I
NTRODUCTIONThe great majority of the world’s wealthy people live in and around urban centres, but so do a growing share of those living in poverty. While cities are often described as economic powerhouses, access to their power is very unequal, and rapid urban growth is often accompanied by growing economic inequalities. Deprived urban- dwellers not only receive lower incomes, they often pay higher prices and face more social and political obstacles than their wealthier neighbours. It has been estimated that the number of urban-dwellers who lived on less than a dollar a day rose from 240 to 290 million between 1993 and 2002, while those living on less than two dollars a day went from 690 to 750 million (Ravallion et al, 2007). On the other hand, UN-Habitat has estimated that in 2001 almost a billion urban-dwellers lived in slums, and faced serious defi ciencies in one or more of the following: tenure, water, sanitation, housing quality and crowding (UN-Habitat, 2003). While such statistics should be viewed with considerable scepticism, and are not strictly comparable, more detailed research also suggests that in urban areas shelter poverty – the inadequacy and insecurity of homes and basic services – is more severe than income poverty, and that both are growing in absolute terms.
A central theme of this book is that the benefits of urbanization and urban development need to be both recognized and seized, and this certainly applies to poverty issues. On the one hand, urbanization and urban development do typically benefi t poor groups, in both rural and urban areas. On the other hand, they could be far more benefi cial. Treating slums as a symptom of over-urbanization can reinforce policies that make poverty worse. A more positive stance towards urbanization and urban development is only a start, however. It is important to understand why so many efforts to address urban poverty have failed in the past, and also to fi nd better ways for the future. This is what the chapters in this section set out to do.
The 20th century saw a heated debate over the relative merits of markets and governments, which extended to the question of providing basic urban shelter and services. For a large share of the world’s urban poor, however, neither markets nor governments delivered – and nor, for that matter, did public–private partnerships. In Chapter 4, McGranahan, Mitlin and Satterthwaite start off by reviewing past public and private failures. Many public failures can be explained by a combination of unrealistic standards, inadequate funding and politics that provide little leverage to poor groups.
While private failures have a somewhat different logic, often the same factors that
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undermine public provisioning also undermine private provisioning. Thus, for example, the same informal settlements that are ill-served by the public sector are ill-served by the private sector too.
To overcome these public and private failures, McGranahan, Mitlin and Satterthwaite argue in Chapter 4 in favour of a progressive pragmatism that, rather than trying to identify some idealized approach or set of ‘best practices’ that can be rolled out internationally, builds on approaches that have been shown to work locally.
With this in mind, they review the experience with upgrading the property rights of the urban poor, improving access to fi nance and organizing civil society. Many of the more successful initiatives are those that have managed to promote local control, to encourage incremental improvements and to support alternative forms of community organization. More generally, they suggest that there are critical roles for government in working constructively and routinely with slum-dwellers, creating the basis for more effi cient and equitable land and housing markets, and developing physically and fi nancially realistic strategies for accommodating future urban growth.
While Latin America is no longer urbanizing at anything like the rate of Asia and Africa, its recent history provides insights into the challenges that rapid urbanization and urban growth can bring. Unfortunately, as Smolka and Larangeira describe in Chapter 5, much of Latin America’s experience with informal settlements has been a series of lessons in what not to do. The attitude of different governments towards informal settlement has varied from accommodating to punitive, but few have managed to address the causes of informality. In particular, neither forced evictions, nor upgrading, nor land titling have provided the means for bringing the inhabitants of informal settlements into an acceptable relationship with government, or created effi cient and fair land and housing markets.
Two interrelated barriers that prevent the regularization of informal settlements are the impossibility of securing suffi cient funds to fi nance equitable programmes of the required scale and the confl ict and speculative expectations that often arise when changes are being considered. Smolka and Larangeira argue that the best means of overcoming the fi nancial barrier is to fi nd a way to tap the increase in land values provided by regularization, and to use some of this increase to fi nance the programme itself. Preventing confl ict and speculative expectation, on the other hand, requires involving all parties in the process, including landowners, developers and fi nal occupants. They describe two innovations that have promised to address these challenges.
Regularizing informal settlements is one thing; preventing the emergence of new informal settlements is another. Both of the fi rst two chapters in this section make the case for forward-looking policies designed to bring the supply of serviced land into line with the growing shelter requirements. This challenge is even more central to Chapter 6, in which Angel provides a concrete example of how to provide land for the urban poor in a context of rapid urban expansion, using the experiences of fi ve mid-sized cities in Ecuador. He argues that to ensure that residential land for the urban poor remains affordable, municipalities should provide the public goods necessary for a well-functioning urban land market. They must ensure that accessible urban land remains in ample supply in the coming years, thus avoiding speculative increases in land prices. Municipalities must also expand their city limits; plan for an arterial infrastructure grid and obtain the land rights for the right of way of the entire arterial grid using available laws while minimizing unilateral expropriation; and extend better
SHELTERAND URBAN POVERTY 75 infrastructure services to the urban population – especially to poor families living in marginal settlements.
In short, Angel argues that keeping housing affordable requires keeping land prices affordable. This is an attractive strategy for visionary mayors that can be carried out with a relatively low amount of investment if it is carried out early enough. Looking to the future, this should also be an important demonstration project for the large number of cities in developing countries that now face strong population pressures.
In particularly diffi cult economic or political circumstances, identifying the means to achieve affordable housing does not provide the basis for eliminating urban shelter poverty. Governments often face little pressure to plan for the poor of today, let alone those of the decades to come. Whether they face constructive pressure depends on both how the low-income residents themselves organize to meet their collective needs and how they engage with the governmental, non-governmental and private agencies that can help them meet these needs. Organizations of the urban poor are central to Chapter 7, in which Carolini describes the growing roles these organizations have played in recent decades. She argues that it is misleading to think of these organizations in terms of conventional dichotomies, such as ‘bottom–up’
versus ‘top–down’ or ‘process’ versus ‘product’. Rather, success is often based on strategies that combine the two in innovative ways: where self-help from ‘below’ helps to bring forth more effective assistance from ‘above’; where achieving a well-defi ned
‘product’ for the community contributes to a longer-term ‘process’ of organizational strengthening.
While the chapters in this section focus on different aspects of the urban shelter challenge and suggest different strategies, all are relatively optimistic about the potential for reducing urban poverty, even in rapidly growing settlements. As a fi rst step, it is important not to misinterpret slums and other low-income settlement as evidence of over-urbanization. In order to address the challenge, however, it is important to make better use of the poverty-reducing potential of urban development. The principles, lessons and examples provided in these chapters at least begin to indicate how this can be done.
R
EFERENCESRavallion, M., Chen, S. and Sangraula, P. (2007) New Evidence on the Urbanization of Global Poverty, Development Research Group Working Paper No 4199, World Bank, Washington, DC
UN-Habitat (2003) The Challenge of Slums: Global Report on Human Settlements 2003, United Nations Human Settlements Programme, Nairobi
4
Land and Services for the Urban Poor in Rapidly
Urbanizing Countries
Gordon McGranahan, Diana Mitlin and David Satterthwaite
I
NTRODUCTIONDespite the many advantages urban settlements provide, their poorest residents often live in exceptionally unpleasant and unhealthy conditions. This was so when industrial urbanization started in earnest in the 19th century and continues to this day. In low- and middle-income countries, it is the case for the 900 million or so urban inhabitants of what UN-Habitat (2003a) refers to as ‘slums’.1 These deprived urban-dwellers typically live in worse environments than their income alone would dictate. Their demands for shelter and environmental services are not well met by markets, which favour areas where property rights are well defi ned and people are willing and able to pay for the full range of household services. These same shelter demands also tend to be poorly met by governments, whose public services rarely reach more than a small fraction of those living in slums and whose regulations often work against solutions that the urban poor can afford themselves.
Perhaps it should be no surprise that in an era where market- and state-led models compete for pre-eminence, the shelter problems of the urban poor have rarely been addressed effectively.
Low-income settlements often contravene existing building codes, zoning regulations and even property laws – at least in part because the codes, regulations and laws were not developed with the needs of the urban poor in mind, let alone with their involvement. Public services are often lacking, and utilities are often
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actively discouraged from providing them. Unfounded fears of over-urbanization can make matters worse, as they provide an excuse for fatalism for policymakers.
Governments often defl ect criticisms of their failings by claiming, without evidence, that improving conditions in informal settlements will attract more migrants.
Governments may even claim that it is migrants who are creating the problems in the fi rst place. However, taking a more positive attitude to urbanization is clearly not enough. Conventional approaches to improving informal settlements do not need to be expanded, they need to be transformed. The limitations of both public and private solutions need to be reassessed, along with the notion that these limitations can be overcome by public–private ‘partnerships’.
There are inspiring examples of approaches, many grounded in organizations of the urban poor (OUPs), that have managed to overcome the obstacles to addressing basic shelter and service deprivation. While these approaches have worked in a wide range of circumstances, however, they remain the exception. Although they have reached considerable scale in some cities and nations, they have only reached a small proportion of those in need. Looking to the future, it is clear that not only do successful approaches need to be scaled up, but steps also need to be taken now to avoid a new generation of slums from forming – not by stopping urbanization, but by accommodating urban growth more effi ciently and equitably.
The fi rst two sections below reassess the failure of both public and private solutions to urban shelter and service deprivation. These are followed by a section that assesses the scope of what could be termed progressive pragmatism, transcending the public–private and formal–informal divides and fi nding ways to help OUPs improve their own conditions. The fi nal section looks briefl y to the future.
T
HEF
AILUREOFP
UBLIC-S
ECTORS
OLUTIONSIn the industrializing countries of the 19th century, urban poverty grew to unprecedented levels. Recent evidence suggests that, with early industrialization, urban mortality and morbidity rates actually increased in England, only declining in the late 19th century when local governments became more responsive to the needs of the urban poor (Szreter, 2005). The ‘sanitary revolution’ was an important factor in this decline and helped to enlist broader support for government-led urban-improvement efforts designed to improve public health and prevent the outbreak of major epidemics.
It was in the 20th century, however, that government spending came to account for an appreciable share of economic activity, even in market economies.
This occurred primarily in the wealthier countries, with little apparent effect on their economic growth (Lindert, 2004). The 20th century also saw the distinction between central planning and market mechanisms become a central issue in global geopolitics. This ensured that the debate over the roles of the public and private
LANDAND SERVICESFOR THEURBAN POOR 79 sectors was highly ideological and as infl uenced by international politics as by local experiences.
Towards the end of the 20th century, along with the decline of centrally planned economies, there was a reaction against the growing role of government within the more affl uent market economies. The rise of neo-liberalism was a defi ning feature of Western politics in the 1980s and 1990s, particularly in the US and its closest allies. Through structural adjustment programmes and other conditionalities of development assistance, however, the policy impact of this political shift was more evident in low- and middle-income countries than in the countries of its origin (Stiglitz, 2002). The pressure to reduce the role of government extended to the urban services that had helped to justify the expansion of the state in the 19th century. The World Bank, for example, began to promote increased private-sector participation in water and sanitation provision, and by the 1990s, large concession contracts were being developed for water and sanitation utilities in selected major cities in Asia and Latin America, including Buenos Aires, Jakarta and Manila (Finger and Allouche, 2002; Budds and McGranahan, 2003).
The failure of governments to provide for the urban poor does not explain why private-sector participation came to be so vigorously promoted, but it does help to explain the initial lack of resistance. From the perspective of the urban poor, two common and mutually reinforcing public failures have been that:
1 The urban poor are often marginalized (spatially, legally and politically) by land-use planning designed and undertaken in the name of the public interest.
2 Better-off groups often capture the benefi ts of public programmes developed in the name of the urban poor.
It would be misleading to present the policy issues surrounding defi cient urban shelter and services as if governments and development agencies were always concerned with how best to assist deprived residents. In many cities, the more lively debate in the corridors of power, if not in the pages of reports, has been over how to prevent the poor from settling in the expanding ‘slums’. As described in Chapter 2, this issue is often bound up with fears about excessive rural–urban migration and over-urbanization and the (often incorrect) belief that informal settlements and slums are migrant settlements.
Concern with over-urbanization can easily become a liability for poor groups.
If underserved and degraded neighbourhoods are taken to refl ect over-urbanization, then this can be used to justify more restrictive plans, limiting the amount of land zoned for residential development, raising the standards required for authorization for new residential developments and not providing the infrastructure that might encourage residential development. Under such conditions, urban land-use planning does not serve the poor but marginalizes them.
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On the other hand, many government programmes have been designed with the express purpose of providing land, housing or services for the urban poor.
During the 1960s and 1970s, government housing and public service programmes were instituted in urban Africa, Asia and Latin America, often infl uenced by similar programmes in Europe (Hardoy and Satterthwaite, 1989). Typically, the goal was to provide housing and services of an acceptable standard, and at affordable prices, for those who would otherwise be forced to do without. However, with a few exceptions, the levels of public funding needed to mount programmes of suffi cient scale to meet the demand were not forthcoming. Moreover, problems resulted from overly centralized approaches, with little involvement on the part of the intended benefi ciaries. These limitations were recognized at the time and in some programmes a greater focus was placed on supporting the involvement of poorer groups in designing and implementing measures (Mangin, 1967; Turner, 1968 and 1976).
Where desirable public housing was supplied, it was typically secured by better-off groups – if not immediately, then after changing hands. The tendency for non-poor households to ‘capture’ public housing intended for the poor followed a time-honoured tradition: high standards and low prices were justifi ed on the grounds that everyone deserves adequate provision at an affordable price; limited public resources ensured that supplies at the prescribed standard could not meet demand at the prescribed price; and politics ensured that the better-off, or groups with infl uence on government, were fi rst in line. In many cases, the political compromise between those who claimed to represent the interests of the urban poor and those who did not resulted in policies that claimed to represent the urban poor but actually did not.
The sites and services and upgrading programmes that became popular in the 1970s reduced the contradiction between big ambitions and little funding.
They were based on the recognition that settlements built by the residents, with the help of local artisans, often suited the needs of the urban poor better than expensive units designed by experts and built by contractors. Providing secure tenure was also stressed. Unfortunately, this period also saw a growing concern with ‘urban bias’ in the donor establishment, resulting in decreased funding for urban programmes. Urban bias refers to a tendency for governments, dominated by urban elites, to favour urban areas in both public spending and pricing policies (Lipton, 1977). But while urban elites do undoubtedly skew policies, their interests only sometimes overlap with those of the urban poor. On the other hand, attempts to correct urban bias often harm the urban poor. With declining public funding, even upgrading programmes were often unsuccessful (see, for example, Cabanas Díaz et al, 2000).
In principle, extending services alone should further reduce contradictions between big ambitions and small funding. The 1980s were proclaimed the international drinking water and sanitation decade, and governments set themselves the goal of achieving universal provision of safe water and sanitation. For some time, the standard model for providing water and sanitation services in affl uent