The global
governance response to informal settlements – relieving or deepening
marginalisation?
Marie Huchzermeyer
Associate
Professor
Postgraduate
Housing Programme
University of the
Private Bag 3
Wits 2050
huchzermeyerm@archplan.wits.ac.za
Abstract
Informal settlements are a visible manifestation of
legal, economic and often social exclusion from the formally recognised urban
environment. Across sub-Saharan
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Introduction
Arriving at Cape Town International airport, the
overseas tourist or investor is greeted by a seeming ocean of shacks. Timber
and corrugated iron homes have rooted on every vacant square meter of dune
lining the N2 freeway that leads from the airport into the historical centre of
the ‘mother city’ [photo-shacks along N2].
The city’s decision-makers are caught between a high level political promise to
eradicate poverty, and the wish to improve the global competitiveness of the
city.
This is not the first time informal settlement
dwellers in post-apartheid
In this paper, I try to explore the relationship
between globalisation and informal settlements, and in this context the strong
role played by the market. I use this to define a conceptualisation of ‘marginalisation’
that may assist in understanding the position of informal settlements in a
globalising world. I refer to informal settlement situations in
Informal
settlements, globalisation and the market
Globalisation interacts in many ways with informal
settlements across the globe. Most are of detriment to the lives of informal
settlement residents, and are countered only fractionally by that other brave form
of globalisation – the growing international networking between slum-dwellers,
primarily through Slum Dwellers International. Even in the
While the globalising market is interested in
distributing consumer commodities such as electronic devices to residents of
informal settlements (see Keyder, 2005), the globalising market has no concern
for distribution of the finite resource land. The market for fixed commodity
trade operates in a very different manner, not seeking to expand the consumer
base or widening the range of consumers (as in the case of non-fixed commodity
trade), but narrowing its consumer base down to an ever sharpening elite that
can compete for the properties at highest prices. Large portions of
In
Less formal market-led processes exploit the non-distribution
of affordable land/housing by the formal market. Where there is still urban
land that is not formally commodified, the informal sector arranges
transactions for owner occupation that are not legally recognised, and
therefore insecure, and finances these at unregulated interest rates.
Displacements from insecure owner-occupied housing continues as urban space is reconfigured,
indiscriminately trading advantage to those that can pay. Various forms of entrepreneurial
landlordism also emerge, extracting rent for minimal living conditions that are
stripped from social and public amenity. Where the market does not directly
lead displacement, insecurity of tenure and eventual eviction are ensured by urban
renewal or slum redevelopment programmes.
In
Informal settlements sit at this intersection. Their
existence is caused by exclusion from the formal land market. Improving or
redeveloping informal settlements usually implies commodification – the issuing
of tradable individual freehold titles. Inevitably, unless the original
households’ incomes improve, the original residents are immediately or eventually
priced out of the emerging market, often only at marginal gains. Peruvian
economist Hernando
Marginalisation
Thus the concept of ‘marginalisation’ in relation to
informal settlements must be understood as a condition that results from
households being marginal in relation to the interests of a globalising market.
As the process of globalisation strides across the urban landscape, there is a need
to move beyond Janice Perlmann’s 1976 conceptualisation of a ‘Myth of
Marginality’ (Permlan, 1976). Perlman’s research in a favela (informal
settlement) in
Perlman herself revisited this concept in 2003, with a
follow-up investigation of the same favela households in
Marginalisation is both a condition (in relation to
the market) and a process, namely that of continuous increase of disadvantage
for an increasing percentage of society. The United Nations predicts that by
2030, the percentage of urban households living in ‘slums’ will have more than doubled
(UN-Habitat, 2005c). ‘Slums’, in the way the term is used by UN-Habitat today,
are the visible manifestation of often chronic poverty, evoking images of leaning
shacks precariously perched in steep slopes or dunes, or balancing on stilts in
polluted swamps, shacks surrounded by puddles of stagnant water or fly-infested
heaps of ‘flighing toilets’ [photo-Kibera-flighing
toilets]. According to the UN-Habitat definition, ‘slums’ are areas
that comply with all of the following criteria:
-
Overcrowding,
-
lack
of basic services,
-
inadequate
building structures,
-
unhealthy
and hazardous conditions,
-
insecure
tenure’
-
poverty
and social exclusion
(UN-Habitat, 2005c)
Of course the doubling of the slum population over the
next three decades does not involve a sudden drop from privileged housing into
slums. Various sub-markets, while providing a way out of the worst slums for
some, are also feeding households into these very same slums. Much poverty is
hidden in overcrowded formal housing, ready to spill out into any area that
holds promises for an expanding family. These households and individuals are
able to pay rents in what was traditionally referred to as ‘slums’
(deteriorated and unhealthy housing stock, usually tenements, beyond repair and
therefore qualifying for slum clearance), but have no prospects of owning or
consolidating. Where informal settlement upgrading then inserts limited
opportunities for owner occupation, intense competition for these benefits
result.
In
In the slum Kibera [photo-Kibera
density] the residents have very little say. They are tenants of
structure owners who were illegally and corruptly allocated land by provincial
officials, who in turn control the settlement through youth vigilantes. The
tenants are marginalised and powerless within a deeply corrupt informal sector.
Tenants, structure owners and provincial officials all stand to loose in the
slum redevelopment project of the Kenyan Government and UN-Habitat, which seeks
to impose a new and formal order. However, in this new order new opportunities
for corruption have already been recognised and exploited (Omenya and
Huchzermeyer, forthcoming). Endemic corruption in the Kenyan context must be
understood as a response by the lower income and small middle income classes to
decades of marginalisation from the benefits of a formal market by the Kenyan
political and economic elite under Moi up to the change of government in 2002.
People’s responses to marginalisation take different
forms in different contexts. In
Only after the first decade of democracy was the problem
of spatial displacement was officially recognised in a new Housing Policy (‘Breaking
New Ground’ – Department of Housing, 2004), which now includes an Informal
Settlement Upgrading Programme with mechanisms to support the attempts of the
poor at defending locational advantage. However, the high profile N2 Gateway
project in Cape Town, designed to pilot this very programme, is making an
exception to every new rule and again is displacing the poor in favour of
global competitiveness, and with direct reference a misinterpreted campaign of
UN-Habitat – ‘Cities Without Slums’, to which I return below.
Coupled with a UN-inspired ‘slum eradication’ campaign
in
There is little political will to
counteract marginalisation that has resulted from the process of social
exclusion from urban land. While
This raises concerns about the global governance
response to informal settlements:
-
Does
it equip governments with approaches to poverty alleviation that are not
undermined by attempts to do away with informal land occupation in order to
expand the land market and increase global competitiveness?
-
Does
it recognise that informal settlements in their many manifestations, while
representing marginalisation by the market, in themselves also represent an
attempt to counter marginalisation?
-
Is
this marginalisation halted or deepened?
A fundamental concern with UN-Habitat projects and
campaigns is their seeming support (possibly unintentional) in countries like
South Africa and Kenya of a return to the slum clearance and redevelopment fallacies
of the 1960s, which now, as much as they did then, spark the political
imagination through images of city beautification in which the poor have no
place.
The global governance response to informal settlements
In September 2000, the United Nations General Assembly
adopted a resolution named the United Nations Millennium Development
Declaration, out of which the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and Targets
were developed. Several of the goals and targets are relevant to informal
settlements, most directly Target 11 (under Goal 7), which is aimed at
improving the lives of slum dwellers.
The Millennium Development Project (initiated in 2000)
‘outlined a new development agenda for the UN’ (Emmerij et al., 2005:230).
The Millennium Development Declaration includes a United Nations positioning in
relation to globalisation:
‘We believe that the central challenge we
face today is to ensure that globalisation becomes a positive force for all the
world’s people. For while globalisation offers great opportunities, at present
its benefits are very unevenly shared, while its costs are unevenly distributed’
(United Nations, 2000:2).
The UN (2000:2) further affirms its belief that
globalisation can ‘be made fully inclusive and equitable’. The Millennium
Development Goals and Targets were formulated on this basis. Most of these
outcome-based goals are to be achieved by 2015, halving or substantially
reducing the incidence of income poverty, hunger, gender disparity, child and
maternal mortality, the spread of HIV/AIDS and incidence of malaria, lack of
access to water, sanitation and primary education. Only Target 11 is to be
achieved by 2020 and does not set out to halve or reduce the slum population –
it merely aims out ‘[b]y 2020, to have achieved a significant improvement in
the lives of at least100 million slum dwellers as proposed in the “Cities
Without Slums” initiative’ (UN, 2000:5).
The target is considered to be achieved, once 100
million slum dwellers have received relief in relation to any one of the slum
criteria – reduced overcrowding, access to water and basic sanitation, improved
building structures, reduced environmental and health risk, improved tenure
security or social inclusion (UN-Habitat, 2005a). Thus where only water and
basic sanitation is provided, without tenure security, the target is considered
achieved.
According UN statistics, 100 million slum dwellers represent
no more than 10% of the world’s population living in slums in 2000, a modest
target indeed. Globally, 32% of the urban population is estimated to be living
in slums, amounting to 924 million people (of these, 20% live in north and
sub-Saharan
In this context, it is alarming to hear that progress
towards achieving even the modest Target 11 of improving the lives of only 10%
of the slum population is unsatisfactory (UN-Habitat, 2005c). The
responsibility for achieving the targets lies with country governments.
UN-Habitat merely provides support through its two Global Campaigns, Good Governance
and Security of Tenure. Given the worrying predictions of slum
proliferation, UN-Habitat has resolved to ‘fight on two fronts’: while
improving the lives of 10% of the existing slum population, also to create
alternatives to slum occupation for the newly urbanising population
(UN-Habitat, 2005c). However, no measures are foreseen to ensure that these
alternatives are not taken up by other, better-off, under-housed classes.
Achieving the modest Target 11would hardly result in
‘Cities Without Slums’, and a closer look at the Cities Without Slums Programme
suggest that its slogan was not intended directly as a target – it promoted
only the modest improvement of 100 million slum dwellers’ lives by 2020 (Bazoglu,
2005), subsequently incorporated into the Millennium Development Goals. As one
of the programmes under UN-Habitat’s Global Campaign for Secure Tenure, the
intention of the ‘Cities Without Slums’ Programme is to strengthen
institutions and partnerships for slum upgrading initiatives at citywide level,
with decision-making that is inclusive of the organisations of slum dwellers
and their supporting NGOs (UN-Habitat, 2005c). Cities Without Slums is
referred to as the most successful and best resourced programme under the
Global Campaign for Secure Tenure (ibid.).
Emmerij et al. (2005) highlight the importance
of ideas within the UN. They are either normative, broad ideas ‘about what the
world should look like’, or causal, which are more operational, and often take
the form of a target (ibid.:214). ‘Cities Without Slums’ would
appear to be a normative idea – cities should not have slums. The causal idea is
framed as improving the lives of 100 million slum dwellers by 2020. A
contradiction is evident between the normative and the causal idea. Given
exponential slum growth, the target which merely addresses 10% of the existing
slum population cannot possibly contribute to achieving cities without slums.
Concerns about this contradiction have been raised,
even within UN-Habitat (see Bazoglu, 2005). UN-Habitat fears that the low slum
target may have the perverse outcome that ‘countries where the leaders are in denial that they have a huge slum problem will be free
of international pressure [to do something about slums]’ (Bazoglu, 2005:8).
This ignores the fact that doing nothing about slums, i.e. tolerating them, can
be less harmful than intervening in a manner that further marginalises the poor.
As discussed above, in
The International Alliance of Inhabitants (IAI), which
campaigns globally for secure tenure and a halt to evictions, presents a more
relevant concern in relation to the modest MDG slum-improvement target. Its
concern is that ‘[d]ue to the effects of neoliberal globalisation on the cities
and the weakness of United Nations, even this minimal target me be fatuous’. Toye
and Toye (2004, cited in Emmerij et al., 2005:217) highlight one
significant weakness of the UN as being its submission to the neoliberal
consensus, ‘orchestrated by the World Bank and the IMF’. The weakness of
UN-Habitat, through its dominance by the World Bank and broadly aligned
western-trained professionals/consultants (often representing Western
interests) is also of concern to developing country governments. The South
African government is actively seeking to strengthen its position in global
agenda-setting through two new regional alliances – the South
Africa-India-Brazil inter-governmental alliance and the African Ministerial
Conference on Housing and Urban Development (AMCHUD), modelled on the Latin
American equivalent. At various events of these new alliances, hosted by the
South African Department of Housing, the South African government has requested
dept relief as well as an increase in Target 11 (Sisulu, 2005).
While the modesty of the slum-improvement target is
one fairly obvious concern, there is another that relates to interpretation. In
defence of UN target-setting, Emmerij et al. (2005) point out that
performance on achieving UN targets over the past 40 years has been
encouraging. However, they name examples only from the health. Having the slum
improvement target (MDG7 Target 11) linked to a normative target of ‘Cities
Without Slums’ suggest treating slums as if they were a disease, to be
eradicated through distribution of some universal remedy.
This simple fix-it approach appeals to country and city
decision-makers. In
UN-Habitat obliges countries to define country-level
targets while preventing the formation of new slums (
It is hard not to be pessimistic about the MDG 7
Target 11. Even if the lives of 100 million slum dwellers were improved by
2020, many of these improvements would filter through the market, or would be
traded, to a slightly better-off class which is also under-housed. While all eyes
are on the 2015 and 2020 targets of the MDGs (with lavish 5-year review events
being staged this year), the global governance system is unable to halt
extensive human rights violations that relate to the repressive creation of a
shack-free towns and cities in Mugabe’s
The bigger concern is that the MDG targets are
contradictory in themselves. UN-Habitat’s two global campaigns, good governance
and secure tenure, have been given a largely neoliberal content (good
governance through privatisation, secure tenure through land titling and
commodification). This supports a form of westernised modernisation that labels
any alternative or informal mechanism of land delivery and governance as
‘slums’, the antithesis of commodified orderly urban development. A false dualism
ignores the large fringes between formal and informal, where households are
filtered out of the formal market. It is deeply flawed, in simplistically
wishing away slums, something that appeals to governments and is translated
into eradication programmes with varying degrees of repression.
Conclusion
Is target-setting the correct global governance
response to marginalisation? I have already suggested that the normative target
of ‘Cities without Slums’ is problematic. While it is largely unrealistic,
given the predicted increase in slums, it is also undesirable in a world in
which income polarisation appears to be an inevitable outcome of the
unstoppable process of globalisation. Preventing the formation of new slums
means forcing poverty into other forms of inadequate housing, not labelled
slums.
A more appropriate outcome may be to ensure that
governance structures and approaches are developed at country and city level to
manage the informal settlements of today and of the future, rather than aiming
at their eradication. A switch needs to occur from ‘Cities Without Slums’
to ‘Cities Caring For Slums’. Accompanying global campaigns would not
focus on government buy-in to the vision of a globally competitive city free of
visible squalor, but to achieve a fundamental shift in mind-set, towards a more
realistic understanding of slums, their interaction with other low income
housing sub-markets, and towards the development of responses that enable new
informal settlements to form as a means of relieving the stress experienced by
the under-housed population.
Some would argue that exactly this was the intention
of the Cities Without Slums initiative, and one should therefore seek to
improve the effectiveness of this campaign rather than reformulate it. However,
I would argue that a fundamental reformulation of the campaign at UN-level is
called for. Renaming of the campaign along the lines of ‘Cities Caring For
Slums’ will send an important signal that slum eradication is a mistaken
course. However, UN-Habitat campaigns have a life of their own. Attached to them
are the interests of many highly paid and powerful consultants and UN-Habitat
staff, who will be unwilling to admit to failure.
The bigger concern however remains whether global
governance, with its current commitment to globalisation of capital, is able to
reverse the marginalising processes of globalisation.
Reference
Ambert, C. (forthcoming). An HIV and AIDS lens for
informal settlement policy and practice in
Arputhan, J. (2005) Make women in slums the millennium
goal keepers. Habitat Debate, September, page 18.
Bazoglu, N. (2005) The need for a more ambitious
target. Habitat Debate, September, page 8.
Department of Housing (2004) “Breaking New Ground” – A
Comprehensive Plan for the Development of Sustainable Human Settlements. As
approved by Cabinet and presented to MINMEC on
Emmerij, L., Jolly, R. and Weiss, T. (2005) Economic
and social thinking at the UN in historical perspective. Development and
Change, 36(2), 211-235.
Keyder, C. (2005). Globalisation and
social exclusion in
Huchzermeyer, M. (2003) Housing rights in
IAI (2005) World “zero eviction” days: for the right
to decent, secure housing from
Kimunye (2005) Address of the Kenyan Minister of Land
and Housing at the opening of the International Housing Research Seminar,
organised by the Department of Housing.
Morena, E. (2005) How far is the world from the slum target?
Habitat Debate, September, page 4,5.
Omenya, A. and Huchzermeyer, M.
(forthcoming) Slum Upgrading in the complex context of political change: the
case of
Palitza, K. (2005) Rights:
Perlman, J. (1976) The Myth of Marginality: Yrban
Politics in Rio de Janeiro.
Perlman, J. (2005) The Myth of Marginality
Revisited: The Case of a Favela in Rio de Janeiro, 1969-2003. World Bank,
Washington. INTERNET: www.worldbank.org/urban.urscd/papers/perlman.pdf
SAFM (2005) Radio interview with Gauteng Province MEC
for Housing, Nomvula Mokonyane, Midday Live with Carolyn Demster, 15 July.
Shatkin, G. (2004) Planning to forget: Informal
settlements as ‘forgotten places’ in globalising Metro Manila. Urban Studies,
41(12), 2469-2484.
Sisulu, L. (2005) Speech by Ln Sisulu Minister of
Housing at the Opening of the International Housing Research Seminar, organised
by the Department of Housing.
Tabbal, F. (2005) Are countries working effectively on
the Millennium Targets? Habitat Debate, September, page 6.
United Nations (2000) United Nations Millennium
Declaration. Resolution adopted by the General Assembly, 18 September.
United Nations (2005) In Larger Freedom: Towards
Development, Security and Human Rights for All. Report for the Secretary
General of the United Nations for decision by Heads of State and Government in
September 2005.
UN-Habitat (2005a) Addressing the challenge of slums,
land, shelter delivery and the provision of and access to basic services for
all: Overview. Background paper prepared by the UN-Habitat Regional Office for
UN-Habitat (2005b) Report of the fact-finding mission
to
UN-Habitat (2005c) Slum challenge and shelter
delivery: meeting the Millennium Development Goals. Background paper prepared
by the UN-Habitat Regional Office for