Local Agenda 21 And The Asian Context

ii) A Well-Functioning City

Sewage, water, solid waste management, transport, primary education and preventive health are simple municipal functions. They have been treated as such in the past. However, since the initiation of poverty alleviation projects and programmes, new ways of funding mega-projects (such as on BOT), and conditionalities related to international loans, they have become incredibly complex. These functions have been reduced to a series of unrelated projects (often mega ones) funded by loans and pushed by a mafia of contractors, consultants (local and foreign), politicians and bureaucrats. They have led to the setting up of super agencies (usually for the term the project lasts which in turn weakens the normal technical wings of local government agencies) and of increasing development costs by anything of up to one thousand per cent of the actual costs of labour and materials involved¹. The repayment of these loans therefore, becomes problematic and user charges to make loan recovery possible become excessive. In addition, this increases the debt on local authorities which is often recovered by federal or provincial governments by reducing the development budget of local governments. As such, debt is becoming a major source of poverty and this needs to be recognized and addressed by all the players in the development game. All this increases the poverty not only of the poor and the lower-middle classes, but also impoverishes local governments. It seems that projects are in and planning is out² especially for the transport, solid waste management and the water sector where international companies are bidding for taking over these functions from local governments. There is strong opposition to this from civil society organizations all over Asia. This opposition is not recognized in most northern development and academic writings and journalism, and the reasons for it are not recorded. The development world needs to take this opposition and the literature it produces seriously.

iii) Security of Tenure

One of the major issues that creates poverty in Asian cities is evictions and the bulldozing of settlements. The scale of evictions can be judged from the fact that between 1998 and 2000 2.5 million people were evicted from their homes and an additional 3.6 million were under threat³. The reasons for evictions are:

• Development and or re-development projects (often considered unnecessary and or insensitive by communities, NGOs and concerned professionals). Many of these are funded by international loans⁴ and many others are built as joint ventures between local entrepreneurs and the international corporate sector. In recent years, in a few cases, NGO and concerned professionals have proposed alternatives to these projects which do not displace people and are far cheaper and more environmentally friendly⁵. These alternatives have been accepted where local government funds are involved but not where the projects are funded by federal and/or international finance.

• A powerful developer-bureaucrat-politician nexus which removes the poor from valuable land, often in violation of state laws and procedures, to build commercial real estate. The nexus also manipulates the design of development projects to cause displacement which they can then utilize for their purposes. The developers fund political parties and their candidates for elections to national, provincial and local assemblies thus giving them an important say in the corridors of power. This say is used to manipulate land records, keep land titles unclear and influence city planning and or the modification of city plans that they consider hostile to their interests⁶.

• Attempts at the regularization of informal settlements has failed miserably to meet its targets because communities do not control the finances that they pay for upgrading and nor do they have technical advise for supporting their interests. Where they do control finances and have technical support, the results are very different⁷.

• Laws to protect communities from eviction or to provide tenure security either do not exist or procedures for their application have not been developed in most Asian countries. Even where they do exist, such as in Pakistan, they can be violated because of the unequal relationship between the developer-bureaucrat-politician nexus and poor communities. Where sensitive and dedicated NGO support is available to communities, a solution can be negotiated in their favour⁸ resulting in improved social and environmental conditions.

The repercussions of evictions and land speculation are a major cause of poverty. They are removing the poor from the city and pushing them into unserviced peri-urban areas far away from their places of work. This puts an additional cost of time and money for transportation purposes; makes it difficult for mothers to work outside the home or settlement; distances the poor from proper health care and education institutions; and increases the rich-poor divide. It also creates alienation and hence conflict which accompanied by poverty increases crime and violence. And above all, it produces new unserviced or under-serviced settlements that governments can ignore since they are not in the city centres.

Squatter settlements are the result of a major formal sector demand-supply gap in housing. One of the major reasons for this gap is the excessive cost of land. This excessive cost is the result of speculative forces supported by formal sector investors and their collaborators in government. If speculation can be curtailed, land prices would be rational, more easily affordable to the richer amongst the poor and poor settlement would be nearer to their places of work.

iv) Neighbourhood Issues

Through numerous projects funded by special poverty alleviation programmes finances are poured into neighbourhood level infrastructure in poor settlements. Much of this infrastructure simply does not function since its links with primary and secondary infrastructure of the city does not exist because of the absence of a comprehensive city plan that links the informal settlements to the rest of the city. In many cases this is because the development of primary and secondary infrastructure has either not taken place or has been ad-hoc since it has developed before planning could be undertaken. No documentation of this infrastructure exists. In addition, no attempt at such documentation has taken place to the best of my knowledge in any city I know except by a couple of NGOs⁹, and technical people in local government have initial difficulties in accepting it.

In addition, building bye laws and regulations that are applied to informal settlements conflict with their typology. They are anti-pedestrian, anti-mixed land use, unrealistic with regard to building materials and compulsory open space requirements and as such often displace families and adversely effect the way of life of poor communities.