in GN cities emerged rather slowly but eventually appeared to have consigned tragic outcomes such as these to the past (see Chapters 6 and 7). Cowgate’s infant mortality rates were exceptionally shocking in the nineteenth century but they were high in Edinburgh as whole, at around 130. They fell only slowly to about 115 in 1915 and then steeply to 20 in 1950; today they are around five deaths per thousand.12
Box 3.2 Desperate slums in Limerick, Ireland in the 1930s
Mam tells us there was a terrible flood, that the rain came down the lane and poured in under our door … People emptying their buckets made it worse and there was a sickening stink in the kitchen. She thinks we should stay upstairs as long as there is rain … One night there is a knock on the door and Mam sends me down to see who it is. There are two men from the St. Vincent de Paul [Catholic charity] and they want to see my mother and father. I tell them my parents are … [u]pstairs where ‘tis dry …
They want to know what that little shed is beside our front door. I tell them it’s the lavatory. They want to know why it isn’t in the back of the house and I tell them it’s the lavatory for the whole lane and it’s a good thing it’s not in the back of our house or we’d have people traipsing through our kitchen with buckets that would make you sick.
They say, Are you sure there’s one lavatory for the whole lane? I am …
They tell Mam and Dad … the Society has to be sure they’re helping deserving cases … They want to know why we’re living upstairs. They want to know about the lavatory … Dad tells them the lavatory could kill us with every class of disease, that the kitchen floods in the winter and we have to move upstairs to stay dry … I have to go downstairs again and show the men where to step to keep their feet dry. They keep shaking their heads and saying, God Almighty and Mother of God, this is desperate … upstairs, that’s Calcutta.
Source: McCourt, F. 1997. Angela’s Ashes. London: Flamingo, pp. 113–14.
Students from countries in the GS doing urban studies in Britain are sometimes astonished to learn that the housing problems with which they are familiar from their own societies were so common across the urban GN, and that, as demonstrated by Angela’s Ashes, these were sometimes still occurring within living memory. This is usually because, in tune with so much of the housing literature, they have been taught to think that the urban housing problems of the GS are separate, with different underlying causes, from those of the GN. When they recognise that the starting point is that people can only be housed in the sorts of accommodation that they can afford, no matter where you are, they swiftly realise the significance of the hard constraints of typical incomes for the lower-paid members of any society. Often they suggest that the difference must be that the state mediates the situation in the GN by enforcing proper standards. However, when it is pointed out that this inevitably means that the cost of the cheapest housing will rise, making it unaffordable for many residents for whom there is nowhere else to go, the true nature of the global housing dilemma at the heart of this book begins to become clear, as does the double-edged sword of standards in a market economy. The solution of tackling the gap between the market-determined prices of labour and decent housing through the state boosting low incomes with housing allowances or providing subsidised housing is the next logical step in the discussion.
In real life, in most societies the situation is far messier than the logical conclusions of discussions such as these. Urban housing outcomes depend on the locally specific interaction between the incomes set by the labour market and housing costs set by housing-market conditions, overlaid by variable and only partial types of intervention to try to address the inevitable affordability dilemma. In this complex mix, housing standards are only one part of the subset of conditions influencing housing costs. Yet their importance for human welfare makes them central to an analysis of the housing dilemma. Their implications are not a simple binary: higher housing costs versus health and social welfare. Although, in general, striving for decent standards must be the right thing to do, there are ways of doing this that reduce possible negative side effects for the poor. Housing standards can be inappropriate or used punitively, and this has to be avoided. The following sections start with an example of GN housing standards legislation from the UK as a template for the crucial welfare issues these address and also to understand their limitations. An analysis of the pros and cons of building standards follows, using examples from The Gambia, Zimbabwe and Texas.
Housing standards in the Global North: UK example
The types of housing standards implemented in the cities of the GN could be illustrated with reference to almost any country, from Australia to Austria, Italy to Ireland. Each would include elements of local idiosyncrasies but the key point is that they would demonstrate the complexity and breadth of the regulations found necessary to prevent market forces throwing up housing that is dangerous for its occupants (albeit possibly affordable). The example chosen here is the situation in the UK.
There are two main sets of housing standards regulated in the UK: the types of new houses that can be built and the conditions within housing deemed acceptable for particular types of residents. Familiarity with the very different types of housing typical in low-income settlements in the urban GS and those in the GN suggest at first that a key difference, because it is so visible, is the type of materials used, and that therefore the use of cheap building materials such as soil bricks and corrugated iron is forbidden in the GN. In the UK, this is not necessarily the case; instead, what is required is that all building work should use materials that are ‘adequate and proper’ for the purposes intended and that the work is done in a ‘workmanlike manner’.13 In theory, a soil brick house with a corrugated iron roof of the sort millions of people in African or Asian cities inhabit is possible. You can even build a house largely of straw bales.14 However, there is a host of regulations about what else is required for a house in which people are going to live. These cover structural safety, fire safety, resistance to contaminants and moisture, toxic substances, resistance to sound, ventilation, sanitation, hot water and water efficiency, drainage and waste disposal, heating and appliances, protection from falling, conservation of fuel and power, access to and use of buildings, glazing safety, and electrical safety. Also, most houses in large cities in the GN are more than one storey, even when they are occupied by only a single household, and frequently most residents live in multi-storey apartment blocks. Many building materials (such as unfired or even fired mud bricks) that are widely used in poor settlements in the GS are only adequate for one-storey houses as they cannot hold up a second floor. The load-bearing properties of building materials is thus a crucial issue. Resistance to moisture is another. Again, mud bricks can work if they are carefully plastered and the roof extends well beyond the walls to provide good protection from rain. Indeed, some of the large one-storey houses in the formerly ‘white’ segregated suburbs of Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital city, were constructed in this way in the early parts of the twentieth century, even though their current occupants may not know this. So, of course, are many cottages and old rural houses across Europe, even if their thatched roofs have been replaced. However, even the best-built mud-brick house in most low-income settlements in cities of the GS is unlikely to comply with all the other regulations listed above, including having hot water, bathrooms and toilets within the house and safe electricity, and being well insulated against heat and cold. The visible outside of the house, therefore, reveals only the beginning of the impact of housebuilding regulations.
Current housebuilding regulations in the UK, or anywhere in the world, can, of course, affect only new housing stock. This is why in any long-established town across the world there is usually such a mixture of housing, and much
