2008 global financial crisis were still reverberating through the economy, and the newer negative impacts of the UK’s impending exit from the European Union (Brexit) were beginning to emerge. Taken together, these meant that factors influencing whether regulations are implemented – political will and capacity – were acting to reduce the frequency with which housing regulations were effectively imposed, particularly within the private rental sector. As a consequence, poor conditions involving risks to health – slum conditions, in other words – were becoming more common.
Informal housing and building standards
Regulations about housing standards are not peculiar to the cities of the GN – substandard housing in the GS is not due to a lack of legislation. Nearly all societies have plenty of regulations on the books. In ex-colonies these may still be partly derived from the town-planning laws handed down by the former colonial power. For example, they could be modelled on British, French, Spanish, Dutch or Portuguese ‘norms’. However, they are much less likely to be enforced. In 1990, during a field trip with undergraduate students to The Gambia, one student project was on housing in Serrekunda, the country’s largest urban settlement. The students diligently interviewed various ‘key personnel’ in the urban council offices in Serrekunda, returning with photocopies of regulations relating to building standards. These included the usual array of requirements about types of building material, distance between buildings, room size, windows, and minimum water and sanitation standards. These were all ‘modern’ and were drawn fairly directly from British legislation of the 1940s and 1950s. The students suggested that this meant Serrekunda had been ‘planned’. However, a moment’s observation of nearly all the residential built environment in the settlement demonstrated that the regulations had not only been honoured mainly in the breach rather than the observance, but in fact entirely in the breach. To a significant extent, Serrekunda was constructed of corrugated iron sheets. Many households were renting and living in one small room in buildings often built and rented out by the owners of the rural land plots onto which the settlement had encroached and sprawled. These buildings did not conform to any urban plan or regulation; neither did their tenure. Many obtained their water from wells, just as previous rural populations had done. The case of Serrekunda demonstrates that, as with all laws, it is not the existence of the legislation that really matters but whether it is implemented. Leaving aside the issue of affordability, standards can only lead to improved housing if there are two key things: the political will and authority to enforce the regulations and the institutional capacity to implement and monitor that enforcement. The example of the UK above has already suggested that political will can ebb and flow.
The housing dilemma as defined in this book, whereby there is a mismatch between low incomes and the costs of housing provided by the private sector, is specific to situations in which housing is decent because certain standards are enforced. However, if they are not, the private sector can deliver housing that is cheap enough for most people. Some of this will be in true slums, but not all of it. The informal housing that is so widespread in the GS is cheaper than formal housing not only because it may skimp on physical quality. Often, an important reason why it is affordable to the poor is that the land used at the time of building was cheap. This might be because it was originally occupied by squatting. However, the tenure may simply be non-capitalist. Hundreds of millions of informal private-sector residential units, both for owners and renters, are found in the urban areas of the GS (see Chapter 4). The meaning of the term ‘informal’ is often contested,20 but here, in relation to housing, it is defined as housing that does not conform with government planning, zoning, tax regimes, regulations and standards. By definition, therefore, this crucial housing sector does not comply with housing standards. However, improving this situation without causing worse health and suffering is tricky. As the next chapter will explain, removing such housing because it is poor quality is not the answer. This merely treats a visible symptom of poverty without doing anything about the causes. Invariably, those displaced simply have to adopt other informal solutions, and these are often worse for their welfare. The answers have to lie with assisting and encouraging upgrading of housing in situ – which generally happens anyway where occupiers are also homeowners, their incomes allow and they feel secure – or with providing state-subsidised decent alternatives.
Housing standards in the Global South: Zimbabwe example
The outcomes of adherence to inappropriate housing standards and ill will on the part of governments that punish poor people living in informal housing have been well illustrated in the cities of Zimbabwe. Yet this also shows how complex the situation can be, since political attitudes and incomes are not fixed but change over time. The fixation with standards evident in this case also helps demonstrate how differences between the GN and GS may be less marked than supposed.
As explained in Chapter 2, the cities of the countries of southern Africa that were once ruled by white minority regimes are all of colonial origin and are premised upon a crucial difference between them and the urban colonial experience in many other societies, except in Latin America: that is, usually nearly all the land on which they developed and their surrounding areas were alienated from the original occupants and either owned by the state or held privately. In both cases, the norms and legal underpinnings of capitalist property were dominant, backed by the necessary institutions. In this regard, cities such as Harare, Windhoek and Pretoria are more like American or European cities than they are like other cities in much of the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, where pre-capitalist tenurial arrangements remain significant.
These circumstances made it easier to control residential housing developments and to exclude Africans from ‘white’ cities. Although these controls broke down towards the end of liberation struggles to end white minority rule in all three countries (Zimbabwe, Namibia and South Africa), and squatter housing on private and public land emerged, in Zimbabwe most of what was a fairly limited amount of such housing was removed after independence in 1980. Crucially, at that point many of the occupants were moved into highly subsidised new site-and-service schemes and not left to fend for themselves. This left Zimbabwe, uniquely in sub-Saharan Africa, with an essentially planned and regulated residential urban landscape by the mid-1980s. In other words, cities such as Harare and Bulawayo were more like London or Birmingham in terms of land tenure, property rights and regulated housing than they were like Dar es Salaam or Lagos or Kinshasa. And the government was determined to keep it that way.
Over the next 20 years, up until 2005, Zimbabwean urban housing projects ostensibly targeted at low-income groups varied somewhat in their characteristics, particularly in terms of the degree to which state or donor subsidies were provided to make housing more affordable for the poor. These shifts were in line with global neoliberalism and the shift to more market-oriented policies generally; some of the outcomes for affordability have already been discussed in Chapter 2. On the whole, most planned urban housing had been delivered through site-and-service schemes and the official focus was almost entirely on homeownership, as is common throughout the GS. In such schemes, residents purchased a plot and then built a house, hiring their own builders and/or using their own labour. However, they had to comply with a host of building standards. Throughout the process, the housing built was closely regulated and monitored by local officials. Key regulations included the conditions that the plans were approved by the municipality, the houses were fully serviced with water and sanitation, and they had proper foundations, a concrete slab floor, and walls of fired brick or cement blocks. The roof had to be asbestos, metal or tiles. In theory, homeowners were meant to construct a four-room unit and ablution facilities within 18 months, although often they could not afford this and a blind official eye was usually turned as long as some progress was occurring. As explained in Chapter 2, many of the poor could not afford
