Broken Cities. Deborah Potts
up’ and add storeys. The usual ‘rules’ of the economic geography of any urban settlement pertain for both sectors. There are also similar influences on the extent to which houses originally built as homes for a family or one household may now also contain lodgers, or have extensions built to house lodgers – swings in income and domestic household cycles among them. The cost of materials such as cement, sand and roofing will feed through to costs in either sector, as will the ways in which any government subsidies or restrictions on, for example, imports affect their availability and price. But factors such as these are rarely at the forefront of comparisons between the sectors.
Much of the housing literature, with its tendency to analyse urban housing in the GS and the GN as distinctive subsets that do not require cross-comparison except to note their differences, tends to be negative towards urban housing in the urban GS. The emphasis is usually on the poor quality of housing and services for many residents, and on institutional ‘problems’ in GS cities which hinder the achievement of the housing norms of the GN. The term ‘slums’ may be used loosely in such discussions, despite decades of efforts by thoughtful housing scholars1 to limit its use to very specific housing types. It is rarer for analyses to consider which characteristics of GS urban housing, especially informal housing, offer anything positive for urban people, or how they might add to understandings of housing issues in the urban GN.
Formal-sector, large-scale, for-profit housing
Many urban settlements in Europe and Asia and in parts of Africa are very old and some of their housing stock reflects the workings of modes of production with class and land ownership systems that pre-dated capitalism. Much has been knocked down and replaced, of course, sometimes facilitated in large industrial cities by the bombings during World War Two. Smaller towns in Europe, such as Bury St Edmunds in the UK, Verona in Italy or Carcassonne in France, often have better-preserved sections of still inhabited housing built in a pre-capitalist era. Much has been fully incorporated into the capitalist land and housing markets since the institutions of capitalism came to dominate. Although the building types and materials do not comply with modern regulations, this is understood to be inevitable and only gradual modernisation occurs as houses are maintained over time. GS cities such as Beijing, Mumbai, Kano, Kochi, Timbuktu, Addis Ababa, Istanbul and a host of others all require an understanding of pre-capitalist land and property systems and regulations about the built environment if some of their housing, and their more general built environment, are to be interpreted. In many, more than two modes of production are still evident – Addis Ababa, for example, started afresh (and very late by world standards) as a feudal city in the late nineteenth century. Then, without much change, it became a Marxist-Leninist city after a revolution in 1975. After a subsequent revolution in 1987 it shifted down the path of capitalism and market-oriented urban policies and influences. However, Addis remains an extraordinary mixture of forces, because, while the government ‘talks right’ to appease the global forces of capitalism and entice foreign direct investment (FDI) from anywhere it can, especially China, the state is still inclined to ‘walk left’ and intervene in the housing market, inter alia, far more than is usual for an African state.
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