Background

Rapid urbanisation is a fact. More than half the world's population of 6.9 billion currently reside in cities and urban spaces. The growth of cities is described by the UN - including UNFPA and UN-HABITAT - as the single largest influence on development and poverty reduction in the twenty-first century. Urbanisation also appears to be outpacing the capacities and capabilities of formal and informal institutions and civil societies. Most urbanisation taking place in developing countries is also contributing to a spectacular growth in slums and shantytowns - massive urban sprawls at the margins of the city-space. The shanty towns that choke the cities of Africa and Asia are experiencing unstoppable growth, expanding by more than a million people every week. But it is also the case that "mega cities" (with populations over twenty million) do not have a monopoly on population growth: more than half of the urban world lives in cities with a population of less than 500,000.

Urbanisation and related challenges are moreover exacerbated in countries and societies affected by chronic armed violence and, by definition, state fragility. As a result, there is a growing constituency concerned with urbanisation and armed violence. For example, UN-HABITAT has long been promoting "safe-cities" through policy research in countries across Africa and the Balkans. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) is also exploring the development of standards for multilateral and bilateral donors to prevent and reduce armed violence - particularly at the sub-national and municipal levels. The World Bank and its sister agencies are seized by the issue of extreme victimisation in cities throughout Latin America and have supported small grants programmes to encourage evidence-led interventions to promote environmental design and violence-reduction activities. Likewise, at the policy level, the Canadian government is also sponsoring extensive research on human security in cities, while NGOs and research institutes around the world are undertaking research on related issues.

While researchers are conscious of the risks and effects presented by swift and unsustainable urbanisation, there is less consideration of how formal and informal institutions cope with them. It is moreover the case that much is known about what a broken city or settlement looks like, but comparatively little is known about how to bring about one that is coherent and functional. Less still is understood of how and why urban institutions function at all particularly in the context of extreme levels of urban violence or state fragility. Urban geographers, planners and environmental design experts have long struggled with identifying "good practice" and indigenous coping strategies in developing country contexts. A wave of new public management, sociology and political science specialists have written extensively on identifying patterns of social transformation and the ordering and sequencing of incentives and deterrents in enhancing urban resilience, but little is known about how similar institutions cope in situations of extreme insecurity or post-conflict recovery.

As a result, very little is actually known of formal and informal "resilience" of urban institutions in the face of acute violence or even post-conflict recovery, although some scholars and research centres have attempted to address this knowledge deficit in various ways. For instance, Mike Davies has documented the tremendous challenge (and lesser known opportunities) presented by slums and their implications for sustainable development.1 Likewise, in examining the metabolic flows, social dynamics, governance networks and the built environment of urban settlements, the Resilience Alliance is examining aspects of resilience, but not necessarily formal and informal experiences in violence-affected contexts.

This project understands the concept of urban "resilience" specifically as an ongoing process of adaptation/coping of territorial bounded units (labelled as a city's formal and informal social, political, and economic institutions and its inhabitants) to exogenous and endogenous stress. Thus, resilience is related to the degree of predictability of institutional adaptation to exogenous "shocks." "Chronic" violence poses one such shock, and refers to violence that occurs over a prolonged duration (in contrast to "acute" or "episodic" violence, which may begin and end suddenly).

The institutions we will examine may be specific security institutions - policy, army, special security units, intelligence, etc. - as well as new, informal institutions such as neighbourhood "watch" groups, news media, or armed vigilantes or militias, or even adaptations within older institutions such as mediation initiatives based from churches. One of the central questions to be addressed is how these manifestations of institutional adaptation interact: if state security institutions in particular are failing to provide acceptable levels of security, do informal groups rise in prominence (in terms of numbers, resources, visibility, armed activity)? If such informal institutions do become most salient, how then does the state react to them? How do the sources of chronic violence react? We seek to describe and analyze the city's repertoire of adaptations and counter-adaptations in order to provide a topography of resilience.

This focus on urban resilience in chronic violence thus calls attention to a particular scale of analysis among donors and also to critical gaps in development thinking. As de-industrialising processes persist (spurred on by unregulated, unplanned growth and its visible effects on both local and regional economies) and unemployment escalates, metropolitan areas will continually be exposed to new forms of insecurity, crisis and shock into the future. The URCV project recognises that urban institutions affected by violence may also respond in qualitatively different ways from national and rural responses, thus making the study of these adaptations indispensible to understanding how societies and governments can cope with chronic violence.

1) Mike Davies, 'The Urbanization of Empire: Megacities and the Laws of
     Chaos', Social Text, 22:4 (2004).