UN-Habitat World Urban Forum III
H. William Batt
[A report on the foum, held in Vancourver, British Columbia.
Reprinted from
GroundSwell, July-August 2006]
I spent a week in Vancouver, June 19-24, attending the United
Nations HABITAT's World Urban Forum. This is the third such event
known by this name, although its antecedent was launched thirty
years ago also in Vancouver. This World Urban Forum included both
national level and city officials, NGOs, and grassroots organizers,
unlike other UN conferences where UN ambassadors and bureaucrats
meet in "official" sessions separate from NGOs. With no
registration fee, it drew over 11,000 people from more than one
hundred countries worldwide, over twice what was anticipated.
The theme of the conference was Our Future: Sustainable Cities -
Turning Ideas into Action. Our Land Value Taxation movement was
represented by seven of us: Alanna Hartzok, Annie Goeke, Ted
Gwartney and I representing the American Georgists, Dave and Heather
Wetzel for the British Georgists, and Henry Abbott, from Darien,
Connecticut, a resurfaced Georgist who came with Ted. Some of us
stayed in downtown hotels proximate to the conference, but others --
Alanna, Annie, and I -- stayed in a dormitory suite at the
University of British Columbia, to be shuttled back and forth to the
convention site each morning and evening. The benefit of being on
the campus besides lower cost was the chance to make connections
with thousands of others also staying there. Everyone was a "delegate"
at this affair, and the national dress -- especially of indigenous
peoples and those coming from Africa and Asia -- helped everyone
recognize and appreciate the rich array of human experience.
The tenor of the conference was electric, due mainly to the sheer
numbers of people, the many plenary sessions, training and
networking events, and the rich assortment of exhibits. To be sure,
going through the security system was onerous with all the metal in
our pockets and briefcases, but it was understandable. Lebanon's
former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, who was awarded and honored at
the last HABITAT conference, was assassinated just a bit over a year
ago. If present heads of state were few, one had the sense that many
future leaders were. Every one of us has come back home with pockets
of business cards, and it took me a week to follow up all the
contacts.
For Alanna the conference gave ample evidence of her past work.
This year's meeting inaugurated a special Global Land Tools Network,
where those who have been pressing hardest for greater recognition
of the importance of land will now have opportunity to see their
issues explored. But my first cut at writing up these details got so
many things wrong that Alanna is better elaborating that part
herself. So, this part is about the conference generally, and Alanna
can talk about LVT's progress on the world and HABITAT front
specifically. The results should really be evident at the 2008
HABITAT WUF in Nanjing.
There were chances to make statements, pose leading questions, and
otherwise mark our presence. And we all took full advantage of those
opportunities at all the breakout sessions we attended. I myself am
very impressed by Alanna's conferencing skills: she knows just how
to ask a question, or make a statement, just at the right time, and
using just the right tone. When there seemed to be hesitation in
discussion about the Global Land Tools Network -- a ten-year effort
funded by Sweden and Norway, she interceded with a perfectly timed
comment that brought the decision to the fore, and action was taken.
At two other occasions when I was also in a session with Alanna, she
also managed to get herself recognized and then heard. Due perhaps
to her assiduous cultivation of the issue, land value taxation is
very much on the table among HABITAT discussants and subscribers.
Alanna has reminded me, however, that promoting discussion of land
value taxation has been a long process; for her and for Pat Aller it
has been a twelve-year campaign. Alanna came prepared at this
conference to distribute a modest one-pager describing LVT and what
Earth Rights Institute is prepared to do by way of training and
consultation to governments everywhere.
Other Chance Meetings of Value
For my own part, the many contacts I established by itself made
the trip worthwhile, for contacts are really what such conferences
are all about. At one session by chance I sat next to a Vietnamese
woman from Hanoi who knows Bruno Moser now living there. It turned
out she was instrumental in getting Nic Tideman to visit Vietnam
earlier this year and speak on LVT. At another session, a woman sat
down next to me who lives close by my home in Albany, sent there by
her county Cooperative Extension office to learn more about the
advantages of urban agriculture. Todd Litman from the Victoria
Transport Policy Institute, with whom many of us have exchanged many
messages on transportation finance, was there talking with some
planners.
Other fortuitous meetings were with a planner from Vermont, the
Deputy Director of the Ministry of Construction and Urban
Development of Mongolia, a Vietnamese doctoral student in Planning
finishing his degree at University College, London, the former mayor
of Bogota, all who seem just primed for the Georgist message, and
with whom I have followed up. (The Vietnamese fellow, soon back in
London, showed up at my suggestion at the International Union
conference two weeks later.) The exhibit of the city of
Vitoria-Gasteiz in Spain (right near the Basque region) offered an
impressive instance of a sustainable city, the representatives of
which were most interested in learning more about LVT. Among the
Canadians was a woman demonstrating new ways to use GIS technology
to foster development and acceptance of policies, and many local
government officials who have had extensive exchanges with their
third-world counterparts for improvement of administration. Having
served my Peace Corps stint in Thailand over four decades ago, I was
happy to meet the Thai delegation, all there to talk about the
tsunami that hit the southern coast in December, 2004. Three were
directly affected, one with a heart-rending story I was privileged
to learn about in detail. They talked about how the rescue and
reconstruction efforts are going -- in a word, not very well. I even
met the director of the Thailand Appraisal Organization, who was
responsible for arranging for me to speak to his assembled members
when I was last in Bangkok in 2003.
Before we left Vancouver, it was our good fortune to visit with
members of our long-standing Georgist community there: Mary Rawson,
the former city planner of Vancouver, Olaf Klasen who has roots in
Estonia, and Bob Williams who served a term on the Schalkenbach
Board of Directors. Tatiana Roshkoshnaya, whom many of us have known
since her first visit to the CGO conference in Los Angeles in 1993,
was also there, since she now serves as a UN HABITAT official in
Nairobi. Tatiana's Georgist presence has been important in that
organization's receptivity to LVT, and my chance meeting on the
shuttle bus with one of her colleagues, the Chinese-born Chief of
the Urban and Housing Finance Section of Nairobi's HABITAT office,
probably strengthened his awareness of what we're all about.
The Entertainment Part
It was not all work. The opening and closing sessions had some
wonderful art and entertainment. We saw perform the champion Native
American Hoop Dancer, as well as three acts from Cirque du Soleil
and a few other well-rehearsed choruses. I was taken particularly
with a quartet of pre-pubescent Kenyan girls -- a set of triplets
and their younger sister -- who sang a song in KiSwahili about land
and justice. They were so impressive at the opening session that
they were called back to perform again for the closing. They've been
singing since they were two, trained by their mother and father. I
managed to get the English lyrics for that song, about a child who
wants to return to the bush, where life is more serene, and where
one can survive more easily than in the city where life that is full
of debts and trials.
"O Father, please give me a piece of land (shamba) and I will
use my own hands to earn a noble living. I am not happy with city
life where earnings are meagre and as evanescent as salt. In the end
I'm left by mid-day hopelessly scouring newspapers for a job and
ducking endlessly from my debtors." The refrain, "Give me
a piece of land," rang powerfully.
By total fluke, my comments in one of the sessions were picked up
and printed in an online daily newspaper about the conference. We'd
been talking about transportation finance, and there arose a chance
for me to mention value capture. I'd already used the free transit
pass we were given to ride around in the new SkyTrain that serves
the city. A freelance journalist writing on the session found my
observations on it worthy of including in his daily recount of
things. Here they are:
Scratching heads at SkyTrain
In the afternoon, the folks from TransLink (Greater Vancouver's
Transportation Authority) put on a plush PowerPoint show describing
their integrated approach to transit. Visitors from Sweden and
Nigeria were wowed by images of the SkyTrain and SeaBus, of
wheelchair elevators and HandyDarts. Yet TransLink board chair
Malcolm Brodie made no mention of the fact that TransLink is
currently hundreds of busses short of meeting its modest service
targets, largely because the province has chosen instead to pour
money into the Canada Line rapid transit route to Richmond and the
airport.
"How do you see transit?" asked a woman from Nigeria
after that presentation. "I think it's a human rights issue.
It gives us access to health. To education. To employment.
Everyone has the right to transit." This prompted William
Batt, a sustainable transportation expert from Albany, New York,
to recall the ride he took on a fancy new elevated commuter
railway in Chennai, India. "They put the rail where the
politicians wanted it to go, not where people needed it. So at
rush hour, it was empty." Batt also spent a lonely Sunday
afternoon on Vancouver's Millennium SkyTrain Line What shocked him
most were the vast parking lots along the way, like that at
Brentwood Mall. "Parking lots! That land is begging to be
used."
Batt suggested that such land would be better utilized -- and
cities could pay for fancy transit projects -- if we simply
re-thought how we taxed the land.
"Right now you guys tax both the land and improvements.
It's a double-whammy that punishes the developers who actually
build anything. It encourages them to sit on property for years.
You should cut the tax on improvements, and heavily tax the land
around transit stops. This is called capturing the land value. The
more you tax the land, the more the developer is going to invest
in that land to recoup his tax expenses." In one study, Batt
found that if such tax strategies were used along one road project
in New York State, the government could have recouped the cost of
that highway eleven-fold. Just an idea, he said.
So it was an enjoyable and successful conference for us, and I
think for all the delegates. HABITAT, begun as a rump caucus three
decades ago, is an important part of the UN, and is a valuable
adjunct to our focus of activity.