Housing Africa's Urban Poor

Philip Amis, Peter Lloyd

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429817182
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Originally published in 1990, this book reveals the extent to which petty landlordism is developing not just in the African urban settlements that have sprung up but in government-sponsored low-cost housing estates. The first part of the book traces African governments' changing responses to urban growth since the 1960s. The second presents case studies of housing markets and landlord-tenant relations north and south of the Sahara. The third examines World Bank involvement, and the book ends by considering policy implications.

PART I

CHANGING APPROACHES TO URBAN HOUSING IN AFRICA

1 Richard E. Stren

URBAN HOUSING IN AFRICA: THE CHANGING ROLE OF GOVERNMENT POLICY

I intend in this chapter broadly to outline the ‘housing question’ in African cities since the period immediately preceding independence, and to relate this question to government policy responses across the continent. I shall argue that by the late 1980s, our understanding of the role of housing in the development process has undergone some major changes. These changes are related both to more modest expectations of the role of the state in the provision of housing in Africa, and to the elaboration of commercial networks in African cities which have been increasingly responsible for the supply of urban services to the poor.

To understand the context within which urban housing is presently situated in Africa, it is necessary first to sketch the history of housing as government policy across the continent. This history can conveniently be divided into three phases. The first of these may be called the state housing phase. This phase lasted from the 1950s (or just before independence) in most countries, to the late 1960s and early 1970s. During this phase, the focus of government policy was the construction of public housing estates, tight central planning controls and large-scale urban master plans. This gave way – in many, if not all countries – to the aided self-help phase, during which planning standards began to be relaxed and state aid was extended to (in principle) low-income groups to build and improve their own houses. This second phase overlapped with the first, lasting from the early 1970s through the early 1980s. The present phase, which began in the late 1970s when the consequences of the African economic downturn began to manifest themselves in the cities, may be called the management and infrastructure phase. During this phase, governments have become increasingly concerned about efficient local management and effective controls over decentralised initiatives, while they struggle to deploy resources to maintain a deteriorating infrastructural base. Although many countries have now entered the third phase, they have not necessarily totally discarded either the symptoms of, or the policy approaches characteristic of the other phases. In the remainder of the chapter, I shall explore the dynamics of each of these phases, concentrating on the interaction between the changing manifestations of the ‘low-income housing problem’ and the government policy response.

PHASE ONE: STATE HOUSING

The post-war years in Africa were, in relative terms, a period of rapid social change. From stagnation during the inter-war years, and heavy administrative controls on rural-urban movement during the Second World War, the towns began to grow much more rapidly. Georges Balandier, the author of one of the earliest classics on African cities, begins his exposition with a lengthy treatment of the ‘rural exodus’ in Congo-Brazzaville, and the problems posed by the ‘brutal growth’ of urban centres (Balandier, 1985: 15–45). From a population of about 4,000 Africans on the eve of the First World War, Brazzaville had grown to a population of between 80,000 and 100,000 by 1950. Elsewhere, the capital cities of other colonies were expanding at an equally rapid pace. Although there were substantial non-African populations in most major colonial cities, the great majority, the fastest growing part of the urban population, was of African origin. As Jean Dresch put it, the African city was ‘created by the whites, but inhabited by blacks’ (quoted in Balandier, 1985: 15).

This enormous population growth in post-war African cities was accompanied by a more dynamic economy throughout Africa, and by legislative instruments in Great Britain (the Colonial Development and Welfare Act of 1940) and France (FIDES, or the Fund for Economic and Social Development, established in 1946) which supported economic planning, and the construction of significant infrastructural works. Such a major effort implied higher productivity of African workers. Productivity of African workers, in turn, was seen to depend on a certain level of urban welfare measures, not the least of which was the provision of adequate family housing. Indeed, large-scale projects to construct urban housing estates were a key element in the effort to create a stable African urban middle class – a particularly attractive administrative objective during the fifties all over Africa, but especially in Kenya.

Two of the hallmarks of the colonial approach to African urban housing in the fifties were the redevelopment of decaying ‘core’ areas combined with the removal of ‘slums’ or squatter areas, and the construction of large rental (sometimes tenant-purchase) public housing estates. Once the dust had settled after independence in the early sixties, these policies were pursued with even more vigour than before. In a classic Nigerian study, Peter Marris studied a large ‘slum clearance’ scheme covering seventy acres in central Lagos. Marris stresses the visible achievement of ‘modernity’ as a public goal. ‘The overriding aim’, he writes, ‘was to rebuild the most conspicuous neighbourhood of Lagos to the standard Nigerians had set themselves, as a matter of pride, and a symbol of the progress they were determined to achieve’ (Marris, 1961: 119). Most of the people who were forced to leave the redeveloped area on Lagos Island did not, for various reasons, settle in the mainland flats that had been built especially for them.

In Kenya, many of the same factors were at work. Thus the colonial Central Housing Board (originally established during the early 1950s) was transformed into a National Housing Corporation (NHC) in 1967, and given power directly to undertake housing projects throughout the country. The NHC was expected to be a more vigorous actor in the housing field than the old Board, which needed ‘to have a new image in playing a role which is in keeping with the spirit of the new, independent Kenya’ (quoted in Stren, 1984: 235). By the early 1970s, the NHC was building an average of about 2,000 public housing units per year, most of them in the capital city. To the south, Tanzania also established a National Housing Corporation in 1962, for essentially the same reasons. While the Kenyan housing agency operated through a tendering procedure with private sector contractors, the Tanzanian NHC hired a large staff and built directly. But over the five-year period of Tanzania’s first national plan, which ran until 1969, fully 70 per cent of the 5,705 low-cost houses built by the Tanzanian NHC were replacement units, built on the site of former ‘slum’ dwellings that had been eradicated in downtown Dar es Salaam. Although the Kenyan NHC managed to maintain a relatively high level of production of conventional housing units throughout the 1970s (from a low of 317 in 1976 to a high of 4,085 in 1979), the Tanzanian NHC was wound down by the government. Mismanagement and corruption, an inability to keep costs down, and unavailability of low-interest funding from the Treasury were cited as the reasons for this low level of performance. From 1975 to 1980, the corporation averaged less than 100 units per year (Stren, 1984: 248). While both Kenya and Tanzania began seriously to experiment with other modalities of public support for housing, the public housing corporation was the main instrument of policy until the mid-1970s in both countries.

Across the continent, large public housing projects, accompanied by systematic eradication of ‘urban blight’ and the maintenance of high standards of physical development, characterised both Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire. In Senegal, SICAP (Société Immobilière du Cap-Vert) was formed as early as 1949, as a mainly public company to develop lodging in the capital. Ten years later, a fully public corporation, OHLM (Office des Habitations à Loyer Modéré) was formed for lower-cost housing. Both corporations depended largely on state subsidies, the funds for OHLM coming notably from a 2 per cent tax on the salaries of permanent workers. By 1968, the two agencies had produced close to 12,000 housing units, almost all of them in Dakar. Of this total, SICAP in the period 1951–68 produced 7,441 units in seventeen different projects in the capital city (Sommer, 1972: 65). Although the production of SICAP and OHLM declined in the 1970s, the Senegalese state carried out a major campaign to eradicate central-city ‘bidonvilles’ from 1972 through 1976. Over the whole period from 1951 to 1976, more than 90,000 people were displaced through eradication measures (White, 1985: 512). And in 1976 and 1977 the state pressed further, systematically and forcefully ejecting urban marginals, or ‘human encumberments’ as they were called in official documents, from the downtown areas (Collignon, 1984).

The approach of the Ivorian government, while initially slower to gain momentum, and bereft of the same animus toward urban marginals as in Senegal (perhaps because the expanding Abidjan economy offered more formal opportunities to absorb such people), followed a similar trajectory. From 1955 to 1970, the state stayed in the background in the promotion of housing (Haeringer, 1985). Urban policy during this early period was characterised by Philippe Haeringer as a ‘double or nothing’ policy (Haeringer, 1969). Pursuing this imagery, Michael Cohen writes:

Insisting on rapid, modern urban development, Ivorian public authorities have established objectives which do not include the majority of urban population. High quality housing, building standards, capital-intensive infrastructure, incentives for growth-producing industries rather than employment-generating enterprises, and spatial planning all reflect official intentions to develop urban areas according to ultramodern standards. This policy ignores the majority of the population, providing few services which urban residents can afford or simply not providing services at all. Housing policies force people to reside in bidonvilles in unsanitary, crowded, and expensive conditions. Rather than improve these quartiers populaires, the government allocates resources to the residential neighbourhoods inhabited by the ruling class. (Cohen, 1974: 33–4)

Just after the late 1960s when Cohen carried out his research, the Ivorian state made some major efforts to catch up with the housing deficit in Abidjan. Haeringer calls the decade from 1970 to 1980 the period of ‘the great leap forward’. During this period the state made a significant commitment to build ‘social housing’ and to equip large tracts of peripheral urban land with high quality infrastructure (Haeringer, 1985). In a massive construction orgy, unparalleled in black Africa, SICOGI (Société Ivoirienne de Construction et de Gestion Immobilière, formed out of two existing parastatals in 1965), which had built only 1,858 units in Abidjan before 1970, produced 21,897 ‘low-cost’ units in the next decade. At this pace, it was only slightly ahead of SOGEFIHA (Société de Gestion Financière de l’Habitat, created in 1963) which built 17,912 ‘low-cost’ units during the same period (Djamat-Dubois, N’Guessan et N’Guessan, 1983). Meanwhile SETU (La Société d’Equipement du Terrain Urbain, established at the end of 1971), by September 1979, had prepared 1,779 ha. of land in Abidjan, of which the company itself estimated 444 were for ‘low-cost housing’ and accommodated as many as 350,000 persons (Equipements et Transports, 1980: 227). In proportion to the population of the country, but excluding the enormous amount of private housing constructed on plots prepared by SETU, the Ivorian housing parastatals produced over four times as much housing as did the NHC in Kenya – one of the leading housing agencies in Anglophone Africa.

By the late 1970s in Côte d’Ivoire, but much earlier in most other countries, this direct, statist approach to urban housing had run its course. While it has not totally disappeared as an active option, it has been downgraded in importance and obliged to coexist with other policy approaches. Perhaps the major reason for this shift in emphasis is the enormous expense of financing and constructing fully equipped housing units, particularly at a time of economic stagnation and even recession in most African countries. A related reason involves equity. Although billed in most cases as ‘low-cost’ units, state-built housing has inevitably involved a high level of public subsidies to ensure that the monthly (rental or mortgage) payments fall within the range that ‘low-income’ families can in principle afford. In the process, and given the enormous pressure on urban housing outside the state sector, this has produced a distorted situation in which enormous benefits accrue to individuals who are able to obtain these housing units. As a result, the wealthy and the well-connected have benefited disproportionately from state-built housing, in comparison with the urban poor and lower middle-income groups. While this ‘bias’ in public housing programmes (Temple and Temple, 1980) mirrors similar biases in other sectors, it is particularly hard to defend in countries where the rural poor constitute the overwhelming majority of the population. In the event, an alternative approach, to which we now turn our attention, has developed in an attempt more effectively to respond to this question.

PHASE TWO: AIDED SELF-HELP

For Africa, the origins of the aided self-help approach to urban housing lay in two apparently unrelated phenomena. The first was the massive growth of spontaneous housing. While controls over the use of residential land in African cities were relatively tight during the colonial period, the immediate post-independence period saw the inability of the formal planning system to provide adequate infrastructure and services for large numbers of rural to urban migrants. Thus by 1967 it was estimated that 36 per cent of Dar es Salaam’s population lived in ‘uncontrolled settlements’; during the same year, the equivalent figure for Lusaka was 27 per cent. Two years later, Dakar had an estimated 30 per cent of its population in such settlements (World Bank, 1972: 82). These figures, while they varied considerably between countries, tended to rise over time. Thus Dar es Salaam had 44 per cent of its population living in ‘squatter’ areas in 1972, constituting an average compound yearly increase from 1969 through 1972 of 24 per cent (Stren, 1975: 60–2). By 1979, the estimate of the Master Plan was as high as 60 per ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Contributors
• Foreword I. M. Lewis, Hon. Director of the International African Institute
• Introduction: Key themes in contemporary African urbanisation: Philip Amis
• Part I: Changing approaches to urban housing in Africa
• Part II: Case studies in housing markets: commercialisation and change
• Part III: Housing projects and policy options
• Epilogue: Peter Lloyd
• Index