Environment & Urbanization

This paper describes the nationwide “slum” upgrading (Baan Mankong) programme in Thailand, which supports community organizations to find their own solutions to getting land for housing. Between 2003 and 2008, the programme supported 512 upgrading initiatives involving 1,010 communities. Community organizations form their own savings groups and draw on soft loans, and find solutions that work best for them in terms of location, price and tenure, and negotiate with the landowners. Infrastructure subsidies can be drawn on to support the upgrading, and housing may be built or just improved. Collective land ownership strengthens the community processes that help households make the challenging transition from informal to formal, provides protection against market forces that often lead poorer households to sell, and encourages on-going community responses and less hierarchic community organization. Larger citywide networks of community groups work with local governments and other civil society groups to help find land solutions for all those living in informal settlements.

The Karachi Circular Railway (KCR) was planned in 1962 as a goods service linking five important work areas of the city. Subsequently, it was upgraded for commuter use as well. Pakistan Railways now wish to upgrade and expand the circular railway and double-track those parts of it that are single track. However, for this to be done about 20,000 households living in informal settlements along the railway tracks will have to be evicted and relocated. The residents of the informal settlements have organized themselves as part of the All Pakistan Alliance for Katchi Abadis (APAKA), and their local chapter is known as the Network of Railway Colonies. Two Karachi NGOs, the Orangi Pilot Project—Research and Training Institute (OPP—RTI) and the Urban Resource Centre (URC), have been instrumental in supporting the Network of Railway Colonies and other community organizations in surveying the “encroachments” (both formal and informal) along the railway tracks and in documenting the histories of the different settlements. This documentation has strengthened the negotiating power of the railway land informal settlements, whose communities have also made a number of proposals for changes and alternatives to the government’s scheme.

This paper discusses the land struggles of the urban poor in Zimbabwe and the emerging strategies used by the alliance of the Zimbabwe Homeless People’s Federation and its partner Dialogue on Shelter to address these struggles in the face of continued economic and political crisis. The paper looks at how they are navigating this space and creating new solutions for housing and livelihood strategies. It considers the recent history of informal settlements and government measures to control or destroy them, including Operation Murambatsvina in 2005, which made hundreds of thousands of people homeless. It discusses the pragmatic decisions regarding partnership with different government agencies that the alliance has had to make in light of the sustained political and economic crisis, and the positive responses, especially from some local governments. It suggests that these decisions and strategies taken at a time of crisis and rapid change should be seen as part of a longer-term debate that seeks to change the relationship between communities of the urban poor and the state. Today, the alliance presents government with an alternative way of dealing with land and housing issues. Although progress to date has been minimal given the scale of need, there is a strong basis for partnership that can be scaled up.

In Moratuwa, Sri Lanka, the tsunami disaster of 2004 forced new ways of working on both organizations of the urban poor and local authorities. Building on this experience, an emerging federation of the urban poor (built on community savings groups) has been collaborating with local authorities to secure land and adequate housing in two deprived settlements unaffected by the tsunami. This article examines these recent initiatives and their citywide relevance. The federation (the Women’s Development Bank Federation) receives support from a local NGO (Janarukula) and is affiliated with an international confederation (Slum Dwellers International), whose principles are also evident in these improvement efforts. One of the two settlements is located on the periphery of Moratuwa, where land is plentiful and existing plots can be upgraded. The other is a central settlement, where land is scarcer and the federation has opted for multi-storey residences. Securing community control over the multi-storey development has proved difficult and has required far tighter collective action. Success in dense settlements is important, however, if the federation is to meet its goal of creating a citywide strategy.

This paper describes two large-scale upgrading programmes in Argentina that sought to transfer land tenure to the inhabitants of informal settlements as part of a larger process that provided good quality infrastructure and services and other measures to strengthen their social inclusion in the wider city. In doing this, they went beyond the proposition that providing the urban poor with legal land titles in itself reduces poverty. The paper discusses the constraints on such programmes, including the long, complex process of getting land titles. Both upgrading programmes faced challenges from slow bureaucratic procedures and inadequate and fragmentary regulatory frameworks, with urban standards that were inappropriate to the social reality of low-income households. The paper notes that upgrading programmes will always lag behind need unless they are supported by more appropriate legal and regulatory frameworks.

This paper describes and discusses community-driven land tenure initiatives to address the issue of access to land in urban areas in the Philippines. This includes countering actual and threatened displacements from market-driven land, housing and urban development policies, mega-infrastructure development and disasters. The paper begins with a review of the relevant Philippines land and housing policies and their implications. It then describes the experience of the Homeless People’s Federation of the Philippines with three different land acquisition strategies (direct negotiated purchase, the Community Mortgage Programme, and usufruct schemes) in responding to the need for land and housing and to threats of, or actual, displacements. This includes case studies of community-led land acquisition initiatives by federation homeowners associations in Montalban, Iloilo and Albay (direct purchase), Quezon City (Community Mortgage Programme) and Quezon City and Muntinlupa (usufruct). It then considers what has been learned from these initiatives and what they imply for enabling mechanisms and policies to benefit self-help, low-income communities in their land tenure improvement initiatives. This includes a discussion of the potential advantages of usufruct in securing tenure more easily than with conventional land titling programmes.

This paper reviews whether land titling programmes have achieved the benefits claimed by their proponents. It finds that they have generally failed to do so. Investment in land and housing, access to formal credit, and municipal revenues have not increased noticeably more than under other tenure regimes, including those that allow many unauthorized settlements, and there is no significant evidence of poverty levels being reduced. Titling does provide increased tenure security — but many alternative forms of tenure, including those in many informal settlements, also provide high levels of security. In addition, in many nations, land titles do not necessarily protect people from eviction and expropriation of their land. Land titling often fails to increase access to credit, and low-income households who obtain titles are often as reluctant to take loans as banks are to lend to them. Titling also does not necessarily improve infrastructure and services provision, while many settlements have obtained improved provision without titles.

This paper describes the changes in official policy on riverside development in Surabaya, negotiated by the residents of low-income riverside settlements through their organization, Paguyuban Warga Strenkali Surabaya (PWS). They shifted the official policy from relocation to redevelopment by organizing the riverside communities and by developing their own proposals to show how flooding could be avoided and city development promoted through upgrading. As a member of the province’s parliament noted, there is a large difference between communities threatened with eviction saying: “Help us because we are poor” and “Listen, we have this problem and here is a possible solution.” The riverside communities now have five years to upgrade their homes and work with the government to clean up the rivers and clear space for riverside roads without evicting residents. The paper describes the work that is underway and how it is supported by savings groups. It also describes the constraints, which still include eviction threats and the lack of funding available to support the communities’ own processes and priorities. PWS plans to develop a revolving fund to support house renovation.

This paper discusses the dynamics of land use in the inner city of Lahore, based on a study of the Mochi Gate locality in particular. This includes a description of the evolution and transformation of the area over time and its development into a successful centre for wholesale, small-scale manufacturing and support services, much of which is based in informal enterprises. Principles of land use organization that lead to the successful commercial functioning of the area include strategic location, close physical proximity between “firms”, and a clustering of similar trades. Paradoxically, while the area is an important pillar in the city economy, it also suffers from symptoms typical of inner-city decay such as acute traffic congestion, dilapidated infrastructure, out-migration and a general deterioration of the built fabric. To date, attempts to address causes of decay have been fragmented and have failed to understand and incorporate key local actors, systems and processes. In so doing, this has also risked disrupting a major economic node in the city that provides livelihoods for a large low-income population. The paper argues that any attempt towards a successful upgrading of the area must be rooted in an understanding of these existing local “systems” of operation and organization.

This paper describes the implications of the land acquisition process in a village in the Gurgaon district of Haryana state in northwestern India. Gurgaon city, the district capital, is emerging as a major industrial hub, its growth made possible by the large-scale acquisition of agricultural lands by the government. The expansion of the city has altered patterns of rural natural resource use, created social, cultural and economic changes, and bred resentment among many peri-urban residents against urban authorities. The current top-down policies for land acquisition need to be revisited and replaced by more participative processes in which landowners and peri-urban residents themselves are involved. The speedy disbursement of reimbursements for lands acquired, and the spread of livelihood generation activities, can make processes of urbanization more inclusive and participatory. Improving transportation and connectivity to the city will be essential for sustaining new peri-urban livelihoods.

The impacts of climate change are likely to affect population distribution and mobility. While alarmist predictions of massive flows of refugees are not supported by past experiences of responses to droughts and extreme weather events, predictions for future migration flows are tentative at best. What we do know is that mobility and migration are key responses to environmental and non-environmental transformations and pressures. They should therefore be a central element of strategies of adaptation to climate change. This requires a radical change in policy makers’ perceptions of migration as a problem and a better understanding of the role of local and national institutions in supporting and accommodating mobility.

This paper describes the design, construction and management of the Beddington Zero Energy Development (BedZED), a high density residential development that accommodates a mix of income groups and combines homes and workspaces. It dramatically reduces carbon dioxide emissions per person from the homes and encourages and supports other aspects of a sustainable lifestyle — including reduced water use and reduced private automobile use. The paper also describes and discusses the limits to what residential developments such as these can achieve by themselves in relation to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and ecological footprints, especially those related to household choices (for instance, residents’ choice to fly) and to the policies and infrastructure for the district and city where BedZED is located (for instance, the quality of public transport). The paper outlines a residential development in Brighton that drew on the experience with BedZED and describes work with the local government in the borough where BedZED is located to address these larger-scale sustainable lifestyle issues.

This paper considers the implications of population growth and urbanization for climate change. It emphasizes that it is not the growth in (urban or rural) populations that drives the growth in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions but rather, the growth in consumers and in their levels of consumption. A significant proportion of the world’s urban (and rural) populations have consumption levels that are so low that they contribute little or nothing to such emissions. If the lifetime contribution to GHG emissions of a person added to the world’s population varies by a factor of more than 1,000 depending on the circumstances into which they are born and their life choices, it is misleading to see population growth as the driver of climate change. A review of carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions levels for nations, and how they changed between 1980 and 2005 (and also between 1950 and 1980), shows little association between nations with rapid population growth and nations with high GHG emissions and rapid GHG emissions growth; indeed, it is mostly nations with very low emissions per person (and often only slowly growing emissions) that have had the highest population growth rates. The paper also discusses how in the much-needed planning for global emissions reduction, provision must be made to allow low-income, low-consumption households with GHG emissions per person below the global “fair share” level to increase their consumption.

Following the Pol Pot era in Cambodia, the high levels of poverty, rapid urban growth and low level of community organization were exacerbated by an absence of government support for the poor. The Urban Poor Development Fund (UPDF) was established in 1998 to provide support to a growing number of community-based savings groups. It provides loans and grants for land acquisition, upgrading, house building, income generation and food production, but also gives community savings groups the chance to improve their knowledge, their confidence and their capacity; most critically, it supports them to develop better relations with government agencies. By April 2008, 122 communities in Phnom Penh and 44 communities in 11 other cities had received support — more than 22,000 households in total.