Urbanisation: Delhi

The Global Dialogue on Urbanisation was held in Delhi in September 2011. It was co-organised by IDS and our partner PRIA (Participatory Research in Asia). The idea was to bring together practitioners and thinkers to explore through dialogue the key issues for a rapidly urbanising South both now and over the next twenty years. Urbanisation is growing at a rapid pace. It is driven by changing agricultural practices, the inability of people to sustain livelihoods in the face of climate change, people fleeing from conflict, etc. It will be but a matter of decades before the majority of the very poor live in cities. However this rapid transformation of the landscape of poverty is neither reflected in the international development agenda, nor in that of philanthropic giving. Thus it represents both a pressing need and a major opportunity. The urgent issues at a personal level are security and ensuring that social networks are not destroyed through development. The urgent issues at a societal level are failures of governance, planning and taxation, and at the interface between them there are fundamental and unresolved issues about how the infrastructure development which accompanies economic growth displaces poor people and creates further inequality.