1 Urban Poverty and Environmental Management in Asia: Livelihood, Habitat and Social Networks in Suan Phlu, Bangkok Mike Douglass and Malia Zoghlin * Third World Planning Review, 16:2, 171-200, 1994. Abstract : The purpose of this paper is to link the issues of urban poverty and environmental management at the community level. Seen from the perspective of the household, sustaining cities through community-based environmental management is a longer-term process embedded in larger social, political and economic relations operating at all scales -- from the international down to the community, household and personal level. The experience of Suan Phlu, a low-income community in Bangkok, is drawn upon to show how environmental management is nested in the quest to sustain livelihood. A household survey of the community reveals that its residents are both critically aware of their environmental circumstances and devote significant amounts of household time and resources to environmental management. The capacity for households to collectively engage in improving environmental management is ultimately contingent upon particular sets of circumstances, including community stability and land and housing tenure, overall economic welfare, community leadership, the dedication and commitment of outside as well as internal sources of organization and power. Longitudinal studies at the community scale are required to further investigate such experiences and, by extension, to assist the longer-term environmental monitoring, evaluation and management needs of low-income communities. 1. Introduction The idea of “sustainable cities” has emerged as a reaction not only to the environmental deterioration of urban areas of most developing countries, but also to processes of unequal development that continue to leave large portions of the urban population in poverty (Campbell, 1989; Jimenez and Velasques, 1989). 1 As Asia moves toward its first century in which more than half its population will be living in cities, the interrelated nature of these concerns is underscored by the spatial confluence of poverty and environmental degradation in communities given the disparaging titles of slum and squatter settlements (Hardoy Satterthwaite, 1989). Throughout urban Asia, low-income communities face the severest forms of water, solid waste and air pollution and land contamination. In the large cities of Asia such settlements account for one-fifth to more than three-quarters of the population where abraded environmental conditions are associated with poor health and other impediments to increasing income-earning potentials of poor households (Douglass, 1993). At the same time, the incomes and welfare of poor households are intricately tied to the “waste economy” of scavenging, recycling, and petty trade in water, fuel and related services. In many instances it is poor children who work in the most life-threatening segments of these activities. Since poverty and environmental degradation more severely affect children than adults, and * Department of Urban and Regional Planning, University of Hawaii; School of Hawai’ian, Asian and Pacific Studies, University of Hawaii. 1 In many Asian countries more than half of the gross domestic product is attributed to urban regions. Whether or not these regions are centers of production or centers of accumulation through rural surplus transfers (Armstrong and McGee, 1985), the dense spatial concentration of economic activities in a few such regions has resulted in chronic environmental stress and deterioration. In Thailand, for example, five of Thailand's seven lead smelting plants are found in and around Bangkok, along with 83 percent of fluorescent lamp manufacturing plants, and between 90 and 97 percent of the chemical, dry cell battery, paint, pharmaceutical and textile manufacturing plants (Phantumvanit, et. al., 1989).