Unsustainable Environment

This volume is an international desk review that attempts to provide an alternative perspective of the emerging urban unsustainable environment of the Third World. The review covers a broad range of urban environmental issues, ranging from solid waste management, water and sanitation, housing and transport, to government policies, the role of NGOs, and the impact of international lending agencies on urban policy. The underlying aim is to develop a subaltern research agenda critically analysing the roles, performances and limitations of international lenders and of the Third World capitalist governments towards addressing the sustainability debate.

Undertaken by the International Centre of Development and Environmental Studies (ICDES) of Edge Hill College, Lancashire, in 1995, the review provides the students, researchers and practitioners with a controversial but a reasonably rigorously debated discourse on the prospects of the ‘Sustainable Urban Environment of the Third World’. Looking into many social indicators, variables and environmental indexes of the new millennium, the reviewers believe that things have not changed drastically since the 1990s. Unless there are dramatic changes in the socio-economic and political aspects of the capitalist developing world, attaining a ‘sustainable environment’ shall remain an illusion for a considerable future.

The review team includes Dr. Tasleem Shakur, Director ICDES, Dr. Nandini Dasgupta, Reader in Development, Employment & Environment at the University of Greenwich, London, and David Treloar, an Environmental Planner, University of Staffordshire, UK.

ISBN 969-8380-50-7