Landlordism in Third World Urban Low-income Settlements: A Case for Further Research

The debate on housing the urban poor has become more sophisticated since Turner’s original ideas of self-help and self-building by the poor were introduced in the 1970s. Today, the emphasis in housing the poor is on a pluralistic approach that stresses enabling housing provision for the poor by expanding the range of providers to include government, the private sector, the poor themselves, non-governmental agencies, and cooperatives. Official housing policy in Ghana does not reflect the pluralistic approach that prevails in practitioner and academic circles. Using ethnography, this paper presents the housing experience of a typical poor family in Ghana to determine what the poor build. It highlights the obstacles the poor have to overcome to acquire the housing they want. The ethnography provides a basis upon which the mismatch between the pluralistic approach and Ghana’s housing policy can be bridged thus providing a way forward. The paper concludes by emphasizing the importance of the housing industry in poverty alleviation in Ghana.

Housing the Urban Poor in Twenty-First Century Sub-Saharan Africa: Policy Mismatch and a Way Forward for Ghana

African Urban Research since the Late 1980s: Responses to Poverty and Urban Growth

Subsistence and Petty Capitalist Landlords: A Theoretical Framework for the Analysis of Landlordism in Third World Urban Low Income Settlements*

The poor state of housing in the cities of developing countries has been the subject of numerous studies. Only a few published articles on the topic, however, emphasise the complexity and interrelatedness of the key components of housing such as land, finance, building materials, and construction technologies. This article examines one of these components, namely finance, and assesses its importance to the development of appropriate low‐income housing in Kenya's second city, Mombasa. Kenya's urban housing policy emphasises home ownership rather than rentals. For the low‐income groups, the twin package of site and service and settlement upgrading has been the main programme of action. One of the most recent projects of this nature, the Second Urban Project (SUP) is evaluated here in so far as the nature of its financing has had important repercussions on the low‐income urban housing sub‐sector in Mombasa. It is the contention of this paper that the introduction into Mombasa's low‐income settlement...

The changing nature of financing low‐income urban housing development in Kenya

This paper examines the changes which have occurred in the low-income settlements in Mombasa, Kenya's second largest city, in connection with the production and retail of building materials. The analysis is conducted via the articulation of modes of housing production concept. Prior to the implementation of settlement upgrading in Mombasa, funded by the World Bank and the United States Agency for International Development, there existed a distinct mode of low-income housing production and consumption in the town. The typical low-income housing in Mombasa is the swahili house which had its own market both for the supply of traditional building materials as well as tenancy arrangements. With the commencement of the provision of low-income housing based on international aid agencies' planning orthodoxy, the swahili housing scene has undergone a tremendous transformation. The proscription of the use of traditional (indigenous) materials in housing construction has resulted in raising the cost of housing beyond the majority of the urban poor. In addition, it has adversely affected small-scale retail outlets which specialized in the supply of these materials. This process has gone hand in hand with the prescription that only industrially manufactured materials are to be used in low-income settlements. The popularization of the use of industrially manufactured materials has also resulted in the emergence of middlemen in the supply of these materials to the low-income settlements. This development too has meant that the cost of building materials has to rise, in some cases by over five times, from the production points to the construction sites. The fundis (traditional artisans) have also found themselves in a precarious situation because they have either to get extra training in handling the ‘new’ materials and ‘modern’ housing plans or be marginalized to mere repair works.



The paper concludes that the articulation between the traditional and the modern modes of housing production in Mombasa has been to the benefit of the latter. It is, however, pointed out that the process of commercialization of low-income settlements had commenced earlier than the involvement of international aid agencies, and therefore state intervention in this sector merely speeded up this process and increased its magnitude. It is argued that for state intervention to benefit the intended group, it must build upon the pre-existing organizational structures as blind intervention would be costly, if not counterproductive, and may exacerbate the problem, as the Mombasa situation reveals.

Gervase Chris Macoloo

Papers

The Transformation of the Production and Retail of Building Materials for Low-Income Housing in Mombasa, Kenya