The Placemaker's Guide to Building Community

Nabeel Hamdi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781844078028
• eBook ISBN: 9781136540967
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

From the author of Small Change comes this engaging guide to placemaking, packed with practical skills and tools that architects, planners, urban designers and other built environment specialists need in order to engage effectively with development work in any context. Drawing on four decades of practical and teaching experience, the author offers fresh insight into the complexities faced by practitioners when working to improve the communities, lives and livelihoods of people the world over. The book shows how these complexities are a context for, rather than a barrier to, creative work. The book also critiques the single vision top down approach to design and planning. Using examples of successful professional practice across Europe, the US, Africa, Latin America and post-tsunami Asia, the author demonstrates how good policy can derive from good practices when reasoned backwards, as well as how plans can emerge in practice without a preponderance of planning. Reasoning backwards is shown to be a more effective and inclusive way of planning forwards with significant improvements to the quality of process and place. The book also offers a variety of methods and tools for analyzing the issues, engaging with communities and other stakeholders for design and settlement planning and for improving the skills of all involved in placemaking.

Ultimately the book serves as an inspiring guide, and a distillation of decades of practical wisdom and experience. The resulting practical handbook is for all those involved in doing, learning and teaching placemaking and urban development world-wide.

1

THE EVOLUTION OF DEVELOPMENT AND THE PLACEMAKER’S TOOLS

A SHORT INTRODUCTION

‘In 1876, King Leopold II said that his goal for Africa was to bring civilization to the only part of this globe where it has not penetrated, to pierce the darkness that envelops entire populations … a crusade worthy of this age of progress.’¹

It is hard today to agree with either the goal or motives set out by Leopold. And yet, the concept of bringing civilization (development?) and promoting progress being a crusade (for some) resonates still with some of the ambitions, if not policies, which underpin the politics of aid under the guise of development.

If we look back to more recent history, we will see that the evolution of ideals for international development have witnessed many brave ambitions to bring development to the needy, to generate wealth, improve well-being, reduce or eliminate poverty, to make government and governance more fair, more accountable and transparent, to save the world from climate change and its people from the evil of despots.

In this introductory chapter, I will map my own selective views of the evolution of ideas not as a historian but as a teacher and development practitioner trying to understand where we were in thinking and doing, where we are now and why and what difference it has made to the tools and methods of practice. Specifically, I will do this through the lens of urban development and, in particular, urban housing and settlement planning, perhaps the largest component of any placemaker’s task, given all that it encompasses: design, construction, land, infrastructure, tenure, financing, management, participation, governance, partnerships and rights. My purpose here is to introduce a number of key themes that we will explore in more detail, progressively, throughout this book.

URBAN HOUSING AND URBAN DEVELOPMENT

In the early 1950s and 1960s, the need for reform in housing and urban settlements was largely driven by the desire to build a new Utopia, free of slums and informal settlements. With the growing demand for affordable housing associated with progressive urbanization, you tooled up, scaled up and built up, as high as you could and as densely as you could, according to standards we thought were suitable for everyone in general but no one in particular. Standardization, it was thought, was the key to mass production. If you could reduce it all to numbers, type plans and building components, then you could make it all cheaper and quicker. Everywhere, in cities of countries in the north and south, the demolition of slums and clearance of informal settlements was the norm. ‘The values and living conditions of squatter settlements were obstacles to modernization and had to be obliterated.’²

In developing countries and under this regime of ‘clearance’ in pursuit of modernity, informal settlements were seen as an intrusion into the life of cities and the formality of city planning in its search for the city beautiful. They ‘were perceived as a manifestation of poverty not an opportunity for urban productivity’.³ As such, urban growth and urban housing would be strictly regulated in design and production and administratively rationalized. Housing policy was (and still is?) an instrument of political and social reform in response to public health and public strife, rather than benevolence.

It wasn’t long, but long enough, before questions were being raised about the effectiveness and cost of these highly centralized processes of planning and production. In the mid-60s, providing a 30 square metre finished house for every poor family would consume 25–50 per cent of gross national product (GNP) in most countries.⁴ Those who could afford to spent 3–6 per cent on all forms of shelter, the poorest countries 0.5 per cent. Standards were too high and so, therefore, were costs to the poor, despite the subsidies. Research suggested that those who needed these houses most could not afford even the most highly subsidized rents, particularly because later governments were required to remove subsidies to meet the demands placed on them by structural adjustment.

It soon became apparent that deficits of adequate shelter grow rather than diminish, not just because not enough houses are produced, or because technologies fail, but because expectations rise as housing becomes available; because we did not allow adequately for the reduction in household size; because we failed to count concealed households that come into being as soon as housing becomes available; because more people live as independent households as income rises; because of the unpredicted increase of migration to cities; because of conflict or natural disaster that displaces thousands, many in cities and into cities.

The watershed in the debate on shelter and settlement came, arguably, in 1976 at the UN-Habitat Conference in Vancouver. There was, for the first time, a formal recognition of the informal sector as a legitimate provider of housing and other services. With a little bit of help in credit provision and a few adjustments to standards, a little less in costly regularization, then the informal sector could provide housing and services in a way more acceptable to city planners, more affordable to families and more fitting to the political ideals of how cities should look and function. The question became not how to eradicate but rather, how to incorporate this informality into formal housing.⁵

The principle that emerged was simple. Don’t invest in building houses that people can do in any case for themselves and could do better with a bit of help, but rather invest in the collective good that people can’t provide for themselves: in land regularization, infrastructure planning, security of tenure, self-build opportunity and credit provision. These themes came together around ‘sites and services’ and the many forms they would take: open sites, core housing, roof loan schemes.

The World Bank was quick to move sites and services into its own free market ideals. Their lending for sites and services projects in 1972 was partly in response to stopping the growth of informal settlements (rather than incorporating them) and partly inspired by the opportunity to mould self-help into ‘its own neo-liberal frameworks which relied on free markets, individualism and payment by users…’⁶

The first World Bank experiment with sites and services in 1972 was in Senegal with 4000 lots in Dakar, the capital, and 1600 plots in Thies. It was the first of a series of projects designed to explore alternative approaches to housing ‘which did not rely heavily on the public purse, which mobilized private savings and addressed shelter needs of the city as a whole’.⁷

During the 1970s, World Bank policy had begun to shift away from housing projects and towards urban projects in which housing played a key role. The Bank pursued four linked strategies during the 1970s: urban shelter projects, urban transport, integrated urban projects and regional development projects. These were intended to guide governments toward a ‘…broader perspective in the urban sector…’⁸

Between 1972 and 1982, the World Bank lent more than two billion dollars to some 36 governments, financing 62 urban projects within the above categories.⁹

By 1990, it had financed 116 projects in 55 countries. The Bank’s own review of sites and services projects in 1976 was positive. They were more affordable and, therefore, generally more accessible to the lowest income groups; their impact on improving the socio-economic conditions of the poor was moving in the right direction; and the repayment of loans did not cause negative impacts on household expenditure on food or other basics.

Criticism of sites and services grew, however, as more projects were completed and more evidence was collated. Architects and planners were worried by their technically rational design emphasis, their use of coefficients of efficiency, as the major determinant of design and planning decisions. These projects lacked art. They were ignorant of context and resentful of culture.

Others argued that these projects required the same level of centralized planning as public housing projects, that they displaced people who depended for work on inner city locations, rather than the periphery where most projects were located, that the cost of their administration was high and that they would polarize classes and present far fewer economic opportunities than in the mixed economies of informal settlements.¹⁰ Families would sell out when they had finished building and would return to their shanties. There were few guarantees that people would repay loans, which made them unattractive to private banks: in this sense, the banks targeted people with steady incomes, which most of the poorest do not have. In short, they would fail to reach those in most need unless governments continued their heavy subsidies for land and infrastructure, which they could not afford to sustain.¹¹

In the early 1980s, in response partly to the critique of sites and services, partly to increasing housing deficits despite the effort and partly to better understanding of settlements and housing as a social process, not just a unitary one, there was again a significant shift in policy: upgrading or ‘integrated development projects’ became the focus of shelter and urban development policy, still combining the building of some houses where necessary (for migrant workers, single parent households) with some serviced sites, but primarily concerned with improving the existing stock – first in formal slums and later in informal or squatter settlements.

Instead of making large transfers of money to building projects, the World Bank directed its funds more toward the reform of policies and institutions: to public administration, to local banks and to providing technical assistance. Its terms of reference for borrowers encouraged programmes to be designed more on the basis of effective user demand and less on preconceived notions of adequate housing.

Upgrading was supported widely by the World Bank and others into (and beyond) the 1980s, so that public authorities could ‘restore formal control over land subdivision and house building processes, while seeking to mobilize the energies and resources of low-income groups for either the improvement or creation of shelter’.¹²

Most upgrading programmes entailed the provision of loans for housing improvements, sanitation, electricity, water and drainage, the paving of streets and footpaths, the legalization of tenure rights to land (a policy designed to control the growth of illegal settlements) and the provision for improving facilities such as schools, clinics and community centres. Costs had also been reduced, on average to US$38 per household for infrastructure improvement, compared to the many thousands of dollars per household for conventional housing provision.¹³ A large number of projects involved regularizing land in order to establish legal boundaries to property (the basis to issuing titles) and to get services into otherwise inaccessible settlements. And most programmes, out of necessity rather than desire, confronted the interests of demands of local residents.

In the early 1990s, and after the usual plethora of conferences and learned papers, we see the beginnings of another significant shift in shelter and urban development policy. It was in response to a variety of findings. Critique of upgrading suggested that many programmes serve only the most able, physically and politically, or the most enterprising; that programmes were often overly ‘synchronized’, more fitting to the routines of planning than the ad hoc arrangement of informality; that the rate of cost recovery was worse than that of sites and services projects and that they had failed to turn the tide of illegal occupations – indeed, in some cases, had encouraged it. Land regularization and the legal titles to land had also fuelled an informal market in land speculation. This, together with the push to recover costs by the local authorities through property taxes, was increasing rents that were forcing the lowest income groups out.

Importantly, the shift in policy came in response to findings that successful programmes had been small in scale, relative to demand and difficult to keep going. They were difficult to sustain because of all the management and administration they entailed over the long term, unlike the one-off projects of earlier years. They were difficult to sustain and scale up, not because of bad design, but because of poor management. What we got was a ‘move toward management reform rather than bricks and mortar’.¹⁴

Urban Management Programmes (UMP) were, essentially, technical support collaborations between United Nations Centre for Human Settlements (UNCHS) and the World Bank.¹⁵ Their focus was on more effective ways of managing land, money, skills, knowledge and other resources, promoting housing and urban development across a range of sectors and at an urban rather than project scale. All of this fitted well with neoliberal policy – eliminating supply constraints to encourage private sector involvement, formal and informal; withdrawal of the state from direct provision to that of enabler; elimination of subsidies to balance the budgets; capacity building across a range of organizations, government, non-government and community based, and exploring new forms of partnership.

The move, in other words, was even further away from site-specific interventions and toward city-wide, market-wide and inter-sectoral programmes. The focus had become more strategic in deciding interventions and increasingly on sustainability and on poverty. This was reflected in a series of global initiatives and proclamations.

For example Agenda 21, adopted by the UN Conference on Environment and Development in 1992, promoted sustainable human settlements. This included tackling social and economic constraints, as well as conservation and management of resources (land, water, etc). Strengthening the role of women, NGOs, the private sector and local authorities, continued as key themes in promoting sustainability.

Then there was the Habitat Agenda, adopted in June 1996 by 170 governments. It had two main objectives: ensuring adequate shelter for all and the sustainable development of the world’s urban areas. The talk was of enablement, participation and international cooperation on major social and environmental initiatives in pursuit of sustainability.

In 1999, the World Bank and UN-Habitat founded the Cities Alliance. Their focus was on eradicating urban slums, or at least improving conditions for some one hundred million slum dwellers by 2020.

More recently, there were the Millennium Development Goals agreed in 2000 at the UN and which set out in Goal 7, Target 10 to halve by 2015 the proportion of people without safe drinking water and basic sanitation and Target 11 to achieve by 2020 significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers. And yet, according to UN statistics, as of recently:

• 840 million people globally are malnourished;

• 6 million children under the age of 5 die every year...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Acronyms and Abbreviations
• Prologue
• 1 The Evolution of Development and the Placemaker's Tools
• Part I Place, Time and Clutter Learning from Practice
• Reflection: Listening to Communicate
• Part II Placemaking and the Architecture of Opportunity
• Reflection: Getting Answers to Questions You Don't Ask
• Part III Placemakers Responsible Practice and the Question of Scale
• Reflection: The Invisible Stakeholder
• Part IV Teaching
• Reflection: The Mess of Practice
• Notes and References
• Index