Land: The Central Human Settlement Issue

William T. Perks was Professor of Urbanism and Planning, Faculty of Environmental Design, University of Calgary.

The geographical focus of Land isthe developing countries. Some two-thirds of this highly informative book are dedicated to a documentation of global conditions and trends in urbanization, demography, and housing; along with this flows a recital of the failures of aid agencies and governments (the “formal sector”) in the general matter of devising, controlling, and implementing programs that do little more than keep the lid on the Third World cauldron of urbanization. Formal sector (i.e., top-down) planning and building programs of the past 20 years have seemingly victimized the poor while at the same time they have ignored — if not suppressed — the ingenuity and latent powers for self-aid and economic self-reliance that reside in the “informal sector” (i.e., small-scale enterprises and individual entrepreneurs).

The basic contention of Oberlander’s documentation is that the fundamental indecency of large settlement conditions can be traced to an interrelated set of land issues: no security of tenure; imbalances between formal sector housing/land development programs and remedial squatter district policies; illegal subdivisions; no local community say on authority; isolation of the poor in identifiably low-standard housing projects; monopolistic practices by central authorities in land assembly, planning and building projects; etc.

In Chapters 6 and 7 Oberlander enunciates a very large set of “policy initiatives for action planning.” Most of these are synthesized from the reports and advisories of researchers and consultants who move with regularity on the trajectories of U.N. missions and international conferences, CIDA and the IDRC, World Bank, etc. No report on proposition seems to have been left out, and it is a singular impediment of the book that Oberlander could not reduce so many ideas for “action” into a more succinct agenda. The proposed “initiatives” repose on a stipulation of releasing self-directed opportunities linked to local community autonomics: “the poor can house themselves if given access to land”; “the informal sector (already proven in retail and commercial enterprises) can do the job of ‘land development and shelter production’”; and the management, planning, and stewardship of land and its development must be vested in the local community.

These are not particularly radical principles, nor are they new. But as Oberlander himself points out, de facto recognition of them by the authorities who govern shelter policies and land allocation will require profound attitudinal and institutional behaviour “shifts:’ Among these: land can no longer be regarded as a commodity, it must be handled as a community-held trust; “security of occupancy” should be emphasized rather than security via property ownership; and governments should cease their quest for popularity through their sponsorship of massive “housing projects.” Instead, governments and aid agencies should together release the untapped resources of individual and mutual-help enterprises to build housing in more informal, varied and even ad hoc ways. Thus, while land is demonstrably the central material issue, the central development issues are techno-bureaucratic behavior and process, and political ideology.