In June 2014, the
World Bank sent a team of urban specialists to the Vietnamese city of Can
Tho. The team was part of the World
Bank’s Resilient Cities Program, which it started in December 2013. They came to Can Tho to carry out what the
World Bank calls a “CityStrength Diagnostic.” With a population 1.25 million people Can Tho
is the largest city in the Mekong River Delta.
Its population is growing at a rapid clip of 9.7%, has an 11.7% poverty
rate, measures unemployment at 4.7%, and has a robust 11.6% GDP growth. While 98% have access to electricity, only
62% have piped water, trash collection only happens in the urban core, while
only one district has piped sewers (World Bank Group 2014, 20).
As the world’s
urban population adds another 2.5 billion people by 2050, we know that
secondary cities like Can Tho will be the primary location for the great
demographic shift. We also know that 90%
of urban growth will be in Africa and Asia.
Understanding how the development community approaches projects in
places like Can Tho can help us to develop an analysis of 21st
century urbanism, as well as thinking about the making of the Habitat III
agenda.
The World Bank’s
June 2014 visit to Can Tho was the most recent in a series of international
efforts at bringing resilience to the city.
Can Tho was one of 10 cities participating in the Rockefeller Foundation
supported ($9.4 million) Asian Cities Climate Change Resilience Network
(ACCCRN)’s 7-year program (2008-2014).
The program’s main objective is to strengthen urban resilience to
climate change. ACCCRN has 3 broad
goals: capacity building, a network of
learning, knowledge, and engagement, and scaling-up. The program brings together a wide-range of
protagonists in the world of international development, with the Institute for
Social and Environmental Transition (ISET, http://i-s-e-t.org) taking a lead
role, along with Arup’s International Development team. Together they generated an Urban Resilience
Framework (ACCCRN 2012). ACCCRN serves
as the network that brings together actors that constitute the field of power
and knowledge that underpins ways of being, seeing, thinking, and acting within
the making of Habitat III.
The core
epistemic advanced within the ACCRN network is the basic proposition that
global south advances in development will be lost to climate change unless
adaptation and mitigation are undertaken.
When looking at Vietnam, for example, ACCCRN states, “Since the early
1990s, Vietnam has significantly reduced its poverty rate, but these gains are
now threatened by climate change, which will have serious impacts on
agriculture, aquaculture and other key economic activities in the country”
(ACCCRN n/d, 8). About Can Tho, ACCRN
states, “Although the city is accustomed to large-scale, long-lasting seasonal
flooding of the Mekong River, sea level rise and upstream land use changes will
exacerbate this threat. This will likely increase damage to crops and
negatively impact livelihoods. Saline intrusion and water shortages in the dry
season have also become more noticeable in peri-urban areas. Climate change
stands to intensify these dynamics, leading to deleterious impacts for deltaic
populations” (ACCCRN n/d, 8). From this
framing of the 21st challenges facing Can Tho, the ACCRN team
undertook its agenda of capacity building, knowledge production, and
scaling-up.
When the
World Bank team arrived in June 2014, it brought a well-planned schematic, a
discursive framework for ordering Can Tho’s urban form. This schematic is nested in the authoritative
power/knowledge structure of a “diagnostic process,” one that has a 5-stage
sequence. This approach reminds one of
taking the family car to the dealership for its check-up, where the mechanic
does a “comprehensive diagnostic” of the car’s key systems. “Diagnostic” is not a neutral word as it
conveys a scientific, objective epistemic deeply embedded within modernity’s
enlightenment tradition, the core belief that the basic laws of universe are
knowable through observation and study, and that the knowability of the
universe enables humans to control nature in the effort to eradicate human
suffering. It is the Cartesian
instrumentalist view of nature that reduces to a metaphorical machine. “Diagnosis,” interestingly, carries two core
meanings. It can mean the diagnosis of
an illness or problem, but it also can mean the characteristic of a particular
species, genus, or phenomenon. When the
World Bank came to Can Tho, its way of thinking, seeing, being, and acting
embraced the first definition, which understands the second definition, the reality
that is Can Tho, to be a metaphorical illness or problem that needs to be
solved through the diagnostic process itself, in this case, the World Bank’s
the 5-stages of its program.
The World
Bank’s diagnostic program begins with “pre-diagnostic data collection,” which
focuses on rounding up previous reports and studies about the city and
summarizing their contents for project participants. This data collection is one of the key steps
in the institutional reproduction of power and knowledge, as it legitimizes
previous development efforts as well as adding authority to the current. In the second stage, the diagnostic workshop
is launched. It has the main goal of
“put[ting] the interests and priorities of different stakeholders into a
holistic framework of urban resilience,” as well as showing the investment of
top city officials (17). This step
builds the illusion of participation, as the local stakeholders are shoehorned
into pre-existing structure of power and knowledge, one carried in the lap-tops
and powerpoints of the World Bank, which is the diagnostic process itself. Next, the project undertakes interviews and
field visits. These are designed to
inform the World Bank’s external experts about the status of the city and to
“qualitatively measure how well key systems are performing in relation to the
characteristics of resilience” (17). The
diagnostic presumption is that a world of diverse urban knowledge derived from
the lived experiences of urban inhabitants, the “what it means to live” in Can
Tho, can be captured in field visits.
This “qualitative” data collection reveals the top-down, “seeing like a
state” (Scott) epistemic of the ACCRN project that can be juxtaposed to the
“other knowledge” of the urban grassroots.
This qualitative step in the diagnostic serves to silence the “other
knowledge” while enhancing the illusion of participation, especially as the
field visits translate into the glossy photos of locals engaging with World
Bank team that show up in the diagnostic reports, often with a folksy box quote
from an urban dweller that perfectly captures the epistemic generated by the
diagnostic process. The fourth stage is
to prioritize actions that can enhance the city’s resilience, while keeping
focus on how to integrate the different sectors of urban resilience. Prioritization is the crucial discursive
gesture, one that moves from creating knowledge through diagnostics to
implementation of that knowledge, which constitutes the actualization of power
through the implementation of urban programs.
In this instance, Arup International played the lead role in giving
shape to the prioritizing stage, a step that added legitimacy to the
process. Rounding out the diagnostic,
the fifth step calls for “debriefing and discussion” between the World Bank
team and local authorities. From the
meeting, a publication is generated, one that defines the next steps for the
local authorities to undertake, which sends the power-knowledge cycle into its
policy implementation phase.
The main
conclusion reached by the World Bank diagnostic of Can Tho’s 21st
century challenges identifies two main threats:
flooding and uncontrolled urbanization.
The World Bank’s main recommendation is for city officials to
“proactively [guide] urban growth to areas with lower flood risk, including the
higher elevation areas near the urban core” (World Bank Group 2014, 68). To accomplish these goals, the World Bank
pinpoints the need for better coordination between city departments, the city
and national governments, as well as Can Tho’s relationship with international
non-governmental organizations. The
World Bank identified several priorities for Can Tho, which included: “enhancing institutional capacity,
collecting, sharing, and evaluating data, standardization of damager and loss
assessment, incentivize transport to strengthen the city’s core.” The bank also called upon city officials to “strengthen
financial management” and “enhance financial-investment planning” (World Bank
Group 2014, 68). The World Bank’s
recommendations serve to ensure Can Tho will need continued assistance,
guidance, and tutoring from the development experts. With the priorities and recommendations set
for action, the next wave of experts from the international development
community prepares to descend upon Can Tho.
The challenge of climate change will keep the urban resilience consultancy
complex hard at work well into the future.
Sources
Asian Cities
Climate Change Network (ACCCRN).
2012. “ACCCRN City Projects.”
Bangkok, Thailand. (August).
Asian Cities
Climate Change Network (ACCCRN).
N/D. Brochure.
Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to
Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press,
1998.
World Bank
Group. 2014. Can
Tho, Vietnam: Enhancing Urban Resilience. CityStrength Resilient Cities Program. Report # 92710. (June).
