Learning from informal markets: Innovative approaches to land and housing provision; Berner

The migration to the urban areas, particularly in developing countries poses a challenge on international, national and local policy making. In most developing countries the attempts to formalize markets have failed to provide the adequate housing for the ever-growing urban population. Self-help housing and squatting has long been seen as detrimental to sound urban development and planning. In last two decades it has been recognized that self-help housing has a great contribution towards providing a sufficient housing for the urban poor and “it is still the only architecture that works” (Turner, 1976) This form of housing is not only crucial for providing housing for the poor working in the informal sector but it also plays an important role in the urban economy. Without this informal settlements the local economy could not be competitive in the global context.

In the urban context the urban poverty is closely associated with spatial segregation; overcrowding, filth, unemployment, total absence of social services, malnutrition – this representation of poverty is only one-sided and represents only partial reality. To address the issues of urban poverty it is fundamental to recognize that housing needs to meet adequate living standards “as well as cultural definitions of security of tenure as an essential part of a decent standard of living”.  Substandard informal housing has two major issues:1. lack of quality, infrastructure and space and 2. insecurity.

Current policies fail to recognize the importance of providing appropriate land for the housing. Evictions and relocation are justified by governments wanting to beautify and redevelop the cities. These schemes more often than not result in communities repopulation the vacated site. In the case of social housing, the immense expenditures on land and adherence to inappropriate building regulations make the resulting products unaffordable for the urban poor. Since the 70’s slum upgrading and upgrading sites and services are the major approaches to introduce participation and self-help housing into practical policies. It is more efficient to improve the existing settlements that to build new ones, yet the performance and scale of upgrading is disappointing. The upgrades face the inappropriate planning standards and building regulations which increase the public investment and limit the investment to single intervention. In addition the issue of land ownership is a major constrain to redevelopments. The land central to the city is usually to expensive to be populated by the urban poor resulting in relocations. The alternative locations are usually on the periphery, without the adequate transport links to the livelihoods. The prime locations come with the price tag, even the pavement dwellers in India have to pay regular fees to the policemen or syndicates. The informal market plays a significant role in providing housing to the poor. Houses built without permits with a substandard infrastructure and quality, by cutting corners and cost are the only affordable option for the poor. This kind of housing represents an opportunity for the occupant to incrementally improves the home, however the improvements also increase the value of the property which can increase the rent in case of rented properties.

Deficits of formal urban land management and informal responses under rapid urban growth, an international perspective.

Note: This article is specifically about African cities but has interesting observations relevant to Thailand.

The central premise of this article is that informality is a response to poor public policy. In the case of Africa, urban land management was practical to European colonialisation, ‘centered on peripheral ports, with access routes to exploitable resources and later to environments deemed suitable for European settlement’. Because this system was not endogenous, post colonial African cities are ‘exploding cities in unexploding economies’. The residual policies, land use controls, regulations, and high standards have led to a slow pace of development and unaffordable housing.

The author lays out three types of urban land markets:

1. formal/official statutory
2. customary/indigenous, and
3. informal/unauthorized or non-statutory.

On can’t develop a piece of land unless his/her rights on that land are legally specified and protected. However, legalisation of ownership is time consuming, complex, cumbersome and expensive for two reasons: one is that mapping, title registration, surveying, etc. setups are poorly developed and the other is because it is within the interests of some individuals to reinforce the inefficiency of the status-quo. As a result “the ‘informality’ of urban land markets…is as much a commentary on the ineffectiveness of existing official land tenure and regulatory arrangements as it is on their growing irrelevance.”

( I think this is really interesting because it has implications for policy development: if you find informal systems, try to figure out which policy they are responding to!)

The author doesn’t exclude completely the need for public intervention in informal land systems. She says while informal markets are good at provision of low-income housing, one must overcome the externalities of development like: water pollution, sanitation/public health hazards, traffic congestion, encroachment of public/open space, etc. in severely dense and chaotic informal subdivisions. Question: how is this accounted for in the Baan Mankong program?

I don’t want to write an essay here so there are three other interesting things to note:

One is the emergence of SCRs(Substandard Commercial Residential Subdivisions) which are illegal commercial supplies of urban land which imitate formal urban layouts and provide rudimentary services like water, electricity, etc. These SCRs are officially permitted and have financial linkages to urban administration. While they provide low service levels, they are also incrementally phased and built as the income of the residents increases. “As observed in SCRs, developers proceed according to the occupation-building-servicing-planning sequence, a reverse of the formal procedure.”

Another interesting thing is an example from Egypt where another author (Zaghloul) identifies 3 phases of informal settlement growth (he says that slums in the same city of different characteristics are generally closer or further along the same chain of growth): starting, boom, and saturation stages. He says the city can intervene before the boom and provide infrastructure or buy land that will later be used for school, public spaces, or other services.

Finally, a quote which I think is super interesting on the merits and demerits of informal land systems: “Informal urbanization not only poses a major threat for the depletion of agricultural land, but also creates a substandard urban product that is plagued with environmental and social problem. Nevertheless, informal urbanization has exhibited singular merits: it responds to the shelter needs of, what the author calls the forgotten segment of the housing demand; it meets the demand of  expectations and affordability of many segments of the population; operated in a market context and manipulates existing market forces and avoids the market distortions of public subsidies and direct supply. The challenge for public policy, therefore is to transform the informal urbanization product into a decent urban space and to utilize the informal development process to respond to the needs of many segments of the population.”

Don’t know about this for sure but maybe the Baan Mankong urbanization product isn’t under enough scrutiny? There’s a lot going on in this article so it’s worth a read especially if you’re doing your dissertation on Africa. Also… SUPER IMPORTANT is that this article talks about policy in a very spatial way. There is section called “Impact of informal urbanization on the Cairo Urban Region space structure” that blows my mind in that it’s exactly how I have trouble thinking/writing but I feel like it’s the kind of thinking/writing that Camillo is trying to get us to do.

Urban Development Discourses, Environmental Management and Public Participation: The Case of the Mae Kha Canal in Chiang Mai, Thailand (G. Ribeiro & A. Srisuwan)

Ribeiro, Gustavo & Angunthip Srisuwan. ‘Urban Development Discourses, Environmental Management and Public Participation: the Case of the Mae Kha Canal in Chiang Mai, Thailand’, in Environment & Urbanization, Vol. 17, No. 1, April 2005, pp. 171-182.

ABSTRACT

Projects that target problems of environmental degradation can be seen as platforms for interaction between different social groups and stakeholders and they risk therefore becoming the stage for power struggles and social conflict. The paper discusses the case of a low-income settlement in the city of Chiang Mai in northern Thailand in a context of environmental deterioration where low-income communities have squatted on land owned by the government. It has become ground for social conflict between low-income communities fighting for the right to stay on squatted land and government authorities who attempt to evict them.

Chiang Mai was selected as the main urban centre for economic development in the northern region, attracting poor rural migrants who settled in informal settlements, some of which where located on the banks of the Mae Kha canal. This is the case of Kampaeng Ngam community, which has settled in an area between the Mae Kha canal and Kampaeng Din. Shantytown dwellers had very limmited access to education. They are mostly employed as non-secialized labour and have limited earning capacity. Local people have limited opportunity to own land.

In 1997, 17 informal settlements along the Mae Kha canal were identified. Seven were designated as squatter settlements located on public land. The Kampaeng  Ngam community is located on land owned by the Department of Fine Arts (DFA) in charge of the protection and restoration of historic monuments. Kampaeng  Ngam has no sewage nor garbage collection.

Mae Kha canal was already heavily polluted in 1978 and the waste produced by informal settlements contributes only marginally to its pollution. The main sources of pollution were private companies. and the city centre.

Kampaeng  Ngam has been under increasing threat of eviction. This situation has stimulated the involvement of several interest groups and organisations. Among these are:

– Municipality: The services are not provided by the municipality. Kampaeng  Ngam community has been given financial support by the municipality for improvements. A master plan for the area was developed in 2002 but the major stated that he would work for the right of this community to stay in their current location.

– DFA: Has commissioned studies for the rehabilitation of the city, which includes a proposal for the restoration of the canals. The communities are located in an historical site and the DFA’s policy is to evict them but Kampaeng  Ngam was allowed to remain in the current location on condition that some dwellings were moved. However, in the long term they were going to be evicted.

– Lanna Architects: Consultant to the municipality in the elaboration of a 30-year master plan. Community participation is built into the planning of the project through the inclusion of public hearings.

– CODI: Under the National Housing Authority (NHA) implemented community development programmes that adopt a bottom-up approach to improve the living conditions of urban poor communities and to strenghten their organisational capacity through the organisation of saving groups to loans for housing improvement and income generation. CODI has been a catalyst in a process of social change, which aims to promote a large scale community-driven development movement and places the decision making and management of responsibilities with community networks.

The Urban Community Environmental Activities (UCEA) project included grants to urban communities that are actively involved in environmental improvements, self-managed development in the communities, community-driven participatory processes, mechanisms for coordination and mutual decision-making between communities and local authorities and developing and promoting coordination among communities. Environmental improvement is seen not as an end itself but, rather, as means of promoting social change. UCEA adopts a bottom-up approach in which communities are the main actors in the processes of problem identification, project design, decision-making, budget management and imlementation to create ownership of interventions.

– People’s Organisation for Participation (POP): CODI’s main partner in imlementing UCEA has been the POP. They have worked organising events such as canal-cleaning weekends, placing the communities in a stronger position in their fight against evictions.

UCEA has stood as an alternative approach to dealing with environmental issues focused on empowerment and education of poor urban communities in environmental management, beyond short-term political agendas. But it has also remained an isolated initiative. The process of urban development and environmental management in Chiang Mai is dominated by struggles at the political, economic and cultural levels, between central and local governments and civic representation. Housing conditions in squatter communities along the Mae Kha canal, is being shaped by conceptions of environmental management in terms of promotion of tourism which has led to accelerated economic growth and a continuous depletion of the environment. Environmental management takes the form of beautification and preservation of historical identity, however fail to consider the contradictions implicit in mass tourism, economic and infrastructure development, environmental decay and historical identity.

ACTORS

Chiang Mai Municipality, CODI, POP, DFA, Lanna Architects

Patterns of Development on the Metropolitan Fringe: Urban Frindge Expansion in Bangkok, Jakarta, and Santiago (1995)

Browder, John O. et alli. ‘Patterns of Development on the Metropolitan Fringe:  Urban Fringe Expansion in Bangkok, Jakarta, and Santiango’, in the Journal of the American Planning Association, Vol. 61, No. 3, Summer 1995, pp. 310-327.

The paper examines the socio-economic composition and structure of settlements on the metropolitan fringe in developing countries.

Nearly all of the future growth in the world’s urban population is taking place in the cities of the developing countries.

Traditional Conceptions/Themes

Fringe areas have been created in three ways:

1. engulfing villages
2. transitional zones in rural-urban migration
3. suburbanization – land aquisition and speculation

Themes:

1. The importance of peri-urban agriculture and rural linkages to recent metropolitan fringe settlements.
2. The importance of the ‘informal’ economy (in housing, construction, financing…).
3. The tenuous nature fo property ownership.
4. The demographic processes responsible for fringe development, including temporality – daily, seasonally, circular.

Bangkok as a primate city.

It has suffered from the absense of any systematic, enforced planning.  The city’s urban development has been driven principally by market forces.  Even in the construction of housing for lower-income residents, the public sector has not beeen a major force. (this is pre-CODI)

Dispite the continued pressure to expand at the outer fringe, large tracts of land remain undeveloped in the ‘inner’ suburban zones.  This is mainly because of a lack of infrastructure.

Survey Findings

Demographic Process of Peri-Urbanization

• Intrametropolitan mobility was found to be the predominant pattern of migration to fringe areas, and the principal migration flow was outward from the city centre.
• Expansion of residential development in the fringe sites is related to government policy.
• State directed planning schemes are consistent with Harvey’s notion of ‘capital circuit switching’.

Employment Characteristics – Bangkok was different to Jakarta & Santiago in many ways.  Rates below are for Bangkok. (with comparative employment charts)

• Number of remunerated workers per household = 2.5
• Female wage to Male wage 1:1.19
• Female as principle income earner 23%
• Low rates of employment in agriculture
• Public service (gov’t) was the predominant employer of male workers = 28.7%, followed by industry = 22.8%
• Four important Patterns: 1) The percentage of ‘industry’ was not cottage industry but larger enterprises with +10 workers, 2) ~2/3 of male workers in Bangkok received regular salaries (so more formalised economies), while female workers were more likely than males to be ‘self-employed’ and dissproportionally represented in the informal work force, 3) Most male workers commute to city-centre or other fringe areas, while women work locally, 4) Fringe areas are not functionally integrated with rural areas.

Income Generation

• Bangkoks fringe would be most accurately characterized as an enpansion of middle-income households, interspersed with lower-income households
• Only in Bangkok, where almost equal proportions of male and of female engage in remunerated economic activities, does contributions to household income of the other members exceeds that of the head
• 7% of surveyed households in Bangkok had saved some surplus income during the preceding 12 months

Conclusions – Fringe settlements are highly diverse in character, function and form