Housing And Neighborhood

THE WORLD BANK

"HOUSING AND NEIGHBORHOODS"

PRESENTATION BY WEIPING WU, VIRGINIA COMMONWEALTH UNIVERSITY

[TRANSCRIPT PREPARED FROM A TAPE RECORDING.]

P R O C E E D I N G S MS. WU:

Hi.

Commonwealth University.

This is Weiping Wu from Virginia Today, we will be spending about

30 minutes to look at housing and neighborhood upgrading.

First, I would like to introduce some very basic concepts and different types of upgrading.

Then, we will

look at standards and land-use regulation issues, and then we will conclude the lecture with some best practices from around the world.

So, first, let's get started with some very basic concepts of upgrading.

Sometimes it's also called slum

upgrading, generally applying to neighborhoods of very low income or very high concentration of poverty.

And despite

different types of services and programs involved in upgrading, there are some very key elements of upgrading.

First of all, is a provision of some very basic or even upgraded infrastructure services and then, second, is to try to regularize property ownership.

This is actually

very important because when titles or ownerships are not clear, residents tend to have a problem, for instance, using housing as their collateral to get more credit, so regularizing property ownership gives not only residents incentives to invest more in the housing, but also give cities some better ways of taxing properties.

And last, but not least, a basic element of housing upgrading is the improvement of the dwellings or the

buildings, physically.

So there are a number of different

programs around the world for slum upgrading over the last few decades, and research or experience has shown that there are some ingredients for successful upgrading.

And first of all, and most important of all, is that it should not be a top-down process; it should be a partnership among the city or its implementation agencies, the community or neighborhood and the residents.

It's very,

very important that the residents be involved and have real demand for upgrading; i.e., it's not the city who will set the standards for upgrading.

It really should be up to the

residents to set the standards of upgrading, and we'll talk about that

a little bit later.

And then these standards should be also affordable financially to not just the city authorities, but also to the residents.

This will ensure what we call the

sustainability of upgrading.

Now, there are different types of upgrading.

Certainly, we've heard about terms like sites and services.

That's basically what we call here upgrade in place; that is, that residents are not moved, and upgrading programs are carried out while residents are living there.

So most of it

is somewhat basic services without involving, you know gutting the houses or redevelop the neighborhoods on the large scale.

And then we also heard about slum clearance or slum removal.

That is some concept very similar to the last

two types; clear and redeveloped.

In this type, clear and

redeveloped, we basically moved the residents to a temporary site for the time being, while redevelopment occurs, and then once redevelopment completes some of the residents, at least some of the residents will move back to the original site.

And last is the clear and relocate type which is really slum removal, which has proven to be not very successful.

Basically, the residents are moved somewhere

else, and the new development, either new types of development or new types of housing are redeveloped on the site for very much higher caliber of residents, in terms of financial affordability.

Certainly, most upgrading programs are done at an individual site, and that's basically the third type where we call it individual project, which is the most common types of upgrading, whereby different neighborhoods really go through different types of upgrading programs, and using different standards, but we also have countries that have used nationwide programs, and citywide programs.

Both of these we have seen in Indonesia, we have seen in Jordan.

We will talk about them a little bit later.

These really require very strong political will; i.e., either at the national level or the city level, so that

multiple sites are undergoing upgrading almost at the same time or in sort of a sequential manner.

So those are some

very basic concepts of housing and neighborhood upgrading.

Next, let's take a look at, you know, if we are going for the most common type of upgrading, which is individual project and individual site, and then how should we select an appropriate area for upgrading; i.e., what kind of criteria are we looking at here?

Obviously, first of all, the housing and health situations of the neighborhood should count the heaviest; i.e., if the situation is the worst among many neighborhoods, then this neighborhood should be a very good candidate for upgrading.

And, second, we should look at the level of community organization in the neighborhood.

Whenever we

have a better community organization in the form of either community association or neighborhood association, we tend to see projects going better in terms of organizing residents to put work in or to monitor the progress of city implementation agencies.

And third criteria we should look at is land use and tenure constraints, especially if we have multiple different types of land tenure conditions; i.e., some rental, some ownership, some second-hand ownership, and so on and so forth, and that tends to slow down the land

consolidation process.

It tends to make upgrading somewhat

more difficult.

So it's a balance.

I can't say that we should

pick a site that has a very simple tenure.

Certainly, many

informal neighborhoods and many slums have very complicated tenure constraints, and that doesn't mean that we should not aim for upgrading in these neighborhoods.

And certainly then we have a few other very obvious criteria--very strong, strong public interest from the residents, and then the existence of trunk infrastructure nearby.

Therefore, it's relatively less

costly to connect to the trunk infrastructure.

This will

include water, sewer, even electricity.

And then the boundaries of the neighborhood should be somewhat clear.

Therefore, we could define the

neighborhood, we could define the association of neighborhood in terms of engagement in upgrading.

And last, but not least, obviously, is also the priorities of the government agencies.

One of the very important things in upgrading projects is really setting up property standards for upgrading.

This is really not a technology issue.

It's

really an institutional issue; i.e., there are a number of different, for instance, technologies for delivering water or treated sewage.

Well, most projects should be considered, for instance, let's say in Beijing, in China, that we should consider what technology is appropriate, both in terms of affordability to the residents, but also existing capacity of the implementing agencies.

So we need a really true what

we call available technologies or appropriate technologies instead of using very update new ones or very costly ones.

For instance, research has shown, for instance, in very poor neighborhoods, if we use the traditional Western, centralized sewage collection and treatment system, it tends to cost very much, especially up front.

Therefore, we reach

much less or a much smaller number of residents.

So, in many countries, for instance in Brazil, a system called condominial sewers has been used very frequently in which a number of houses are connected together to a trunk line instead of as opposed to a Western system where each house is connected individually to the trunk sewer line.

And so that is a low-cost and alternative

infrastructure system that can be used fairly well, as experience has shown, in developing countries and developing cities.

Last, similarly, though, we need to set very realistic building regulations; that is, for instance regarding health codes, building codes and types of materials, and types of structural materials that we need to use for the dwelling improvement.

It should be affordable

to the residents as well.

So these standards are actually

just some examples and shows the importance of selecting appropriate standards not just advanced technology.

Let me just then use this table as an example to illustrate standards in infrastructure services.

For

instance, in many neighborhoods, the very first step of upgrading involves basically the provision of basic services, and this for water would be probably communal stand pipe that is shared by let's say half a dozen households instead of every single household has their own water tap.

And then in terms of a sewer, I just introduced the condominial or communal sewer system, and in terms of street, we could just use this paved access, instead of more fancy types of a street, furniture, and then for drainage, we could use unlined channels.

But as neighborhoods, this

is actually very important, upgrading is not a one-time shot.

It should be continuous, as shown in experience, for

instance, the very successful Indonesia.

It should be

continuous, and upgrading can be scaling up; i.e., higher standards can be used at a later stage of upgrading.

For instance, for a full service of infrastructure provision, we could use meters in individual houses for water, and we could use the Western conventional sewer for our different residents, and then we could use curved and

paved streets in the neighborhoods, and we could use line channels for drainage.

Basically, at the latter stage of upgrading, we could--scaling up--we could be scaling up the standards, not only for service delivery, but also for dwelling improvements, maybe even adding social and economic programs, as I will talk about when we look at the Indonesian case.

And I mentioned earlier that another very important part of operating program is the land issues or land-use regulation issues, and this I have two slides to show you.

First of all, we will look at quickly what regularizing properties would involve.

This will really

involve recognizing the legal right or even semi-legal right for the residents to use the property; for instance, in Indonesia's Kampung neighborhoods, many residents have lived there for generations, but they really don't own the properties, but what do you deal with this?

You know, you

can't really trace back all the way through the original owners, so these people really have what we call de facto ownership.

So we need to recognize at least part of it, so allow the residents to at least trade or either use these properties as collaterals to get additional investment to

improve their neighborhood and housing.

So that's really

the two key part of regularizing properties.

And also on the neighborhood scale, in the process of upgrading, we will probably very much be engaged in a process of what we call land adjustment.

Because oftentimes

in these poor neighborhoods or slum neighborhoods, properties tend to be very small, tend to be very irregular in shape, so we may need to either pool different lots together into one big lot, for instance, especially on the street front, to accommodate future commercial development or, in cases where land ownership is not clear, how do we actually give some residents some legal recognition.

For instance, in the case of some neighborhoods in Thailand, in Bangkok, whereby the slum dwellers have collectively bargained with the developer so that they get a share, let's say, 50 percent or 40 percent of the land ownership, so they have some say in terms of how the land will be developed or can be traded in the future.

But this

can be actually quite complicated, and sometimes if the resale of the upgraded properties will be involved, then it gets even more complicated, where newer and more negotiation may be necessary.

So it's not across-the-board types of practice we could sort of recommend to just any city.

And then another type of land adjustment process, what we call the land pooling or consolidation, this has

been used a lot in Japan, and Korea, and also in Taiwan, whereby, small lots are actually purchased together to form larger lots, especially along the street fronts for future commercial development. will take quite long.

So that actually is a process that

Sometimes the city will have to step

in and what we call condemn or acquire some of the smaller properties and consolidate them into larger lots.

And the second part of land-use regulation process is what we called using zoning as a tool for upgrading and for future development.

For instance, most of the slum

neighborhoods or the poor neighborhoods tend to have just residential use, and as they are upgraded, we need to think about potentially commercial uses or small neighborhood commercial uses for the resident.

Therefore, we need to

identify future land uses for the neighborhood, especially, like I said, again, the street front.

And then, second, this is also an opportunity for the city to use zoning to encourage desirable development patterns.

We see, in many of these slum neighborhoods or in

many of these poor neighborhoods, whereby, the setback is very, very small.

The fire access is very, very small.

Therefore, the fire truck can't get in, and all kinds of sort of hazards for health and fire purposes.

So using this opportunity to set appropriate standards for development patterns would be actually an important thing to do; again, being done through zoning.

And last, but not least, is the importance of open and communal space.

Obviously, again, in many poor

neighborhoods and slum neighborhoods, we don't see these.

So people don't have places to hang out.

Kids don't have

places to play, and so we need to consider providing this up front at the beginning of the project.

Therefore, we need to think about allowing some green area of open space for all residents.

And the trick

here, many research has shown, experience has shown, that the trick here is to provide somewhat larger open space or communal space in a smaller number.

Therefore, it's a little easier to maintain, and they do not turn into obsolete spaces that will be occupied, let's say, for illegal activities, drug trade, and so on and so forth.

So we need to have these spaces more visible,

bigger, easier to maintain, and available to all residents of the neighborhood.

So that's the last part of what we

call land regularization.

Oh, yes, actually, I forgot about this part, which is what we call community participation in upgrading. is actually very important.

This

It's really a process issue,

not so much of standards, not so much of a regulation issue.

It's a process issue, and I think China is currently looking into involving more and more residents in development process, in certainly upgrading process.

And so I would like to introduce very quickly why this was so important.

Again, experiences from other parts

of the world have shown that, first of all, project design should be bottom up, not top down; i.e., the residents should be involved in setting standards of what kind of materials are we going to use for the pavement, what kind of pipes are we going to be using for water, are we going to be using very expensive ones, are we going to be using appropriate affordable ones?

So that's what we call a

bottom-up project design.

And then, and not just the residents, but also in some kind of organized manner, through either what we call community-based organizations, CBOs, or nongovernmental organizations or what we call NGOs. So these organizations really are intermediaries between the residents and then the city authorities, sometimes even national authorities, and these organizations have also been very important in providing technical assistance to the residents, or instance, again, in the Indonesian Kampung program, we see a lot of that.

In the

Orangi project in Pakistan, we see the importance of NGOs or as well as local universities.

So, when we look at

community participation, I want to emphasize that, that it's not just the residents, but also the organizations, the NGOs, and the CBOs, and that's what we call, in the case of Orangi project in Pakistan, whereby, we have internal

development; i.e., the residents get organized through the organization, putting up their demands, getting them engaged in setting standards picking, materials, picking level of services, and then that is combined with the external development of the city authorities; for instance, in providing trunk infrastructure and in providing connections sometimes.

In fact, the NGOs helped a great deal in negotiating that connection.

So that was a very, very

successful example of how neighborhoods, organizations, city agencies get together in this sort of model of what we call internal development and external development.

And then the last part of setting standards is about the dwellings.

So the dwellings also oftentimes are

upgraded, in terms of its physical structure, its floor plan.

So, again, here I would like to advocate an

interactive dwelling design process, whereby the residents are also engaged.

In fact, a number of researchers or advocates have advocated that we use a process where the residents actually start with their dream houses; i.e., I don't have to worry about the cost constraints, what kind of houses would I need, and then later on, the architects will come in and work with them, and adjust their ideal design of the dwellings with cost constraints, with material constraints, with the size of the lots, these type of constraints.

So the residents are again in another round of working will come up with some more realistic designs of their dwellings.

Obviously, architects are involved

throughout the process, and then at the end of it, architects will help the residents to determine costs of materials and construction.

Again, the residents will have

some say whether this is satisfactory or whether it's beyond their affordability.

So, again, in terms of not only the infrastructure provision that we need community participation, in terms of the improvement of dwellings themselves, we also would like to see sort of, more or less, an interactive process for setting designs and standards.

As I mentioned earlier that I would like to conclude with a couple of best practices from elsewhere in the world, and the first of them is the Indonesian KIP, which is really, in terms of full name, is Kampung Improvement Programs. successful housing and the world.

This is probably one of the most neighborhood upgrading projects in

It started in the '60s.

First, in the second-largest city of Indonesia, Surabaya, and then was adopted by the Indonesian national government to be a national-scale project, and so it is using other cities, especially in the biggest city of Jakarta.

So this is a project that has been very successful.

I am talking about all of them, across

different cities.

Obviously, a level of success varies

across the city, but we have seen assessments by United Nations, World Bank, on the effect of this program, and in general they are very successful.

And some of the key elements or key factors of success in this project are what I will be mentioning in the following: First of all, and most important of all, is what we call community participation.

In fact, in many of these

Kampung neighborhoods in Indonesian cities, people have lived there "illegally" or informally for generations, and many of them are really what we call rural urban migrants.

In China, we have a lot of them. congregate by their origin.

Many of them

Let's say they're all from the

same rural village in the North, and they tend to live together.

Therefore, they have broad community relations

with them when they came to the city. Therefore, they actually maintain some of these community relations.

Therefore, they have had actually, in many Kampungs, very strong neighborhood associations.

In fact, they have different levels--at the neighborhood level, at the block level.

It's kind of like

in China we have I guess neighborhood, and we have building level where we have organizing people.

So this kind of a

system of social relationship or what we call social capital has been utilized very well in Kampung Improvement Programs, in KIP. Basically, these organizations would organize the residents, first of all, to identify what types of upgrading the neighborhood wants.

Second of all, and then what kinds

of in-kind contribution that a neighborhood could make.

As a matter of fact, this program is also very affordable because most residents get free materials from the city, but then they put in a great deal of work, what we call in-kind contribution, to implement these programs, let's say, install the sidewalks, install the water pipes, obviously, with some assistance or technical assistance from the local universities.

So that's one thing that's very,

very important.

And, second, this is very much an ongoing program.

It has gone through three phases nationally.

The first two

phases, Phase I and Phase II, essentially, involved a physical improvement to the neighborhood infrastructure, housing improvement.

Some of your most traditional type of

upgrading elements.

But in the first three, which is in more recent decades, in the '80s and '90s, we have seen KIP being scaled up; i.e., we have seen the provision of some health clinics, employment training or resident training for employment, and also educational facilities for children.

So we begin to

see social and economic programs being implemented through upgrading, and this is what we call scaling up.

And last, but not least, is that this KIP program has had a fairly low what we call homeowner turnover because the process of upgrading at each phase is fairly rapid and fairly extensive in terms of coverage; i.e., the entire neighborhood undergoes upgrading around the same time.

Therefore, most residents actually tend to stay where they are, instead of moving out or instead of being relocated all together.

So this is really an on-site upgrading program.

Obviously, there also have been some problems.

In fact,

some of my former Indonesian students have been telling me that some Kampung residents do sell their improved Kampungs after the completion of the upgrading program, so that they can make some money or they rent them out, and as a result, they themselves ended up living in other neighborhoods with Kampungs of even worse conditions. upgrading.

So here's the problem of

Do we really want to benefit?

benefit the people or the neighborhoods?

Are we wanting to And so it's

actually quite important, identifying these residents not just neighborhoods.

Overall, Indonesian's KIP programs are

fairly successful in keeping the residents on-site.

And, last, I would like to introduce to you basically Jordan's example, in terms of upgrading housing and neighborhood upgrading.

This is again a national

program.

It's still a very much ongoing program.

So it's

somewhat difficult to really assess the successfulness or success of the program.

A couple of things I'd like to mention for this program is basically the engagement of the private sector.

See, and KIP, it's basically the residents and then the government agencies, right?

Obviously, this is sort of the

case in many parts of the world.

But in Jordan and in other

countries, governments start to understand the difficulty of sort of affording the costs totally by the public sector in upgrading.

Therefore, in Jordan's program, there is a

significant element of private engagement with developers, in fact.

So that the upgrading of the neighborhoods in many

cities in Jordan engage what we called a mixed-income housing redevelopment; that is, only part of it will be saved for let's see residents who are originally there.

But

some of the other units of new housing or redeveloped housing will actually be set aside for market transactions; i.e., being sold to other residents who can actually afford market prices for housing.

So there is a sort of mixture of different kinds of housing in the redevelopment process, and so this is a little bit of an on-site improvement, but also relocating because some of the original residents will have to be relocated.

And this has been done in the United States, as

well, for instance, in Chicago, some of the HOPE IV programs

to improve public housing because this way we can utilize the financial resources of the private sector in helping some poor residents affording better housing.

So I guess with that I would like to end my discussion on housing and neighborhood upgrading. it's useful.

Thank you very much.

[End of Session.]

I hope