Sustainable urban housing policies in the era of post-covid climate change mitigation

ABSTRACT

This paper briefly reviews recent and current approaches to the formulation and implementation of urban housing policies in towns and cities in the global South, with emphasis on local government-community participation and partnerships. It looks ahead into the implications of the lasting impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic and tenets of climate change that will constitute the ‘New Normal’.

KEYWORDS:

• Low-income group housing
• Community Participation
• Subsidiarity
• Devolution
• Local Governance
• Partnership
• Global Heating
• Climate Change
• Coronavirus

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. UN-Habitat, 2003

2. Recognition of the most efficient/effective (lowest) level of decision-making and authority.

3. Notably: SDG Goal 11 to: ‘Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable’

Target 1 of which is: ‘By 2030, ensure access for all to adequate, safe and affordable housing and basic services, and upgrade slums’, [respecting and applying the post-Coronavirus tenets of ‘social-distancing’].

4. . See: ‘Nature’ magazine, UK, October 2016

5. See also: UN-Habitat/UNDP/World Bank ‘Urban Management Programme’ (UMP) 1989–2006 ‘City Consultations’, which had identical objectives and similar procedures to CDSs.

6. In small sites, where possible linked to other low-income group housing with which its occupants can join local community assets, governance and infrastructure management responsibilities (not vast ‘conventional’ public housing estates, as were constructed in the past in many cities (Wakely 2018, p. 99).

7. . On a different level, the extent of institutional discrimination against whole ethnic groups, such as the Uyghur people in Xinyang province of North West China and the Rohingya ethnic group in Rakhine state in North West Myanmar, emerged into public consciousness in the second and third decades of the 21^st Century, together with the success of the ‘Black Lives Matter’ (BLM) campaign and movement, in developed countries of the global North.

8. . Legislation related to definitions of ‘head of household’, ‘entitlement to inheritance of property’; registration and property tax procedures, etc.

9. Water vapour, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, ozone, fluorocarbons, of which industrially emitted carbon dioxide -CO₂ has the greatest negative impact.

10. See: proceedings of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the reports of the UN International Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the various international conferences and Subsidiary Body meetings and Kyoto Protocol 1997 and the Paris Accord 2015.

11. The Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) defines disaster as “a situation or event, which overwhelms local capacity (10 or more people killed; 100 people affected; loss and/or significant damage to property).

12. It is estimated that ‘by 2050 as many as 350–600 million people in Africa could be affected by drought’ (UN-Habitat 2011)

13. E.g. Customary prescriptive development control legislation needs to be recast by proscriptive (good-practice) standards.

14. First coined by UNICEF in reference to international relief and recovery efforts following the S & SE Asian tsunami, 2004/5.

15. The ‘Brundtland Report’ was made famous by defining ‘sustainable development’ as: ‘development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’.

16. ‘An action Agenda for the 21^st Century’ for the UN, other multilateral organisations, and individual governments around the world to be executed at local, national, and global levels. Agenda 21 and its subsidiary report -Local Agenda 21- were popularised by the dictum: ‘Think globally and act locally’.

17. For instance, promotion of the use of building materials from renewable (or recycled) and indigenous sources and limiting those that consume extensive energy in their production or transport, such as steel and cement, the production of which also generates high levels of atmospheric pollution, as do polycarbonate materials that release excessive greenhouse gases into the earth’s atmosphere.

18. For example, support to the upgrading of dwellings and services in the Oshakati Human Settlements Improvement Programme in Namibia, was conditional on the planting of shade trees on each plot in low-income group housing areas as a social/climatic amenity and to stabilise the desertic soil, which, coincidentally, also increased the safe capture of CO₂, thereby contributing to the local amelioration of global heating on the fringes of the Kalahari Desert (Wakely 2018, p.p.74–83)

19. Through the evaporation of liquid, on the surface of leaves, generated by the botanical process of transpiration.

20. An excellent example of such communal vegetable- and fruit-growing plots was in the informal settlements of Sheikh Khoder and Herat Shahiddin, in Aleppo, Syria, prior to the 2011–21 civil war.

21. In many cities long-term climate change can have significant effects at a regional level that impact directly upon urban low-income housing. For instance, sustained periods of drought or extensive flooding can disrupt agricultural production in rural areas, occasioning increased migration to towns and cities by ex-farmers seeking shelter and employment in urban low-income group (informal) settlements.

22. E.g. The UN World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED), 1983; The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development -UNCED ‘Earth Summit’, 1972, (The ‘Rio Declaration on Environment and D; The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (‘The Paris Agreement’), 2015.

23. E.g. Habitat International Coalition (HIC),the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights (ACHR) and Shack/Slum Dwellers International (SDI).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Patrick Wakely

Patrick Wakely is Professor Emeritus of Urban Development in the University of London and former Director of the Development Planning Unit (DPU), University College London (UCL). An architect (AA Dipl, London), he has 40 years of experience of research, consultancy and teaching in participatory housing, sustainable urban development and planning, on which he has worked in more than twenty developing countries.