Geneva, Palais des Nations - May 3-6, 2000
CITIES OF THE SOUTH:
SUSTAINABLE FOR WHOM?
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ESF/N-AERUS International Workshop Geneva, Palais des Nations - May 3-6, 2000
CITIES OF THE SOUTH:
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Geoffrey Payne
Geoffrey Payne and Associates
Why do so many people in the cities of developing countries live in housing and urban settlements which disregard official planning regulations, standards and administrative procedures? Clearly, there are many factors to consider in attempting to answer this question. However, one major factor is likely to be the high social and economic cost of conforming to official requirements. Where these costs are greater than households can afford, they have little alternative but to seek alternative options. An extreme example of this is squatting, though there are now many other processes of varying degrees of legality or illegality operating in most cities. For example, households may construct a house on land they own, and in an area officially designated for residential development, but not in conformity with administrative procedures which provides the essential documentation required by the authorities. Under such conditions, the ability of urban authorities to impose official norms is restricted to developments under their direct control. Elsewhere, the proportion of people unable to conform has reached a critical mass which enables people to act with relative impunity in undertaking further unauthorised actions.
A major proportion of all urban housing in developing countries, and also in some European countries such as Greece and Portugal, is now developed outside officially sanctioned processes. This is less a reflection of a global desire to break the law than the existence of inappropriate planning regulations, standards and administrative procedures. Many countries have inherited or imported their regulatory frameworks from outside, and these were designed to meet very different conditions to those currently facing countries in the South. By attempting to impose such approaches on populations which are invariably too poor to be able to conform to them, there is a danger that respect for the law and official institutions in general will be undermined.
For urban development to be socially, economically and institutionally sustainable, it is therefore vital to review existing regulatory frameworks to assess the extent to which changes are necessary to meet the needs, resources and priorities of the majority of urban populations. It is only by lowering the bottom rung of the legal housing ladder that the urban poor will be able to get onto it.
This paper is intended to act as a 'position paper' for an international research project evaluating the social and economic costs of regulatory frameworks for new urban development. The project will evaluate the literature and includes detailed case studies in India, Lesotho, South Africa, Tanzania and Turkey.
N-AERUS: Network-Association of European Researchers on Urbanisation in the South
http://www.naerus.net