Introduction

Should the urban poor be asked to pay their way out of poverty? Should transnational corporations (TNCs) be invited to profit from the deprivation of the urban poor? If we use privatization to solve urban poverty, then are we answering “yes” to these questions? In an impassioned and challenging contribution to Divided Cities: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 2003, former President of the World Bank James Wolfensohn describes the United Nations' “Cities Without Slums” action plan. It is in the process of upgrading infrastructures and services in urban slums globally. This plan, and others like it, in part seeks to solve urban poverty through a specific privatization technique, the public-private partnership (PPP). By harnessing the power of TNCs to solve urban poverty, such partnerships demand that the poor pay private companies for what should be their birthright, a basic social and economic infrastructure.

For some time, the World Bank has viewed infrastructure projects as a precondition to economic development and an essential step in ameliorating poverty. Increasingly, the Bank advocates using private companies to deliver these infrastructure services to the urban poor. This move toward using private infrastructure companies is one part of the trend discussed in Chapter 2. Traditionally states and intergovernmental organizations had invested directly in infrastructure projects that were carried out by public corporations. However, in the late 1970s, all of this started to change as private companies began to play a leading role in delivering infrastructures globally.