Stokes (1962) introduced a clear distinction of what he regarded as successful and unsuccessful poor communities, referring to them as slums of hope and of slums of despair, respectively. Residents, characteristic of slums of despair, have little expectation of material advancement and make few improvements to their homes. Contrastingly, self-help movements in slums of hope promote both investment in infrastructure and improvements to individual dwellings. The work of Stokes was influential to the changing perspective of third world governments.
The principal reason behind the shelter crisis is that large sectors of population cannot afford adequate housing. Solving this problem, thus solving the crisis, involves either increasing the incomes of those in need or reducing the cost of housing. A reduction in the cost of housing is the most viable solution, which can be achieved by; reducing the labour cost element; incremental completion; or avoiding speculation and development gains by third parties.
One of the most obvious solutions to the shelter crisis in developing world cities is to prevent urban growth primarily due to rapid rural to urban migration and a high rate of natural increase. The Brazilian government, for example, is planning improvements in the rural areas and colonization schemes in Amazonas as ways to relieve urban overcrowding. Investment in rural areas may reduce urbanisation, however as long as urban areas offer economies of scale and agglomeration economies, large cities will continue to grow attracting migrants from rural and smaller urban areas. Attempts could be made to reduce birth rate thus reducing population growth rate; increasing the availability of contraception; raising the awareness of family planning; improving women’s rights; restricting early marriages and increasing the education period for children. Such solutions, although viable, would not instantaneously effect or solve the crisis. In my opinion, increased housing construction in cities facing crisis is necessary to accommodate population growth, rather than attempting to reduce population and urbanisation to correspond to present housing stocks.
The construction of housing should be the focal point for resolving the shelter crisis. Government initiatives and the new political need for governments to be seen to intervene in the housing market in support of the lowest income groups, have lead to the formation of public housing programmes. Tenement blocks of minimal-sized apartments or individual single storey dwellings of relatively high standard permanent construction with individual utility connections typify such programmes. Commonly located on the urban periphery where land is available and cheap, such programmes are therefore far from centres of employment and social amenities and with only tenuous and costly transport links. Government architects and engineers design them whose aim is to produce the lowest cost structures that could meet both the standards set by the by-laws and the professionals' view of "how the urban poor should live". There is rarely any attempt to study the particular needs of the intended users, let alone consult them. The beneficiaries, who are officially qualified by having incomes below an established ceiling or who have been displaced by a slum clearance programme, tend to have no part in the decision making that determines the location, design, standard of construction or management of their housing. Therefore, there is little chance that public housing construction can respond to the individual needs, demands or aspirations of any of its occupants, and no chance that it could respond to those of all of them. Despite the subsidies that are often built into the housing, many occupants cannot afford the rent, even though the housing was supposedly designed for them. A major consequence of this is that many housing units are sold or transferred by their intended beneficiaries to wealthier households. The appropriateness of public housing schemes to solve the shelter crisis is therefore disputed.
In Costa Rica, with a population of 3,015,000, the housing shortage reached a critical stage following the financial crisis of the eighties, which resulted in the emergence of marginal areas and slums in the city of San Jose. This shortage affected the least favoured classes of the population, exacerbating their social exclusion. As a result the Popular Habit Program started off in 1988 as a bilateral assistance project to construct new housing for low-income families and to solve the housing shortage in the city. Families and the community are actively involved in the programming, execution and administration of the Popular Habitat Program. Over 17,000 families have gained access to decent housing, helping to reduce the housing shortage in the city. The participatory nature and a strong emphasis on community capacity building, enabled over 30,000 of the newly housed people to have training in various fields related to operations and maintenance, project management and administration. This has created employment and increased income. Community participation and capacity building have considerably strengthened community spirit and involvement in civic affairs and in improving the overall living environment. Another spin-off of the participatory process is the unique approach where each neighbourhood designs its own housing projects demonstrating that there can be no single model in responding to housing needs and demand. The needs of the poor vary just as much if not more than other segments of the population and housing solutions will vary according to the conditions, desires and necessities of the individual. This scheme has proved successful in halting the shelter crisis in Costa Rica, primarily because of the high level of community involvement.
Today, self-help housing schemes represent a major element in the housing policy of most Third World nations. Self help approaches to the provision of housing take the form of either spontaneous self help, development which is not planned by official planners but well prepared by the users themselves, or assisted self help, in which the intervention of the state or other agencies helps to overcome housing shortages. The attempt to reduce construction costs was the main reason for the introduction of organized self-help programmes. Assisted self-help schemes recognise slum dwellers as valued members of the community and as partners in the development of the city. Guidance and support is given to the poor by authorities for self build activities as the first step towards improving housing conditions. Authorities may grant squatters legal title to the land, provide essential infrastructure or give loans to the residents for the purchasing of building materials or the hiring of builders. Self-help housing production is assumed to be cheaper than state or market provided housing as the residents are able to fully maximise use of local resources, and can save profits otherwise pocketed by builders and suppliers. Through a greater degree of local control, individual needs and changing requirements can be matched to a greater degree of accuracy, and buildings can be adapted to specific topographic and climatic conditions of the location. State agency control reduces the flexibility of development. Because of the participation of local communities, marginal population groups can be included and integrated into self-help schemes. Self-help approaches educate and enable the population to obtain practical skills thus can be means to self-fulfilment and personal pride. It is highly unlikely that planners, architects and researchers meet the all the aims of such schemes. Self help projects do not give residents a freedom to build, but are restricted and conditioned by the conflicting interests of owners, tenants, builders, financing agencies, politicians and other social groups who all have their own vested interests. Squatter settlements are characterised as breeding places for radical social movement and hotbeds of crime, disease and political dissent. For this reason, governments often exploit self-help schemes in order to achieve their vested political interests.
In Mexico a self-help scheme known as the Solidarity programme was launched in 1988. This public investment scheme by the government concentrated on local public works such as piped water, drainage, paved roads and bridges. Local organisations and voluntary labour channel the financial resources of state and municipal governments, while the local people provide the manual labour. The Solidarity programme aims to motivate people to solve their own problems and make their own decisions by providing advice and expertise. Criticisms of the scheme focus on vested political interests, as the government has gained enormous popularity among the poor and migrants, especially through the showpiece shanty town of Chalco, on the outskirts of Mexico City. Roads have been built, water pipes laid, new schools opened and no one living there would dream of voting for the opposition party.
Land ownership and over utilized infrastructure and services further the shelter crisis. Successive generations of governments have recognized this and a number of approaches have been adopted in finding a solution to the dilemma of squatting. The two popular approaches used by the public authorities have been sites-and-services and settlement upgradation.
During the 1970s and 1980s, sites-and-services schemes were implemented in nearly 100 countries. The World Bank, for example, implemented 36 sites-and-services schemes between 1972 and 1981 worth more than one billion US dollars, which benefited nearly two million people (World Bank, 1983). Sites-and-services schemes provide the target group with a plot and basic infrastructure, such as water, roads and sanitation facilities, on which they can build their own dwellings. The beneficiaries either lease or buy the allocated land. Often, they are provided access to a loan with reasonable terms as well as an additional loan for the construction of a house. Although typically not included in the project, it is expected that the plot owner would eventually build a house of reasonable standard.
Many problems have been encountered with sites-and-services schemes over the years. Sites-and-services schemes have, often, proved to be unaffordable or inaccessible for low-income groups. Many projects have been situated in the urban fringe in order to reduce costs for purchasing land. These locations have often been too far from income-generating activities and the costs for service provision have increased because of the distance to the existing service network. Furthermore, the process of selecting eligible households for the scheme often takes a very long time and is hampered by problems of defining criteria for eligibility in order to avoid corruption and accusations of beneficiaries being selected for political reasons. The installation process of such schemes must be carefully controlled. There needs to be careful standardisation of wages and a uniform recruitment process to avoid conflict within the community. The number of local residents employed should be maximised and the number of outsiders minimised. However, perhaps the most serious, but common, failure in sites and services projects has concerned the assumptions made of low-income households' ability and willingness to pay for housing. Early World Bank-financed projects assumed that some 25 per cent of household income would and could be devoted to housing. This frequently proved to be far too high. Twelve to 15 per cent or even less is a more likely proportion when up to 80 per cent of an urban household's income may have to be spent on food alone. Although the sites-and-services approach offers many opportunities, it is not a feasible method for providing housing to the majority of urban low-income residents because of the huge shortage in the existing housing stock and high costs.
The basic ingredients of slum upgrading are the award of legal rights to the land upon which squatters live, and the provision of access to safe water and waste disposal. Such programmes often progress hand in hand with sites and services projects in order to provide new land for those households who had to be moved to clear space for public amenities and use, and safe access.
Considering the magnitude and scale of the housing deficit and the lack of concerted action or inadequate response of government agencies, there is no doubt of the positive role that squatter housing plays in housing the millions of poor families. Squatter settlements in urban areas are inevitable phenomena. Today most urban authorities of the developing world recognise self-help, through the construction of squatter settlements, as the only practical solution to the crisis. In order for the shelter crisis to be resolved, there needs to be a greater degree of community involvement in conjunction with government assistance. Action is being taken in an attempt to reduce the crisis for example by UNCHS (Habitat), whose mission is to promote socially and environmentally sustainable human settlements development and the achievement of adequate shelter for all. However, there is no universal solution that can solve all the problems of the shelter crisis in all parts of the developing world.
UN Centre for Human Settlement (1996) – An Urbanizing World
J. Gugler (1997) – Cities in the Developing World
R. Potter (1999) Low-income shelter in the Third World City – Applied Geography
J. Turner (1968) Architecture the works – Human Identity in the Natural Environment
