The Importance of Secure Tenure in Slum Communities
              (by Wojciech Gryc)

As urbanization continues to increase and millions of people flock to cities, the problems cities face become more apparent and serious. Issues like sanitation, water quality, and homelessness affect all cities, regardless of location and size. Indeed, estimates say up to 3 million people are homeless in Europe, a developed continent, with 18 million more living in inadequate housing conditions. The problems cities face are most serious in slums, which provide living space for 32% of the world's urban population and pose unique challenges to cities. The problems affecting slums are numerous, with many interacting to exacerbate the negative social, economic, and physical conditions slum dwellers face. The biggest of these problems is lack of tenure security, with legal reforms being the most promising approach to alleviating these problems and improving slum dwellers' lives.

According to the United Nations, slums are "heavily populated urban area[s] characterized by substandard housing and squalor". The problems they face include the lack of availability of clean water and sanitation, environmental problems, poor nutrition and health, and lack of legal protection. While most prominent in large urban areas, population growth rates in many small cities are much higher than those of megacities and continued urbanization threatens to increase the amount of slums everywhere.

Slums may be formal or informal settlements, and tend to form on both privately and publicly owned lands where slum dwellers are relatively unlikely to be evicted. These areas are rarely developed and lack proper infrastructure to support water utilities or sanitation, forcing residents to use dirty water. Local entrepreneurs may transport water to slum areas, but charge prices up to twelve times as high as those charged by utility companies, further promoting the poverty of slum dwellers. Water contaminated by faecal material kills up to 3 million children a year, and this is a major problem within slums. As urban populations continue to grow, governments may be unable to continue to provide public services. Nairobi's population, for example, grows at roughly 5 per cent a year and the city's waste collection rates dropped from 90 per cent to 33 per cent between 1978 and 1998, causing adverse effects to the city's water supply.

Areas settled by slum dwellers tend to be of substandard quality and are often environmentally unsound. Many slums are located on steep hills or near rivers, exposing residents to landslides, floods, and other environmental hazards. Flooding in Venezuela during 1999 showed just how vulnerable such populations are - hundreds of poor people were killed after persistent rain caused landslides and flooding. In some cases, rather than facing natural threats, slums may be located near industrial areas and areas threatened by pollution instead. Many of those affected by the chemical disaster in Bhopal, which killed 3000 people, were living in nearby slums.

The lack of sanitation and clean water, coupled with environmental threats, leads to a wide range of health problems affecting slum dwellers. Vermin infestations caused by inadequate housing and propagation of waste and expensive health care programs cause widespread health problems within slums. The costs of healthcare and basic services also promote gender inequality, as poor families tend to favour treating boys. In one slum in Dhaka city, for example, the death rate of boys was 20.5 per 1000, while girls suffered 27.0 deaths per 1000. While NGOs work to alleviate these problems, their success has been limited to local vaccination programs.

The problems outlined above, however, are all rooted in the economic, social, and political rights of slum dwellers. The disproportionate amount of female deaths has been linked to a lack of basic human rights, and in many cases, the economic systems which slum dwellers must cope with cause problems such as local food shortages even when food production is stable. Thus, the issue of tenure security and human rights within slum communities is the biggest problem slum dwellers face.

One major problem of slums is population turnover due to economic changes, government programs, or forced evictions. Without population retention and development of psychosocial bonds between people within the community, slums will continue to deteriorate. Many slum dwellers already depend on their social ties rather than institutions, and these ties are continually threatened due to people's lack of permanent residence. Forced evictions and population displacement also exacerbate these problems within slums.

In many developing nations and areas where slums are a major issue, slum dwellers tend to be ignored by the government. Indeed, many legal systems only recognize and work to benefit those who have formal land holdings; a legal resource most slum dwellers do not have. The social exclusion brought about by inadequate rights may be the reason for high crime rates, violence, and inadequate housing conditions within slums.

The numerous problems affecting slums have forced a large number of academics and social scientists to research possible solutions. This has led to a large amount of debate as to the possibility of a universal solution to the problems of slums. Localized policies have been criticized as too focused, and allow cities to adopt inappropriate solutions that simply displace slum dwellers to other areas, while others have argued that slums tend to form in clusters that suffer from unique combinations of problems, making it impossible to design a universalized slum strategy. Thus, it is important to find a balance between the two, and developing a universal policy that may be molded to the specific needs of slum communities would be optimal.

Furthermore, solutions advocated by specific groups have been criticized for not meeting the needs of slum dwellers. Government-backed solutions like slum upgrading schemes or funneling money into urban development have not been successful in the past. Jane Jacobs argues that, contrary to popular belief, money is not the problem - planning and policy making is the real problematic issue. Such an idea has been reinforced by failed projects in the past. Giuliani and Wiesenfeld point to examples of sports complexes being built near slum neighbourhoods to develop and improve the community.

Solutions implemented through non-governmental organizations have also been criticized for having narrow spatial foci. While solutions like vaccination programs or development projects may help people at a local level, they are difficult to implement universally. Furthermore, many slum dwellers depend more on social ties than local NGOs, as NGOs may suffer from funding cutbacks and changes in projects, which makes slum dwellers dependent on NGOs for help incredibly vulnerable.

The Challenge of Slums, a report released by the United Nations Human Settlements Programme, outlines participatory slum upgrading as a best practice. Such solutions have the support of governments and NGOs, but work with slum dwellers to figure out the communities' needs; all parties involved work to implement solutions. While such a solution works well, it depends on the support of government, and may require large amounts of funding.

Based on the need to have a universal policy applicable to the unique circumstances of slums, and the importance of including all key players within slum development in the process, the most promising solution to the problems facing slums is tenure security reform. Removing the bureaucratic and legal barriers to secure tenure in slums may be the most important aspect of slum development. By removing such obstacles, not only do slum dwellers become immune to forced evictions, they also gain access to credit, allowing them to further improve their homes and living areas.

By giving slum dwellers the ability to own the land they live on, they not only gain access to credit, but they get incentive to improve the land. Observations of Boston's "North End" slum during the mid-1900s showed that while Boston's government lacked any major development projects in the area, citizens worked together by trading labour and materials to improve each others' lives. The Economist cites similar examples in the developing world, such as Orangi, slums in Karachi, where citizens worked together to build their own sewage system with a minimal amount of outside funding; a similar event took place in north-east Brazil. Such projects would not be possible if local populations were continually threatened by evictions and the loss of property.

It is estimated that the value of property informally owned within the developing world and former communist states is as high as $9.3 trillion, part of which is owned by slum dwellers and urban poor. By giving them the ability to use their property as collateral, slum dwellers gain access to credit and are then able to afford small-scale loans and microinsurance, allowing them to protect themselves from economic fluctuations, disease, and other problems that may arise. Not only does this promote secure tenure, but may improve health and nutrition within slum communities.

The importance of secure tenure and benefits thereof has been recognized by both NGOs and multinational corporations (MNCs). Organizations like Slum Dwellers International work to promote formal ownership within slums and advocate simpler legal approaches to ownership.

Some MNCs have begun offering services to slum dwellers and urban poor, even supporting them with private credit programs that do not depend on government support. In such cases, companies work to promote relationships with clients and offer low-cost services and products to individual people, or promote the development of cooperatives that allow citizens to work together to buy products they would not be able to afford if working alone. This, too, has allowed citizens to improve their living arrangements and ensure better quality of life for everyone involved.

Where NGOs and MNCs are not present to develop such programs, slum dwellers have been able to do so alone by forming land cooperatives and community land trusts. Collections of slum dwellers have also banded together to lobby governments for legal recognition, or have worked together or with NGOs to ensure they will not be evicted from their land. Not only does this benefit slum dwellers legally and economically, it also strengthens the psychosocial bonds that some researchers have found to be so important with regards to slum rehabilitation.

However, without proper legal recognition and support from local governments, such solutions continue to be threatened by unfair and arbitrary laws.

While the means may be different, the collective actions of slum dwellers, NGOs, MNCs, and willing governments has shown that regardless of how they are achieved, increased property rights can lead to better access to credit, microinsurance, and an overall improvement in the health and well-being of slum dwellers. Thus, tenure security is the most urgent problem currently facing slums, as without it, slum dwellers are subject to harassment, forced evictions, and a general inability to improve their lives. By creating a multifaceted approach that includes all key players in development, including government, NGOs, MNCs, and slum dwellers themselves, it is possible to improve slums and the lives of those within them.

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