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Lecture 9: Informal Urbanism – Slums Poverty and urban violence in the…
Lecture 9: Informal Urbanism – Slums Poverty and urban violence in the developing wold
Definitions:
Informal economy/informal sector
Waged jobs with no formal contract or labour rights
Self employed people/groups who operate either outside the law (illegal) or in the gaps in the law (extra-legal)
Little or no payment of taxes
Informal settlements/ informal housing
– commonly slums
Residential areas built with little or no urban planning (by the state)
Housing built in contravention of laws and regulations
Often interlinked
Also criticised as definitions not quite clear but still commonly used
Conclusion
Planning needs to happen with rather than just for informal workers and slum-dwellers: you cannot wish informality away
Attention to the specifics of urban poverty – including vulnerability to violence – must factor into planning
Affordable public transport is key to addressing inequality and social exclusion (as well as providing jobs?)
Vulnerability among urban workers and slum-dwellers will persist without attention to structural drivers of informality
Urban job creation and moving beyond dependence on agriculture/ primary commodities will be key for many countries
Cultivating a sense of urban citizenship that includes the informal is important for political stability and social cohesion
Urban Informality
Why does it matter?
Due to none legal status within city - usually lack access to legal rights (including property rights) and many basic services
Unplanned settlements often lack basic infrastructure (e.g. roads, water, drains)
poor construction
Difficult to plan when informal development takes up large parts of a city
difficult to demolish, issues of displacement
Lack of taxation means the state lacks resources to provide services and benefits
People living and working informally often vulnerable to violence, eviction, disease and other dangers
In many countries the majority of city-dwellers live in these conditions - global issue
Informality: pre-history
During colonial times, ‘native’ societies were viewed through a lens of dualism:
Distinction between ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ economic activities/housing
The ‘traditional’ associated with the rural, but also with ‘urban peasants’ (bringing village life to cities); seen as stagnant and unproductive
A planned modern sector and an unplanned informal traditional area
The urban unemployed in the ‘Third World’ often seen by Marxists as:
A ‘reserve army’ of labour
Collection of poor people desperate to make money therefore can be used by the state and discarded anytime
The failure to provide waged jobs to city-dwellers was seen as a failure of capitalism in these societies
Keith Hart
coined term ‘informal sector’ after studying work outside of public/private waged jobs in Ghana
Rejected the Marxist idea of the urban ‘masses’ as ‘labour reserve’
Presented the activities of urban poor as economically dynamic: working in the ‘informal sector’ was their ‘salvation’
people being entrepreneurial through informal sector. People surviving by creating job for themselves
Such workers provide ‘many of the essential services on which life in the city is dependent’
Vendors etc
The International Labour Organisation
(ILO) adopted the term in 1972, and defined it in relation to:
– Ease of entry
– Small scale of operation
– Family ownership
– Unregulated markets
Informality as salvation
After Hart and ILO report, informal sector seen as a ‘solution’ to unemployment
De Soto criticised the bureaucratic obstacles that informal workers had to face
Over-regulation was preventing informal workers’ potential
Informal enterprises reflect entrepreneurial spirit of the urban poor, which needs to be ‘unleashed’ through deregulation
Celebration of informality went well with the neoliberalism and free-market ideas:
Emphasis on ‘rolling back the state’ and liberating market forces
Helped legitimise the stopping of ISI (Import substitution)
Informal sector - very dynamic and vibrant
Marxist Interpretation
Many criticised this positive attitude to informal labour
Should we really celebrate the informal economy?
People who have been abandoned by the state and living in poor conditions
Ignores exploitative link between formal and informal sector
Part of capitalist mode of exploitation (Moser)
‘Informalisation’ a deliberate strategy by formal sector to protect itself (cheap labour) (Meagher)
People also criticised idea of just one informal ‘sector’
All sectors of the economy contain elements of informality
Distinction between formal & informal is ‘utterly fuzzy’ (Peattie)
Gave rise to new alternative terms
E.g. ‘Second economy’; ‘real economy’; ‘shadow economy’; ‘grey economy’; ‘parallel economy’
Informal Housing
Informal response to housing deficit
Colonial investment confined to planned ‘white towns’, with little attention to ‘native’ areas
After Independence, city populations grew without control over planning and little urban public housing
This period coincided with the ‘urban bias’ thesis (countryside is economically poor because it is politically powerless) and failed efforts to address this by keeping people in rural areas (Fox)
People building in areas where land is available and not planned or regulated by state
No one building houses for poor as investment only given to cities
Public housing rarely exceeds 10% of total housing stock in low/middle-income countries
Rise of ‘self-help’ in place of new social housing
Often supported by ‘sites and services’ and ‘slum upgrading’ schemes in 1970s/80s
informal housing supported by state through offering basic services in area and cheap land
The only option most people had was to build or rent informally
Most low income areas remained (or became) slums
Sri Lanka as an exception
Sri Lanka – One Million Houses programme 1980s
One of the largest efforts to provide low-income communities in both rural & urban areas with improved infrastructure & shelter
Gave people basic blocks allowing them to develop it once financially able to
Based on flexible system of loans and community participation
State-driven programmes (rare but was successful)
Causes and persistence of slums
-
Sean Fox
argues many cities in power interested in keeping slums
because slum landlords make profit from slums, capital to be made
too much involvement can lose votes for political party, seen as interfering with people's lives
Syagga et al found that slums are big business for political elites:
41% of Kibera’s (slum in Nairobi) landlords were government officials
Regression of taxation
– lack of public investment for housing
No tax being paid as poor can’t afford to pay and rich refuse to pay, leaving a lack of public tax funds
‘Poaching’ – houses built for poor people, but rich people end up buying to create profit
Slums may be due to failures of post-colonial states promising stuff to poor and fail on doing so
Exacerbated by withdrawal of the state from public provision of services
Neoliberalism ideas
Meant urban poverty rose by 50% in Latin America
Building housing for the poorest rarely profitable
Work in the informal economy
Statistics
Women are more likely than men to be working in the informal economy
10-20% more likely in many African cities
(Herrera et al)
On average, the ‘informal sector’ comprises 41% of GDP in African countries
(International Labour Organisation)
Informal sector jobs
Street trade
Waste-pickers
Home-based work
Informal manufacturing
Informal service provision
Sex work
Informal transport
Informal construction
Informality in Global North
Informal economy accounts for around 26% of GDP in Italy and 12% in UK and 8.5% in USA
Link between informal work and large-scale migration from EU countries
engage in informal work due to difficult legal status
De-industrialisation has contributed to increased informality in UK
Increased concern about informal housing in the global North
Eg. Renting out garages in UK
Hong Kongs informal rooftop communities
World of informality buried in modern, rich cities
Hong Kong informal housing on roofs of buildings (out of public eye)
Shack-like dwellings
Unplanned settlements despite being in rich city
Contrast between rich urban city and informal settlements
Urban Poverty and Vulnerability
Why focus on urban poverty?
Most of the developing world’s poor still live in rural areas; BUT
Poverty is very clearly becoming more urban over time (Ravallion et al)
Data not reliable (old and not consistently collected) but shows poverty is becoming more urban and cities becoming poorer
The poor are urbanising faster than population as a whole
Rural poor are declining
Rural vs Urban poverty
• Urban poverty exists because cities attract poor people in search of a better life (Glaeser)
Cities have more opportunities
Judgements about rural vs urban poverty – how do you compare between rural/urban poverty
Is it better to be poorer in the city or poor in rural?
Not always about jobs/poverty, urbanisation may be due to personal/political reason
What does urban poverty look like?
$1 a day used to compare poverty in rural/urban areas
doesn't consider the inflated prices that comes with living in cities
a dollar may go far in rural but not in cities but both can still be considered poor
Key characteristics of urban poverty and vulnerability
Reliance on a monetised economy
Reliance on employment in the informal economy
Expensive and inadequate housing
Insecurity of tenure\ land can be repossessed
Lack of access to basic services and unaffordable services
Vulnerability to diseases and accidents
Environmental hazards
Exposure to violence and crime
Social fragmentation
Increasing experience of warfare and terrorist attacks
Intra-city inequalities
Location affects your mortality
City-wide indicators obscure urban deprivation due to high levels of wealth cheek by jowl with poverty
Some cities, GDP seems good but inequalities are so extreme they balance each other out. Extremely wealthy and the extremely poor
Urban gini coefficients (measure of inequality, 0-1,0 being equal, 1 being very unequal)
most extreme being 0.75 in Johannesburg
In Kibera slum people die on average a whole decade earlier than in non-slum areas of Nairobi
Life expectancy in deprived areas of Sheffield (Central and East) is 18 years lower than in wealthy areas (West)
Urban access to water and sanitation
Differences in costs of access to water
poor people dont have access to public tap water so buy of private vendors which is much more expensive
statistics from World Health Organisation about improved water/sanitation can be manipluated
EG: 15% of African urban-dwellers lack improved water provision
but around 40% lack adequate and safe water provision
Moser and asset portfolios
To improve people's prospects, need to look at what the poor already have and understand households ‘asset portfolios’ and strategies (Moser)
5 aspects
Labour (women & children joining labour force)
Human capital (affects ability to mobilise labour, family members who are possibly educated?)
Productive assets (may have some bit of lend they can capitalise on and rent out)
Household relations (restructuring family members to increase income, someone looks after relative whilst other goes to work)
Social capital (neighbours who help each other, dynamic & impermanent; but eroded by violence)
The intangibility (not physical form) of many assets and vulnerabilities has implications for poverty-reduction programmes in cities
Urban Violence
The experience and threat of violence constantly cited by urban poor
Homicides cause more deaths than civil wars globally (Fox)
Impacts of urban violence on poverty and development are multifarious (Moser). E.g:
Drain on savings (costs of private security)
Reduced livelihood security and capabilities to earn income
Human capital impacts and gender inequality
Earnings lost through fear, injury and extortion
Erosion of social capital
Reduced investment of homes as it will probably be damaged or stolen
Are cities inherently violent?
The urban paradox:
the very urbanism that makes cities dynamic and resilient (proximity, size, diversity) can also make them violent (people competing for space, conflicting ideas etc)
Yet there is nothing inevitable about urban violence
What then causes high levels of urban violence?
Connection to poverty, unstable political institutions and socioeconomic inequality
Recent research also highlights the importance of access to space/land and gender-based insecurity
Gender-based violence is rife in some contexts
A study of Karachi (Pakistan) found that 76% of women reported physical abuse, 12% sexual abuse and 100% verbal abuse
Informality and urban planning practice
Planning
with
informality
Finding a way which planning can work with informality, supporting survival efforts of the urban poor rather than hindering them (Watson)
What to do about ‘gray space’ (Yiftachel):
People living/working informally are caught between
legality/approval/safety
and
eviction/destruction/death
Planning creates informality
planning inscribed informality by designating some activities as authorised and others as unauthorised (Roy)
coming in and stating what is formal/what is informal
planners responsibility to make people vulnerable by deciding whats informal/formal
How can planning support informal homes and livelihood
The role of transport planning in providing access to work for marginlised populations
Do zoning regulations take into account that many people use the house as a place of work as well as home/shelter? Can we make the regulations flexible?
Are entirely new planning laws needed to replace old colonial ones?
Do urban plans enable to poor to access land for small-scale agriculture within the city?
How much space is there in transport nodes for trading etc?
Can violence and crime be tackled through urban design?
Operation Murambatsvina (negative example)
Huge slum clearance programmed where 700,000 people lost their home, livelihood or both
Affected 1/5 Zimbabweans
Political reasons for clearance since urban population mostly voted for the opposition
Used colonial British planning laws to enable clearance
Warwick Junction, Durban (positive example)
Innovative approach to planning by the municipal government to support informality in a major transport node
The junction attracted thousands of traders daily by the mid-1990s but was a neglected & dangerous ‘cesspit’; City Council launched Project in 1996
abandoned infrastructure where people lived and worked here
Government helped informal settlement by improving and regenerating it
Reconnected redundant freeway to pedestrian bridge & provided infrastructure & shelter
one of the first examples in South Africa celebrating informality