Report: Informal Systems in Urban Sustainability and Resilience

Report: Informal Systems in Urban Sustainability and Resilience

Report: Informal Systems in Urban Sustainability and Resilience

By : Jadaliyya Reports

The Climate Change and Environment team at the Issam Fares Institute of the American University of Beirut, in partnership with the Lebanon office of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, a German non-profit institution working for the public interest, are conducting a research project that explores informality in the urban systems of transportation, water and wastewater, energy, solid waste management, and the use of public space. The main aim of this research project is to identify, map and assess the economic, social and environmental impacts of these informal systems to help establish measures that would reduce their negative impacts, and “institutionalize” or “integrate” some of their aspects into the formal systems for improved overall urban sustainability and resilience.

This research project includes two phases, the first phase being an initial background research phase on the role of informal systems in urban sustainability and resilience across the region. This background report lays the groundwork for the second phase of the project, a case study set in Beirut, Lebanon, which seeks to design and apply a sustainability assessment framework specifically designed for informal systems, which could then be applied to study these systems in urban settings across the region. The research conducted will lay the foundation for a set of informed policy recommendations that seek to enhance urban sustainability and resilience to climate change by learning from informal systems in urban settings.

The first phase report has been published, and below is its summary:

As cities across the region continue to grow, so will the complexity of the urban systems upon which their functions rely. Cities are often viewed as “systems of systems”, and it is vital that these systems are fully understood if efforts to enhance their overall sustainability and resilience are to be undertaken (Da Silva, 2013). Systems of water and wastewater, solid waste management, transportation, and energy, as outlined in this report, are dependent to a large extent on the informal sector. The informal sector in many cases is highly interconnected to the formal sector within these urban systems, and in some cases these connections create a complex web of interactions, as is the case in solid waste management, making a distinction between the formal and the informal nearly impossible. In the case of some systems, such as the energy system, the informal sector operates separate from the formal sector, with little interconnection between the two. As demand for their services grows, and the factors contributing to their growth remain unchanged, the extent and complexity of these informal systems may grow as well. And although complexity of urban systems may contribute to their overall resilience by increasing redundancy, robustness, and diversity, this does not always translate into more sustainable systems over the longterm. In some cases high levels of connectivity and complexity within a system may result in increases in resource use, which in turn diminishes its resilience (Hassler and Kohler, 2014; Ahern, 2011).

Informality across the various systems discussed in this background document results from a complex array of contributing factors. It appears, based on a review of the literature on these systems across the region, that the most common contributors across the systems are either a lack in the provision of services by the formal sector responsible for providing them, particularly in sectors of water and energy, or they provide employment and financial opportunities for urban populations who are dependent on them as their main source of income, as in the case ofinformal waste collection and valorization. The informal sectors across these systems also exhibit some resilient qualities, such as flexibility, creativity, entrepreneurship, resourcefulness, adaptability, and ability to respond quickly to challenges and changing demands. However, there are also numerous environmental, social, and economic costs that result from informal activities in the sectors that cannot be ignored. For these reasons, it is important to gain a better understanding of how these informal systems operate in relation to the formal systems. Addressing urban challenges will be dependent not only on the resilience and sustainability of the formal systems that operate within urban settings, but will also depend largely on the resilience of informal systems as well, particularly in countries where these systems play a significant role in the function of the overall urban system. In order to do so, research efforts are needed to gain a more extensive understanding of informal systems within urban settings, how they operate, their environmental, social and environmental impacts, the links to the formal system, as well as their contributions to overall urban resilience.


[The authors of the report include: Nadim Farajalla (Climate Change and Environment Program Director), Ayah Badran (Project Coordinator), Jad Taha El Baba (RA), Yasmina Choueiri (Consultant), Rana El Hajj (Senior Program Coordinator), Mona Fawaz (AUB Professor, Social Justice and the City Program Director), and Ali Chalak (AUB Associate Professor).]

 

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Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412