Abstract

The majority of the world's population---and the majority of the poor people of the South---will soon be urban residents. Many affected cities and towns lack the capacity to plan for or manage this unprecedented growth, have weak institutions of local governance, and are beset by severe poverty. ;In this essay, I analyze and evaluate the World Bank's response to this phenomenon in its recently released urban and local government strategy, Cities in Transition. In my view, this strategy has several deficiencies and should be improved. My evaluation is based on a model of ethically-focused, participatory urban development and one explicitly normative approach---that of the United Nations Development Programme. The UNDP's human rights approach supports an urban development - human rights connection in its general contention that both development and human rights share a "common vision and a common purpose---to secure the freedom, well-being and dignity of all people everywhere" . ;Although moral issues seldom achieve prominence in formal urban development strategies and policies, they ought to. Important moral issues abound, yet the moral content of urban development and governance dialogue currently remains implicit, fragmentary, incomplete, and arbitrary. What is lacking, I contend, is a procedure or framework that can raise the profile of moral concerns to become an explicit, unified, cohesive, and pertinent influence, shaping the means and ends of urban development and governance processes and decisionmaking. I demonstrate that this framework---in many forms---already exists within the field of development ethics. ;I argue, therefore, that the development challenge confronting cities and towns in the South should be viewed from a moral perspective, and as a human rights challenge. In this context, the UNDP's human rights approach does have an important---and motivational---role in the World Bank's new urban strategy