David Drakakis-Smith - Urbanisation, Housing and the Development Process

ROUTLEDGE LIBRARY EDITIONS: DEVELOPMENT

URBANISATION, HOUSING AND THE DEVELOPMENT PROCESS

URBANISATION, HOUSING AND THE DEVELOPMENT PROCESS

DAVID DRAKAKIS-SMITH

Volume 67

First published in 1981

This edition first published in 2011
by Routledge
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Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
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1981 David Drakakis-Smith

Printed and bound in Great Britain

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ISBN 13: 978-0-415-58414-2 (Set)
eISBN 13: 978-0-203-84035-1 (Set)
ISBN 13: 978-0-415-59499-8 (Volume 67)
eISBN 13: 978-0-203-83682-8 (Volume 67)

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PLATES

FOR

ANGELA, CHLOE

AND EMMANUEL

PREFACE

This book examines the problem of housing provision for the urban poor in the Third World. Shelter cannot be isolated from other aspects of urban life and both its production and consumption are closely linked to other difficulties experienced by low-income groups. For this reason the question of housing provision is examined here within the development process as a whole and is related in the early chapters to current ideas on this subject. However, as this book is intended to be a course text, these concepts are reviewed rather than discussed in detail. Further clarification and investigation of particular issues can be followed through in the reference bibliography.

Four main types of accommodation, government, private, squatter and slum, are examined in terms of their current and potential roles in meeting low-cost housing needs. The crucial question asked is whether the present system in any particular country meets the real needs of the urban poor or is intended to satisfy other goals set by the established elites of the society, whether government or private. This is examined in a series of detailed case studies drawn from a deliberately restricted number of Asian countries. It is obvious from these profiles that economic and political, rather than welfare, objectives predominate and that the range of implemented programmes is both disturbingly narrow and ineffectual. Whilst there is a clear need for more flexibility to meet the changing circumstances of both supply and demand, it is also apparent that adjustments to the programmes themselves will not meet the real housing needs of the urban poor unless policy motivation is changed.

This book is essentially based on my own experiences in the Third World but I owe a considerable debt of gratitude to Denis Dwyer and Terry McGee for both the initial stimulation they provided and later guidance in the development of conceptual approaches. Needless to say, any inadequacies are my own. In the cities where I undertook fieldwork the people who have helped me are too numerous to mention individually but I would like to single out Rusen Keles, Frank King and Ted Pryor for particular thanks.

The preparation of the book would have been a time-consuming task without the considerable and much appreciated assistance of Christine McMurray and Jane Hurst. Pauline Falconer and Rowena Barker typed the original manuscript, Keith Mitchell drew all the maps and diagrams, and Ken Lockwood prepared many of the prints. To all of these people I owe many thanks. Finally, I would like to acknowledge the support given to me by my wife Angela in both a practical and spiritual sense.

Although it is axiomatic to state that houses comprise the greater part of any city, this sheer physical dominance does not mean that housing provision is important enough to be discussed in isolation from other aspects of urban life. Housing as a commodity has many different characteristics so that its importance and nature vary from producer to consumer. Castells (1977) has argued that the housing crisis does not derive from exploitation but from the mechanistic relation between supply and demand. However, in the Third World, where massive shortages of conventional houses exist, the socio-economic characteristics of the production process determine the nature of this crisis and these almost inevitably involve exploitation. As such, housing provision is a function of the national and international structural relationships which have given rise to Third World cities; it is not unique and shares many features with other important and diverse components of urban life, such as the distribution of political power, or the availability of employment.

In this opening chapter it will be useful to examine the general characteristics of the urbanisation process in the Third World in order to identify some of the broader forces involved. Later chapters will focus on more specific issues, such as housing provision per se and its individual components, illustrating the main arguments with reference to case studies. It is important to remember, however, that the structural relationships discussed in this initial overview are omnipresent throughout the spatial hierarchy.

The Statistical Dimensions of Urbanisation

Most statistical information on an international scale is assembled by multinational organisations such as the United Nations or the World Bank. The national data collated in such summaries often exhibit considerable differences in both working definitions and reliability, and where possible some form of standardisation is employed to enable more useful international comparisons to be made. Thus urban data cover settlements of at least 20,000 inhabitants, whilst cities are taken to be urban agglomerations of more than 10,000 people. These figures are essentially population counts for official administrative districts and may not correlate either with the actual metropolitan area or with the socio-economic functions of the settlement.

The general scarcity of uniform and reliable data in the Third World also means that aggregate tables may vary widely in the accuracy of their individual components. This is particularly true for intra-urban social phenomena, such as health indicators or housing quality. The latter is usually poorly defined and gives rise to very misleading comparative figures; for example, most tabulations which purport to summarise both slum and squatter populations invariably cover only squatter settlements simply because they are visually more distinctive and appear easier to record. There are relatively few criticisms of such international aggregations and their data are too readily accepted by eager quantifiers. Admittedly, neither the United Nations nor the World Bank claim complete accuracy for their statistical compilations but the prestige of such information sources often lends a credibility which far exceeds reality. Criticisms and data peculiarities may be found in almost every country in the Third World and it would serve no useful purpose to itemise them all at this point. Suffice it to say that basic caveats do exist and should be borne in mind when national or international statistics are utilised. Where possible in the broad overview which follows, such data will be supplemented by information from detailed subnational surveys.