NEWS: Dilemma: how to upgrade slums without chasing the poor

The UN Millennium Development Goals, established with specific targets to improve living conditions for the world’s poorest, will expire next year.

They are to be replaced with a set of Sustainable Development Goals, with one goal specifically for cities.

The urban goal is proposed to include this target, among others: “By 2030, ensure access for all to adequate, safe and affordable housing and basic services, and upgrade slums.”

According to UN-HABITAT, 62 percent of the urban sub-Saharan population live in slums.

If I combine a couple of dictionary definitions of a slum, I get something like “an area of squalor and overcrowding, inhabited by very poor people.” And squalor refers to something that is “wretched; filthy; mean or poor in appearance.”

In South Africa we tend to think of slums as townships where dwellings are built informally and illegally, and where drinking water and sanitation are inadequate or absent. But District Six was a slum by some measures, and there are similar slums in developed and developing countries around the world, where buildings and infrastructure are decaying through neglect. Parts of Johannesburg’s CBD, or Cape Town’s Woodstock, could be considered slums.

The question raised by the Development Goals is how exactly we might upgrade them, and still have them affordable. An August 11 article in the Guardian hints at how Hanoi – where 90 percent of all buildings were built without official permission – are “legalising unplanned structures if they meet minimum standards”.

They are creating the conditions that will allow homeowners to do the building and upgrading themselves: the minimum standards are less onerous than usual. They can then receive sanitation and water services. I’m not sure it’s eliminating slums, though.

Informal settlements are built on land the residents don’t own, and here in South Africa most shack dwellers invest only the bare minimum in their illegal plots. There is no official recognition that these places are permanent. And, unlike in cities like Hanoi, Bogota and Nairobi, there is no cooperation in building bigger informal structures.

In many cities, people create structures shared by several families, despite lack of a legal framework for doing so. What is different here? One thing is that shack dwellers themselves are holding out for more robust houses being given to them as they move up the housing lists.

People’s motivations are complicated, as demonstrated just last week when shacks were erected on open land owned by the city in Enkanini in Khayelitsha, by people who could no longer afford the rent as backyard dwellers.

It was reported that they chose one particular piece of land because “bad things happen there” and so they were (by their logic) providing a better use for the land.

If they can’t afford their backyard shacks, what is the affordable alternative? Replacing shacks with bricks and mortar structures won’t do it.

Though our memories may have romanticised decaying areas like District Six, the “slum” label certainly did not justify razing the place. District Six provided many things that other places did not, like community, proximity to opportunities and a sense of identity that came from its history. It was a “place” with meaning and value for its residents.

If history had taken a completely different turn, if District Six had been allowed to follow the usual course of economic cycles of decay and regeneration, it may have seen the same eventual result of people being displaced to the Cape Flats as wealthier people moved in and gentrified the place.

So we can blame the social engineering of apartheid for what happened in District Six and other slums that were deliberately cleared, but that leaves us with the vexing question of how to improve conditions without chasing away the poor.

Our inability to answer that question is the reason why our experiments in slum replacement over the past 20 years have failed dismally to improve living conditions for the poorest residents.

The best we can say is that government-subsidised houses have established new serviced land to accommodate some of the growth in the urban population.

But most of these new areas would still fit the definition of a slum. They become overcrowded in the ways they are used, the services become insufficient for the numbers of occupants and the added backyard dwellings, and they experience high levels of unemployment, crime and other social ills. So what, really, is a slum upgrade that benefits the poor?

Read more at the Cape Times- August 25, 2014


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