IMPLICATION OF THE FORMAL SETTLEMENT IN DEVELOPING CITIES
Abstract
The paper studies Informal settlements in Abuja, from the analytical framework of poverty and homelessness. The environmental, socio-economic and cultural feature associated with population growth, is, highlighted to underscore the severity of issues.
According to the UN, at least one third of the global urban population suffers from inadequate living conditions. Lack of access to basic services (drinking water and/or sanitation, not to mention energy, waste recollection, and transportation), low structural quality of shelters, overcrowding, dangerous locations, and insecure tenure are the main characteristics normally included in the definitions of so-called informal settlements . Recognized as a global phenomenon, no country can claim to be free of informal settlements, although the numbers of people suffering can vary largely depending on the region: these problems now affect up to 60 percent of the worlds population—or even more—in some Sub-Saharan African and Southeast Asian cities, and the number of people affected in these locations is expected to double over the next two decades. High percentages are also seen in several Arab countries, and at least 25 percent of urbanites in Latin America live in informal settlements. Precarious housing and living conditions and growing homelessness can also be found in Europe, North America, Australia, and New Zealand, affecting, on average, one in 10 people.
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.1 BACKGROUNDS OF STUDY
Deteriorating urban environmental conditions and their life-long implications on quality of life have become significant aspects of debates and discussions. Towns and cities in developing countries like Nigeria are growing rapidly (World Bank, 2005). In the urban areas, the pace and scale of the growth have outstripped the capacity to maintain acceptable standards of public health, physical infrastructural development, environmental safety and sustainable economic growth, therefore reducing the housing quality and quality of life in general. Informal settlement (also referred to as a shanty town or squatter settlement) has been defined in various ways depending on the planning and legal framework of a country where it exists. For the purposes of this discussion, informal settlements are defined as residential buildings built on“planned” and “unplanned” areas which do not have formal planning approval. They are characterized mostly by the low quality houses and the lack of, or inadequate infrastructure and social services. Informal Settlement (IS) has been perceived both as a problem and solution to housing needs in speedily growing cities of many developing countries. (Srivinas 2005, Todaro 1994).In academic and government documents, “informal settlements” is the label typically applied to these areas. That those communities are not incompliance with building norms and property and urban planning regulations is often given as the main reason for qualifying them a“informal”. Also defined as “irregular”, they can easily be called “illegal”, and their inhabitants subsequently criminalized, displaced, and persecuted. From India to South Africa to Ecuador, legal and administrative changes have been made in recent years to give special/ad hoc inspection and demolition powers to local, provincial, and national governments to deal with these neighborhoods and, in theory, to prevent them from growing (in many cases, environmental laws and regulations or urban projects are used as excuses for destroying these settlements). As was recently recognized , the UN’s Millennium Development Goal 7-Target 11 commitment to reducing the population living in slums by 2020 was tragically translated in several countries as the pressure to destroy people´s self-built housing and even to incarcerate the leaders of social movements (for a critical analysis of the “cities without slums” initiative and why language matters, see Gilbert, 2007). In Zimbabwe alone, the UN reports that as many as 700,000 people were affected by terrifying slum “clearance” operations in 2005, which took the revealing name of “ Remove the filth”.Following a tradition most probably started before the mid-19th century in some English cities undergoing industrialization processes and migration from the countryside, our contemporary media still often depict the inhabitants of informal settlements as the troublemakers, the thieves, the lazy. It is hard to find positive stories about their daily struggles for better life conditions, rights, and dignity.It is clear that we urgently need a better approach to naming and framing such areas broadly called “informal settlements”—one that is respectful and sensitive to the people who live there and that could better promote the transformations that our cities and our societies need.
Likewise, the classification of all such areas as “informal settlements” does not indicate the relevance of the places in their cities that they occupy or the spatial segregation they usually suffer from; the lack of access to affordable and public transportation, places of employment, schools, hospitals, and other basic facilities; the lack or limited access to financial resources such as credits, subsidies, etc.; or the lack of technical assistance and/or adequate materials to consolidate housing and neighborhoods buildings and infrastructure, just to mention a few. The difficulties of defining a phenomenon so varied and dynamic as “informal settlements” are often invoked to justify the continuing use of the catchall term and the predominant focus on what they do not have (Connolly, 2007). But academics in several regions have been discussing the formal/informal false dichotomy as a kind of “discursive differentiation” that shapes and enacts knowledge and power relations on the territories. Many of them argue that binary classifications are clearly insufficient to reflect the complexity of settlement processes that we face in reality; such classifications simultaneously hide authorities’ responsibilities in producing informality (Roy, 2009; Yiftachel, 2009; Wigle, 2013).Instead of “informal settlements”, we prefer to understand and describe them as practices and social struggles that not only build houses and neighborhoods strictly on a physical level; at the same time, and perhaps even more importantly, they also build active and responsible citizenships against marginalization and social and urban segregation, advancing direct democratic exercise and improving individual and community livelihoods, participants’ self-esteem, and social coexistence (Ortiz and Zárate, 2004). In fewer words: the city produced by the people.
IMPLICATION OF THE FORMAL SETTLEMENT IN DEVELOPING CITIES
