This article, which has been condensed by the Northwest Hub team, was originally published in FuturArc (2nd Quarter, 2009). Click here to subscribe.
Cities in the future must consider low-income groups as part of their equation for redevelopment, especially cities in developing countries where poverty and shanty towns are still a pervasive urban reality. So how can we refocus our efforts from economic-oriented development to community-driven development to effectively redevelop slums into sustainable, self-sufficient communities? This article examines the differences between the two development models.
Economic-Oriented Development Model
For the past decades, the development of most Asian cities has been overwhelmingly driven by the lure of economic benefits. In a city like Jakarta, this has inadvertently tipped the social and environmental scale off balance, resulting in a slew of negative side effects such as the uncontrolled existence of slums and squatter settlements, as well as massive, seasonal, citywide floodings.
Economic-oriented development has also rapidly and systematically squeezed out the existence of Jakarta’s indigenous kampoengs (villages). Zones for lower-income groups rapidly diminished and were vastly replaced by high-end real estate housing and commercial developments. Now, land as an economic commodity has become less readily available for the poor in the city, creating a shortage of proper housing for them. In spite of the housing shortage, lower-income groups are still flocking to the city—due to the lack of jobs in rural villages or for want of a better life—where 75 to 80 percent of the nation’s wealth is accumulated.
The combination of these factors has led to the mushrooming of slums and squatters in Jakarta. The same economic-oriented development has also excessively converted more than 20 percent of the land previously designated as greenbelt zones—under a legal master plan—to the construction of luxurious commercial and housing projects. And now, Jakarta is left with only a meager 8 percent of green space, which explains in large part why the city has become more prone to vast floods.
Now more than ever, we need to review, rethink and react with a different paradigm of urban development and find more humane solutions to these interlinking problems of slums and squatters, lack of open spaces, garbage, flooding, traffic congestion, unemployment and poverty.
Community-Driven Development Model
Looking to the future, the focus of redevelopment should be not so much about designing beautiful buildings, it should be more about building a sustainable city for all. The operative word here is all, meaning the inclusion of low-income citizens is an inherent reality in rebuilding cities for the future. Collaboration and community-driven are two key concepts that have worked for upgrading slums in the past and, hopefully, will become the more common way for to redevelop in the future.
Community-driven projects are aimed at solving the squatter problem in a more sympathetic manner. Without the fear of eviction, current residents can complete each redevelopment of these areas—they reorder the settlements, clean up the rivers, green the urban areas and produce their own food. Communities even participate in community watch to prevent new squatters from developing.
It is, in a way, a rather "upside-down" process when compared to conventional architectural design and project development processes. In community-driven projects, the “community members," who are often poor and less educated, become the “initiators and designers,” solving their own problems collectively under a certain development corridor. The professional architects are the “facilitators,” while the government plays the role of “enablers and inducers.” The local private sector and the banks also need to be direct participants—the “economic linkages”—to speed up the whole redevelopment process.
Current Constraints of Community-Driven Development
A collaborative development process has its challenges. There are several constraints that inhibit, or even prevent, community-driven projects. Until these are addressed, it will be difficult for individual communities to find creative and sustainable solutions to redeveloping slums.
1. The lack of political will and bureaucracy: Political will attributes 30 percent of the success of a project, while bureaucratic inflexibility has proven to be a major obstacle in enabling innovative solutions.
2. Cost and benefits are often viewed in a short-sighted way. Benefits that would make project investment more sustainable—such as poverty alleviation, human resource development, natural disasters mitigation, community jobs provision, operations and maintenance savings, and community solidarity building—are often not recognized by the financial experts.
3. Coordination problems among the local and central governments, banks and the utility companies can demotivate the community and slow down its momentum.
4. Employing contractors takes away community participation and self-help opportunities, deters the opportunity to solve interrelated problems, excludes the real creation of jobs and makes the overall project budget more feasible.
5. Eco-design innovations are often inhibited and even eliminated by conventional "technical specifications" that are imposed by the conventional concepts of technical solutions.
6. Spatial city planning and building regulations that are not “pro-poor” are less-enabling for the participatory process.
7. Innovative building systems are not welcomed during the financing process, which demands that conventional building quality be maintained. Nevertheless, it is useful to note that the creative use of existing building materials, construction and design technologies are actually key items to the success of housing the poor, especially when it is necessary to minimize the cost of DIY renovation of existing housing, build new housing in the resettlement sites and construct multi-story walk-up developments to make them more affordable.
Development is a Fact of Life
Urbanization is a fact of life—we cannot ignore the problem. Now with the global crisis, there is a growing urgency to rapidly rethink how we can redevelop the shanty towns in a sustainable way, while building our future cities. While a community-driven development model is more sustainable than an economic-oriented development model, its collaborative nature also makes it more challenging to implement. We need to combine and consolidate our knowledge and learn from one another to overcome these challenges and solve this human global issue.
