Site-and-Service Programmes

In addition to the above constraints which were identified during evaluation missions, a number of landmark trends came to light during the mid-1970s to mid-1980s. Perhaps the most critical was the recognition that the economic ‘trickle down’ effect was not turning around the lives of the majority even in prosperous countries such as the US and UK or in some fairly rich Latin American countries like Argentina and Brazil.

Development policies thereafter began to focus on growth with equity and provision of basic needs such as food, housing, healthcare, and adequate and accessible infrastructure. Major protagonists of this approach include the International Labour Organization (ILO), the World Bank and United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). Meanwhile, the Soviet Bloc countries were insulated from these debates and so continued to concentrate their efforts on social housing.

The first UN conference on the environment convened in Stockholm in 1972 focusing on two key dimensions: the green fields or natural resource base and the brown fields or the build up environment, known as the human habitat. The Stockholm Conference realized that efforts to save the environment would also have to focus on the visibly growing challenge of urban poverty and squalor. While the developed countries at that conference focused on international support measures to save the global natural environment, poor nations, led by Indira Gandhi, then Prime Minister of India, insisted that ‘poverty was the biggest polluter’. Supported by other progressive governments, mainly the Nordic countries and Canada, this view emphasized the need to promote international support to assist local governments and municipalities make requisite investments in housing and urban infrastructure.

Under the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the United Nations Habitat and Human Settlements Foundation was established in 1974 by the UN General Assembly. It was to serve as an international financial institution with authority to lend to member states to mobilize resources for their shelter and infrastructure programmes. In 1977, it was merged with the Department of Housing, Building and Planning of the Department of Social and Economic Affairs (DESA) to form the United Nations Centre for Human Settlements (UNCHS) following the first Vancouver Conference in 1976. The Vancouver Declaration and Plan of Action – the first Habitat Conference – was a watershed event during this phase. It was during this conference that the incidence of unplanned rapid urbanization and how it was negatively affecting economic development as well as quality of human wellbeing came under global focus.

At this time, the recursive relationship between housing and poverty on the one hand, and the environment and economic development on the other, was well articulated. In addition to suggesting that more pragmatic policy instruments be devised, the Vancouver Declaration also emphasized equity in the housing sector. Attention therefore shifted from public-sector support to self-help ownership on a project-by-project basis. The key policy instruments employed in order to realize the objective included recognition of the informal sector; slum upgrading, site-and-service programmes (SSPs) and provision of housing subsidies.

Theoretically, these instruments, especially SSPs, were thought to have a cost advantage over public housing since only serviced land and possibly a miniscule proportion of the cost of the building would be provided. Hence, more beneficiaries would be recorded. Another potential advantage of these programmes is that potential owners would use their time and labour in the form of aided self-help to design and construct their houses according to the dictates of available funds, desire, and capacity to mobilize additional labour or finance.

SSPs were also considered appropriate because they approximate the traditional mode of incremental construction which could take as much as one or more years. This temporal flexibility enabled beneficiaries to adjust the construction schedule to suit their income stream. The first experiments in Sub- Saharan Africa included the World Bank-assisted SSP in Owerri, Nigeria, which was initiated in the late 1970s.

Although SSPs provided opportunities for the middle class and a few poor people to gain freehold access or long-term leasehold landed property, many were unable to mobilize the requisite funding for actual development or to complete construction work. Some of the officially allocated plots of land ended on the real estate market. For an SSP to continue on a long-term basis, national governments have to acquire or lease private land or commit it on a regular basis to the programme. In addition, an SSP requires technical experts such as urban planners, architects and engineers to provide guidance to beneficiaries. Such experts were not readily available in many developing countries in particular.

The World Bank facilitated both SSPs and slum upgrading wherever it was invited. In Asia, for example, under its Urban Settlements Programme, the Bank funded the Kampung Improvement in Jakarta and selected urban settlements in Indonesia, the Bustee Improvement Programme in Calcutta, India, and Iponri-Olaleye, in Lagos, Nigeria. Again, the Government of India in the 1980s focused on slum upgrading and SSPs, but the cumulative impact of both schemes, which symbolized a shift in approach and strategy, was marginal compared to demand, thus necessitating a further shift in strategy.

The Enabling Approach and Urban Management

In response to the Vancouver Declaration and Action Plan, another issue was opened in the search for equitable, effective and efficient housing policies and strategies from the late 1980s to the early 1990s, when there was more or less a wholesale adoption of the enabling strategy by all countries. Further evidence emerged on the need for new instruments from ex-ante impact assessments of urban slum and squatter upgrading programmes and SSPs conducted in a number of countries in the 1970s.

These studies indicated limited spatial impact, despite growing challenges in the housing and environmental sectors. The total output of such project-based programmes was estimated to be between 1972 and 1981 only 10 per cent of the actual requirements. Some projects were also classified as outright failures. The market enabling strategy revolves around the principles of affordability, cost recovery and replicability. Under this strategy, emphasis shifted from direct state housing delivery towards facilitation of private-sector participation in the delivery of housing.

This shift was partly in response to gradually changing international responses to the housing challenge on the one hand, and the increasing economic liberalization, premised on the application of market dynamics and efficiency in various sectors of national economies, on the other. The enabling strategy emphasized the productive relevance of human settlements to economic development, and the coupling of the roles of government, markets, and the informal-sector groups and organizations. The new strategy was meant to increase the practical efficiency of private markets towards producing housing for the majority of the population.

The imperative of meeting the challenge of proper management of rapidly growing cities to achieve greater efficiency through leverage encouraged the international community to simultaneously place emphasis on urban management. Under this approach, national government guides and creates strategic opportunities for housing construction and environmental improvement, rather than prescribing what is to be done, and avoids direct involvement in housing supply. Governments were also expected to develop policies to guide the growth of their cities and concentrate on reforming and managing the legal, regulatory and financial policy framework.

The adoption by the UN General Assembly in 1988 of the Global Strategy for Shelter (GSS) up to 2000 gave a boost to the enabling approach. The overarching objective of the GSS is the mobilization of ‘the full potential and resources of all the actors in the shelter production and improvement process so that the people concerned will be given the opportunity to improve their housing conditions according to the needs and priorities that they themselves will define’.

The GSS did not aim to discard earlier approaches; rather its main objective was to reduce inefficiency and empower prospective home-owners by opening up new opportunities for them. It was also meant to reduce publicsector financial burden and achieve improved environmental conditions through the involvement of all stakeholders. The importance of the enabling approach, especially in the process of slum upgrading, was reaffirmed by the global community in the 1990s, as contained in the 1996 Habitat Agenda. In addition, within the framework of the enabling approach, public-private partnership, community participation, land assembly, and housing finance and capacity building constituted the key policy instruments employed.

In the enabling approach phase, most developing countries were adversely affected by the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) introduced as a condition for development assistance and economic rejuvenation. This neo-liberal economic approach required liberalization of trade and currency devaluation in addition to reduced public-sector expenditure on public infrastructure and services, including housing.

The impact of the SAP on the housing sector is mixed. While the sector benefited in a few Latin American countries such as Chile and Mexico, countries such as Nigeria, Kenya and Tanzania experienced growth in informal settlement expansion. The general adverse effect of the SAP on housing was noted in the Habitat Agenda and a call was made for the programme to be more sensitive to the needs of the poor and other vulnerable groups.

Again in this phase, the adoption and implementation of the GSS in diverse countries brought to the fore key factors constraining housing production. Salient among them were inappropriate physical planning laws and building standards, poor planning administration, lack of land tenure, speculative land markets, poorly developed housing finance systems, and retrogressive institutional frameworks in dynamic and rapidly growing urban settlements.