"Cityscapes 2002" Global Convention on Agenda for Urban Infrastructure Reforms
October 21-22, 2002, New Delhi

Keynote Address by Mr Len DuVall, OBE, Chairperson, Commonwealth Local Government Forum (CLGF) and Member, Greater london Assembly 

Mr Chairman,
Honorable Minister,
Distinguished Mayors and local Government representatives, 
Mr Secretary and distinguished officials,
Fellow CLGF Board members from throughout the Commonwealth,
Colleagues and friends.

It is an honour for me, as Chairperson of the Commonwealth Local Government Forum, CLGF, to address your Convention.

This it not the first time our organisation has held meetings in India, but is the first time we have held a meeting of our Board in your country, indeed in Asia.

I am moreover delighted that the Government of India, through Hon Ananth Kumar, is hosting our CLGF Board meeting.

The CLGF

The Commonwealth Local Government Forum is a membership organisation which currently has some 170 members in 40 Commonwealth countries worldwide.

We have received formal recognition for our work from Commonwealth Heads of Government including at their last meeting held in Australia in March 2002.

Our members include individual municipalities, local government associations and other local government stakeholders as well as ministries of local government.

I am pleased to note that here in both New Delhi Municipal Council and the Municipal Corporation of Delhi are CLGF members, as well of course as the Union Ministry of Urban Development and Poverty Alleviation.

Urban Infrastructure Reform

The theme of your Convention -Urban Infrastructure Reform- is of key concern to local government throughout the world.

Growing urbanisation is creating ever-greater pressures on infrastructure, whether it be housing, provision of water and 
sanitation or city-wide transport.

UN Habitat has pointed out that we live in the urban millennium when over half of humanity now lives in urban areas. It is also expected that within the next two decades the urban population in developing countries will grow from 1.9 billion in 2000 to over 3.9 billion in 2030. This is the equivalent to 70 million people a year - Lagos, for example, is expected to grow from its present 13 million to 20 million by 2010!

As result of such rapid urbanisation 50-70 per cent of the population in many cities in the developing world live in spontaneous settlements or slums and it is estimated that a staggering one billion poor people living without adequate shelter and basic services, many of them here in Asia.

The recent World Summit on Sustainable Development, at which CLGF was represented, accepted the urgent need for adequate shelter and set targets for providing sanitation and clean water. In this respect improving the living conditions of at least 100 million slum dwellers by the year 2020 - 10 per cent of the total is a key Millennium Development target.

Clearly the tasks facing local government in the big cities is enormous. We will have to use all resources at our disposal. Above all we need to develop new strategies and new ways of thinking if we are to rise to the challenges confronting us.

London

In 2000, I was elected as member of the newly-established Greater London Authority, the GLA, which also has its own directly elected mayor, Mr Ken Livingstone, for the first time. At the GLA, I have the following responsibilities:

• Vice Chair of the Budget Committee
• Chair of the Labour Group
• Member of the Culture, Sport and Tourism Committee
• Lead Member on Appointments on behalf of the GLA
• Vice Chair of the London Development Agency

One of the key issues facing Greater London, a world city with a population of some 7 million, is its ageing transport infrastructure and growing traffic congestion on its streets. London's population is expected to grow by 700,000 over the next decade. To accommodate this growth London has to have a massively improved public transport infrastructure, better quality and varied housing and investment in health and education.

Traffic congestion in London is such that some roads in central London are approaching gridlock. A number of schemes have been, or are being, introduced by the Mayor to try and tackle this problem:

• Making radical improvements to bus services in London, including overcoming unreliability and slow journey times
• Better integration of rail and bus services, moving towards a London wide, high frequency 'turn up and go' service
• Bringing forward new integration initiatives to improve key interchanges, enhancing safety and security and providing better information and waiting environments
• Supporting local boroughs' local transport initiatives, including walking and cycling schemes, safer routes to school, road safety improvements, better maintenance of roads and bridges
• Increasing the capacity of London's transport systems by major new cross-London rail links, improved orbital rail links in inner London, new Thames River Crossings and new guided bus lanes or tram projects.
• Bringing in Congestion Charging - charging motorists £5 per day to bring their car into London (on stream February 2003)

Your Convention will look at some of the new ways of financing urban infrastructure.

Local government or even central or state government cannot deal with the tasks facing them on their own.

Increasingly local government is working in partnership both with community organisations and NGOs and with the private sector in delivering services and raising funds.

In March 2003, CLGF will hold the second Commonwealth Local Government Conference in Pretoria/ Tshwane, South Africa. This Conference will have as its theme 'Local Government Service Partnerships': with community groups, with the private sector.

Our Conference will bring together mayors, ministers, senior officials from local, state and central government as well as community and private business leaders and look at specific case studies of partnerships from around the world, including India.

We hope the Conference will help us develop recommendations and guidelines on good practice, including financing and the appropriate legal and institutional framework to promote partnerships.

These will be formally submitted to Commonwealth Heads of Government, including the Hon'ble Prime Minister of India, when Heads of Government meet in Nigeria later in 2003.

I accordingly invite all of you to have an interest in this area to join us at our Conference in South Africa next March and contribute to our discussions. Information on the Conference and how to register is being made available to you.

Globalisation requires international co-operation

We live in a globalised world. Most of our big mega-cities are competing on the global market place - for investment, jobs and tourism: what happens in India not affects its Asian neighbours, but countries through the world. The same is true in reverse.

Local government cannot afford to remain local anymore. We must learn from each others' experiences, from good practices, as well as bad practices.

The Commonwealth Local Government Forum seeks to promote exchange of experience among its members. We do this in a number of ways, including through our Good Practice Scheme, which I am pleased to be launching in India this week.

Above all, we provide a network where local government can talk to each other, can interact with partners in central government and the many other stakeholders which have an interest in our work, not least in respect of supporting the urban infrastructure.

Such international co-operation is essential if local government, if municipalities, are to modernise and achieve true excellence in the delivery of services to their communities.

I would therefore like to invite all mayors and other municipal representatives here to join us by agreeing to become a member of the Commonwealth Local Government Forum before you leave New Delhi. City-to-city co-operation is not a luxury: it is an essential strategy in our urbanised world.

You will find that being a member of the CLGF will keep you up-to-date with key developments world-wide and link you to our international network of practitioners.

Our Director, Mr Carl Wright, and our Board members which include Hon'ble Ananth Kumar, will be pleased to provide more information.

Conclusion - Cities without slums

As this Convention's agenda recognises, providing a decent urban infrastructure means looking at a wider picture. It entails ensuring good local governance - where the Commonwealth has much expertise, addressing property rights and secure tenure, having access to adequate finances, including from the private sector, and facilitating community participation. All of these moreover need to be brought into a long-term, integrated city development strategy.

The World Bank, through its Cities Alliance, has put forward a vision of Cities without Slums. Progress will be measured by access to sanitation and access to secure tenure. Through slum upgrading and other strategies, this vision can be realised. An example is the 'parivartan ' or upgrading programme currently underway in the city of Ahmedabad in Gujarat.

If cities like Ahmedabad -with 300,000 families in slums- can come up with innovative urban strategies, then we can indeed move forward towards meeting the millennium development targets: We can start to address our cities' massive urban infrastructure problems.

In conclusion I wish to echo what Mr Kofi Annan, UN Secretary-General said on the occasion of this year's World Habitat Day, 7 October:

'If cities are the collective future of mankind, it is time for us to take collective responsibility for their development'

Let us rise to this challenge together.