Leuven and Brussels, Belgium, 23-26 May 2001
COPING WITH INFORMALITY AND ILLEGALITY
IN HUMAN SETTLEMENTS IN DEVELOPING CITIES
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ESF/N-AERUS International Workshop Leuven and Brussels, Belgium, 23-26 May 2001
COPING WITH INFORMALITY AND ILLEGALITY
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Mohammed Idriss Konate
Recent trends reveal the significance of illegal and informal settlements, particularly in sub Saharan Africa. These settlements play a role in housing an increasingly growing proportion of the city population. Moreover, the lack of basic environmental infrastructure and services, quality of building, tenure issues and so forth are relatively well known.
However, much more enquiry is needed into specific action areas such as those aiming at preventing illegal land occupation. However, the combination of policy measures - in the context of Burkina Faso - that aims at enabling the access to housing has instead indirectly encouraged illegal occupation of land. The translation of such measures has also in practice not paid enough attention at a number of issues that are at the interfaces between social and legal considerations linked with these settlements. The paper argues that policy responses to the issue of illegal settlements and its range of environmental and public health implications, at least in the case of Burkina Faso, have instead encouraged the development of illegal settlements by its underlying rationale, that is, granting ownership over land to those who have already illegally occupied land in these settlements. This rationale has created a distortion in the land market and can be considered as a determining factor for the occupation of land in illegal settlements. In other words, the paper endeavours to show that the growth of illegal urban settlements is indirectly the result of the incapacity of public authorities to comprehending the social dynamic of illegal settlements' growth.
Furthermore the paper aims at advocating the taking into account of this social dynamic within urban management practices, particularly with regard to illegal settlements. It appears that public authorities addressing the problem of urban illegal settlements are too much often within the urban planning paradigm that does not give enough consideration to aspects other than those relating to the physical environment of these settlements. In addition, a participatory framework and institutional mechanisms to identify social demands are to be set up to curve current trends in illegal settlements' growth in Ouagadougou.
The methodology if based on a review of public authorities' practices with regard to urban illegal settlements and a survey in the areas in order to ascertain factors that have been discussed above. The paper will receive contributions from PhD candidates/researchers in Sociology (EHESS, France), Environmental Resources (Univ. of Salford, UK) and Environmental Psychology (University of Paris V René Descartes).
N-AERUS: Network-Association of European Researchers on Urbanisation in the South
http://www.naerus.net