Simpiwe Seti gives an overview of a session on urban safety and security from the third World Urban Forum held in Vancouver, Canada

South Africa has gained an unenviable reputation for poor urban safety and security and the recently released crime statistics largely confirm that the country has a deep seated problem in this regard. When the 2005/06 statistics were released, Hillbrow once again emerged as having the highest rate of social contact crime such as murder, rape, robbery and assault in the country .

South Africans are, however, not alone in their anxiety about the safety of their urban spaces. The recent World Urban Forum 3 conference held in Canada heard that citizen’s confident use of public space such as streets, public transport, public toilets and parks in cities worldwide has been steadily weakened due to a deteriorating climate of public safety and security and heightened risks from a new array of security threats. Some of the key presentations from Canada, Afghanistan, United Kingdom, Colombia and South Africa noted that threats to safety and security often damage a city’s economic prospects.  A city’s ability to attract tourism and investments are heavily conditioned by its climate of safety and security and by the overall quality of life people can expect in their use of public space.

Local authorities around the world are battling with a range of security-related issues including threats to long-term political, economic and social sustainability. Frequent and persistent violence creates a climate where crime becomes a normal part of daily life and citizens begin to incorporate feelings of insecurity into their routines of everyday existence. Safety, security and justice are often outside the competence of local authorities and tend to be the responsibility of central government, but city-based crime often cuts across local and national boundaries. Municipal and national government is, therefore, forced to cooperate closely around crime prevention and law enforcement. Experience suggests that devolving responsibility for safety and security to community level allows traditional systems of community justice to take effect. Solutions may thus be found through local culture and an emphasis on reconciliation and restorative justice as opposed to solely punitive measures. In order to avoid unintended consequences such as vigilantism or citizens ‘taking the law into their own hands’, cities are expected to play a coordinating role.

The WUF3 also heard the argument that the persistence of crime and the decline of public trust in cities has serious implications for governance. Local governments may be seen to be losing control, thus eroding confidence in municipal leadership and casting doubt on their ability to govern. Communities turn to alternative security measures including private companies, vigilante groups and gated communities to protect themselves. Coordination between local government departments and the police is critical in achieving and sustaining urban safety and security.

The WUF3 heard a number of ideas about how safety related to the sustainability of cities. Case studies illustrating the feasibility of these ideas included:

Strategic Plans for Urban Security
It is argued that by identifying the risk factors that predispose individuals, families and neighbourhoods to crime, local authorities can build a strategic plan to deal with the problem. Bogotá City in Colombia, for example, implemented a series of specific steps to reduce crime that included:

• Strengthening the Metropolitan Police
• Making the police accountable
• Evaluating progress in strategies to combat crime and monitoring every project and programme
• The provision of civic training in security and peaceful co-existence

Bogotá reported that this comprehensive strategy had resulted in ten years of improved security and reduced violence. It was reported that the number of homicides in Bogotá dropped by 70% between 1993 and 2002. However, in comparison with South Africa, the  recent crime analysis conducted in SA suggests that Bogotá is still the ‘murder capital of the world’.

Dar es Salaam in Tanzania has initiated a safer cities initiative aimed at coordinating and strengthening local institutional crime prevention capacity, changing attitudes to the law and promoting a culture of adherence and reducing youth unemployment through skills training and cultural activities. The initiative is said to have helped in bringing together local community leaders, the city authorities and citizens. Safer Cities Dar es Salaam was initiated in March 1997 by UN-Habitat with technical support from the International Centre for Prevention of Crime in Canada and United Nations Development Programme. The initiative was officially launched in 1998.

In Belo Horizonte, Brazil a Stay Alive Programme involving both crime prevention and social mobilisation was initiated in 2002. A pilot phase targeted the most violent slum areas of the city and thirty months after implementation reported that homicides were down 47%, attempted homicides were down 65% and bank robberies were down 46%.

Integrating Disaster Mitigation in Development Planning
Due to the increase in frequency and intensity of natural and human-made disasters, local and national governments have been compelled to put risk prevention, mitigation and adaptation at the centre of their development planning. This focus has been reinforced by the occurrence of the recent tsunami in Asia and floods and earthquakes that constantly wreak havoc worldwide. It is, therefore, argued that cities need to manage the risk of disasters proactively by, for instance, identifying key risk factors and preventative measures and building these into city and national development plans.

Building Community Resilience
This concept is related to the idea of integrating disaster mitigation into development planning. Community resilience relates to the use of participatory tools that enable community members to map their own hazards and risks and mobilise critical resources to respond to those risks in order to build community resilience. While increased risk of disasters poses a challenge to both local governments and their citizens, it is community members who are the first respondents in an emergency and their capacity to cope with impacts of disasters often determines the level of risk to life and property. The strategy spells out what citizens should and should not do before and after disasters. The state still plays the major role in post-disaster rebuilding and reconstruction.

Disaster Watch
This entails using ‘on the ground knowledge’ of grassroots organisations that have already experienced disasters to shape the response to future threats. The experiences of women’s groups that have survived previous disasters were found to be useful in monitoring the responses to new disasters and building relationships with grassroots organisations in disaster-stricken areas. In India, an NGO worked closely with grassroots women’s groups in over a thousand villages in Maharastra after the 1993 earthquake. The knowledge of grassroots groups who had previous experience of recovery procedures was found to be invaluable to similar groups in newly traumatized cities.

Safer Cities
Canadian women’s organisations have developed creative tools to assess problems and to advocate for policy change to make cities safer for women. Women’s safety audits are now said to be an internationally recognised practice that can equip women and communities to identify what corrective measures are needed to improve personal safety in urban settings. By way of example, an intervention dubbed ‘between two stops’ was initiated in the City of Montreal in 1992. It aimed at improving the safety of women who are using public transport, especially in the evening, and allows women and girls to alight from the buses at night as close to their destination as possible. The process leading to ‘between two stops’ was recognised as a UN-Habitat Best Practice in 2000.

The WUF3 discussions revealed that each city faces its own unique challenges in addressing urban violence and security and each must find solutions that are adapted to its own historical, political and institutional context. Effective and long-term solutions, however, have common features that must be anchored in an empowered city governance approach that acknowledges the respective roles and contributions of a wide array of actors within an overall framework of the rule of law.

Sources

• Sunday Times online, posted on 2 October 2006. ‘Hotbeds of Crime’
• Report on the third session of the World Urban Forum. Vancouver, Canada. June 19-23, 2006.
• Background Paper: WUF3. Our Future: Sustainable Cities – Turning Ideas into Action. Prepared by Patricia.L.McCarney.

The Local Government Transformer Vol 12. No. 5 Oct/Nov 2006