Kuecker: Diagnosis Can Tho

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 21^st 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 21^st 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 21^st 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).