Book Reviews 137

different appreciation of issues of cost, incomes, politics and power. The collection demonstrates a disarray among experts more effectively than any clear strategy for the future and that itself is a disappointing outcome.

Alan Murie Heriot- Watt University

JORGE E. HARDOY, DIANA MITLIN and DAVID SATT~RT~WArTE, Environmental Problems in Third World Cities. London, Earthscan, 1992, 302pp,, f11.95.

The authors of Squatter Citizen and The Poor Die Young: Housing and Health in Third World Cities have now produced a third study on urban environmental problems in the South. It is an extended version of their report prepared at the request of the ODA (UK) for the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. Early chapters give careful attention to a range of urban environmental problems. These include problems within the home (e.g. lack of drinking water and sewage connection, little or no primary healthcare, overcrowding, indoor air polIution); at the workplace (e.g. dangerous concentrations of toxic chemicals and dust, inadequate lighting and ventilation, lack of protection for workers from machinery and noise); in the neighbourhood (e.g. dangerous housing sites, no collection of household garbage, unchecked disease vectors, inadequate provision of drainage and other forms of infrastructure); and in the wider city environment (problems related to e.g. toxic and hazardous wastes, water pollution, air pollution, noise pollution, natural and human-induced hazards). There is also consideration of regional impacts on cities and rural-urban interactions, and of issues related to cities and the global commons. Later chapters discuss what can be and has been done, or not done, about such urban environmental problems and how the problems and the policies to cope with them fit within debates about sustainable development.

There is much to commend in this book. The authors have rightly emphasised that the growing interest in urban environmental problems in the South is framed too much in terms of Northern perceptions and precedents. For example, they underline the Northern bias towards paying too much attention to the largest cities, which obscures the fact that most urban populations in the South live in small cities with populations of less than 100,000. They rightly dismiss fashionable Northern views that the reason for urban environmental degradation in the South is either ‘over population’ or ‘rapid urban change’ (Milton Keynes is one of the world’s fastest growing cities, but there are no serious environmental problems there). The authors also repeatedly and persuasively point out that the impacts of environmental problems fall mostly heavily on the poor, and that the appalling environmental problems faced by the poor could actually be substantially eased at nominal cost. Numerous examples from Asia, Africa and Latin America are used to emphasise the major point that each city in the South has its own unique range of environmental problems. There is also an extensive bibliography, usefuf suggestions for further reading, and an unusually good index.

Less successful is their politicaf analysis. The book seems to be remarkably bland about the political project needed to tackle the outrageous environmental conditions in which most people in the urban South live - conditions sustained for the most part by the ‘vested interests’ of the comfortably-off and the rich in the South and the North. Indeed, the authors appear almost to believe that no project, no struggle, is needed and that it is the advance of democracy and democratisation in the South that will inevitably lead to the establishment of conditions favourable to enlightened environmental policies. Faith in the advance of democracy in the South as a major development that will ease urban environmental problems is evident throughout the book (e.g. pp. 16, 24, 38, 159-162, 196, 207, 209-210, 213). But the concept of democracy is neither defined nor examined carefully; hence its use in the analysis remains rather general and

138 Book Reviews

unsatisfactory. The argument is made, for example, that environmentai problems are being tackled much more vigorousIy by environmental NGOs in India (e.g. Centre for Science and Environment in New Delhi) and Malaysia (e.g. Sahabat Alam Malaysia in Penang) than elsewhere because of the favourable democratic contexts in which they work, but the argument fails to notice that there are equally vigorous environmental NGOs in non democratic Indonesia (e.g. WALHI in Jakarta). One difficulty here is that ‘democracy’ in India and Malaysia is in certain respects only formal or heavily qualified; vested interests opposed to the implementation of environmentally friendly policies can thrive in such semi-democratic settings. Another difficulty is that any polity, be it India or Indonesia or Vietnam, is more or less democratic on each of a number of dimensions, and positing a consistent relationship between all such dimensions of democracy, on the one hand, and more or less successful action on environmental problems, on the other, won’t work because the conceptual apparatus is inadequate. In any event, far more than aspects of demo~ratisation in the South must be considered in explanations of why little has been done to resolve urban environmental problems in the South. The mistake is to assume that political changes in the South alone will make a decisive difference. Such a view misses the main feature of environmental politics in the South today; it is increasingly a global politics involving a global environmental movement, including coalitions of Northern and Southern NGOs, struggling to shift the policies of economic and political institutions at local, national and global levels which together sustain global capitalism. Waiting for democratisation in the South will not shift that global structure of power.

David Potter The Open University