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.

Chapter 13: Perpetual Returns: Vampires and the Ever-Colonized City

Pile, Steve, ‘Chapter 13: Perpetual Returns: Vampires and the Ever-Colonized City’ in Bishop, Ryan et all (Editors), Postcolonial Urbanism: Southeast Asian Cities and Global Processes. Routledge, London 2003, pp265-284.

Summary:

Vampires love the city as it is a place they can hide without recognition, their true identity veiled behind a cloak of indifference. “Cities are full of strangers, familiar and unfamiliar, unknown and unremembered. In this sense, cities are the natural breeding ground of vampires. Ready to suck the life out of others, they find a ready stock of potential victims that no one will notice missing” (p 266).

Pile narrates the journey of vampires through the Edge[s] of Empire to London: the Beating Heart of Empire. The author than makes a cross-Atlantic trip to New Orleans to view the Old Blood in the New World before making a final stop in Singapore for Cautionary Tales of Blood and Money. Amidst the many arrivals and departures Pile takes Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (and its 1994 film adaptation) and the pontianak from the respective cities by way of analysing what the myths and legends of vampires can reveal about Cities Without End. “Tracking the vampire will allow us to see something of the city: specificity of the global, the colonial, and the perpetual” (p 265).

Notes taken from text:

Referring to Jonathan Harker’s description of his journey to Dracula’s castle: “Across this landscape, however, the more significant geographies refer to journeys, to geographies of communication, and to “places of rest”” (p 270).

One of the changes noticed was the arrival of the railway which reduced journey times between London and mainland Europe: “The railways, as they had done elsewhere, had ensured that it was possible to travel far quicker and more reliably than before. The extension of the railway network across Europe had effectively brought far-off places (far off both in space and time) nearer to the heart of central European empires) (ibid).

This form of transport enabled Dracula to travel to London where the “great crowds would act as the perfect cover for the vampire. In a city of strangers, Dracula would be just another man” (p 271):

“Here I am noble; I am a boyar; the common people know me, and I am master. But a stranger in a strange land, he is no one; men know him not – and to know not is to care not for. I am content if I am like the rest, so that no man stops if he sees me, or pause in his speaking if he hears my words” (ibid).

In a way this reflection may be similar to that of people from small towns where ‘everyone knows everyone’ without a sense of individualism and perhaps (though not always) limited opportunities. Whereas a city may be perceived to have windows of opportunity, a place where one can submerge into its sea of anonymity.

Jonathan’s accounts of his encounter with the vampire are told through various forms of written media, if the story were set in our contemporary world, the format would be in the form of digital media such as texts, emails, faxes or even Skype! “The circulation of legal documents, money, and messages, of course shows that empire was an open and unbounded system, in which a vast array of circuits of people, information, goods, property, money, and blood were possible” (p 272).

“Dracula is surely a metaphor for all plagues, but more than this, he is also a metaphor for anxieties about the vast numbers of “strangers” who were tramping London’s streets… [thus leading to the notion that] The imperial city does not simply belong to the colonizer – in a very real way it belongs to both the colonized world and, further, to the world” (ibid). There’s a suggestion that Dracula’s journey resembles Bram Stoker’s own journey from Ireland to London; stories of migrants moving from one city to the next with the hope of a ‘brighter’ future.

In this sense the “imperial city is, in many ways, the archetypal global city: open to the world, and what the world will bring with it” (ibid).

In the perpetual city life once taken away always threatens to return; “This sense of “the return” can also evoke something of the relationship between the city and the colony, because the settlement of strangers (anywhere) can produce anxieties: anxieties about blood” (p 273).

Vampires hiding themselves under the camouflage of death: “The vampires in New Orleans hide themselves in the familiarity of death: perfect camouflage… [although] Orleans in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century was also a bustling cosmopolitan port city, similar to London” (p 275).

According to Louis, the vampire being interviewed in Anne Rice’s novel, “the imperial city is exotic, a kaleidoscope of languages and peoples” (p 275-276).

The diverse nature and large population of the city makes it relatively easy to mix in with the crowd unnoticed, be invisible. It also exposes one to various cultures, “Under the influence of the great cities, the vampire has become urbane, sophisticated, cultured, excited by contact with strangers, reveling in its indulgent pleasures, and capable of great sadness” (p 277).

Relating back to the city:

“…empires do not simply occupy territory and then simply expand their control over more and more territory. There are limits to the imperial and postimperial cities” (p 281).

“The vampire, then, tells us that histories of empire run through cities in discontinuous ways: rising, falling, and perhaps finding new life in undead ways…the vampire shows us that empires are not simply about territories “under control”, but about the circulation of people, ideas, money, information, and the like” (p 282).

The three cities that Pile considers (London, New Orleans and Singapore) “are open, almost without borders. The vampire shows that the world outside the city cannot only move in, it can also feast on the city…This is to say that cities are made up of a variety of worlds, that they have multiple histories (imperial and otherwise)” (ibid).

The cities in “vampire tales give us a way to specify and situate these ambivalent emotions [fear, desire and feuds for blood] as they express themselves in the whirl of city life” (p 282-283). Thus suggesting that “there is an emotional life to the seemingly abstract and cold-blooded relationships that we have come to name as “globalization, “postcolonialism,” and the like” (p 283).

Pile suggests that following the journey of a vampire reveals “how the blood gets sucked out of the living city through wide networks of exploitation…For the city may be just like the vampire: It might view the worlds it see before it simply as its life-blood, the city’s hunger for people might never be satiated…cities have bitten deep into our necks” (ibid).

Actors:

Vampires

Chapter 1: Perpetuating Cities: Excepting Globalization and the Southeast Asia Supplement

Bishop, Ryan et all, ‘Chapter 1: Perpetuating Cities: Excepting Globalization and the Southeast Asia Supplement’ in Bishop, Ryan et all (Editors), Postcolonial Urbanism: Southeast Asian Cities and Global Processes. Routledge, London 2003, pp1-34.

Summary:

The book’s introductory chapter discusses the various issues regarding postcolonial urbanism in Southeast Asian Cities and the global processes that it entails. Themes of metaphoricity, colonialism, post colonialism, stereoscopy, imperialism and empiricism, historicity, diversification and the ‘middle voice’ are discussed within the context of the globalisation in Southeast Asian cities. It provides some historical contextual analysis of the Cold War and Post-Cold War eras and the impact on urbanism in the region.

Notes taken from text:

Notion of ‘city’ no longer applicable due to speed of growth and functions – hence the terms ‘urban’ or ‘suburban’ are more suitable.

Similarly reference to the discussion of post colonialism cities is becoming outdated.

“This is an international anthology….Space limitations preclude including material whose primary focus is on African, Asian or South American cities, but many of the urban realities and urban processes are applicable everywhere precisely because they have become internationalized” (p 2).

 Assumption 1: global urbanisation fit to homogenous and uniform criteria stemming from Europe, US or Australia.

Assumption 2: Asian, African and South American cities can be analysed based on the models from Europe, US or Australia.

 Therefore eradicates contextualisation and the notion of economic, social and cultural differences between countries and contents. The studies within the book aim to challenge this notion of homogeneity based on European, US and Australian ideas specifically of urban environments within Southeast Asia.

“Attention to the cultural diversity and social heterogeneity within locales leads to unconventional formulations of the ways in which Southeast Asian cities are placed in relation to the “global” “ (p 3).

“Global diversification and local diversity would be more or less the same thing from different perspectives unless we were able to sharpen our sense of how diversity helps produce the cultural, economic, political, and personal contexts that interest us.” (ibid).

Assumption 1 for theoretical framework: urbanisation, internationalisation and modernisation occur in contexts with complex and diverse conflicting historical conditions resulting from colonial to post-colonial periods:

 “The differences in the urbanism of Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, Manila, Ho Chi Minh City, Hanoi, Phnom Penh, and Vientiane, for instance, indicate diverse relationships to disparate histories. The only directly uncolonized city in this list, Bangkok, in its past and current relations with the United States, France and England imitates something of this diversity when compared to Kuala Lumpur’s relations with Britain, Jakarta’s with Holland, and Manila’s with the United States. Ho Chi Minh City, Phnom Penh, and Vientiane each also manifest a complex Eurasian historicity” (p4).

More complex once China, Japan and India are put into the equation.

 “…southeast Asia has often served as the conduit, or the space between, the pulls of Europe/North America and the Asia writ large during the colonial, postcolonial, Cold War, and post0Cold War eras” (ibid).

Assumption 2 for theoretical framework: recognition of the “importance of conflicting interests and trends in contemporary geopolitical relations and rapid teletechnological developments” (ibid).

Colonizing the Post

Generally “…a postcolonial situation always involves a relation (often if not always in terms of repetition) at once to its colonial history and to its current geopolitical and economic dependencies (which might always be the same thing)” (p 13).

The notion of postcolonialism relates to modernity, particularly global modernity, which is generally perceived the perspective of Western modernity (ibid).

“in Southeast Asia – perhaps more than in any other region – the figure of the refugee, the transmigrant, the homeless wanderers of several different diasporas emerge in situations that at the same time represent not only extreme attempts to establish and maintain modern state nationalism but also entrenched social and cultural division and opposition based on traditional values or assertions of indigenous ethnicity” (p 15).

“…the notions of belonging, property, attachments, and home (each of which play privileged roles in the establishment and perpetuation of modern nation-states and the notions of human rights that go with them) [are] rigorously dependent upon aspects of existence from which they are distinguished rhetorically” (p 17).

‘Historicity’ comprises “the conditions on which a historical determination could ever have come about at all” (p 18).

‘Institutional’ outlined in the chapter refers to ‘enunciation’ a “modality according to which the application of instrumental rationality and predicative logic tends to replicate itself in attempts to engage and comprehend processes like colonialism and globalization” (ibid).

The term ‘perpetuating’ is used in regards to “the futural direction of global urbanism, a dimension that at once gives itself to current determinations…yet which perpetually withdraws from calculations, thus allowing further determinations” (ibid).

“Modernity tends to advance through repositions of its patterns of inclusion and exclusion” (p 19).

The Empirial

In the book the notion of the ‘empirial’ is taken “as a conceptual resource for outlining the conditions of the possibility of urbanism in Southeast Asia…the stress is more on the possibilities and impossibilities that are produced and perpetuated by those constraints” (p 20).

There is no single source of the empirial “but rather is the upshot of a series of tensions, struggles, and formations of compromise” (ibid).

1.                  Derives from two aspects:

a)   Imperialism: “the form of centralized government common to the great empires of the East…the great Roman Empire…[and the] European imperialism and its colonial fulfilment” (ibid).

b)      Empiricism: with a “focus on the sensible object and, its correlate, the subject of experience, the figure par excellence of early modern urbanism with its democratic pretensions and its developing technology” (ibid).

Tension between the two aspects: it is not a simple case of tensions between ideologies from the East and West but the notion that “empires come and go, but the imperial mode of government remains the only viable system” (ibid).

“…the empirial is not the culmination of a historical progress or development but the result of specific patterns that manifest comprised economies” (p 21).

1.                  The imperial patterns that support the tendencies to gain international economic interests are two-fold:

a)  View the “city as a nodal point in the network of international cities facilitating…social, cultural, cosmopolitan, religious, and financial exchange”

b)      Imposition of “rigid rules, regulations, and laws, as the manifestation of cultural, social, and governmental constraint in the hands of decision-making governmental elites” (ibid).

Stereoscopy

‘Stereoscopy’ is “the simultaneity of virtual and real environments” (p 22).

The idea that people are now converging in-between two global networks on a daily basis; the geopolitical and the electromagnetic.

Virilio’s perspective on the implications of stereoscopy: “…the human being is increasingly caught between two worlds, stuck simultaneously in the “real” space of an increasingly limited environment and real-time relations at a distance [through telecommunications], to the extent that the human experience of the world and of the world’s horizon is becoming…irretrievably polluted” (ibid).

(Post)Colonial Experimentation

Postcolonial ideologies began from the impacts of the Cold War to the rest of the world, which essentially began the process of decolonisation of many countries around the globe. So globalisation can be directly linked and be a consequence of the Cold War.

“The colonial site can be seen as an ideal space for all kinds of experimentation, including, civic, military, ideological, technological, and scientific” (p 23).

The Southeast Asian region is “like an intense and multidisciplinary laboratory in which some of the greatest developments of urban modernity (in anthropology, technology, visual culture, and mass media not least) were developed, to be returned to European and American urban state centers, often in unexpected ways” (ibid).

The experimentation of ideas and models in “science, technology, social control, labor practices, and knowledge formation” (p 24) were exported back to colonising states for implementation.

There is also a “colonial legacy of aerial bombing of civilian populations. Accords reached by the European powers at the turn of the twentieth century that sought to forestall the potential threat from the sky posed by flight agreed to ban all bombing of civilian populations; such bans did not extend to colonized peoples, as they did not count as civilians. The efficacy with which air power could contain, control, and decimate large numbers of people in colonial sites proved too seductive for military and political planners” (p 24-25).

The Cold War versus Postcolonialism

Cannot differentiate postcolonialism from the Cold War as both eras have complex overlapping and interrelated developments and ideologies. “If one were to consider Indonesia’s Sukarno or Suharto, for instance, as postcolonial political figures of vastly different nationalist stripes,  the myriad ways in which the US, Chinese, British and Japanese policies in the region kept corrupt regimes in power from the moment of autonomous statehood would largely be ignored” (p 26).

The problems faced by Indonesians postcolonial rule were not the departure of the Dutch but more so of “how to make ends meet under the shadow of dictatorial administrations that waged direct and indirect war on their populations. The struggles were not over conceptions of autonomy and self-rule but to get rice on the plate and shelter over one’s head” (ibid).

“The nodes constructed in the neoliberal interventions of the current “global” moment did not often align with centers related to “domino theories” or communist anxieties. Cambodia provides particularly vivid examples. Because Cambodia did not seem to fit neatly into the networked nodes of capital, production, and labor that mark the post-Cold War world of globalization, it has been allowed to lapse into civil war and mine clearance at the expense of developing any sustainable infrastructure after being decimated by the US-Vietnam war” (p 26-27).

Tourism is an important sector for the Southeast Asian cities regaining economic improvements and development strategies. It proved to be central to the “hearts and minds” (p 27) strategy implemented by the US Cold War policies as consolation of the destruction caused.

“In a move as chaotic and violent as the one from colonial to postcolonial status. The move from Cold War to neoliberal ones has generated the commodification of intranational violence as spectacle” (ibid), taking the use of political messages on t-shirts to detract tourists from visiting Cambodia resulting higher tourism populations in Jakarta and Dili.

Brushing up against the powerful “(almost supernaturally so) networks promises immortality but can leave the city’s corpus with gashes in its necks and drained of its life-giving substance, as Cambodia, Burma, large chunks of Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand know all too well. These are the lesson the most recent emerging “global cities” in the region, those in Vietnam, have before them, as well as their own draining and drained past encounters with the global networks of the Cold War” (p 28).

Historicity

‘Historicity’ refers to the notion of what we have to uncover “as the grounds or conditions of the phenomena of globalization and postcolonialism” (p 29).

Distracting people from situations to analyse and make observations of what has happened is crucial – regroup rational thought.

Heidegger provided an strong alternative logic to mainstream ideologies: he “opens with the way beings are revealed through what he called “the question of being,” which he formulates as follows: “why are there beings at all, and not rather nothing?” The “why” in this case would not be a question about the cause of beings but something more like a celebration of the wonder that anything exists at all, thus revealing beings in hitherto unthinkable ways –for instance, opening experience up to the indeterminacy of its future and the disjunctive quality of temporality” (p 30).

Modern urbanism is therefore a consequence of historically forgetting the being and the historicity.

In terms of the coexistence of Christianity and urbanism: “The determination of being as presence finds its most consistent formulation in the division between the empirical (e.g., the perpetual presence of urban distraction) and the transcendental – the radical absence or placing beyond of an eternal and fundamental ground” (p 31).

Beyond the Third World City: The New Urban Geography of South-east Asia

H.W Dick and P.J Rimmer

Urban Studies, Vol 35, No.12 2303-2321, 1998

Abstract

The paper makes the case of  decolonisation being only a ‘transitional phase’ in south-east asian history despite many academics attributing this period to the defining of south-east asian cities as third world cities; essentially unique and not influenced by the first world.   In the authors’ view the late colonial period shows that south-east asian cities were in fact developing with similiar ideas and designs to  western cities.   They argue for a single urban discourse which acknowledges the unique chracteristics of south-east asian cities but also includes the influence of the first world as many have tried to do.

The paper discusses the many driving forces which have caused and shaped the urban form and land use of south-east asian cities many of which are attributed to Globalisation.

‘ ….globalisation has made the paradigm of the Third World City obsolete in south-east Asia’.

– 1970’s inustrialisation has led to rapid urbanisation’.  This in turn has seen an increase in job creation, a growth in population, migration.

–  1980’s developers have purchased large areas of land and accumulated vast land portfolios to the point as in’ Thailand of      destabilising the national financial system’.

There was a focus on ‘world cities’ as a result of international division of labour

Internationalisation of finance

Global network strategies of multinational corporations

-1990’s saw the influence of globalisation on local culture and identity

– The’ transport revolution’ has altered the settlement patterns as new roads and transportation became increasingly available and accessible

New town developments integrated with industrial estates, toll roads and airports have emerged.  The re-structuring of land use driven by rising middle class demand for comfort and security and the avoidance of social discomfort.

South-east asian cities have 3 main elements, elite garden, kampung and squatter settlements.

Promoters of the third world city discourse have labelled  the settlement transition of the urban and rural as ‘kotadesasi’ – kota = town, desa = village and si= process.  Desakota = settlement and Desakotasi = process

Desakota areas have 6 main features –

– a dense population engaged in smallholder cultivation, commonly of wet rice;

– an increase in non-agricultureal activities;

– a well developed infrastructure of roads and canals

– a reservoir of cheap labour

-highly integrated ‘transactive’ environment in terms of movements of people and commodities;

– a state perception as being ‘invisible’ or ‘grey zones’

The ‘third world city’ discourse argues this settlement pattern was unique to the developing world, however it as per the article there are also many similarities to the first world which should not be ignored.

South-east asian cities in a global context

Divergence and convergence between metropolitan and south-east asian cities –

Three phases of globalisation

1 Convergence – between urban forms was brought about by the increase in political and economic control exerted by metropolitan powers through colonial rule trade investement and new transport technologies.

2 Divergence – in urban forms occurred as a consquence of the breakdown of colonial political and economic control and installation of indigenous admininstrations

3 Convergence – was renewed in the 1980′ by increasing trade and investment and the application of telecommunications and high speed transport.

The elements and the patterns that are now observed in new towns and settlements resemble those observed in the US.

– Fear of public space

– Cultural and economic divisions between people

– Master planners employed by developers

– heavy reliance on (mainly U.S)  foreign experts

– marginalisation of poorer members of community as developments concentrate only on wealthy middle classes.

 

Actors

Bangkok Land (private developer), Tanayong and Land and House (private developers)

Key words:

Globallisation, colonial, Third world cities, Desakota,  urbanisation (driving force for)