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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2022
Half of all urban dwellers and eight out of every ten rural inhabitants in developing countries live in inadequate and badly equipped housing, crowded together and subjected to unacceptable environmental conditions. This means that in the countries of the Third World alone more than 2,300 million people live in housing that is without (or has only insufficient) services and that is marked as well by varying degrees of deterioration. The need to construct new units to absorb the natural increase in the population, to overcome gradually the qualitative deficit indicated above, and to renew existing stock makes housing and complementary services the major investment that must be made if one of the basic needs of the population is to be met. “A house is something more than a simple or complex construction, detached or grouped, forming an agglomeration that might have diverse forms and functions. Defined as a dwelling, this construction is converted into an essential aspect of man's existence as a social being and his way of life on earth.”
Translated with funds provided by The Ford Foundation.
1. Fundación Bariloche, Catastrophe or New Society? (Ottawa: International Development Centre, 1976).
2. Ibid.
3. Jorge E. Hardoy, “La vivienda de los pobres,” Revista Interamericana de Planificación 10, no. 40 (Dec. 1976):5.
4. Jorge E. Hardoy and David Satterthwaite, Shelter. Need and Response (Chichester: John Wiley and Sons, 1981).
5. Jorge E. Hardoy, “The Recommendations of the UN Conference on Human Settlements and Their Viability in Latin America,” Habitat International 3, no. 1/2 (1978):161–66.
6. An honest evaluation by someone who worked hard and well for the success of Habitat is to be found in Duccio Turin, “Exploring Change: What Should Have Happened at Habitat,” Habitat International 3, no. 1/2 (1978):185–95.
7. In this situation are to be found El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, and Trinidad and Tobago, in Latin America; Angola, Mali, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Tanzania, in Africa.
8. United Nations, Global Review of Human Settlements. Statistical Annex (New York, 1976), table 1, pp. 22–49.
9. The World Bank includes a list of 38 low-income countries ($360 or less per inhabitant). Only nine in 1978 had a life expectancy at birth that was higher than fifty years; in only seven was the index for food production in 1976–78 greater than that for 1969–71, and in two it was equal; and in nineteen the annual rate of growth of the national product was 1.0 percent or less. See The World Bank, World Development Report, 1980 (Washington, 1980), table 1, pp. 110–11.
10. Interamerican Development Bank, Propuesta para un aumento de los recursos del Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo (Washington, D.C.: December 1978), Section 4, esp. pp. 54–62. During its first years of activity between 1961 and 1966, the IDB gave far greater attention to projects having to do with potable water and sewerage.
11. Commission of the European Communities, Summary of the Activity and Expansion of the European Development Fund of Housing Projects (Nairobi: October 1978).
12. Sites and services: in 1973 in Managua (Nicaragua); in 1974 in Francistown (Botswana), Calcutta (India), and several Jamaican cities, among them Kingston and Montego Bay; in 1975 in San Salvador and other principal cities of El Salvador, Jakarta (Indonesia), Nairobi (Kenya), Lusaka (Zambia), three cities of the Givanju region of the Republic of Korea, and Dar-es-Salaam and two other Tanzanian cities; in 1976 in Kuala Lampur (Indonesia) and Manila (the Philippines); in 1977 in Madras (India), Abidjan (Ivory Coast), and a second project in San Salvador; in 1978 in La Paz (Bolivia), several cities of Colombia, Cairo, Alexandria and Assiut (Egypt), several Tanzanian cities, Rabat (Morocco), and Ciudad Lázaro Cárdenas (Mexico); in 1979 in two states in northeastern Brazil; in 1980 in urban centers in the Republic of Korea, in Burundi, Lesotho, Nigeria, and Thailand. Urban transportation: in 1973 for Kuala Lampur; in 1974 for Teheran and Tunis; in 1976 a second project for Kuala Lampur; in 1977 for Bombay; in 1978 for five metropolitan areas of Brazil and San José (Costa Rica); in 1979 for Bangkok; and in 1980 for Calcutta and for various urban centers in Nicaragua. (Information taken from Annual Reports of the World Bank, 1972 to 1980, inclusive.)
13. We see it in the Jakarta project of 1975 or in the one for Manila in 1976; in the ones for Madras and for Abidjan, and in a new project for Jakarta, all of them in 1977; especially in the projects approved in 1978, such as the one for Ciudad Lázaro Cárdenas and the ones for the Colombian cities; in new projects for Francistown and Calcutta and for Tanzania, in general; in projects for Ouagadougou and Bobo-Dioulassou (Upper Volta), Bangkok (Thailand), Nairobi and other Kenyan cities, and others; in 1979 in Cartagena, Molina, Tunis and Sfax, and in several urban centers in Brazil and Indonesia; and in 1980 in Guayaquil, Panama City and Colon, Bangkok, Manila, and several urban centers of Nigeria, the Republic of Korea, and Nicaragua.
14. Since its inauguration in 1966, the Asian Development Bank has dedicated very few funds to housing projects: of its total loans between 1966 and 1978—5,404 million dollars—a mere 0.7 percent went to urban development and housing projects, 15.6 percent to potable water and drainage projects, and none at all to construction materials. Other agencies, such as the African Development Bank and the African Development Fund, have only granted loans to potable water and sewage plants or projects.
15. The total cost of a lot measuring 81m2 (5.40 × 15m), including urbanization improvements and water and lighting services, in Guatemala City, as financed by the World Bank, was 1,749.06 quetzales (equivalent to dollars). Land costs took up 23.44 percent, 63.7 percent was spent in urbanization improvements and services, and 12.81 percent in construction (complement to urbanization). The monthly payment that the new owner had to make was $21.09 (US) and the family earnings corresponding to that payment was to be $105.00. Approximately 60 percent of the general population was not capable of making payments that would allow it access to the type of project just mentioned. See Hermes Marroquín, Guatemala 1978. El problema de la vivienda popular (Guatemala: CIDU, 1978), table VII-3-3, pp. 263–64.
16. Prices of land for projects such as the one mentioned in the preceding note increase conservatively by 25 percent per year in the case of areas relatively close to the city. In 1982 the purchase of the lot would represent a cost of 1,251.25 quetzales (dollars) and would be equivalent to 34.65 percent of the cost of the lot plus services. See Marroquín, Guatemala, p. 264 and table VII-3-3.
17. 2,369.5 million dollars for potable water and sewerage and 1,173.7 million dollars for urbanization, which includes housing and urban transportation.
18. Some recent projects dealing with sites and services and the improvement of slum housing include small amounts to render trash and garbage collection more efficient. I have found only one loan, granted in 1975 by the World Bank to the government of Singapore, for the modernization of the trash and garbage collection system.
19. Silvia Blitzer and Jorge E. Hardoy, “Aid for Human Settlements in the Third World, 1977 and 1978” (London: International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), 1980), internal document. The World Bank Group granted 66.6 percent of that amount (58,419 million), the IDB 15.8 percent (13,988 million), the Asian Development Bank 6.1 percent (5,404 million), the European Development Fund 2.6 percent (2,308 million), and the United Nations Development Program 2.9 percent (2,613 million). Together those five agencies granted 94 percent of the multilateral financing that was made available.
20. This optimistic assessment does not seem to have any possibility of being carried out. In 1980 dollars, the World Bank loans for urbanization, housing and urban transport, and potable water and sewerage represented in that year half of what had been estimated. Silvia Blitzer, Jorge E. Hardoy, and David Satterthwaite, “The Sectoral and Spatial Distribution of Multilateral Aid for Human Settlements,” in Habitat International (in press).
21. Concerning the expansion plans of the multilateral agencies, see the article by Andrés Federman, “Poverty's Strange Bedfellows,” South, London (June 1981), pp. 7–12.
22. United Nations, “Report of Habitat: United Nations Conference on Human Settlements,” A/Conf.70/15 (New York, 1976).
23. The World Bank, World Development Report, 1980 (Washington, D.C., 1980), table 1, pp. 110–11.
24. There are, of course, exceptions. In late 1981, the World Bank completed an evaluation of their sites and services projects in a selected number of countries. In Argentina, an evaluation of some low-income housing was underway in 1981.
25. “The City of São Paulo (Brazil) had to invest 69,700 million dollars to eliminate, in four years, its accumulated deficit and to attend to its basic needs (between 1976 and 1980). In the meantime what was available for those years was less than 8,000 million dollars, including the State's investment in the city.” Jorge Wilhelm, “Algunas contribuciones a la comprensión y al ejercicio del poder local,” Foro Internacional de Asentamientos Humanos, Mexico, April 1980, p. 37. Wilhelm was secretary for planning of the State of São Paulo between 1973 and 1978.
26. During the last few years, the cost of a square meter of construction has generally risen more sharply than the increase in salaries.
27. Two good examples of the negative impact of giving priority to individual transportation instead of improving mass transportation are the federal districts of Buenos Aires and Mexico.
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