Venice - March 11-12 1999
Concepts and Paradigms of Urban Management
in the Context of Developing Countries
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International workshop Venice - March 11-12 1999 Concepts and Paradigms of Urban Management in the Context of Developing Countries |
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W.J. Kombe and V. Kreibich (University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Universität Dortmund, Germany)
"Informal Land Management as a Response to Public Planning Deficits in Tanzania[1]"
Excessive urban growth has largely outstripped the administrative capacity to provide housing land and to regulate settlements in most developing countries. The increasing deficit of the public sector has, however, been partially compensated by an upsurge of informal activities to achieve security in land ownership and orderliness and efficiency in the spatial arrangement of neighbourhoods. Under certain conditions, these informal institutions seem to be able to engender even semi-regularised procedures. The time seems to be overdue to assess the potentials and limitations of this hidden system to reconcile individual with community interests and to open up the debate about the future relationship between the formal (public) land administrative sector and its latent informal counterpart particularly the potentials at the the grass-roots.
This agenda has been taken up with an empirical investigation into the performance of local institutions regulating housing land development and settlement growth in Tanzania[2]. Reacting to the economic and political changes which have taken place in the country since the mid 1980's, including the adoption of liberal economic policies, the government has proclaimed a new market-sensitive National Land Policy and a Land Law was enacted in February 1999. According to the new land policy and the enacted law the public sector shall, however, remain the key player in the urban land market.
The new policy and legislation were not built on new structures but rather on the old administrative institutions without improving their capacity which has remain feable for decades and will remain extremely insufficient for many years to come. The increasing deficits of the public land management and urban planning systems, which in Tanzania are linked in the sense that surveying, registration and issue of titles for a piece of land go together with the designation of its use, have given rise to the proliferation of an informal system of semi-regularised housing land supply and settlement organisation which is, suprisingly, not espoused in the new Land Law and Policy. The research conducted was intended to support the proposition that coherent urban development in Tanzania and other developing countries with a resource starved public sector will depend on a successful reconciliation of the two hitherto separated sectors.
The benchmarks for this research was derived from earlier work of the authors In Keko Mwanga and Rangi Tatu settlements in Dar es Salaam, Kihonda in Morogoro and Changómbe in Dodoma were selected as settlements which represent typical stages of self-regularised urban growth. There, actors, institutions and procedures deployed in local decision making for housing land supply, security of tenure rights, lay-out regulation and land servicing were explored over a perod of two years.
Taken as a whole, the results of this study dub those who feel threatened by the proliferation of self-regulated settlements. The findings call for a sensible review of the prevailing perception of and attitude towards 'unplanned' urban growth. In the absence of public land management and planning regulation the semi-regularised sector has developed as an appropriate instrument, well adapted to local needs, norms and standards, and even able to link up with formal institutions in the public sector. Informal sector land regularisation instruments are especially strong in the initial and even at consolidation phases of urban growth where it is often paralleled by little effective public planning exercises. The instruments seem to lose their influence as informal settlements near saturation stage. The study of self-regularised land development is thus providing valuable insights and calls for a strategic re-orientation of the resource-starved public planning system. With excessive urban growth and insufficient administrative resources continuing in the coming decades the salient potentials at the grass-roots will have to be utilised in order to improve the quality of urban life and the overall economic performance of the large cities. In the following sections the main variables characterising semi-regularisation of the informal settlement studied are explicated before conclusion is drawn.
Study methodology
The study on informal housing land regularisation potentials was undertaken over a period of two years in three cities in Tanzania. The field work has been based on an appraisal of the settlement structure with the help of air photographs in order to development a typology of informal settlements. A survey of formal and informal institutions involved in land management in 29 selected Wards of the three cities provided information about the performance of the public sector in land management and the extent of informal institutions. Based on this information and the settlement typology one saturated settlement and three settlements undergoing consolidation have been selected for in-depth study.
In these case study areas150 detailed household surveys have been conducted focusing on the role of house owners in land transactions and property rights, spatial regularisation and land servicing. In addition, extensive interviews were held with key officials and committee members of the Ward administrations and of grass-root institutions in order to understand the relationship between formal and informal land management practices. Interviews with officials in the three municipalities helped to validate the information obtained at the grass-roots.
Land transactions and property rights
The detailed studies conducted in four informal settlements Dar es Salaam, Morogoro and Dodoma revealed that even though the private land market was statutorily acknowledged only with the beginning of this year, informal land markets have in practice been operating for over four decades now. The main reason why they emerged and are now a the prevalent modus operandi for accessing land in the rapidly growing urban areas in Tanzania can be attributed to the hitherto government policy to disregard values of land and to the failure of the public land supply system to provide buildable land for home builders and room renters (Materu et al.1992; Kombe 1995; Kombe and Kreibich 1999).
In each one of the four areas studied a grass-roots system for protecting private buyers' rights on land has emerged. It has been evolutionary in the sense that initially land transfer deals were verbally concluded and later written land sale or transfer agreements involving friends and relatives of the buyers and sellers as witnesses were evolved. Today selling agreements are in addition to friends and relatives usually authenticated by the heads of local administrative or political units (Sub-Ward orTen Cell Leaders. Adjoining property owners are also involved particularly during the handing-over ceremony. Social recognition by grass- roots actors (viz. community members and leaders) is constituting the main mechanism through which individual rights on land are authenticated and safeguarded.
Land disputes resulting from trespassing on private or public land or from dubious sales are firstly resolved by the same grass-roots actors. In cases were they are not able to resolve the disputes, the cases are often referred to the courts of law. This widespread practice points to a linkage between formal and informal structures: although informal land markets are not officially sanctioned, in practice the formal judicial institutions play an active role in arbitrating land disputes and in authenticating ownership rights[3]. It is therefore no wonder that none of the respondents interviewed in the four study areas expressed fears about the security of the land or property bought simply because it had been accessed through the informal system.
Spatial orderliness
An eye-catching spatial order has been engendered in the settlements studied which has been engendered without conventional land use planning tools and equipment .Inspite of the fact that the public planning authorities were adamant and increasingly finding it untenable to recognise and support self-regularisation of housing land in the informal settlements, two of the four settlements a fairly orderly alignment of houses was observable that closely resembles a layout plan in planned housing areas..
In all the four cases pre-settlement physical fixtures as well as local grass roots leaders played a role in achieving the spatial regularisation of the settlements. The local leaders often took a leading role in directing land parcelling, overseeing transfer as well as assisting builders to site houses in accordance with the unwritten community norms. Pre-settlement fixtures have been adapted to constitute the physical bench marks for the orderly land parcelling and siting of houses.
The Villagisation Programme which has served to establishe Ujamaa villages after independence in many areas in the country did also provide spatial fixtures for orderly and efficient village development without public planning assistance. In two settlements studiedIt was reported that during villagisation a Village Land Use Committee was established to oversee the allocation and use of land in the resettlement areas. These committees seem to have done a commendable job in creating physical orderliness.
Active local community participation was the basic ingredient of successful spatial regularisation in the two other case study settlements. Social cohesion among the residents seems to have constituted an important force that facilitated support for concerted action. The latter was particularly critical for instance in ensuring compliance with the unwritten norms and procedures for acquiring and developing land.
Land servicing
Unlike in the formally developed housing areas, provision of basic infrastructure services and facilities preceded habitation in the informal settlements under surveillance. This observation seems to question the tendency to consider the availability of basic services a pre-condition for housing land development. In contrast to this (conventional) wisdom often held by planners or urban managers in the country the general land development pattern recorded in the settlementsunder study followed the path "land -> shelter/house -> habitation -> servicing".
Local leaders have been patrons in all communal initiatives to service land. Even though the respective local government may have contributed materials and some cash required during the construction of primary schools, local leaders mobilised the residents to contribute in cash and in kind (including labour and materials) in order to raise resources required for the provision of primary schools in two settlements. Like in formal housing areas private individuals, organised groups as well as non-governmental organisations have participated in land servicing initiatives, e.g. the provision of potable water.
In most cases land required for communal facilities such as markets, religious facilities and cemeteries was freely donated by the first and second generation of land owners. There are, however, areas where basic services are lacking or cannot be sufficiently provided because no land has been designated for these facilities, e.g. land for sports and other recreational facilitiesIn the past, land owners used to freely contribute their land for communal facilities, particularly during the initial settlement development period However, with the increase in land values and intensification of the informal land market it is becoming difficult to freely access land required for basic communal services. Thus, land for some services, e.g. for a mosque and a church, was acquired through purchase from private individuals. From this observation it is pertinent to observe that informal land development is not always able or efficient enough to provide for the prerequisite needs of urban settlers. In one settlement the unfettered (informal) land market has led to overdensified housing which is difficult and expensive to retrofit.
Formal - informal linkages
For decades planners and urban managers have been pre-occupied with the categorisation of urban housing land development from a dichotomising perspective, viz. formal and informal or regular and irregular or even legal and illegal. Often this categorisation has been deliberately done to underline independence between the two sectors and most importantly to dismiss or debase the quality of the informal sector even though its quantity is by far outstripping the formal stock (Kombe 1995; Kombe and Kreibich 1999).
The study of informal housing land development in four settlements in Tanzania has, however, generated sufficient evidence to suggest that the two systems are interdependent and in fact the informal sector has even imitated and adopted a number of normative values cherished by the formal sector. The following diagram is summarising the interdependence between the formal and informal sectors in urban land management.
Some conclusions
The persistent government policy to disregard the potentials for the informal regularisation of housing land seems to hinge on the conception that informal housing land development is a transient phenomenon which will perish with the improvement of the national economy. This is indeed one of the factors which continue to impede meaningful policy changes. The environmental and socio-economic implications of this position are costly and will become prohibitive if allowed to accumulate.
The believe that the public institutions in place shall be able to deploy the capital and other resources required to squarely address the problems emerging from the rapidly growing informal settlements is at best a wishful thinking. Studies have repeatedly suggested that the capacity of the state to manage urban land have been shrinking year after another (Kombe 1995; Kombe and Kreibich 1999).
The absence of an appropriate policy framework to deal with self-regularised land development has allowed informal housing to mushroom in a haphazard fashion rendering the informal land development sector unpopular among urban planners and managers. A closer examination of self-regularised land management which has been the intention of the study reported have, however, revealed notable exceptions.
The grass-roots actors and institutions regulating informal housing development which could be unveiled in the settlements studied ought to be supported in order to complement the declining public capacities. Building on the subsisting self-regularisation mechanisms and even increasing their efficiency provides an opportunity window for the marginalised public sector to improve the quality of land management in the urban growth centres even with limited resources.
One of the preconditions for the successful adaptation of the hitherto neglected potentials of self-regularised land management and its reconciliation with the formal sector is the redefinition of user rights and their separation from ownership rights. Statutorily the state is at present the sole owner of all land and it also enjoys the right to define the use. Experience has shown that in practice this is not the case, since land occupiers or those who possess the rights on a piece of land in an informal area also define the use to which a piece of land may be put[4].
It seems safe to predict that unless the public policy on land comes to terms with the initiatives and institutions steering urban land development, the institution of a workable and economically productive land management system in Tanzania and many other Third World countries facing similar problems shall largely remain a dream.
Notes
Bibliography
Kombe, W.J.: Formal and Informal Land Mangement in Tanzania - the Case of Dar es Salaam. Dortmund 1995 (SPRING Research Series 13)
Kreibich, V.: The Spatial Form of the Informal City - Rome, Madrid, Dar es Salaam. In: Journal of Area Studies 12, 1998, S. 120 -134
Kombe, W. J. and Kreibich, V. (eds.): Urban Land Management and the Transition to a Market Economy in Tanzania. Dortmund 1997 (SPRING Research Series 19)
Kombe, W. J. and Kreibich, V. Community Based Land Regularisation - Prospects for Decentralised Planning. In: TRIALOG 55, 1997, S. 27 - 31
Kombe, W. J.: Regularizing Urban Land Development during the transition to Marked-led Land Suppply in Tanzania. In: Kombe, W.J.; Kreibich, V. (eds.): Urban Land Management and the Transition to a Market Economy in Tanzania. Dortmund 1997, S. 29 - 48
Kombe, Wilbard J. und Kreibich, Volker: (eds.): Informal Responses to Deficits in Formal Land Management. HABITAT International (special issue forthcoming)
Kombe, Wilbard J. und Kreibich, Volker: Informal Land Management - Responses to Public Planning Deficits in Tanzania. Dar es Salaam/Dortmund 1999 (unpublished research report)
Materu, J.; Kironde, J.M.L; Masebu, H.; Halla, F.: Urban Land Management in Tanzania. Dar es Salaam 1992 (unpublished report to the World Bank and to the Government of Tanzania)