Deficits of formal urban land management and informal responses under rapid urban growth, an international perspective

Abstract

The objectives of public urban land management, namely the provision of affordable buildable urban land in sufficient quantities and guidance of the growth of cities and ensuring their efficient functioning are, on the whole, not being achieved in Sub-Saharan Africa. The main reasons for this are outdated and restrictive land-use control and regulatory standards and unreformed tenure arrangements. The informal sector, unacknowledged and illegal, at best tolerated, has been making up for the inefficiencies of public land management. The informal sector has proven adaptive and responsive and has been providing the bulk of the urban population with buildable urban land. Public housing programs, sites and services and upgrading have all been attempted as ways of meeting the housing needs of the population with limited success. Yet over time, informal settlements do improve in quality, providing satisfactory living conditions for a large proportion of the urban population. A number of examples of this are examined in the paper. There are lessons to be learned from these cases which have implication for urban development policy. This paper examines these implications.

Introduction

It is now becoming increasingly evident that the rate of urbanization has outgrown the management and financial capacities of most African cities, with potential adverse long-term consequences both for the environment and the health of urban dwellers (Stren & White, 1989, p. 19; Khoury, 1996, p. 197)).

The unprecedented urbanization rate¹ is a consequence of inherent demographic processes, viz. natural population growth and in-migration, both national and transnational. Problems stemming from rapid urbanization have been aggravated by over two decades of ontinuous declining economic performance,² political instability and institutional decay in most of Sub-Saharan Africa. High urbanization rates have posed multifaceted challenges, both to urban administrators and dwellers. Existing formal urban planning standards and regulations, however, have proven too outdated and inappropriate to meet these challenges. African low-income urban households, on the other hand, have been bypassing these alien, outdated and inhibitive formal/official urban planning standards and regulations, constantly improvising, creating and adopting their own parallel indigenous structures, procedures and institutions in order to tackle their existential problems, chief among which is the provision of shelter/affordable housing.

The initial attitude and response of African states toward the self-initiative of the urban low-income households consisted of either active hostility or benign neglect. The various adjectives characterizing the self-initiated settlements of the urban poor, found in most official literature, are, at least in part, indicative of these attitudes: `informal', `illegal', `squatting', `unregulated/uncontrolled’ growth. Government measures ranged `from passing tough, stringent regulations to exclude such settlements from any infrastructure extension plans, barring their integration in any urban or municipal services’ (Zaghloul, 1994, p. 7) to outright demolition.³

Eventually, however, governments have been forced to acknowledge that `informal’ settlements exist because of or in response to their public policies (Dowall, 1991a, p. 2). Government attitudes are now shifting from initial hostility toward viewing low-income groups as `real builders and designers of large parts of cities’ (Hardoy & Satterthwaite, 1993, pp. 112–115) and providers of affordable housing, sometimes as much as making up 84% of all housing units built’ (Brennan 1993, p. 83).⁴ The `informality’ or `illegality’ of their settlements is increasingly considered as more of `an externally imposed residual category’ (Berry, 1994, p. 439; Glenn & Wolfe, 1996, p. 59). Both the potentials⁵ and limitations of the informal/illegal settlements are now subjects of much urgent research and policy deliberation.

This paper aspires to contribute to this process of reflection on informal settlements, better called self-planned settlements. The main area of focus shall be on urban land management systems and the responsive evolution of self-planned/informal settlements, their densification and their impact on the greater urban form. Relevant experiences from different parts of the Third World will be referred to in order to draw lessons for African conditions.