Tag Archives: SDG11

Valuing Our Communities and Cities: the role of libraries in community-focused urban development

According to the UN, over half the world’s population lives in cities. This is expected to increase by three billion by 2050.

Crucially, it is these people that make cities, not buildings. Cities are vast networks, made up of many smaller networks that connect citizens to one another, to services, utilities, and opportunities.

People, and the communities they form, are the heart of urban spaces. As we look to the future, how can human communities be kept in the heart of sustainable urban development?

What steps do city planners need to take, including robust participatory processes , to ensure that our evolving cities provide equitable opportunities for social engagement and mobalisation for all people?

This is the question the UN  asks of us  on World Cities Day 2020 with the theme: Valuing Our Communities and Cities.

As cities are interconnected networks, stakeholders from all sectors must work collaboratively in order truly to realise the goal of sustainable urban development. We cannot work in silos. Institutions that promote the inclusion of people and communities, ensuring they are informed and given the ability to take part in enacting change, are necessary.

Libraries are an essential part of this community-focused urban development.

This article explores some ways in which libraries contribute to creating better cities and better lives for the people who live in them. We invite you to share your ideas in the comments below.

Cultural Life as Urban Right

The 2020 Rome Charter affirms that the right to participate fully and freely in cultural life is vital to our cities and communities. The Charter, led by Roma Capitale and the UCLG Committee on Culture, involves over 45 cities and 95 advisors.

According to the Charter, a city that truly supports the participation of its inhabitants in cultural life is one that has provisions for people to discover, create, share, enjoy, and protect culture. Moreover, it states that this is a requirement for cities and communities to thrive.

We stress the fact that libraries contribute to each of these values.

  • DISCOVER: Libraries provide access to information through their collections and internet access, where cultural expressions and heritage can be discovered.
  • CREATE: Libraries encourage creativity by championing freedom of expression and providing spaces where people can exercise this.
  • SHARE: Libraries are built on the principle that sharing expressions of culture enriches one’s life. Their role in promoting freedom of access to information, expression, and multicultural connectivity upholds this.
  • ENJOY: Libraries are often cultural centres, they are free-of-cost places where all people are invited to access collections, services, and programmes.
  • PROTECT: Libraries are memory institutions and leaders in the preservation and conservation of documentary heritage.

By supporting libraries, a city can uphold the core values of the Rome Charter. It can help ensure the right of its citizens to participate in cultural life fully and freely, as is vital to healthy cities and communities.

Memory and Change

This contribution can be vital in addressing pressing challenges, bringing about necessary changes in attitudes and practices.

The Climate Heritage Network (of which IFLA is a founding member) has led the conversation on culture’s role in climate action. Cultural institutions like libraries build a more sustainable future for our communities that keeps people and culture at the heart of development.

For example, the role of traditional, local, and Indigenous knowledge can have real impact on built adaptations and sustainable practices (The Future of our Past, ICOMOS, 2019). Libraries, as holders of memory and providers of information, have a key role to play in connecting the knowledge they hold, as well as the people they serve, to these initiatives.

The Climate Heritage Network has been taking part in Daring Cities 2020 events during Urban October. Organised by Local Governments for Sustainability (ICLEI), Daring Cities is a global forum on climate change for urban leaders tackling the climate emergency.

In a recent panel discussion, the Climate Heritage Network in partnership with ICLEI showcased local climate action by culture authorities from around the world in addressing the climate emergency, such as adaptive and resilience-building measures and climate change mitigation efforts. You can watch the full programme online here.

This high-level discussion, bringing together cultural institutions and local government, affirms the transformative role that cultural institutions can have in promoting sustainable, human-centred climate action in urban spaces.

Memory institutions (libraries, museums, and archives) must be included in climate action for their ability to engage people in the present, connect them with the knowledge of the past, and preserve information on this process for the future.

Libraries and Sustainability

Exploring this role of libraries within IFLA is the Environment, Sustainability and Libraries Special Interest Group (ENSULIB).

This Special Interest Group (which will transition to an IFLA Section in 2021) focuses on the role of libraries in social, economic and environmental sustainability including environmental threats, like climate change, as well as in broader SDG delivery.

ENSULIB has mobilised librarians around the world to connect, publish, gather (in person and virtually), and raise a call for collective action in their communities. Libraries are by nature spaces for access to knowledge and information, but they are also places for sharing, socialising, meeting with others and for personal and professional growth. The programmes they facilitate regarding climate change and sustainability help people address these issues not as abstract concepts, but rather as real factors in their communities’ health and wellbeing.

Through our work, ENSULIB elevates the role of librarians as teachers and role models for in greening practices. Libraries in cities can be poles of transformation, but they are also the example that citizens observe every time they reach their services.

Cities want to be resilient and sustainable now more than ever. The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged libraries to take an active role and help communities that need them.

Citizens transform cities and libraries can help citizens make positive choices.

Libraries in democratic societies

Looking beyond environmental sustainability, libraries also play a role in social sustainability – our ability to live and work together, and build a stronger future.

IFLA’s core values include the belief that people, communities and organisations need universal and equitable access to information, ideas, and works of imagination for their social, educational, cultural, democratic and economic well-being.

We share the conviction that delivery of high-quality library and information services helps guarantee that access.

Libraries power literate, informed, and participatory societies. They do this through by championing access to information, supporting skills-building and lifelong learning, and encouraging participation in governance.

These values will be necessary to achieve the vision for the future of urbanization in which cities are equitable providers of opportunity, connection, and social mobilisation.

In his 2018 book, Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life, Eric Klinenberg suggests that the future of democratic societies depends not only on shared values, but on shared spaces. This combats the racial, religious, cultural, and class divides that threaten to polarise our societies by finding a common ground – gathering places where connection is made.

Libraries are one these elements of an inclusive social infrastructure that is required for an equitable, community-valuing approach to urbanization.

See IFLA’s recent blog post, Libraries at the Heart of Democracy, for more on this topic.

Conclusion

One of the many lessons we have learned from COVID-19 is that community is vital to resilience. We have seen this in the volunteerism, community organising, and local support networks that have helped so many people through these challenging times.

As the world continues to urbanise, this value of community must be built into the fabric of our cities to create resilient and sustainable urban spaces. We need support for libraries to fully realise this goal.

Libraries are spaces for social economy to thrive. They are free-to-access, public meeting places that exist to enrich local connection and access to culture, information, and opportunity. When discussing community-focused transformative change in cities, libraries are the nodes in the network where change can be sparked.

 

A special thank you to ENSULIB members for contributing to this article. You can learn more about them online here. 

 

The Right to the City is the Right to a Library

A key theme at the World Summit of Local and Regional Leaders, taking place this week in Durban, is how action at the local level contributes to building a better world for everyone.

The Summit’s organisers – United Cities and Local Government – have strongly and successfully made the case for the role of regions and cities in delivering the Sustainable Development Goals, both through a dedicated Goal (SDG11), and contributions across the 2030 Agenda.

In this context, they have placed a strong emphasis on the concept of the ‘Right to the City’ as a framework for thinking through how to develop local policies, and so deliver on the commitments made.

Given the focus on the idea, this blog offers an explanation of what the Right to the City means, and how libraries fit in – both as an example of this right in action, and as a means of making a reality of other policy goals.

 

What is the Right to the City?

As a support to the session focusing on the subject at the World Summit, the Global Platform for the Right to the City has prepared a background paper.

This discusses the emergence of the idea, defined as ‘the right of all inhabitants (present and future; permanent and temporary) to use, occupy, produce, govern and enjoy just, inclusive, safe and sustainable cities, villages and settlements defined as common goods’.

In effect, it covers all existing economic, social, cultural and human rights, but does so from the perspective of place.

This marks it out from approaches that look only at national law-making, or the individual perspective, in order to take account of the impact of the environment where people live.

In doing this, it implies that the villages, towns and cities in which people live – and so the people and bodies that govern them – have both the possibility and the duty to change lives, and deliver global goals.

According to the Global Platform, the Right to the City has a number of dimensions: the idea that cities have a social function, that public spaces are important, that rural-urban linkages need to be strengthened and made sustainable, that economic and civic life should be inclusive, that political participation should be enhanced, that people should not be subject to discrimination, and that cultural diversity should be preserved and promoted.

In each of these areas, the background paper sets out recommendations and actions for local, national and global decision-makers.

 

Libraries as an Example of the Right to the City at Work

The thinking behind the Right to the City will be familiar for anyone interested in libraries.

As documents such as the Public Library Manifesto set out, libraries serving communities are founded on a belief in the importance of public services dedicated to enabling and empowering all members of society.

Public libraries in particular are often the only free, non-commercial indoor public space in a community, giving people a context and setting for realising their own potential and creating links with others. In doing so, they help develop social capital, as well as being a source of civic pride.

Libraries also have a specific mission to take steps to reach out to those members of the community who would otherwise risk exclusion. This is essential. While possibilities may officially be open to all, without a specific focus on groups vulnerable to exclusion, those who need them most may struggle to seize them.

As set out in the Public Library Manifesto, as well as in laws in many countries, libraries have a mission to develop programming for specific groups, or otherwise take the steps needed to reach everyone meaningfully.

Through this, libraries provide a service with a strong spatial dimension, illustrating the Right to the City at work.

 

Libraries as Partner for Delivering the Right to the City

The potential contribution of libraries stretches beyond simply being an example of the Right to the City at work. Yet the services and support that libraries provide can be as much of an enabler as an end in themselves.

This is easy to see when it comes to cultural diversity, given libraries’ role in giving access to collections that reflect the diversity of their communities, in preserving this creation for the future, and in stimulating new creation.

But it also applies to other areas, such as economic opportunity, political participation, and allowing for social mobility. This is down to their role in delivering access to information and the skills that allow everyone to use it – a vital first step for almost any other policy.

For example, through the equitable provision of information, libraries are connecting people with employment and training opportunities. This is the case in Tunisia, where women in rural areas are using skills developed at the library to create economic opportunities.

They are also making it easier for people to break out cycles of poverty, such as in Zagreb, Croatia, where libraries have proved to be ideal (and stigma-free) places to reach out to people experiencing homelessness and facilitate their economic and social reintegration.

They can also help citizens hold governments accountable, such as in Chattanooga, US, where the library hosts the city government’s open data platform, and has helped to make it as accessible and usable as possible.

Libraries also support engagement in policy development, such as in Medellín, Colombia, where libraries not only host pollution sensors, but also provide the skills to allow users to interpret the data received and reflect on what this means for local transport policy.

In short, libraries have the potential to be key partners for local governments on delivering on the Right to the City for their citizens.

 

Recommendations

This week’s meetings in Durban will be a great opportunity for local leaders from around the world to discuss how to turn the concept of the Right to the City into a reality.

In libraries, they not only have a pre-existing illustration of the Right at work, but also a key partner for delivering on it across the board. It’s now time to realise this potential!

Therefore, in order to deliver on the Right to the City, the following recommendations could be made:

  • Use libraries as a means of demonstrating what the right to the City means in reality
  • Enable libraries to use their potential as a public space to bring communities together
  • Integrate consideration of the importance of information and the skills to use it in any strategies for the implementation of the Right to the City, and make sure that libraries are part of delivery

Libraries at the Heart of Better Cities

World Cities Day 2019 focuses on the fact that to deliver on the Sustainable Development Goals, it will be necessary to succeed in cities, where more than half of the world’s population lives.

Cities, in concentrating people, can also concentrate both opportunities and problems. They can be places where new possibilities emerge, new collaborations form and new ideas develop. However, they can also be marked by economic and social divides, as well as severe environmental damage.

The difference between the good and the bad is often associated with the ability of the members of communities to work together. When people living in an area have strong social connections, trust tends to be higher, and cooperation becomes easier.

The sum of these connections is sometimes described as social capital. Different levels of such capital have been cited as explaining variation in growth rates between cities and countries, or resilience in the face of disasters.

Given the major efforts required to deliver on the SDGs, we will need as much social capital as possible. Libraries can help!

 

Libraries as Social Infrastructure

Sometimes, these connections are only between people belonging to a certain family or group. While these can help in some ways, they can also risk being exclusive. As has been pointed out, the strength of mafia groups, for example, is an example of social capital at work, just not in a good way.

In a modern, diverse city, what is needed are connections that link together all people living in the space.

For this, it is important to have common reference points, and common spaces. Common reference points can come in many forms, such as culture, history, or simply information.

Common spaces are places where everyone can come and feel welcome, outside of home, work, or social life within a particular group.

Libraries, in providing both, represent a key part of the ‘social infrastructure’ of any town or city.

They ‘provide the setting and context for social participation’. This is the thesis of Eric Klinenberg, whose book ‘Palaces for the People’, has been strongly welcomed in the library field for its clear explanation of what libraries can offer.

 

Taking the Message Further

One of the reasons Klinenberg gives for writing his book is the sense that despite this contribution, libraries are not always recognised for their role.

They are less glamorous than other cultural institutions, but are also too often seen as less urgent or less necessary than other core public services such as the police or schools.

In effect, they – and the benefits they can bring to the cohesiveness, the inventiveness, and the resilience of cities – risk being overlooked.

This is a concern. There are few public services which offer such welcoming spaces, provide such a rich range of references, or are as inclusive as libraries.

It is certainly hard to imagine any that can claim to provide the combination of all three that libraries do. Clearly this is not to say that libraries are more important than other services, but rather that they make an irreplaceable contribution.

 

Therefore, as cities look to work out how they can promote inventiveness, change behaviours, and improve economic, social, cultural and political life, they should look to make sure that they are making the most of their libraries.

Happy World Cities Day!