Munkhtsetseg Ulziikhutag

After three years of work to improve services in Ulaanbaatar’s ger districts and introduce a more inclusive style of urban governance to the City Municipality, more than eighty project stakeholders gathered for a June 12 workshop in the City to look back and reflect.

Uncontrolled urban migration and the proliferation of informal settlements known as “ger” areas around the periphery of Ulaanbaatar have created enormous challenges for city services in this burgeoning Mongolian capital, perhaps none of them more perplexing than the problem of simply collecting the garbage.

Mongolia is now one of the world’s fastest growing economies, and nowhere is this growth more evident than the bustling and energetic capital, Ulaanbaatar. Expensive high rises, luxury stores, and modern apartment buildings are common in this city of 1.5 million; tower cranes dot the rising skyline, harbingers of even more cutting-edge development projects to come. But in the shadows of the cranes and high rises, are the city’s ger districts, where more than half of the capital’s residents live without access to basic public services like water, sewage systems, and central heating.