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ABSTRACT
Incremental housing is a gradual process whereby residents incrementally improve or extend their houses by themselves, whenever funding or time becomes available. This approach has attracted attention as an affordable way of improving poor living conditions in slums often with sites-and-services scheme. In many cases, this approach is coupled with an emphasis on self-help sweat equity, which can be strengthened by active community involvement. This study seeks to suggest a way of combining a scheme of empowering self-reliant communities with incremental housing. Based on the lessons from previous slum upgrade projects in Jinja, Uganda, this study points out the necessity of 1) more sustainable approach with self-help incremental housing than one-time grant-based projects, 2) an assisted way of empowering community and providing training schemes, 3) a temporary shelter for original dwellers who are affected by slum upgrade projects, and 4) an inclusive scheme for tenants who are frequently ignored in many slum upgrade schemes. This study proposes a ‘Self-Reliance Centre (SRC)’, which is designed to function as a space for community empowerment, a training centre, and a temporary shelter for incremental housing scheme in slum upgrade. As an assisted self-help approach, the SRC in incremental housing has a feature of initial involvement by public sector to invite eventual self-reliance of communities for sustainability in incremental housing.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 This study is based on a joint consulting project of ‘Development of an incremental and affordable housing policy toolkit and pilot city case studies’ by the World Bank and the Ministry of Strategy and Finance of Korea. The views expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of any agency involved in the project.
2 For example, Bokumjari village, a successful community-initiated settlement movement in South Korea, was built with the help of committed leaders in the community, including Paul Jeong-gu Jei and Jesuit John Vincent Daly. Based on a loan of US$100,000 from Misereor, the German Catholic Social Aid Fund, a village for 170 families was developed on new land, by their own hands, from sewage system to completed housing, when they were evicted from a slum area in Seoul in 1977. Houses built with community labour in an incremental way initially cost US$50/m2, largely using self-made construction materials which are one-third the cost of commercial materials. The community was in a position to repay the loan after two years of the initial settlement. However, as Misereor declined the repayment, the community expanded the scheme, which led to the development of a second village, Handok, and a third, Mokwha. Paul Jeong-gu Jei was awarded the Magsaysay Award for his contribution to this community movement. For more details, see http://www.rmaf.org.ph/newrmaf/main/awardees/awardee/profile/298.
3 The approach of ‘organized self-help housing’ by Santos-Delgado (Citation2009) is similar to that of assisted self-help.
5 The official figure from Uganda Bureau of Statistics (Citation2017) is 72,931, but JMC contested against this saying this under-counted the real population.
6 This feature of Jinja provides favourable condition for sites-and-services schemes. Most of sites-and-services schemes were criticised for reduced job opportunities and expensive cost of connecting infrastructure because they were mainly located far from original residence seeking for cheap land in outer area.
7 It is hard to tell how long, however according to the residents, they have been residing longer than 50 years. It is suspected that someone subdivided the land and sell them to the current residents illegally, and the residents believe they have legitimate ground for their argument.
8 For more details see: Slum Dwellers International Homepage (http://www.sdinet.org/country/uganda/projects/kawama-housing-project/1192/)
9 Procedure of land readjustment is as follows: (1) the owners of the land parcels are identified and their consent to land readjustment needs to be secured; (2) the land value of each parcel is evaluated for later distribution after subdivision and infrastructure upgrade; (3) a new subdivision and infrastructure plan for the designated site are prepared. In doing so, governments can plan parcels of land for communal facilities, such as parks and schools, and reserve parcels of land to cover the costs of subdivision and infrastructure upgrade, which imposes little fiscal burden to the governments; (4) when the land owners agree on the plan, subdivision and upgrade begins; (5) finally, newly subdivided land with infrastructure are distributed to the land owners according to their initial land value. For example, in a land readjustment project, 30% of the lands can be used for road and communal facilities, 10% of the lands can be reserved for development costs recovery, and 60% of the lands can be redistributed to original land owners. What makes this scheme feasible is increase in land value from subdivision and infrastructure upgrade.
10 For more about the discussion meeting, see 4.6.
11 65.2% of the surveyed residents in Masese1 prefer self-help incremental way in housing delivery.
12 Majale (Citation2008) points out that slum upgrading process has a good opportunity for employment creation in the case of Kitale, Kenya.
13 In most cases, compensation for tenants in redevelopment projects are not enough, which eventually lead to formation of other slums in nearby areas.
14 Joint redevelopment project (JRP) in South Korea is a typical example of this approach. This scheme is appropriate where land price is increasing. For more information on JRP, refer to the works of Ha (Citation2001a), Ha (Citation2001b), and Shin (Citation2009).
15 The cases of Makhaza and New Rest in South Africa shows the importance of a meeting hall for social gathering and cultural activities of communities in sustainable social networking (Massey, Citation2013).
16 The community in Bokumjari village, a successful community-initiated settlement movement in South Korea in 1970s, was strengthened by multi-layered groups, such as credit association, scholarship committee and cooperatives.
17 Greene and Rojas (Citation2008) point out the necessity of external help in incremental housing when it comes to affordable materials, housing standard, consideration of expansion of dwelling units.
18 The level of the fee would be the cost of maintenance of the dwelling units. However, the dwelling units should not be free of charge in order to prevent residents’ refusal to move back to original site or move into new site.
19 The tenants (44% of residents) in Masese1 might be reluctant to land readjustment scheme because 1) it takes much time for land readjustment and following incremental housing and 2) level of rent payment would increase to unaffordable level after the development.
20 There are some available land of JMC in outer area of Jinja municipality. As the lands are located around 4km away from the city centre, residents can commute to existing work places after the upgrade, which can overcome the typical problem of sites-and-services, lack of job opportunities by locating in far peripheral area from city centre. Actually, JMC has experience of providing land for slum upgrade in previous projects such as Masese Women’s Low Cost Housing Upgrading Project (1989–1994) and Kawama Low Cost Housing Project (2010-).
21 In order to reduce construction cost, residents’ labour need to be mobilised in infrastructure upgrade in new settlements. This is a similar approach in Hyderabad’s case which followed land→people→works procedure as Turner (Citation1986) described ‘historically normal process of housing delivery) not land→works→people procedure in normal sites-and-services projects (see Aliani & Sheng, Citation1990).
22 Parcelling out land to residents at new settlement may cause a problem of speculations for a one-time windfall profit as Bredenoord et al. (Citation2010) point out.
23 JMC agreed to use this empty land for the purpose of the SRC in the discussion meeting in Jinja.
24 Most of the land in informal settlements in Jinja is considered to be under the residents’ de facto ownership.