ABSTRACT
The popular image of cities in developing countries tends to be dominated by the acute contrasts afforded by modern high-rise commercial buildings, replete with the premises of multinational firms, and squalid, chaotic squatter settlements. Not infrequently these occur side by side, which is very convenient for the ten-second background shot of a television reporter describing another ecodisaster or reactions to it. The Rio and Cairo meetings of the early 1990s provided many such visual ‘bites’, as did the Cancun summit a decade earlier.
