[dehai-news] Dailynews.habarileo.co.tz: PROPERTY AND URBAN DEVELOPMENT: Urban slums in Eastern africa


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From: Berhane Habtemariam (Berhane.Habtemariam@gmx.de)
Date: Sun Oct 05 2008 - 12:35:34 EDT


PROPERTY AND URBAN DEVELOPMENT: Urban slums in Eastern africa
Kironde
Daily News; Saturday,October 04, 2008 @20:01

Introduction

NEIGHBOURHOODS in most urban areas can be considered to be either planned or unplanned. The planned areas usually include most parts of the older parts of the urban areas. Many were planned by the colonial governments although post colonial governments have added to this to some extent. Central areas, high income (former colonial residential) areas, and commercial areas are well planned and may be well-provided with infrastructure and services such as water supply and sewers. Only a minority of urban residents, usually the well-to-do live in planned areas.

The majority of urban land seekers, some not so poor, end up in the informal sector, acquiring land and developing it outside the formal system. This land eventually grows into slums. For the poor, marginal land, such as that liable to flooding, or on steep slopes, or that which is highly polluted, is the only land they can afford to acquire not only in terms of monetary or other resources which they can muster, but also in terms of suitable locations vis a vis livelihood supporting activities.

Slums

The majority of the people in urban areas of Eastern Africa (with the possible exception of Mauritius and Seychelles), live in unplanned areas which in this article we elect to call slums. Slums may be scattered in pockets throughout the city. Some develop on marginal land. Some residents are outright squatters on neglected public or private land. Others are former villages which have been engulfed by the growing urban areas, without being planned. Others grow in peri-urban areas and may start as farms which are subdivided slowly over time.

The urban poor are in many places forced to settle on hazardous and otherwise unsuitable land for building: over-steep hill slopes (like in Mwanza Tanzania); river banks and floodplains. Many times also they squat on unsuitable land: in the shadow of refineries, chemical factories, toxic dumps, or in the margins of railroads and highways. Here, they are exposed to disasters, such as chronic flooding but are also vulnerable to occasional state violence in forms of bulldozing and forced evictions.

The proportions of residents living in slums in Eastern Africa, using the Millennium Development Goals definition of slums are as follows: Comoro (61.2 per cent); Eritrea (69.9 per cent); Ethiopia (99.5 per cent); Kenya (70.9), Madagscar (93.7); Rwanda (90.1 per cent); Somalia (97.4); Sudan (85.5 per cent),; Tanzania (89.6 per cent); and Uganda (92.7 per cent).

Unplanned settlements (slums) have mushroomed in Eastern Africa, growing faster than the rest of city growth, and creating negative impacts on the social and biophysical environment. Slums are the physical manifestation of poverty, inequality and social exclusion in urban areas. Slum dwellers live in neglected parts of towns and cities where housing and living conditions are appallingly deprived and often hazardous, and where basic services are lacking. Slum dwellers are not valued as members of the urban community and have few rights. In many areas they live under constant threat of eviction, although the situation in countries such as Tanzania is much more positive.

In Nairobi, Kenya official figures show that 55% of the population live in 78 slums comprising 5% of the total land area of Nairobi. However, if the MDG definition of slums is adopted, the proportion of the slum population is much higher.

Balbala, an unplanned settlement with over 240,000 residents in the city of Djibouti accounted for the largest share of the city's growth during the past decades. In Ethiopia, over 80 per cent of the urban population lives in slums. In Eritrea, 70 per cent of the population lives in slums. In Somalia, over 85 per cent of the population lives in slums.

Densities in these slum areas differ. Unplanned areas could be used at very high densities and with rudimentary or no basic services, especially in inner-city areas, but others especially at the periphery of towns are used at medium to low densities. A number of slum areas have attained world fame. Kibera in Nairobi (Kenya), covering two and half square kilometres is considered to be the largest slum in East Africa (and second only to Soweto in Africa) harbouring between 750,000 and 1,000,000 people or a third of Nairobi's population. There are no permanent residential buildings over a single storey in the slum. Population density is estimated at 3,000 people per hectare, being one of the most crowded places on earth. 90 per cent of Kibera residents are tenants, paying rents to absentee slumlords, some owning as many as 1,000 shacks, who have no title to land and are not obliged to provide services to their properties.

In Madagascar, "Soixante-sept hectare" is one of Antananarivo's low-lying districts, subject to flooding and home to the city's poor. Here people pay rent for small shacks (to slum-lords) that just clear the water level of the surrounding flood plain during much of the rainy season.

Asmara, Eritrea's capital city is considered to be one of the beautiful; cities in Africa. However, it has a patch of land measuring about two square metres on the southwestern side, Mai-Habashawl and Medebber which are homes of hundreds of people. Most of these live in one-room mud-built wattle huts and wooden or basic stone houses, often windowless. These are Asmara's biggest slums. They are massive ditches of mud and filth.

The majority of residents in slum areas, as are those living in many other informal areas in the cities in eastern Africa, work in the informal sector as street vendors, washer-persons porters, charcoal sellers, street food vendors, you name it. There are usually no services in slum areas. Sanitation could be as rudimentary as using 'flying' toilets, well documented for Kampala.

The attitude of governments to slum areas has differed with time, from outright hostility, to tolerance, to upgrading. The latter has sometimes been supported by international development partners and NGOs. Upgrading has in most cases been aimed at ameliorating living conditions in these areas, but not dealing with tenure issues.

Almost all times, slum dwellers are poor urbanites, but sometimes these may reflect social groupings and migration status to urban areas including refugees and IDPs. Eviction and displacement sometimes take place. In Greater Khartoum, three categories of slums areas (shammasas) can be identified: (1) Inner-city Slum areas which are annexed and engulfed by urban extension such as the former Fallata Village (Ushash Fallata) that has been redeveloped and the dwellers moved out further. The dwellers are mainly from the Central and the Northern Regions of Sudan (2) Outer Slum areas that have been planned by the authorities and distributed to the landless. Living conditions are described as worse than the first group. (3) Squatter Settlements, which are built on land illegally occupied by new-comers. The dwellers are either from Southern Sudan tribes such as Dinka, Nuer and Shuluk or from Western regions of Kordofan and Darfur tribes such as Fur, Nuba, Mseiria, Zaghawa, Masalit, Borno and Rizeigat. Living conditions, as expected, are far worse. Being denied construction rights -- even mud being considered a semi-permanent material in this context -- these residents are forced to resort to erecting their shelters from cardboard, sacks, tin, and plastic sheeting. The right of the poor to due process before their homes are demolished is nonexistent. Their homes are bulldozed as "unauthorized settlements" and they are forced to live in sites in which they have no right of tenure and no guarantee against displacement.

Demolitions rates for slums have come down in many countries but slum life is characterized by lack of sanitation, overcrowding, low quality shelter, insecurity, and exposure to natural disasters such as flooding as well as high levels of environmental stress such as pollution.

While slums are not a desirable policy objective, their existence is unavoidable, and may have a number of unforeseen benefits. For example, they are often the first stopping point for rural-to-urban migrants; they provide low-cost affordable and well-located housing that enables new entrants in the urban labour market to save enough money for their eventual absorption into the formal urban society. In addition, the slums provide a vibrant array of economic activities which give livelihood opportunities to those who dwell there. Besides, slum inhabitants provide the major labour force involved in the more ordinary yet vital tasks required in the maintenance of safe and vibrant towns and cities in developing world, although they get very little in return, in form of public services.

Most countries do not have an articulated policy towards slums. In contemplating the development of an urban development and management policy, it has been argued by most experts that in-situ upgrading is a far more effective solution to improving the lives of slum dwellers than is resettlement. This is more so since 72 per cent of urban residents in sub Saharan Africa live in slums.
kironde@aru.ac.tz

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