Broken Cities. Deborah Potts
in situ – which generally happens anyway where occupiers are also homeowners, their incomes allow and they feel secure – or with providing state-subsidised decent alternatives.
Housing standards in the Global South: Zimbabwe example
The outcomes of adherence to inappropriate housing standards and ill will on the part of governments that punish poor people living in informal housing have been well illustrated in the cities of Zimbabwe. Yet this also shows how complex the situation can be, since political attitudes and incomes are not fixed but change over time. The fixation with standards evident in this case also helps demonstrate how differences between the GN and GS may be less marked than supposed.
As explained in Chapter 2, the cities of the countries of southern Africa that were once ruled by white minority regimes are all of colonial origin and are premised upon a crucial difference between them and the urban colonial experience in many other societies, except in Latin America: that is, usually nearly all the land on which they developed and their surrounding areas were alienated from the original occupants and either owned by the state or held privately. In both cases, the norms and legal underpinnings of capitalist property were dominant, backed by the necessary institutions. In this regard, cities such as Harare, Windhoek and Pretoria are more like American or European cities than they are like other cities in much of the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, where pre-capitalist tenurial arrangements remain significant.
These circumstances made it easier to control residential housing developments and to exclude Africans from ‘white’ cities. Although these controls broke down towards the end of liberation struggles to end white minority rule in all three countries (Zimbabwe, Namibia and South Africa), and squatter housing on private and public land emerged, in Zimbabwe most of what was a fairly limited amount of such housing was removed after independence in 1980. Crucially, at that point many of the occupants were moved into highly subsidised new site-and-service schemes and not left to fend for themselves. This left Zimbabwe, uniquely in sub-Saharan Africa, with an essentially planned and regulated residential urban landscape by the mid-1980s. In other words, cities such as Harare and Bulawayo were more like London or Birmingham in terms of land tenure, property rights and regulated housing than they were like Dar es Salaam or Lagos or Kinshasa. And the government was determined to keep it that way.
Over the next 20 years, up until 2005, Zimbabwean urban housing projects ostensibly targeted at low-income groups varied somewhat in their characteristics, particularly in terms of the degree to which state or donor subsidies were provided to make housing more affordable for the poor. These shifts were in line with global neoliberalism and the shift to more market-oriented policies generally; some of the outcomes for affordability have already been discussed in Chapter 2. On the whole, most planned urban housing had been delivered through site-and-service schemes and the official focus was almost entirely on homeownership, as is common throughout the GS. In such schemes, residents purchased a plot and then built a house, hiring their own builders and/or using their own labour. However, they had to comply with a host of building standards. Throughout the process, the housing built was closely regulated and monitored by local officials. Key regulations included the conditions that the plans were approved by the municipality, the houses were fully serviced with water and sanitation, and they had proper foundations, a concrete slab floor, and walls of fired brick or cement blocks. The roof had to be asbestos, metal or tiles. In theory, homeowners were meant to construct a four-room unit and ablution facilities within 18 months, although often they could not afford this and a blind official eye was usually turned as long as some progress was occurring. As explained in Chapter 2, many of the poor could not afford to be allocated a plot at all. Some who did manage to convince schemes that they could afford the costs then found them too much to bear.
In Zimbabwe in the first decade or so after independence, there was the political will to maintain regulated standards. The government also managed to maintain a situation where there was very little squatting. In any case, it was not generally possible to build urban homes in the immediate rural hinterland by taking advantage of non-capitalist tenurial arrangements (although this constraint was to change when fast-track land reform began in the twenty-first century, reshaping the city’s residential geography in significant ways). This feature meant that it was possible to believe that urban housing processes could be controlled, in contrast to the situation across other parts of the GS. In addition, due to a curious mix of a positive desire for poor urban residents to live in decent housing and an official compulsion to exert control via planning, the vast majority of Zimbabwe’s urban residents did not live in ‘slums’ (as defined by UN-Habitat) by the turn of the twenty-first century. They mostly had on-plot access to sanitation and clean water and accessible clinics and schools. There was no pretence that the private, market-oriented, large-scale housing industry could possibly provide affordable housing, given local incomes, and, as shown for the case study of Glen Norah C in Chapter 2, efforts to bring in private loans for self-builders on already subsidised land had made even these schemes problematic. But Zimbabwe’s urban housing situation was bursting at the seams. The maintenance of building standards made even low-income schemes too expensive for a large sector of the population. They could only afford to rent; homeownership was simply beyond them. Thus, many of the rooms in the new ‘homes’ in the housing schemes and in the older townships of the colonial period were rented out. The ideal of one family per house, which fitted with the decent home concept, was fairly rare, especially in the high-density suburbs closer to city centres.
In fact, in many houses the norm was more like one household per room, just as in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Edinburgh or St Petersburg. Overcrowding was rife. And adding to the density of population, there was such a huge demand for rental housing that many plot-owners took to increasing their incomes by building backyard shacks. These were extensions or freestanding units built in any spare space on the plot behind the house: each had a household living in it or some were shared between lodgers. Complex subletting arrangements developed. In the areas most accessible to work, such as Mbare, Harare’s oldest township, shacks were sometimes eventually also built in front yards, in the gap between the house and the road. In most cases the homeowner also lived on-site, but there was a significant minority of absentee lessors. Besides the overcrowding, the insides of houses were often very poorly finished (no ceilings and unplastered walls, for example) as this was not regulated and had no structural implications. This did, however, undermine the comfort of the tenants.
Planning regulations made it clear that backyard shacks and unplanned extensions were illegal. So why, given its success in preventing squatting, did Zimbabwe allow the backyard shack situation to develop? The answer lies in a complex mix of national and city politics, with different city governments taking different attitudes over time. One factor was a gradually developing degree of pragmatism in the 1990s as the housing affordability problem became increasingly acute. Household incomes took a steep dive and fewer new subsidised housing schemes were built after structural adjustment policies were introduced in 1991. There was an element of genuine concern about increasing urban poverty at the time, and the backyard shacks ‘helped’ by providing affordable, if problematic, accommodation. Unless the state had been in a position to allocate to their residents subsidised houses in new site-and-service schemes, it was hard to see a ‘humane’ alternative. However, at the same time, and often in the same official circles, there was outright opposition to this ‘informal’ type of housing solution, which evidently undermined Zimbabwe’s aspirations for planned and tidy urban landscapes. In other words, the commitment to holding the line against backyard shacks fluctuated, and in periods of relative laxity and few demolitions, tens of thousands were built.
Given income levels and the mismatch between the supply and cost of affordable housing and the demand and need for it, inevitably some squatting did occur after independence, here and there. In Harare, for example, there were various small-scale occupations, usually