convince schemes that they could afford the costs then found them too much to bear.
In Zimbabwe in the first decade or so after independence, there was the political will to maintain regulated standards. The government also managed to maintain a situation where there was very little squatting. In any case, it was not generally possible to build urban homes in the immediate rural hinterland by taking advantage of non-capitalist tenurial arrangements (although this constraint was to change when fast-track land reform began in the twenty-first century, reshaping the city’s residential geography in significant ways). This feature meant that it was possible to believe that urban housing processes could be controlled, in contrast to the situation across other parts of the GS. In addition, due to a curious mix of a positive desire for poor urban residents to live in decent housing and an official compulsion to exert control via planning, the vast majority of Zimbabwe’s urban residents did not live in ‘slums’ (as defined by UN-Habitat) by the turn of the twenty-first century. They mostly had on-plot access to sanitation and clean water and accessible clinics and schools. There was no pretence that the private, market-oriented, large-scale housing industry could possibly provide affordable housing, given local incomes, and, as shown for the case study of Glen Norah C in Chapter 2, efforts to bring in private loans for self-builders on already subsidised land had made even these schemes problematic. But Zimbabwe’s urban housing situation was bursting at the seams. The maintenance of building standards made even low-income schemes too expensive for a large sector of the population. They could only afford to rent; homeownership was simply beyond them. Thus, many of the rooms in the new ‘homes’ in the housing schemes and in the older townships of the colonial period were rented out. The ideal of one family per house, which fitted with the decent home concept, was fairly rare, especially in the high-density suburbs closer to city centres.
In fact, in many houses the norm was more like one household per room, just as in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Edinburgh or St Petersburg. Overcrowding was rife. And adding to the density of population, there was such a huge demand for rental housing that many plot-owners took to increasing their incomes by building backyard shacks. These were extensions or freestanding units built in any spare space on the plot behind the house: each had a household living in it or some were shared between lodgers. Complex subletting arrangements developed. In the areas most accessible to work, such as Mbare, Harare’s oldest township, shacks were sometimes eventually also built in front yards, in the gap between the house and the road. In most cases the homeowner also lived on-site, but there was a significant minority of absentee lessors. Besides the overcrowding, the insides of houses were often very poorly finished (no ceilings and unplastered walls, for example) as this was not regulated and had no structural implications. This did, however, undermine the comfort of the tenants.
Planning regulations made it clear that backyard shacks and unplanned extensions were illegal. So why, given its success in preventing squatting, did Zimbabwe allow the backyard shack situation to develop? The answer lies in a complex mix of national and city politics, with different city governments taking different attitudes over time. One factor was a gradually developing degree of pragmatism in the 1990s as the housing affordability problem became increasingly acute. Household incomes took a steep dive and fewer new subsidised housing schemes were built after structural adjustment policies were introduced in 1991. There was an element of genuine concern about increasing urban poverty at the time, and the backyard shacks ‘helped’ by providing affordable, if problematic, accommodation. Unless the state had been in a position to allocate to their residents subsidised houses in new site-and-service schemes, it was hard to see a ‘humane’ alternative. However, at the same time, and often in the same official circles, there was outright opposition to this ‘informal’ type of housing solution, which evidently undermined Zimbabwe’s aspirations for planned and tidy urban landscapes. In other words, the commitment to holding the line against backyard shacks fluctuated, and in periods of relative laxity and few demolitions, tens of thousands were built.
Given income levels and the mismatch between the supply and cost of affordable housing and the demand and need for it, inevitably some squatting did occur after independence, here and there. In Harare, for example, there were various small-scale occupations, usually on public land. These were never allowed to last for long, however. Once demolished, some of their residents were moved to ‘holding camps’, usually on the edges of the city and sometimes on agricultural land. Over time, these sometimes took on their own community identity, but their residents’ lives were made terribly difficult because the government would often move them on again, sometimes to another holding camp.
Tragically for Zimbabwe’s urban poor, the forces already in existence in official circles that were opposed to the slippage in housing standards were suddenly given free rein and full central government backing in 2005 when ZANU (PF), the party in power since independence, lost both a referendum on constitutional change and nearly every urban constituency in a national election. Furious that the urban electorate had not ‘recognised’ its obligations to the party, which, despite its inner convictions, had allowed backyard shacks to develop to ‘help’ the poor, the government unleashed Operation Murambatsvina (‘Clear Out the Trash’) with virtually no warning. Every single backyard shack and unplanned house extension in low-income urban suburbs across the country was demolished within a few weeks, using bulldozers. Informal-sector activities were also targeted. It was estimated that 650,000 to 700,000 people were either made homeless or lost their jobs, or both.21
There was an international outcry and the UN sent a special envoy, Anna Tibaijuka, to investigate. Understandably, the political punishment angle was frequently highlighted in subsequent analysis. Yet, while this was relevant, it helped obscure some other aspects of the campaign that only made sense in terms of understandings about private property, housing standards and urban planning regulations. First, the campaign did not touch planned and legal private or rented properties, which also housed many of the ‘ungrateful’ urban electorate. Throughout the country, the legal home on the urban plots affected was left standing, surrounded by the rubble of demolished extensions and shacks. Thus, the legal property of low-income urban plot-owners and homeowners was respected. Second, in the ‘holding camps’ such as Hatcliffe Extension on the north-west edge of Harare, the houses demolished were generally those built without local authority support, meaning that services had not been laid on and they were not connected to the networks for sewerage, water or electricity. According to the regulations, this made them illegal. For the international media that were soon on the spot, these issues were not visible (pipes being underground) but the demolition of what were often freestanding small houses constructed of permanent materials such as brick or cement blocks was very evident and understandably condemned. To complicate matters further, unlike backyard shack residents, some in the holding camps had title deeds to their plot of land that local politicians had made available during electioneering periods. Again, the media and many other analyses made much of this, taking it to mean that legal private property had been destroyed.22
The Zimbabwean government defended itself on the grounds of planning and building standards. It pointed out, correctly, that backyard shacks were illegal and if homeowners could show that they had received planning permission for extensions, those extensions were not demolished. They compared the upholding of housing regulations with the situation in cities across the GN. They also explained the nuances of the planning and standards issues that led to so many unserviced and improperly planned and regulated houses being demolished in the holding camps, even if they had been built on land with legal title. None of this cut much ice with the various media, campaigning and agency reports that followed, which was not surprising. The extent of suffering that was caused was catastrophic: no provision was made at first for anyone made homeless, people were scattered across the country and some were forced to take up cross-border peripatetic lifestyles. Many people died.23
