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DEVELOPING COUNTRIES
By-Patrick Wakely
Submitted By-
Shib Shankar(2019MURP003)
Aparna M.R ( 2019MEP019)
Meha Nair (2019MTPLM001)
URBAN PUBLIC HOUSING STRATEGIES IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES
By-Patrick Wakely
Summary
After 20th century there was a need to intervene the production maintenance and management
of urban housing earlier it was market based activities. This paper discuss about the range of
policy alternatives employed by state agencies and also discusses the public sector entry to
the urban housing market through the direct construction of public housing and transferring it
to low income group and also making distinction between public housing and social housing
strategies.
If we observe the housing strategy timeline discussed in the paper we will understand some
key aspects which is as follows.
1950s
After 1950s
Design ,development, testing and institutionalising of alternative strategies for public sector
engagement , maintenance and management of urban housing , management of
environmental infrastructure came into existence.
Before the mid-20th century (1950s) government housing production was confined to the
provision of accommodation for Military and some Public Sector Civic Employees.
Government’s intervention in the housing was to control private sector initiative in the
interests of public health, safety and amenity.
In several countries attempts were made to increase the supply of affordable housing to lower
income groups and limit the exploitation of private sector landlords by imposing rent controls
on urban property. As a consequence of increasing urban homelessness and growth of slums
governments throughout the world started to intervene more directly in the urban housing by
establishing housing authorities, departments & ministries or extending the mandates of
ministries of works.
There are two basic approaches for Informal development of vacant land those are –
It mainly occurs on the peri-urban fringes of cities and varies with the topographical,
economic and political characteristics of different societies. Common occurrence is the
unauthorised subdivision and sale of peri-urban agricultural land by its owners, as higher
financial returns can be made by selling small plots for development, which was officially
considered illegal for the following reasons.
(ii) Development for housing is against the official master plan land use zoning.
(iii) Plot sizes and building construction are not in accordance with planning and building
regulations.
Common in cities of the Middle East and North Africa, particularly at times of
extensive rural-urban migration and periods of drought.
(i) The mass invasion on large parcels of urban land by organised groups of households under
common leadership sometimes supported by formal political organisations.
(ii) The gradual take-over of land, plot-by-plot by individual households in some cities
gradually building up sizable squatter settlements.
These processes may take place on peri-urban vacant land or on inner-city empty plots or on
geologically unstable undeveloped land. An important characteristic of both these informal
development processes is the incremental nature of house building. The incremental
housing process has financial benefits that enable affordable housing for low-income
households.
SWOT Analysis of costs and benefits of informal urban housing processes
According to 1951 and 1961 census informal settlements had grown in and around towns and
cities throughout the developing world. Construction of ‘conventional’ public housing came
into existence. Many Latin American countries also launched their first public housing
policies and set up public housing authorities in the same period.
The Apparent inability of public housing agencies to meet targets for the construction of
subsidised ‘conventional‘public housing and to maintain them in use was to search for ways
to reduce construction costs and to off-load responsibility for the maintenance and
management of public housing and latterly to link access to housing more directly with wider
social policies for urban poverty reduction and the alleviation of its social impact.
A paper by John F.C. Turner and Rolf Goetze was delivered to a conference on Development
Policies and Planning in Relation to Urbanisation at the University of Pittsburgh in 1966 and
published by the United Nations in 1967 and expanded upon later in Turner’s book ‘Housing
by People’ ( Turner 1976).The government started testing Non Conventional practices to
solve the housing issues.
In this paper two non-conventional methods and their outcomes are discussed.
Organised (aided) self-help and Enabling supports - sites & services and informal
settlement (‘slum’) upgrading
By the late 1990s, sites and services projects had been declared “unsuccessful” and were
virtually abandoned by governments and international aid agencies, alike. To a large extent
this was due to their being ‘evaluated’ too soon.
Project-level problems compounded a more universal misunderstanding that in part led to the
discrediting and eventual abandonment of participatory ‘non-conventional’ approaches to
support incremental ‘self-help’ housing production in many cities.
• Last decade of 20th century saw the change from non- conventional participatory
approaches to the conventional housing with the re-emergence of government
sponsored / built public housing for urban low income groups.
• Mexico and Brazil -the response to market demand for freehold ownership of
individual houses, albeit on small plots of land, as opposed to apartments in larger
blocks and at higher residential densities, has been the construction by private sector
developers of extensive low-density housing estates on the peri-urban fringes of many
towns and cities and in some cases several kilometres from the urban area
• Where Next ?
• The next generation of urban housing policies, and strategies for their
implementation, must embrace a range of different programme and project
approaches - ‘non-conventional’ as well as ‘conventional’.