Building Bridges between Cities

Moved by graphic television images broadcast from hunger-stricken communities during the 1985 famine in Ethiopia, citizens of Amesbury – a small town in the American state of Massachusetts – decided to offer their "widow’s mite" by contributing towards easing the pain of at least some of the affected families.


For some 5000 villagers in Esabalu, a settlement in Western Kenya, the decision was the start of a unique relationship that was to assist in relieving the impact of starvation and famine within the local community. Through a farm loan programme organized under the umbrella 'Amesbury for Africa', the aid scheme was initially, intended to help the members become self-sufficient in food production.


In subsequent years, however, the focus of the relationship has been expanded, and today it consists of an open-ended bilateral "sister village" relationship, through which both partners are seeking to personalize the fight against world hunger and underdevelopment.


In Zimbabwe’s eastern border with Mozambique, the 150,000 strong population of Mutare has been learning multi-sectoral environmental management lessons from Holland’s eighth largest city, Haarlem. Elsewhere on the continent, it is the British post-war new town Crawley, that is seeking knowledge on the social, political and economic issues facing the developing world through direct interaction with local authorities in Malawi’s city of Lolongwe. While, on its part, Lolongwe is looking to benefit from access to British local authority networks of technical skills.


These examples are only a few of a growing catalogue of inter-community partnerships now forming across the globe, whereby local communities have been bridging gaps of distance and culture to learn from each other’s experiences in order to implement sustainable urban development.


By the turn of this century, global population growth had seen the number of people living in the world topping 6.1 billion. Of this about 3 billion people now live in cities and towns, and this figure is expected to increase particularly in the less developed countries, where the urban population is expected to double from 1.9 billion in 2000 to 3.9 billion in 2030. This has led to an urgent need for solutions to the emerging socio-economic problems in the cities of the developing world.


"Globalization is making the 21st Century the century of the cities. The challenge is how to make cities a better place for the majority of people", says Anna Kajumulo Tibaijuka, Executive Director of UN HABITAT. And to do this, she says, "partnership is indeed the key for successful implementation of the Habitat Agenda. We must collaborate if we must succeed".


This year, the World Habitat Day Celebrations acknowledges the need to encourage more cooperation between cities, under the theme "City-to-City Cooperation".


City-to-city cooperation initiative, or its acronym C2C, has been driven largely by city managers and local authorities themselves, in an attempt to project their role as partners in the international processes addressing urban issues. C2C programmes, also sometimes referred to as "Decentralized cooperation", generally all share a commitment to exchange between cities on the fundamental premise that cities have a great deal to learn and teach each other. There are, however, broad differences that reflect the wide diversity of interests, purposes, institutions, resources and situations.


UN-HABITAT has been working with many international organizations and associations of local authorities to encourage city to city cooperation. For example, it has been working with the World Association of Cities and Local Authorities Coordination (WACLAC) and the United Nations Advisory Committee of Local Authorities (UNACLA) and United Towns Organization (UTO), to encourage more city to city linkages. More recently, UN-HABITAT has been working with Sister Cities International (SCI). SCI is an organization whose members have built up decades of experience promoting this concept. It is a citizen diplomacy network creating and strengthening partnerships to increase global cooperation at the local level. SCI represents over 700 communities who are working in over 1,500 cities in 121 countries around the world.


Other recent examples include the city to city cooperation organised by a group of six European cities – Bielefeld and Essen (Germany), Delft (Netherlands), Evry (France), San Felix de Llobregat (Spain), and Sheffield (United Kingdom), who are working with a German non-governmental organisation, to form a partnership with the Nicaraguan town of Esteli, to assist with water, sanitation and ecological projects. Building on 10 years experience of cooperation, emphasis shifted to institutional reform, specifically to strengthen democratic governance during the transition to multi-party democracy. This attracted support from the European Commission and led to a series of successful local activities in Esteli, aimed at citizens and newly elected officials, including technical support for finance, administration, planning and international relations.


This was one of the first North-South C2C partnerships to focus on institutional reform and issues of governance. Its concern for operational aspects of local democracy was probably the strongest feature, giving the partnership a concrete purpose and leading to visible results.


Among the 54-member Commonwealth, a Commonwealth Local Government Good Practice Scheme (CLGF) was started in 1997/1998. It supports over 30 projects in 14 countries, linking some 60 councils and associations.


"The CLGF scheme draws on the skills and expertise of local government practitioners to find sustainable solutions to local problems. These often have wider impact for other councils having similar problems", says Carl Wright, Director of the scheme which was endorsed by the Commonwealth Heads of Governments at their meeting in March this year. A key feature of the CLGF programme is the dissemination of good practice at national level, as well as association-to-association exchanges, which enable the scheme to reach beyond the traditional C2C linking.


According to the International Union of Local Authorities (IULA), while most international cooperation programmes and projects today involve either one or a combination of the critical issues of good governance, capacity building and/or specific initiatives to secure sustainability, there are often other motivations that simply demonstrate the concept of human solidarity.


For example, when in 1998 ice storms devastated thousands of lives in Canada, elders in Sanankoroba, a 4,500 population community in Mali, raised 40,000 West Africa Francs (40 Pounds Sterling) in emergency aid from their subjects in support of Quebec’s Sainte-Elisabeth community. In doing so, the community acknowledged that "We are aware that the money is symbolic. It shows that giving has to do with the heart, not the sum".