The%20Moral%20Challenge%20of%20Urbanization%20in%20Less%20Developed%20Countries%20

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The Moral Challenge of Urbanization in Less
Developed Countries Chloe Schwenke,
Ph.D.web chloemaryland.net

• March 26, 2009

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Urban Dynamics
morality?
LDC Context Widespread poverty Resource
scarcity Weak institutions Inadequate
infrastructure Shallow democracy Corruption Enviro
nment under stress Unmanaged land use Poor or no
planning
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Why Morality?

• A way of thinking about development moving
  beyond Codes of Ethics
• Qualitative focus pursued through moral
  theories and moral intuition
• Development for what? For whom?
• Development meaning what?
• How much is enough?
• Who is responsible? To whom? Why?
• What about trade-offs? And the losers?

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Cities as Moral Context

• In less developed countries, cities concentrate
  both wealth and poverty
• Greatest human flourishing vs. the most crushing
  human poverty
• Cities depend on social order and social order
  comes from
• social contract an agreement to behave
• power and coercion (and sometimes tyranny)
• cooperation and caring
• competition with rules and tradeoffs

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Moral Considerations

• Human Dignity
• Human Flourishing and Development
• Justice, Fairness, Equity, Rights
• Compassion Care
• The Common Good
• Safety and Security
• Participation, Inclusion, Identity

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Human Dignity ?

• what to do in urban environments hostile to the
  concept of human dignity cities in the South?
• severe poverty
• deprivation of opportunities
• loss of hope, limited options
• loss of voice, lack of power
• is respect for universal human dignity an
  important goal of development that ought to be
  attended to?

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Human Flourishing/Well-being

• successful execution of a rational plan of life,
  by which the person determines the good for
  himself or herself
• John Rawls
• That human persons are flourishing means that
  their lives are good, or worthwhile, in the
  broadest sense.
• Thomas Pogge

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The Common Good 1

• policies and actions that best serve to promote
  the essential components of human well-being or
  flourishing for all
• going for the best net score of individual
  interests within the community (utilitarian)
• i.e. sacrifices some peoples interests to
  further that of others

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The Common Good 2

• What is the common good?
• subject to moral disagreements
• agreed upon only through a participatory and
  deliberative democratic process of reasoning
  together respectfully
• How does local/municipal governance facilitate
  the articulation of a communitys common good?

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The Common Good 3

• trade-offs
• A moral justification must be provided to
  justify this sacrifice of perceived
  self-interest, and not simply the weight of
  majority interests.
• Richard Flathman
• measuring the impact of trade-offs a
  decision-makers role
• advocate or expert?
• legitimacy?

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Safety and Security

• conditions of stability, order, predictability,
  and freedom from bodily harm
• environment to live within a city without
  becoming ill
• economic security
• access to employment and/or other forms of
  welfare

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Participation Who Governs? Why? How?

• power and wealth concentrated at the center
  national governments elites
• weak accountability to non-elite urban residents
• inefficiency of central command control
  subsidiarity principle
• urban governments generally fail to
• lead or provide advocacy
• generate governance policies
• perform effective strategic planning
• facilitate local participation

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Participation and Inclusion 1

• who ought to decide
• what good development and good governance
  mean
• what the obligations of good governance impose,
  and when must they be met
• what should be done when they good governance
  values clash with other values
• wheres the balance?
• popular participation in governance vs.
  representative democratic institutions of
  government
• participation hijacking the agenda

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Participation and Inclusion 2

• is popular participation a realistic expectation
  within poor cities?
• expensive, prolonged, subject to failure
• who identifies the stakeholders? on what basis?
  who is excluded? why?
• does stakeholder participation ever reflect
  demographic and power realities within the city?

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Participation and Inclusion 3

• deliberative democracy an ideal, not a
  practical objective
• careful structuring of the participatory
  process
• consider different views of means and ends of
  development and good governance

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Moral Demands

• who owes what to whom and when?
• how much?
• why?

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The Challenge to Urban Governance

• what ought decision-makers do to respect and
  respond to the moral demands that recognition of
  basic human dignity entails?
• what about
• social justice?
• human flourishing?
• the common good?
• participation and inclusion?
• safety and security?
• a caring society?

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Moral Vocabulary?

• the myth of value-neutrality
• us and them
• North and South
• experts/managers and beneficiaries
• When we speak of ethics in planning, we refer to
  a capacity to argue about what to do, to a
  capacity to think about, evaluate, and judge
  alternative courses of action. Krumholz and
  Forester

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Moral Visibility

• illustrative moral and ethical dimensions
• freedoms and opportunities who enjoys?
• land ownership rights who controls?
• environmental and ecological integrity
• inequitable distribution trickle down
• rights of vulnerable minorities
• democracy, deliberation, and participation
• gender concerns
• reducing corruption and promoting integrity
• mitigating/preventing conflict
• caring about people and the environment

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Development For What?

• ideals of human and social well-being
• the decent society honor in equal measure
  universal human dignity
• Avishai Margalit
• respecting human nature
• Rousseau, Kant

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Ideals 1

• social justice
• fair, even-handed treatment of all individuals
  and groups within a society
• prerequisite for the achievement of human
  flourishing
• Rasmussen
• the caring relationship between self and others
• Carol Gilligan

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Ideals 2

• distributive justice
• how major social institutions should distribute
  burdens and benefits
• John Rawls
• civic virtue
• Aristotle
• human rights and freedoms
• Amartya Sen

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Ideals 3 The Livable City

• the ideal of the livable city is at least a set
  of morally relevant standards by which citizens
  and others may evaluate their city in terms that
  speak to their own quality-of-life aspirations
  and concerns.
• as such, the articulated livable city ideal can
  qualitatively influence development strategies
  and provide the essential motivation for
  beneficial change

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Reality Check

• Survival takes priority over dignity
• Margalit
• political leadership in many cities and towns in
  the South is top-down or even autocratic
  neither accountable to nor inclusive of the
  residents
• very few cities in the North, and exceptionally
  few in the South, have engaged in a
  representative participatory process leading to
  the outcome of a comprehensive urban development
  strategy

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Objections and Responses

• core methodology of normative analysis

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Five Objections

• 1)moral issues are largely arbitrary and
  subjective in nature, changing in scope and
  intensity
• 2)seeking common ground on moral concerns risks
  upsetting the status quo
• 3)the quality of a moral dialogue on substantive
  issues depends upon uncommon tolerance,
  reflection, mutual respect, and a deliberative
  ethos rare in participatory processes
• 4)moral values and systems are largely unreliable
  in policy making universalism vs. relativism
• 5)moral values are extremely difficult to
  measure, monitor and evaluate

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Response to 1

• moral issues are largely arbitrary and subjective
  in nature, changing in scope and intensity
• morality is not arbitrary
• ethics the systematic and critical study of
  moral beliefs, values and concerns
• in ethics, our values and beliefs are organized
  into various (and to some extent, competing)
  systems, each of which exhibits coherence and
  matches our considered judgments and deeply felt
  beliefs

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Response to 2

• seeking common ground on moral concerns risks
  upsetting the status quo
• yes attending to moral concerns risks upsetting
  the status quo by challenging the existing
  economic and power relationships within any given
  society
• the existence of widespread poverty, corruption,
  injustice, and the lack of universal respect for
  human dignity demand such a challenge

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Response to 3

• the quality of a moral dialogue on substantive
  issues depends upon uncommon tolerance,
  reflection, mutual respect, and a deliberative
  ethos
• if this claim were accepted, it would be
  difficult to imagine a societys moral progress
  over time
• leadership of morally virtuous persons is not a
  necessary condition to progress
• the application of an ethical framework to the
  participatory process may facilitate a moral
  dialogue of substance and quality

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Response to 4

• moral values and systems are largely unreliable
  in policy making
• certain values are universal and fundamental to
  human nature
• local culture, tradition, and context ought
  significantly to influence and shape the
  implementation of development initiatives
  responsive to these universal values

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Response to 5

• moral values are extremely difficult to measure,
  monitor and evaluate
• empirical data can say a great deal about the
  changes in achieving morally desirable goals
• birth weight of babies a good proxy for
  measuring the shortcomings in the quality of life
  of people and the need for better nutrition and
  health care
• qualitative factors in the experience of poverty,
  the enjoyment of basic freedoms and
  opportunities, and the prevalence of respect for
  human dignity are all subject to meaningful
  evaluation through a variety of techniques, from
  focus groups to surveys