Major Influences on Housing Policies

1
Major Influences on Housing Policies

• Links with Modernisation Theory
• Links with Chicago School of Urban Ecology
• Links with practices in the West
• Western Education of Professionals
• Influence of aid agencies

2
Housing Policy Development

• Economic development seen as key priority -
  scarce resources not to be wasted on housing - a
  consumption good
• Economic growth would create conditions for
  improved housing
• Urbanisation thrust upon as a necessary process
  for economic growth

3
Housing Policy Development

• Prior to 1950 not much interest in housing in
  Asia or Africa
• poor urban residents accommodated in tenement
  buildings
• but supply of such accommodation was not
  sufficient to cater for urban growth

4
Housing Policy Development

• redevelopment reduced rental housing stock
• development of squatter settlements

5
HOUSING POLICY DEVELOPMENT WESTERN INFLUENCES
GOVERNMENT VIEWS

• The development of slums and squatter settlements
  portrayed as a transitory phase that would
  disappear as the economy grew

6
HOUSING POLICY DEVELOPMENT1950S

• The persistence of slums and squatter settlements
  began to concern government
• Illegal low-income settlements seen as cancers
  and needed to be eradicated

7
HOUSING POLICY DEVELOPMENT1950S

• common response - slum and squatter clearance -
  by bulldozing
• dumped in the periphery or in distant
  inappropriate sites

8
JUSTIFICATION FOR EVICTIONS

• Improve or beautify the city
• Slums and squatter settlements centres of crime
• Redevelopment

9
IMPACT OF EVICTIONS

• Destruction of few housing options available to
  low income groups
• - overcrowding as a result of doubling up
• - formation of new squatter settlements

10
IMPACT OF EVICTIONS

• Damage to networks of family, friends and
  contacts
• - important for day to day survival
• - basis for community mobilisation

11
PUBLIC HOUSING PROGRAMMES

• 1960s and 1970s - launch or enlargement of public
  housing programmes
• Tried to replicate models of housing in the West

12
PUBLIC HOUSING PROGRAMMES

• 3 main problems with public housing
• Costs were high and therefore few were built
• Middle or upper income groups benefited mostly
• Designs and location ill matched with needs of
  poor

13
PROTAGONISTS OF SELF-HELP HOUSING

• John F C Turner
• uncontrolled urban settlements is a manifestation
  of normal growth processes
• autonomous urban settlements are the product of
  and the vehicle for activities which are
  essential to the process of modernisation -
  location, tenure and shelter

14
PROTAGONISTS OF SELF-HELP HOUSING

• John F C Turner
• autonomous urban settlements are the product of
  the difference between the nature of the popular
  demand for housing and that supplied by
  institutionalised society
• institutional control of urban settlements
  through encouraging popular initiatives and the
  government servicing of local resources

15
PROTAGONISTS OF SELF-HELP HOUSING

• housing should be seen as a verb not a noun
• housing should not been seen as what it is but
  what it does
• - its meaning for those who use it
• housing needs change over time and cannot be
  catered by large organisations with standard
  procedures and products

16
PROTAGONISTS OF SELF-HELP HOUSING

• John F C Turner
• this does not do away with a role for government
  - enabling
• provide services (roads, sanitation, water etc)
• formulate proscriptive but not prescriptive laws
• provide and actively protect access to elements
  of the housing process (land, building materials,
  tools, credit, know-how)