency, it can be inferred that the individually performed practices in the domains of the city level identified indicators will definitely affect, though negligibly, the urban development status of that place. While it is not conceivable to measure the magnitude of change caused by the individually performed practices, city level indicators more importantly reflect direction of the change effect (i.e.

positive or negative) on the level of urban development. This study investigates the practices performed by Pakistani immigrants in Pakistan mainly through remittances. These remittances constitute a major part of the transnational economic force through translocal connections within the migrant’s agency. In short, the implications of translocal practices of Pakistani immigrants for the urban development sector in Pakistan are investigated through selected and amended CDI urban indicators (see Section 9.1).

3.3 Concluding summary

This chapter combines urban theory with the conceptualized debate of development that has been presented in the previous chapter. The synthesis of different theoretical perspectives provides a theoretical base to define and conceptualize the term urban

2 e.g. Federal Statistical Office of Germany (2012) Sustainable Development in Germany, Indicator Report, Federal Statistical Office, Wiesbaden

3 e.g. Sarkozy-Banoczy, Stewart (2010) Global Sustainable Urban Development Indicators, United States Department of Housing and Urban Development

35 development in a broader context of multi-scaled urban change factors. This chapter further highlights the scarcity of the literature dealing with the measurement of the urban development. Despite various attempts to prepare detailed lists of sustainable urban development indicators, there is still a lack of a composite method or guideline for measuring urban development through indicators. The only comprehensive attempt to measure urban development at a city level is exercised by UN-Habitat through development of a CDI on the basis of identified urban indicators.

Chapter 4