Bureaucracy is a significant barrier to providing affordable shelter. Slums are often the result of inappropriate regulatory frameworks. High standards, restrictive regulations and complex procedures force countless people into informal settlements. What can be done to ensure that formal planning systems become more transparent and start to work on behalf of the poor?

A new urban housing manual looks at issues affecting regulatory frameworks for urban upgrading and new housing and offers practical advice to planners and civil society. It draws on lessons from research projects, which analysed how urban residents in five countries understand and use the housing and planning regulations which shape their lives.

Researchers undertook regulatory audits that recorded the legal framework that determines what developers, landowners, communities and residents can do on and with urban land. They compared official requirements with the procedures by which informal or unauthorised developments take place.

The research showed that the rules by which government agencies seek to manage and control urban development are largely ineffective:

• A significant proportion of urban development is unauthorised. Regulations are usually extremely complicated, difficult to understand and inconsistent. They are often inherited from colonial administrations and subsequent changes may have been imposed without removing out-of-date requirements.
• Regulations often lack social legitimacy: poor people may evade those rules that constrain livelihood strategies and restrict access to assets.
• In many countries regulatory requirements may differ from region to region, and may not be enforced.
• Regulators are often resistant to change and fail to investigate the true costs of maintaining current systems.

Regulatory requirements should be simple, accessible and understood by all concerned. They should protect the public interest but allow residents maximum local control. In many cases, just a small reduction in planning standards, a slight relaxation of restrictive regulation or simplification of administrative procedures is enough to promote confidence and improve existing settlements and reduce costs for new developments. To avoid excessive regulation, realistic targets are needed, as well as mechanisms that rely as far as possible on self-regulation.

Target 11 of the Millennium Development Goals calls for the improvement of the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers by 2020. If this is to be achieved, it is important to ensure that more people are able to conform to, and identify with, regulatory frameworks appropriate to their local conditions.

It will be important for regulators and policy makers to:

• accept realities on the ground
• acknowledge the knowledge and information systems of people living in poverty
• recognise that urban poor people’s organisations are an important source of local innovation and are able to promote sustainable livelihoods
• identify champions of change to promote collaboration between central and local government, the private sector, finance institutions and communities
• end favouritism or discrimination in the enforcement of regulatory requirements
• revise regulatory frameworks on a regular basis.

Source(s):
‘The Urban Housing Manual: Making Regulatory Frameworks Work for the Poor’ by Geoffrey Payne and Michael Majale, Earthscan 2004

Funded by: Department for International Development, UK

id21 Research Highlight: 1 April 2005

Further Information:
Geoffrey Payne
Geoffrey Payne & Associates
34 Inglis Road
Ealing Common
London W5 3RL
UK

Tel: +44 (0) 20 8992 2683
Fax: 44(0) 20 8992 2683
Contact the contributor: gkpayne@gpa.org.uk

Geoffrey Payne and Associates, UK

Michael Majale
Global Urban Research Unit (GURU)
School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape
University of Newcastle upon Tyne
NE 1 7RU
UK

Tel: +44 (0) 191 222 7482
Fax: +44 (0) 191 222 6008
Contact the contributor: m.m.majale@ncl.ac.uk

Global Urban Research Unit (GURU), Newcastle Upon Tyne

Other related links:
Safe as houses? Securing urban land tenure and property rights

ITDG Shelter

UN-Habitat Housing Policy and Development Section

ITDG Eastern Africa

Society for the promotion of Area Resource Centres

Homeless International