Un'altra città è possibile. Il futuro delle città come progetto collettivo
Thursday November 18th
Good morning to everybody.
In the first place I’d like to say thank you. Thank you very much to the Genova authorities and to the organizers of this event. I would also like to greet and to thank the International Association of the Educating Cities for inviting me to this really important meeting, because it’s a challenge: in a world which is a global village, where in the south and in the north there are many common issues, it’s very, very important to get together and to share experiences.
As a woman, as an African woman, I also feel honoured to share my experiences from Mozambique, and from the region. When I was invited to give this intervention I wondered what can I offer about cities, about educating cities? I was wondering which kind of experience can I give to the north, what kind of lessons can I give, lessons learned from our region? And then I was thinking what is the meaning of a city, what is the concept of a city? Is it only a group of people, getting together, having some interaction? We have here more than sixty cities: are we getting together, communicating together, in our towns? We have also the social institutions: housing, schools, hospitals. How can we build or reinforce the way, the role that we are discussing here, as educating cities? I have been a gender activist since ’85 in my country. I’d like to raise a particular issue because we can look at this event through many lenses, and I would like to talk and share with you women’s lens, the involvement of women in sustainable development, in sustainable cities.
Cities are growing everywhere, are growing at a high rate worldwide. The city of Maputo, Mozambique, where I live, receives everyday people from the countryside and from other countries, either as economic refugees or political refugees, as an indirect result of wars. A secure city, a liveable city is not yet a reality in our region, in many many countries, because the municipalities have been giving priorities to some basic needs, relegating to second place other needs.
As professor Dussel said, the other needs should be expressed from the local, from the basic level and many times our cities don’t address all these needs. I’d like to draw your attention to raising these issues of cities in urban area. The female population is larger than the male population in Africa, and more than 80% of peasants are women. In Mozambique more than 27% of households are headed by women. What do I mean by cities? And I think it’s very important in this event to think about this according to the Charter of the International Association of the Educating Cities. Cities are completely different from each other. What unifies us as cities? What is different? What should be included in the meaning, in the concept of cities? This can be a very important task, a key issue for making us as cities more unified, more valuable, more rich and also in terms of working together in a great interaction between cities. Also let me try to go back and think to what professor Dussel was saying, about women’s issues and women’s needs.
Before the 1960s women were invisible in the development planning process. Men were seen as responsible for productive work; women were regarded only in connection with their reproductive role, and therefore as targets for programs in nutrition, hygiene and family planning. That decade saw a number of changes and the ‘90s were a pivotal decade for both women and environmentalists. Despite the negative impact development policies had on women by not taking them into consideration in the planning process, gender social scientist Ester Boserop pointed out the role of socio-cultural norms in determining the sexual division of labour and the importance of women as economic producers.
In the last half of the 20th century we have witnessed the emerging of both a global environmental movement and also a global movement of women, and women in the development community called for the elimination of women’s poverty in order to protect the environment, while the so called ecofeminists called for the recovery of what they call ”the feminine principle in nature - both groups challenged the patriarchal, economic, political, social and cultural values, based on the dominance of man over nature” [1].
Following professor Dussel, we were victims and then we started to move and to establish a close community and to raise our voices, our invisible voices. Many summits, many international conferences took place and there was a recognition of the role of women in environmental conservation. It was recognised because the struggle of women in this world, the combining of ideas, networking and advocacy made it possible for women to emerge not only as major victims of the adjustment policies, but as creative and active agents for change. Going to the Charter of the Educating Cities, I saw the principle number 20: an educating city does not segregate the generations.
The above principle is a point of departure for the development of the education potential of the city for all its habitants. This Charter therefore should be expanded to include aspects that have not been dealt with on this occasion, and I saw that you are going to change this chapter. So allow me to recognize that in this Charter is included the role of women in the development process. This is why I decided to focus on the fact that men and women, depending on their class, age and ethnic origin, interact in a distinct manner with the environment. Men and women have different access to the environment’s resources, and the problems of their environment affect them in different ways. Thus their participation in the sustainable management of resources is not equitable, and neither are the benefits that they receive.
This is why this group of victims react to the authorities. When we raise a gender and sustainable development perspective, we mean relationships, we mean empowerment, we mean the responsibility for the well being of the population are the key references. All this implies commitment to changing values and the sexual division of labour in order to achieve a situation where men and women share power and labour in the management and control of the ecosystem. I’m sure that most of you also know that when we say gender inequalities we are talking about power relations, and as the first speaker professor Dussel was saying, he was dealing a lot with power relations which can lead also to domination, and then the situation can change. Development means the participation of all of society in decision making processes and in the implementation of programs.
Meaningful participation provides for meaningful relationships and networks, a key aspect of the full and healthy participation of children, youth and women. All of us are here, besides a discussion about many issues surrounding cities, also to network. In my experience, networking is so important for everyone, for all of us. Let me give you the case of Mozambique to show you the importance of the inclusion of women’s groups in the decision making process in any society. One of the major gains of Mozambican women is that the principle of equality between men and women is in our Constitution, however this hasn’t meant a break with the patriarchal model which structures social organizations. In the urban areas in Mozambique women are active in efforts to combat poverty, with its attendant environment destructions.
Statistics in Mozambique show that women’s participation in the labour force has not changed in recent decades. The percentage of women in the total labour force declined slightly from 49% in the ‘80s to 48,4 % in 1997, and in Southern Africa the rate is always a bit lower. I’m saying that while across most developing countries increasing numbers of women are turning to jobs outside the agricultural sector, most of them located in urban areas, this is not the case in Mozambique, where it is estimated that 96% of the total female labour force is in agriculture.
At the same time statistics find that 80% of urban women are either in agriculture or trade. In addition, 92% of workers in rural areas and 65% of all workers in urban areas are in the informal sector. In fact, a very large percentage of urban women who undertake agricultural activities also devote part of the day to trade. So it is true that even in cities, even in urban areas, women and men are not in homogeneous groups.
We can find defined groups of women with different interests, different needs, different concerns and the educating city has to deal with all these needs of the various groups in a city. This is our challenge. Mozambique has one of the highest indices of women’s participation in the sphere of political decisions: in our Parliament nearly 32% of the seats are held by women; but representation in local municipalities is still very low, which is a contrast. For example, although 30% of the members of Municipal Assemblies are women, only one Municipal Assembly has a woman as its Chairperson.
So this is a challenge also for all the cities in the world; you, as members of the International Association of the Educating Cities, could discuss how we can involve all groups of citizens because this participation is also a development process. Let me go further and talk about education and its role in this process. One of the main existing assets in education in Mozambique is the fact that the new curriculum of basic education is aimed at making the learning process more relevant, in the sense of educating citizens to be more capable, improving their lives, improving the lives of families, improving communities and the country, and promoting democracy and respect for human rights.
The new curriculum we have in Mozambique - in many African regions, countries, and cities - is made at the national level, but since last year it is comprised of two parts: 80% of the content is defined by the national program, and the community defines the remaining 20%.
Its main objectives, from the point of view of communities, are:
In this way all citizens can feel the ownership of the city. In conclusion there is a need to include women in the educating cities, to add more value for development and to capitalize our assets.
The multiple benefits of women’s participation in cities, as I said throughout my intervention, include:
We say that women are a key in our cities within the formal sector but they are not represented in the municipalities. We can’t combat poverty without women‘s participation because they are more sensible and aware of what is the most important program and policy to combat poverty. So this is why I am strongly saying that it’s important to have many women, and to balance the world we have to put women in different places in order to balance gender power relations. I wish you a fruitful Congress in which each of us can take home in our suitcases some homework, a task, with hope that another world is possible and the educating cities can be a reality, in order to replicate and disseminate what we discuss here in our cities, in our communities, in our local governments.
The Councillor of Genova in charge of culture issues wrote in the proceedings for the Congress: ”I hope that this meeting, this Congress should not be just another Congress, but a Congress where we can make changes, we can transform our society”.
I thank you so much for your attention.
The topic of this Congress is “Another city is possible. The future of the city as a collective project”. In fact, this concept is a practical postulate. The topic of this second session is: “The educating city towards an ethic of responsibility”. In my speech I will try to merge these two topics in order to make sense of them.
The postulate of “another city is possible” is what opens up all prospects of future reforms, exactly in terms of projects. If another city was not possible, there would be no way to transform it. However, this is a postulate that will always be open. The ethical responsibility of critical education should be strictly linked to this topic and that is what I will try to do in order to make some reflection possible.
The city: when someone says “the city” I think of Menfis in Egypt, 5000 years ago; I think of Akati, not far from the current bombed city in Iraq; of Babylon, situated not far from Baghdad; of Byblos, the Phoenician city of the Mediterranean which invented the alphabet; of Mohenjo-Daro in Pakistan; of Yang-Tzu, China, that started in Gen-Tze a massive urban culture; of Athens, of Rome; of Teotihuacan in Mexico, a city with 100,000 inhabitants in the 4th century; of Cuzco, which for the Incas means “the world’s belly-button”; of Baghdad, the centre of cultures from China to all Euro-Asian steppes for 500 years, from 756 to 1250 when it was conquered by the Tartars, Baghdad, the large city at the centre of the world destroyed today by the barbarians of the 21st century; of Constantinople, the big city with one million inhabitants; of Cairo, Paris, London, New York.
Ten thousand years ago the urban man, mankind, stopped occupying the land, but this had taken a long time to happen. Four million years ago, the Homo Habilis stood upright, Homo Sapiens did so 150,000 years ago. Only ten thousand years ago the first cities emerged, as humanity present on the globe started concentrating and then organising the cities. For the 0,25% of human history we lived in cities, not even 1% of humanity’s time.
That kind of city exists thanks to two big revolutions: agriculture which has made it possible for us not to be root-seekers any more, and pastoral farming allowing us not to be hunters any more. The nomad man was replaced by the sedentary man, but in fact the human being is a nomad and being sedentary and urban is nearly an illness. Therefore it will be necessary to find a remedy to escape this illness of being urban.
Together with the city, social complexity began. The division of labour started and with it classes started to emerge, along with a large amount of functions. Sahagun, one of the sages at the times of America’s invasion in the 16th-century, used to describe 360 social functions within the Aztec empire. The human being already had various functions; moreover, the domination of one class upon the other emerged, together with a huge memory process: it was necessary to remember what humanity had done in every culture, and what each function’s achievements had been in each of the different jobs. It is thus clear that the memory accumulated started to become gigantic, especially with the creation of alphabetic writing approximately 3,800 years ago, even though ideographic writing is more than 5,000 years old. Therefore, the knowledge which was gathered became enormous. It was necessary to pass on, from one generation to the next, the memory of a community or at least of a culture. The educational process was born as one of the city’s internal functions.
The educating city is nearly 10,000 years old, as it is the city’s duty to teach the new generations its own memory, so that the young man will be able, as an adult, to carry out those functions that are required by the city. Thus institutions were created, which are daily ways of acting arousing expectations and allowing one to know what the other is expecting someone to do, also hoping that the other will do what one expects. The father behaves as a father with his children, the master as such with his pupils, the authority with those under its ruling, and everybody knows how it all works.
Institutions gradually replaced the necessary instinct of the species, so that the human species institutionalised its relations and got rid of instinct, which could thus become creative. Therefore, the possibility of the historical creation of new institutions going well beyond pure animal instincts emerged. That’s how ethics too was born, which functioned as the link replacing instincts that force people into specific behaviours, thus allowing the institution to force someone, albeit in an ethical way, to do something that is essential to the survival of the group. Therefore, rather than an instinctual need, this was an ethical duty which was to become later institutional as well as cultural and was to replace instinct.
I would like to stop for a moment on the issue of ethics, as I’ve been asked of rather talking on an ethic of values. I believe that values cannot be the foundation of ethics. What is the function of ethics, how does it work and how can it be then applied to the city? I would like to distinguish among three aspects within ethics, so as to be clear on some fundamental issues. Firstly, ethics is characterised by an aspect that I will call material. Material means content; this is the meaning of the term which we find in an author who is no longer studied that much, Karl Marx. Marx’s materialism consists in the fact that the content of any act is the human living “corporality”: someone’s life as “corporality” is the ultimate content of all their acts, not only to eat or drink but also to dress up, have a home, even to reproduce oneself, and this also means education and culture.
The material level of the human being could be divided at least into three levels: the level of the relationship of the human being with nature, that of the relationship of the human beings through nature and the cultural level.
As you can see, I have placed nature at the material level, in the sense that it is the matter of study and transmission of education. Ethics forces the members of a community, starting from the origins of the human being up to the end of time, and in all cultures – this is a universal principle – to the responsibility of production, reproduction and development of human life within the community and, ultimately, of the whole of humanity.
This kind of ethic is not an ethic of values, nor is it an ethic of virtues or an ethic of the law. It is an ethics that considers human life as the ultimate criterion. And this is fundamental in our time, where we are in a situation of collective suicide at various levels. This is obvious not just in the case of the atomic bomb but, rather, in the case of the economic danger of humanity’s mass poverty, where 50% are under Amartya Sen’s survival threshold, or for the ecological problem of survival in the next 5,000 years.
Even though 5,000 years ago the first big cities like Menfis were born, this does not mean that humanity will survive another 5,000 years because, at an ecological level, we will probably already have destroyed the earth. This is the first political problem and the first problem for cities.
The second level is called formal level. This is the procedural moment, according to German philosopher Habermas, who talks about a procedure according to which the participants interested in the city with rational topics or at least with reasons, reach agreements having started from a symmetrical situation. The formal moment is the moment of freedom, of the subjects’ autonomy – at political level this is the democratic principle. If, as we’ll see, it is necessary to educate the child, the young man, everybody at the material, ecological, economic and cultural level in relation to one’s own identity, it will also be necessary to educate to the democratic spirit, which means coming to an agreement having started from symmetrical situations. The ideal scenario would be the rule of law which in many countries of the world - I am thinking for example of my current country, Mexico – has never taken place: never have judges been the ones to make a decision regarding a dispute because of corporatism, corruption of the judicial power, injustice of the laws. And all this is the formal level of ethics, that is the second principle, which then states as follows: how can we reproduce and develop life through agreements where participants are symmetrically those who rationally decide on what will be democratically lawful?
The third principle would be that of feasibility, that is: in order for an act to be good, and to claim to be good, it needs to reproduce life through the free participation of those involved, however doing things that are possible and not impossible, because if they are impossible then they cannot claim to be good.
This is the problem of anarchism which sometimes thinks that, for instance, without state nor institutions it would be better. What happens is that, in order not to have institutions, we would have to be perfect. But it is empirically impossible for everybody to be perfect. If these conditions existed, we could say that we would have an order in the city, that I would call ethical, where the city would reproduce the life of its members, that would be democratically decided by means of possible projects. That’s where the breakdown process occurs: there is no possible perfect order, no order can be perfect, and this is universal. The order that claims to be perfect is an illusion, and it would rather be domination since no order is perfect, then it is imperfect, and it inevitably entails negative consequences. All orders inevitably have negative consequences.
There is a saying that says: “The just person sins seven times a day. And how many times does the unjust sin? Not even once” because, contrary to the just person, he is not aware of his negative effects.
Since the negative effect is inevitable, that’s where the critical issue of ethics and of the city begins. Hammurabi, who wrote a code for his city of Babylon (1700 years before Christ), in the first written code that humanity recalls – the stone of Hammurabi which is held at the Louvre in Paris, or rather one of them as all cities had a code in their gate – states: “I have done justice to the widow, the orphan, the poor, the stranger”. In such types of codes not only were laws made for the order in force, but also for the negative effects of the order: justice needed to be done not for one’s own wife but for the widow; not for one’s own child but for the orphan; not for the wealthy but for the poor.
This was a kind of ethic of the city where the legal system took it upon itself to look after the victims of its own city. In this way, a critical ethic is an ethic of responsibility. A good authority in a city is not only the one in charge of making sure that everything works, but, rather, the one that every day asks itself what is wrong, in order to correct it and to keep demanding justice.
Making mistakes is not just human but it is inevitable. However, consistently correcting the mistake, is politics indeed.
Victims are those who inevitably suffer the negative effect. Such victims are now the object of politics and, at the same time, of the educating process. How does the educating city treat its victims? Certainly, its victims are very many. It is all the citizens, and all the more so the marginalized people, the poor and many other types of victims of society, who experience the city’s stress and congestion.
Is the educating city capable of educating its victims or does the educating city have to let itself be educated by its victims? It is not the city itself and its authorities which need to open the victims’ eyes and let themselves be educated by them: victims actually educate the educator, as Paulo Freire would put it.
The educating city needs to learn from its victims as well as, finally, to collaborate with them so that they are no longer the victims. A victim is once again a victim at three levels: victims cannot reproduce their life at material level; they cannot symmetrically participate in the decisions that are made on their behalf; they show the inefficiency of the system because of their existence. A victim can say: “The system is unjust because I am suffering, because I am poor, because I was not asked”. The fact that the victim exists is the city’s critical criterion: given that there are victims, the city is unjust and should responsibly take care of them at the three levels.
When victims become critically aware, they say: “Given that I am a victim, the city is unjust”. Secondly, victims get together and form a community, such as women getting together and criticising male chauvinism, or black people getting together and criticising white people, and so everybody is critical of the one they are dominated by. What is interesting is that among them, a critical consensus emerges which is now against a form of consensus which we could call hegemonic. In talking about this topic, Gramsci says: “Given a political order where there is a historical deadlock in power, this group will have the hegemony which occurs in relation to a consensus”. If society has a consensus, I can be hegemonic. But if the victims now have reached a consensus on what is unjust, they lose the consensus of society and rise against the consensus of the city.
The previously mentioned hegemony then turns into domination because of the lack of consensus. The dominator cannot be an educator by dominating the victim who now has a critical consensus.
In order not to turn into a city dominating its victims, who have a critical awareness in the form of new social movements, the educating city should help them rather than dominate them. The educating city should cooperate in an effective way starting from the state, and transform itself so as to allow the victims becoming actors.
By undertaking the plan of recognising the new social movements, the educating city lets itself be educated and transformed by those movements. The movements are those carrying out the project, i.e. the project is the recognition of what for them is denial. In this way the city’s institutions materially transform themselves: there is the need for new ecological plans, developing the economy in a different way, establishing culture in a different way, as these groups question the ruling order. The state itself has turned into the “apprentice” of these movements, and the city project is not created starting from the state but rather starting from the outside, which is the one that indicates the contents of the project.
Material, i.e. ecological, economic and cultural, but especially procedure-related institutions change.
Now these marginalised groups can democratically participate in the creation of the city.
Jefferson, the founder of the United States, used to say: “If in the cities there are no districts, the American Constitution is useless”. There never were districts, so the American Constitution is useless, because the districts were communities where the citizen directly took part, face-to-face, in democracy within the municipality and this would have meant the citizen’s direct participation at the level of the district, of the area, with the full and democratic participation of all citizens, particularly the excluded victims, who would have had a place now where to ask their questions and express their criticism.
The title both of this Congress and of this Session make sense and can be joined together: the educating city has to let itself be educated by the new social movements, let itself be asked questions and be transformed. It not only has to welcome the questions of these victims’ movements as a negative effect of the system, but it rather has to support these collective projects in order for the future city to be different.
The educating city changes its structure in order to welcome the participation of its citizens every day - not just on election day every four, five, six years - in their districts, in their open city councils, as is stated in the new Venezuelan Constitution of President Chavez, an extremely democratic president, who has been elected six times by the people (however, mass media say he is a dictator).
In the Constitution of Venezuela there is a new power that is the citizen’s power, a fifth power after the fourth one, which is the electoral power, and the other three traditional ones. The citizen’s power is based upon open city councils, open communities within the cities where the people can participate daily and not just once in a while. In the educating city, now transformed, it is possible to educate the youth to be people, like everybody else, to be citizens, so as to make them ethically responsible actors in the creation of a political power “from below”.
All citizens cooperate in this construction. The state’s authority is limited to the delegated exercise of a power that belong to the people. The state is not sovereign in the city as a structure of authority. Power is, on the contrary, the unity of the consensual will of a political community. Such consensus increases with people’s direct participation at a certain level, in the creation of a power “from below” which is capable of resisting the globalisation process coming “from above”.
There is now a dispute of the political space. Yes, I think that another city would be possible now if the victims became actors and if what a Jewish prophet once said became reality: “Lord give me a disciple hearing towards the authority. If I am a disciple maybe I will teach something”.