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“Real Estate” Symptoms of Increasing Global Inequality

May 5, 2015

By Paavo Monkkonen, Urban Planning Assistant Professor and GPA FCL of Global Urbanization and Regional Development


License: Creative Commons [/caption]


There is a growing disjuncture between urban spaces without people, such as the haunting ghost towns in China or bizarre newly built, vacant subdivisions in Mexico, and urban spaces that continue to set records for real estate prices like Manhattan and Hong Kong due to the intense demand to live there. Is this contrast a symptom of the rise in income inequality within world regions, recent changes in global economic geography, or simply the increased financialization of real estate markets?

There has been a marked increase in the differences in housing prices across cities of the United States over the last two decades. In the so-called Superstar Cities like New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles prices have surpassed those of the boom almost a decade ago, and it is argued this is the result of a continued increase in demand from the increasingly wealthy combined with a supply that does not increase in a corresponding manner. Meanwhile, houses in other regions of the country sit vacant and are sold for pennies on the dollar. This trend is observed globally, with increasing inequality within regions at the same time that differences between countries decline. Increasingly, the phenomenon occurs within metropolitan areas. ‘Superstar neighborhoods’ experience skyrocketing price increases while real estate in districts of the same metropolitan region has failed to recover from the recent recession.

It is clear, and not surprising, that increasing income and wealth inequality is making an impact on the real estate landscape. Anecdotally, we know that the wealthy invest great sums in real estate and many fortunes are also built through real estate investment. An important question remains, however. To what extent do these spatial discrepancies in real estate markets contribute to and exacerbate inequality? Or are they merely a symptom. If a review of the Forbes list of the 500 largest public companies in the world is indicative of anything, it suggests that they might be more symptomatic than causal. There are only five real estate companies in the largest 500 and the largest of them is number 238. In the Forbes list of the 100 wealthiest individuals in the world, real estate was the source of wealth for only seven. An analysis by The Huffington Post shows a steady decline of real estate as a source of wealth since the 1980s.

On the other hand, in a recent research paper that has drawn much attention from planners and economists, Matthew Rognlie argues that real estate – especially housing – investment holds an under-appreciated importance in the now canonical simplification of Thomas Piketty’s argument that inequality is somewhat inevitable because the rate of return to wealth (r) is larger than the economic growth rate (g) during periods of slow economic growth. Only during rare moments of human history has r not been greater than g. Rognlie shows that housing has been a key and overlooked component of the rise in income generated by capital in the seven developed economies for which data are available.

The debate and discontent over the role of real estate inequality in actual wealth and income inequality is captured in a nutshell by the uproar over Airbnb. Will Airbnb get you evicted? Is Airbnb to blame over the high rents in certain neighborhoods of metropolitan areas? It is irrefutable that some long-term tenants have been evicted because the landlord can earn more through short-term rentals. But to what extent is the phenomenon of short-term renting a symptom or a cause of increasing inequality? A century ago, as many as one half of households in urban America took in boarders to make ends meet. Perhaps a renewed focus on the income side of the housing affordability equation is merited.

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Mumbai’s Slum Redevelopment: The Question of Consent

April 22, 2015

By Vinit Mukhija, Urban Planning Professor and GPA FCL of Global Urbanization and Regional Development


Source: archdaily.com[/caption]


Mumbai, formerly Bombay, is India’s financial and commercial capital. It is the capital of the state of Maharashtra, India’s wealthiest province. Paradoxically, the city is known for both its high real estate prices and huge slum population. It has recorded some of the most expensive real estate transactions in the world (Economist 1995; Economist 2012) and, according to some estimates, has more slum-dwellers than any other city (UN-Habitat 2003). Mumbai has tried several approaches to improving living conditions within its slums. These include the leading conventional approaches of slum clearance and redevelopment, which involve the resettlement of slum-dwellers on alternative, usually distant, sites; and slum upgrading, which is based on in-situ and incremental improvements to slum-dwellers’ housing through tenure legalization and infrastructure improvements. For almost twenty-five years, Mumbai has also implemented an unconventional program of slum redevelopment and on-site rehousing. My blogpost focuses on this last approach.

A little more than a decade ago, I published a book focused on Mumbai’s slum redevelopment experiment: Squatters as Developers? Slum Redevelopment in Mumbai (2003). This blogpost revisits the book and the subsequent experience in light of a newly elected state government in Maharashtra (Firstpost 2014), with plans to revise the policy (Indian Express 2015).

Mumbai’s slum redevelopment and rehousing strategy leverages the potentially high real estate value of slum land in the city. Slums are demolished, housing is rebuilt at a higher density, and, contrary to conventional slum clearance and resettlement, slum-dwellers are rehoused in replacement housing on the former slum sites. In addition, new market-rate housing is also developed on the former slums, which cross-subsidizes the cost of the slum-dwellers’ replacement housing. The key policy intervention that facilitates slum redevelopment is a change to the land development regulations that allows for an increase in the intensity and density of redevelopment in the city’s slums. This increase in the permitted development attracts market-based, private developers and helps generate the cross-subsidy for the slum-dwellers’ housing. Slum-dwellers, both owners and tenants, receive completely cross-subsidized, replacement housing of 25 square meters or 269 square feet. Projects only proceed forward if at least 70% of slum-dwellers consent to redevelopment.

Slum redevelopment is an unusual strategy for assisting slum-dwellers. Typically progressive planners and policymakers oppose redevelopment because it usually leads to the displacement of the poor. The poor can be either directly displaced by the new land use or indirectly displaced through an increase in housing costs, including higher rents, property taxes, and maintenance costs. Mumbai’s slum redevelopment and rehousing strategy, however, avoids some of the shortcomings of redevelopment by resettling all slum-dwellers (including tenants) on their original sites in fully subsidized housing. Slum-dwellers also receive property tax rebates, and funding support for housing maintenance expenses from project developers. However, these carefully but narrowly defined benefits have a downside. In some cases, they prevent redevelopment projects from being financially viable to developers. In other cases, slum-dwellers find the defined benefits inadequate and unfair. I have argued that a deregulation of the prescribed benefits may lead to negotiations between slum-dwellers, landowners, and developers, and may result in more hybrid forms of upgrading and redevelopment, as opposed to comprehensive redevelopment (Mukhija 2003). At the same time, the city’s slum-dwellers also need alternative policy options, particularly programs that are easier and cheaper to implement.

By July 2011, almost 125,000 units had been constructed and occupied, and several hundred thousands more had received approvals for construction (Government of India 2012). Some critics are impatient and think the pace of progress is too slow. The new state government is one of them, and proposes to remove the need for slum-dwellers to consent to redevelopment (Indian Express 2015). However, the new government is mistaken.

First, removing the consent requirement is bad politics and is likely to be counterproductive. Unlike in places like Shanghai and Dubai that some Mumbai elite fetish, it will be difficult to move against the wishes of the city’s slum-dwellers. It does not matter whether slum-dwellers have formal powers of consent or not. Second, slum redevelopment is a risky policy. It is difficult for slum-dwellers to maintain their home-based businesses in their new apartment homes. It is good policy to let them decide whether redevelopment is in their interest or not. Third, Mumbai’s slum redevelopment projects have several problems, but slum-dwellers’ consent is not one of them. My research and the number of approved projects clearly show that many slum-dwellers are interested in redevelopment. Their consent is not holding up projects.

If the state and local governments want to increase the pace of redevelopment, they can help in several other ways. In addition to assisting with construction finance and temporary housing, public agencies can play a role in helping to address potential conflicts and disagreements, and ensure that slum-dwellers have full access to technical support and information in their decision-making and negotiations with the private market-actors. As the Imperial Towers case shows, there is tremendous potential profit in slum redevelopment (New York Times 2015), and public agencies have a role in ensuring that slum-dwellers receive high quality housing. In a similar vein, the Golibar Colony case shows that the government must provide the slum-dwellers with legal and physical protection from any potential coercion from developers (NAPM).

Further, if policymakers adopt a more flexible approach, as I have suggested, the program will result in more hybrid projects. Urban design and planning coordination will become more necessary and complicated, which will require more government involvement and leadership. The state government should focus on these avenues rather than on removing slum-dwellers’ ability to consent to projects. Perhaps, the most noteworthy feature of Mumbai’s rehousing approach is that slum-dwellers have the opportunity to approve or reject redevelopment proposals, and projects cannot be initiated without their approval. Preserving and strengthening this defining characteristic of slum redevelopment is important.

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Fragile States and Imagined Communities

April 8, 2015

By Stephen Commins, Associate Director of Global Public Affairs and Urban Planning Lecturer


License: Creative Commons


International aid agencies have spent over a decade since the original World Bank Low Income Countries Under Stress (LICUS) report and various initiatives within DFID and OECD (Fragile States Group and INCAF)  trying to define ‘state fragility’ and identify effective levers for reducing state fragility.  Along with the high level work, donors have invested considerable resources into programs that seek to address the problematic state-building in Fragile and Conflict-Affected States (FCS).

The literature on addressing fragilty through ‘state-building’ includes political economy analysis and efforts to understand the specific context of state formation, but there is a lack of attention to the nation-state as a geographic expression of a common/shared identity.

The work of Benedict Anderson (Imagined Communities) highlighted and illustrated the concept of the nation-state as something relative new in the organization of human societies compared to empires, religious institutions, ‘ethnic’ identity (i.e. tribes), and the other traditional social structures.

In regards to FCS: are state-building and nation-building the same, related, distinct? If they are related, how do they relate together? Does state-building cohere with the idea of a nation-state?

Through various efforts at ‘state-building’, donors have sought to promote ‘effective’ ways to reduce fragility through instruments which they define as contributing to the strengthening of accountable and effective state institutions. Within the ‘state-building’ efforts are programs that seek to enhance the capacities of state actors in such areas as security, basic social services, and the rule of law. 

In reflecting on the nature of the nation-state as a construct, it may be useful to ask whether this could mix up the formal institutions of the state with the particular historic processes around the formation of a national identity. The fragile states literature has consistently identified some of the major obstacles that actual state formation faces, but has it adequately accounted for the identity questions?

Well before the recent interest in fragile states, or even the period of decolonization in Africa and much of Asia, there are long-term, historic lessons that go back to the post-WWI ‘order’ that highlight that ‘states’ are not necessarily ‘nations’, and the lack of a common identity can undermine the effectiveness of states.  The well-titled book, Peace to End All Peace by David Fromkin, highlighted the fragility of the externally created states in the ‘Middle East’.  This was echoed in a book Between the Fires by David Clay Large, which explores how the ‘nation states’ of Eastern Europe succumbed to authoritarianism in the 1920s and 1930s, in part due to the problems of establishing a common ‘nation’ with the remnants of the Hapsburg and Ottoman Empires.

The lesson from the 1920s and 1930s, as well as from the post-colonial period is that people in a nation state do not necessarily see themselves first as citizens or ‘nationals’, or only as one of several levels of identity.   They may identify first as a members of particular sub- or trans-national social formation (religion, kin group, ‘nation’) that is distinct from their particular geographic nation-state. This may not matter in some instances, as people carry multiple identities, but it can matter when there are competing ‘nations’.

This is not a particularly ‘African’ issue, as there are a number of instances in South and Southeast Asia, for example, where the ‘national’ identity has been weak and where the issue is not the relative strength of the state, but the sense of ‘imagined community’ within the country: West Papua; Aceh; Solomon Islands; Southern Thailand; Mindanao; the Hmong in Lao PDR. Similar examples can be seen in Spain, Belgium, Canada and the United Kingdom, and some distant 19th Century conflict between ‘north’ and ‘south’ still shapes politics in the United States.

One solution has been devolution or asymmetric decentralization, which is part of the settlement in Canada and Spain, not just ‘developing countries’. The problematic of the nation state and its formation is manifested sometimes as ‘sub-national fragility’, a situation where one particular region or district does not consider itself to share the same identity as the rest of the nation-state. In this case, ‘state-building’ is more than institutions or even accountability and effectiveness.

The attention to the ‘nation’ in nation-state issues has been relatively infrequent compared to state-building, and it is past time to find ways to give this more attention in regards to fragile states and international aid policies.

Background Reading:

Alan Whaites, ‘States in Development: Understanding State Building”, DFID Working Paper, 2008.

Bjorn Dressel and Sinclair Dinnen, “Political Settlements: Old Wine in New Bottles?” Development Policy Center, Policy Brief 9, February 2014.

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Art Does Not Shut Up

March 31, 2015

By Susanna Hecht, GPA Faculty Cluster Leader and Professor of Urban Planning


Mural in L.A.[/caption]


“Art does not shut up!” This phrase is from a mural in South-Central Los Angeles, an area where a vibrant public culture derived from diasporic communities embellishes wall spaces throughout the city. The images range from nostalgic tropical landscapes to ones of horrific whirlpool violence that provoked this migration in the past, and the violence present today (see above). There are also murals of the delight and happiness of daily living, of a realm of tranquility, of the beauty, and sorrows of life wherever and however it unfolds.

We all are outcomes of international forces, in ways sometimes we don’t know about, in ways that are intimate and often quite silent. The effect of diasporas is often like this, since the dispossessions are traumatic, the loss is of a world, and in many ways the social death of that world. In these processes, there are many who don’t survive. I’ve just come back from a trip to Mannheim Germany, in many ways the “family seat”, where my great grandparents resided. As a cultivated person of the elite Jewish banking families of Europe’s Belle Époque, my great-grandmother Helene Hecht had a salon where she cultivated artists, writers, and musicians. She was a life-long friend and probably mistress of Brahms. Felix Hecht, her banker husband, was the inventor of the land-based mortgage – a financial instrument now so common one hardly thinks it had to be invented. He had his bank across from the Palatine Palace the German seat of the Holy Roman Empire, which in terms of palace size in Europe rivals Versailles. Berthe Benz, also of Mannheim, commissioned the first car. Between mortgages, cars, real estate, and the gridded layout, LA on some level seems a sister city to Mannheim.

The late historian Tony Judt points out that “Lost Worlds” and “Evil” remain the central questions of the 20th century. They are also those of the 21st. While unwilling diasporas are as much a part of human history as anything (and surely LA can claim its vast share from Asia, Latin America and Europe), the explosive issues in Europe with the Charlie Hebdo massacre, migration displacement, and the simmering turmoil in the Middle East make it useful to look at some of these questions of the past diasporas, state and non-state violence and opportunism, and global reshuffling. And what and how art works in the retelling and reframing of histories when many of those who were overcome by these forces can no longer speak.

I grew up in Utah, was raised a Lutheran, and was entirely ignorant of my family history until last year. My time in Mannheim was spent rethinking an identity I didn’t know I had. The days I spent in Mannheim centered around looted artwork, and that has brought up the questions of art and its meaning, and how it doesn’t stop talking even when the people who commissioned, created, loved, and bought it are no longer on the scene. In a world where art has become an extremely valuable commodity, as the very anguishing histories of the Cranach looted from Berlin’s Herzog family and now in the Norton Simon in Pasadena, and of course the very famous Klimt painting for which the family had battled for years to have returned to them from a museum in Vienna (hear the story on NPR).

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Klimt’s Woman in Gold

In the conflicts over who owned what, and what happened to them, there are stories about families, displacement, diaspora, death, and social death. And every time the issue comes up, it tells a tale of politics. We all understand how great art is ageless, transcending space and time, and how it moves us at the level where humanity recognizes itself. In this sense “Art does not shut up” speaks by infusing us with a kind of luminance about how differences and otherness are ephemeral categories, transformed in the presence of masterpieces. But this blog is less about the more prosaic forms of art – domestic painting, artifacts, and the daily art of cartoons.

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A drawing by Grosz

At times, vernacular art speaks more loudly, like the cartoons that so defined Charlie Hebdo, and we know that German “Decadent” paintings – often quite cartoonish – were destroyed as well as the artists who produced them. LA’s murals speak to us everyday, and command us to think about the world we inhabit and what we have done to it and other peoples and are fellow Angelenos. These are less about artistic masterpieces and more about the “mundane”. Artwork that goes beyond their aesthetic impact make us ask questions about who made them, who commissioned them, and what was their world like, and the general world from which these art works emerged. And what then happened. In the case of the many LA murals, there is, like Helene Hecht’s life, a story of holocaust and diaspora, of a lot of people making it. The art demands that we work to find out, that we come to understand better the times and the lives in which the artwork pieces were enmeshed. And the brutality that extinguished them. They ask us to retell history.

They also ask that we honor them – the people, the art, and the times that produced them and that we not shut up about the forces of evil and the realm of the Lost Worlds in which they are imbricated especially since in many ways our governments actively produce them. Botero’s extraordinary sculptures and images of the bodies at the Iraqi prison of Abu Ghraib accuse us, and insist that we ask questions about the world we produce and inhabit.

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Botero’s Abu Gharib piece

Helene’s portraits have been haunting my family for some time. My mother felt impelled to find out what had happened to the glorious works in Helene’s house, and to Helene and Felix’ portraits.

Helene was not shutting up.

SHblog_HeleneAndFelix

Much remained silent, archivists know more our about our family than we do, but since then much memory has also been recovered, and much history has been excavated due the diligence of local art historians as and the citizens of Mannheim who have seen fit to remember Helene as a prized female artist. They also remember every single one from the City of Mannheim in a memorial that has every name written on it. Right in the center of town in the busiest walkstreet in front of the train station. These retell the history and the lives of this city. My family has allowed the portraits of Helene and Felix to stay in the Museum with a plaque explaining who they were and what happened to them. I personally am glad that Helene and Felix can stay and continue to be honored in the city they so loved and in whose civic and cultural life they played such a role. I am especially gratified that their history and stories will not reside in an archive somewhere, and that their paintings and story will not be sequestered in a private home, but will be materialized in a beautiful museum where they can continue to have a voice about their time and what happened to them. History doesn’t mean much if there is no one there to remember it, to retell it and to use it as a stepping stone to new understandings.

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Memorial plaque on a street in Mannheim, Germany

Its also useful to keep in mind that besides these plaques and monuments, the German government has initiated a decentralized and profoundly moving public art project call the Stolpensteine: literally “stumbling stones”, that are placed in front of the homes or other sites of those deported and killed in the frenzy. This decentralized monument reminds anyone walking of what happened to some of the earlier residents of those streets.

Art, indeed, does not shut up.

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Global Responsibility: Winning Hearts and Minds

February 5th

By Michael Storper, Director of Global Public Affairs and Professor of Urban Planning



The terrible murders of journalists and Jewish shoppers in organized commando attacks in one of my hometowns, Paris, opened up an old debate: who is responsible? Not in the simple sense of who committed these acts; that is clear. But a loud chorus of voices around the world has held that the journalists themselves were responsible, because they blasphemed the Prophet Mahomet, while at the same time France outlaws anti-Semitic statements, thus arguing that the West protects itself from blasphemy about itself but not about others. It was noted in the French press that in certain public schools with heavy immigrant populations, students tended to side with the authors of the attacks.   Still others observed that the authors of these attacks, French citizens who had been alienated from mainstream French society and attracted by the promised glories of jihad, were the first generation to grow up on images of American soldiers’ boots on the heads and genitals of Iraqi prisoners, flashed around the world in the Abu Graib prison scandal. Zaid-al-Ali, in The Struggle for Iraq’s Future: how Corruption, Incompetence and Sectarianism have Undermined Democracy (Yale University Press, 2014) argues that the Americans in Iraq indulged a select group of exiles based not on their competence or popularity in Iraq, but those “most willing to engage in moral compromise with unrepentant and ideologically driven US officials,” or those who happened to have the backing of other foreign powers, including Iran. The process of parceling out responsibilities on the basis of ethnic quotas, with little attention to honesty and competence, led to the disastrous breakdown of Iraqi state authority and the rise of the Islamic State.

We know the familiar refrain that this current wave of violence from 9-11 to Syria, Iraq, Nigeria and Sudan today is essentially a result of a crisis within the Sunni Arab and Pakistani worlds. Writing in the New York Review of Books, Max Rodenbeck (9/25/14) reviews the Islamic State’s gruesome snuff film, The Clanking of the Swords IV, and sees their extreme cruelty as an extension of ancient Assyrian traditions of cruelty to and extermination of enemies. In the West, it is commonly said that the particular crisis of these societies has been been papered over and marketed as global jihad; turning the tables on things, they say that secular law and secular, multi-confessional modern liberal States represent decadent Western powers attempting to dominate these regions and their peoples. They say that the West just rolls over everyone else, using its “liberal democratic , human rights” mantra as a cover for its power plays and favoritism toward its own or its puppets. And in a more moderate way, Chinese leaders regularly call attention to the failures of Western democracies to live up to their own promises about human rights (think Ferguson or the American justice system) and even democracy (think decision-making and crony capitalism driven by lobbying money). Vladimir Putin frames his adventures with the same type of anti-Western discourse, mobilizing historical and nationalist humiliations and resentments.

The blame game is very complicated, and neither the West nor the developed countries have any monopoly on it. My purpose here is not to absolve anyone for the wrongs they have committed, but rather to observe that we live in a world where blaming and shaming are not a one-way top-down game that is dominated by the rich and powerful of the West. The age of instant communications and the Internet have globalized the blame game and the contest for hearts and minds. The less powerful can now access information and use it and create it in ways that were not true even a couple of decades ago. They are more sophisticated in generating their negative narratives of blame and their positive assertions of justice and virtue. They are better at competing for market share in the global marketplace of ideas.

This means that it is more important than ever to get back to the project of winning global hearts and minds. Since I am a liberal, democratic Westerner, for me this means thinking about why so much of the world doesn’t like us anymore. I was raised on a diet of Western “soft power,” and the narrative that so much of the world wanted to be like us or come here, because we were so rich, free, and dynamic. But for billions of people around the world, and not just jihadi radicals, this narrative is no longer convincing.

This is a two-fold problem for global order and global peace. On one hand, narratives that are wrong and purely hateful, under certain circumstances, can be used in an entrepreneurial way to mobilize and channel resentments from injustice into immoral action. To take the case of the murder of the journalists at Charlie Hebdo, we have done a poor job of explaining (both to ourselves and to the rest of the world) the difference between the freedom to mock and parody, and the call to kill or hate others who are different from you. Mocking Jesus, Moses, Buddha or Mahomet is not, in our view of things, the same thing as a call to hate or commit violence against any people. Producing scholarship on the origins of the Christian Bible is not blasphemy.

This difference is not a natural one to grasp in all parts of the world. In the West, a diversity of opinions can co-exist with a diversity of religions, because neither of them is backed up by a monopoly on State power, which is a liberal defender of the space for such diversity.   When State power is linked to a monopolistic non-liberal regime, such as religious law, then parody becomes blasphemy, and the State can legitimate hate and discrimination. There are more people to gain from a Western-style separation of the religion and other private values from State power, than to lose (e.g. Saudi Arabia), but right now they don’t see it that way.   We have failed in our soft power mission, and we need to get back to it.

On the other hand, narratives of the less powerful tap into our own failings and contradictions.  This is why clubbing others over the head with our narrative about our own superiority is likely to be met by their mockery, and the repetition of images of Ferguson, the tyrannical abuse of prisoners at Rikers’ Island, the ghettos of New York or Paris, Abu Graib, Guantanamo, and our tragic histories of slavery and genocide of Native Americans. We don’t control these narratives anymore. So we need to clean up our act, domestically and abroad, and be able to show the world that we do not preach hypocrisy. This is not just about upping our propaganda game, but becoming more consistent in practice with the values that we preach. Our societies need to become more just, less cruel, and less corrupt. To change the narrative then, we need to do some real work the reality that the narrative refers to. At the current time, fifteen times more people have gone into American movie theaters to see American Sniper which, for all its claims to subtlety, basically glorifies American military prowess in Iraq, against any sensible reading of that failure; than Selma, which reminds us of the violent recent racist regime right in our own South. This is not lost on people around the world.

However terrible the acts that are being committed around the world right now by violent extremists, we live in a world where the contest for hearts and minds is a more global and more sophisticated one than ever before. Every process and every image and every narrative counts. Losing control of the narrative is a great danger to global order and global justice.

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Repeating History but Innovating: Social Housing and Urban Policy in Latin America

January 20, 2015

By Paavo Monkkonen, Faculty Cluster Leader of Global Urbanization and Regional Development; Professor of Urban Planning



Although the major urbanization boom in Latin America occurred many decades ago, cities across the continent continue to grow rapidly and problems associated with adequate, affordable, and well-located housing are widespread. Housing policies designed to provide new, subsidized housing to low-income households still dominate (though the state no longer builds housing, providing assistance through the housing finance system instead), in spite of agreement among most experts that they are not the best way to ameliorate urban housing problems.

Unlike the inner-city public housing projects of the United States, public housing projects in Latin America are generally composed of small single-family homes located in far-flung outskirts of cities. They therefore suffer not only from problems associated with concentrated poverty, but more importantly a lack of urban amenities, poor public services, and a large distance from employment opportunities. Brazil’s most infamous peri-urban public housing development Cidade de Deus, portrayed in a film of the same name, was built in 1964 yet the new housing policy Minha Casa, Minha Vida is criticized for many of the same problems. Mexico has the largest finance driven social housing program in Latin America, and as a recent OECD report documents, faces major problems in new housing developments that lack public services, access to jobs, and as a result, among the highest vacancy rates in the world. In fact, scholars are framing the Mexican housing policy as a social interest housing planning disaster. Social housing programs in Chile and in Colombia face surprisingly similar criticism.

The philosopher George Santayana famously stated, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Kurt Vonnegut’s more prescient and useful retort is that “we’re doomed to repeat the past no matter what.” Thus, perhaps the challenge to policymakers (and scholars) is simply to make sure our iterations of past approaches are innovative in some aspects. And there are innovations. Two notable areas are first, the application of inclusionary housing ideas in the design of public housing programs, and second, policies to promote densification of more accessible parts of cities with services.

Chile is the farthest along in taking seriously the idea of inclusionary zoning/housing – regulations that promote the integration of market-priced properties and subsidized properties in the same multi-unit buildings or within neighborhoods – in public dialogue and action. A notable example is the Project of La Chimba in the city of Antofagasta in northern Chile built from 2003 to 2005. In spite of shifting to demand-side housing subsidies in the 1990s, low-income homebuyers continued to be pushed into certain types of new housing developments that shared the same problems as those previously built by the public sector, including social segregation. To address this problem, a project was developed in Antofagasta that purposely had a range of housing types in the same neighborhood, including some market rate and some affordable to voucher holders. A case study of this project by Hector Vasquez Gaete will be available shortly from Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

New policies to promote housing construction in central cities are also being implemented in Latin America, with the goal of adding housing where there are already services, amenities, and access to employment. For example, property tax rates on vacant land in Brazil are on average five times higher than on land that has been developed. More aggressively, Bogota (which also has higher tax rates for vacant land) implemented a policy that forces the sale of vacant land that is not developed within two years of being identified. Land is then developed for social housing.

In order to make progress in the design of housing policies so that they do not repeat past mistakes and improve the lives of those living in Latin American cities, comparative research on what works, what does not, and why, is necessary. Fortunately, this type of investigation is ongoing and several notable examples have been recently completed; for example an overview book from the Inter-American Development Bank, a paper by Eduardo Rojas, and an edited volume on the inner-suburban neighborhoods of Latin American cities by Peter Ward, Edith R. Jimenez Huerta, and Mercedes Di Virgilio.

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What is ‘Post’ about ‘Post-conflict’?

How the Term Affects Global Aid

January 14, 2015

By Steve Commins, Associate Director of Global Public Affairs at UCLA Luskin; Urban Planning Lecturer



Nepal is a country that is currently labeled ‘post-conflict’. But after two civil wars, one driven by an armed insurgency which later allied with a non-violent democratic movement, and the second spurred on by ethnic tensions in communities bordering India, the Nepalese still struggle with the daily tasks of building a new political system. The label ‘post-conflict’ is a designation that belies the complexities of the country’s status and what is required for a long term, peaceful, political settlement.

Nepal currently faces both deeply rooted forms of poverty and economic exclusion. India, which borders the country, has had a major hand in its economic options, and the country receives a significant amount of international ‘aid.’

Nepal occupies a particular niche in the “aid business”, as it is not a ‘strategic’ conflict like Afghanistan, it is not an aid orphan like the Central African Republic nor is it an aid darling like South Sudan recently. As a result, Nepal exists within the broad sweep of countries that have been labeled ‘post-conflict’ by the United Nations and other agencies, and, in the current jargon, a ‘Fragile and Conflict Affected State’.

In the late 1990s, chastened by the failure of the UN and major political powers to effectively address the human catastrophes of the civil wars in Somalia, Rwanda and Bosnia, as well as the limits of ‘democratization’ and ‘good governance’, a number of international agencies began to give more serious attention to what eventually became labeled ‘Fragile and Conflict Affected States’.

The premise of this approach is that there are complex, historic reasons why states have different forms of violent political conflict and political fragmentation, and there are also situations where states may experience the decay of public institutions even without overt violent conflict. This means that the UN and donor agencies have to address the underlying causes of ‘fragility’ rather than just provide humanitarian (neutral) aid – or as one observer put it, a ‘humanitarian fig leaf’.

Much literature has been devoted to debating ‘fragile’, ‘failed’ and ‘failing states’.  Frequently it misses the mark by not delving into the historic specifics of a country or region, or descending into superficial explanations like ‘these communities never got along’ or the government was doomed from the start’ – explanations that lack depth or insight into the nuances of the specific reasons and dynamics of fragility.

At the same time, the role of international agencies, which sometimes (but not always, hence the term ‘aid orphans’) provide large amounts of finance for both short-term ‘humanitarian’ assistance and longer-term ‘post-conflict’ reconstruction, poses another challenge. The problem with this approach is that donor agencies are making decisions on what to label a specific situation rather than the messy realities of politics (again, sadly, South Sudan’s collapsed political settlement comes to mind). Donor time frames and real politics rarely cohere.

As part of a four-country study on the impact of Community Driven Development projects on livelihoods in FCAS (Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Nepal), I worked with the lead Nepalese researcher on the initial interviews and inception for the country study.

Landing in Nepal’s capital Kathmandu provides no haunting images of war or political turmoil. On appearance the country is back in business. Indeed, fortunately for the country, the Maoists involved in the first civil war did not engage in the level of violence or social destruction found in some other countries (up to 20,000 people died, so ‘level’ is a sadly relative term). The Maoists currently function as a political party similar to the FMLN (Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front) in El Salvador or FRELIMO (Mozambique Liberation Front), which moved into the political process after the peace agreements in their countries.

But talk for any amount of time with Nepalese and a complex picture of hopes and aspirations as well as uncertainties about a very nascent political system emerges. The politics of geography, as it were (Mountains, Hills, Terai), the debates about federalism (too much or too little depending on the individual) and the problematic aspects of nation state building and agreeing on the ‘imagined community’ that remain unresolved.

In the end, whatever label is applied by international donors, Nepal remains a country that has an evolving, contentious and sometimes fraught political process. Perhaps the label should be changed to ‘post-violent conflict’ (though different forms of violence frequently morph into criminality after the overt political violence has been reduced) as in reality all effective political settlements do not end conflict, rather they provide mechanisms that at best may achieve general acceptance for ways of addressing inevitable disagreements in non-violent, democratic and equitable ways.

This can only be seen from the ground up, as each violent conflict or manifestation of state fragility has its own history, meaning and narratives.

‘Post’ is a label of hopefulness about a better future, a short-hand for donors to change how they give aid, and, perhaps, a step towards a political settlement that works better for more people than the previous one.

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Whose Biases Count?

December 5, 2014

By Steve Commins, Associate Director of Global Public Affairs at UCLA Luskin, Urban Planning Lecturer, and co-author of the 2015 World Bank WDR


wdr_cover


A few years ago, a major donor agency organised a nationwide poverty discussion with civil society organizations (CSOs) in Bolivia.  While the meeting between agency officials and the CSO representatives was going on, indigenous people’s organizations were out in the streets, invading government offices and setting up barricades, taking action against their sense of exclusion from the political system.

Their protest handed the donor staff a reality check. While they had reached out to many CSOs, these CSOs had been led by mestizos who spoke Spanish and were generally disconnected from the poorer and more marginalized indigenous communities.

This story — and many more like it from my long career in international development, with both non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the World Bank — came to mind over the last year or so when I have been on the team writing the Bank’s latest World Development Report, WDR2015, Mind, Behavior and Society, published yesterday.

The Report emphasizes the enormous scope for psychologically and socially inspired polices and interventions to help people make choices that promote their own interests, and how behaviors, social norms and mental models shape individual and collective action in ways that do not fit ‘standard’ economic models.

One of the several ways in which the Report is unusual for the World Bank is its chapter on the biases of development professionals.  The premise is first that it is easy enough for professionals to look at (or look down at) the behaviors, biases, mental models and cultural norms of ‘poor people’, patients, students, etc.. It is not so easy, however, to hold up the mirror to the limited cognition of professionals themselves.

Some examples of ways in which organizational structures and embedded institutions limit self-criticism came from a survey of World Bank staff, featured in the report, which found that development practitioners’ models of how poor individuals think and behave are sometimes inaccurate. There are also numerous examples of how even well-intentioned approaches to development can go astray.

A former Peace Corps volunteer who had worked in Lesotho for a number of agencies wrote a superb paper for a course with me, asking if NGOs and others were interlopers or interlocutors in Lesotho.  This distinction is a clear and crisp demarcation about the differences in mindsets and professional approaches to working with poor people and communities.

These professional biases affect lives in OECD countries as well. In the United States at the start of the Ebola outbreak, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) assured the public that US hospitals were well equipped to handle Ebola cases.  This was not an accurate representation of the realities, as confirmed both by nurses and other health workers.

Similarly, there was an expectation that the ‘public’ nature of the British National Health Service (NHS) would guarantee quality care equitably, without considering how the system would promote certain behaviors and norms and replicate social biases.

At the organizational level, this calls for both transparency and accountability, as well as a culture that promotes learning and openness about errors.  This is difficult because, despite the language of ‘learning’, any form of power is made nervous by facts and criticisms that reflect badly on its credibility.

Academics as much as any other profession are prone to a lack of self-criticism (despite the appearance of a critical environment) and to becoming increasingly narrow in their upward climb into the higher ranks.  Too many papers and reports that in theory address complex and important social issues are burdened with jargon, insider debates and lofty phrases that signify membership in a club rather than wrestling with their limited knowledge.

This isolation from the muck and mire has been noted by Robert Chambers (Provocations for Development), Mike Edwards (The Irrelevance of Development Studies) and others.

One of the most recent illustrations of the importance of stepping outside the professional box or mindset is in the magnificent book, Beyond the Beautiful Forevers, by Katherine Boo. Stepping into one slum, she provides the type of voice that professionals need to hear. The centrality of this approach is emphasized in her comment: “Slums are over-theorized and under-reported.”

So, what to do?

The WDR suggests a number of ways to challenge professional blindspots, but the core lesson is that there is no substitute for challenging ourselves individually and collectively to keep narrowing the gap between what we think we are doing and the actual effects of our policies and practices.

 

*** This blog was originally published by Public World, an international social enterprise providing consultancy services to improve jobs, livelihoods and services through better civic and employee engagement.


Print


Full World Bank 2015 WDR

Luskin article on Stephen Commins and the WDR

Related blog by Stephen Commins: “How do power relations affect job creation?” (Public World)

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Global Affairs and Six Human Values

By Michael Storper, Director of Global Public Affairs at UCLA Luskin; Professor of Urban Planning


processes - the fall of new amsterdam


I want to use my first blog post to comment on the obvious: there are many conflicts in this world. Global public affairs involve conflicts of interests (it might be in my interest to invade you, but not yours to be invaded). GPA also involves differences in how to deal with conflicts of interest (negotiate or make war?). But the global also involves differences about the ultimate goal, such as what kind of world we ultimately want to live in. This underlies the values in whose name we are willing to make sacrifices and how we define ourselves, individually and collectively.   It is increasingly clear that we do not live in a world of homogeneous values – not across the street, across the country, or across the border.

So I’ve been thinking about how to characterize my values. They are linked to my personal identity, but more importantly, they are tests that I apply to debates over policies. They help me determine whether I support this-or-that kind of action by my political leaders.

The terms that describe my six most important values are:   Liberal, social, democratic, republican, secular, and humanist.

I mean Liberal not in the American sense of the word, but in the normal usage as, in favor of a society that wishes to accord to the individual the most liberty that is compatible with an organized society and that believes that individual freedom, desire, initiative and development are key to human happiness. A Liberal society has internal differences that stem from human diversity and the freedom to be oneself. It must be organized to allow and even encourage peaceful and respectful combination and sometimes, confrontation, of these energy-giving differences.

I am social in that I inherit from the social solidarity tradition in Europe the notion that no system is perfect, and that people have good and bad luck in this life, and that no system of changes – economic, technological, global – are fair to every individual.  So a society that wants to keep moving forward also needs to guarantee certain basic rights, not just to liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but to basic dignity and sustenance. So I am a social Liberal, not a libertarian Liberal.

I completely buy Aristotle’s argument that democracy is better than aristocracy, timocracy, plutocracy and a bunch of other “cracies.”   Aristotle told us that people should be listened to. In the 18th century Enlightenment, we built on this to start a long voyage of defining who is the demos, from white propertied males to many other humans, and we’re still not all the way there in all parts of this globe. Most existing democracies today are also woefully flawed in their ability to translate the will of the people into public policy. But the goal is still the right one, so I am a democratic, social Liberal.

Way back, Aristotle and Plato struggled with how to synthesize what the people (the demos) want into some kind of unified Republic. Even in a system that gives voice to the people, sometimes the majority can be nasty, intolerant or short-sighted. Plato had a rather aristocratic solution to that problem: of wise men or philosopher-kings. I cannot endorse his solution, because it is not democratic, but aristocratic. Aristotle had a different, mechanical solution of “golden means,” and Rousseau had a similar notion of the “general will.” Both are simplistic. Other thinkers, from Montesquieu through Madison to Amartya Sen tell us instead to concentrate on the design of the Republic’s institutions. Institutions need to keep the worst tendencies of mass rule in check, but also to bring our Liberal messiness together into a common direction. The basic way they do this is by having many levels and checks-and-balances. All existing Republics are currently facing a challenge of renewing their institutional design to meet these two goals, and we are far from where we would like to be. But still, I am a republican, democratic, social Liberal.

These four values coalesce into and are supplemented by humanism. This term is often used to express a kind of warm-hearted “be nice” attitude. But it means something more profound. It refers to a society in which there is no divine or natural law, but in which humanly-constructed rules are those that take precedence over any notions of divinity or nature. Nature certainly forms us and constrains us, but we are intelligent enough to get around nature or at least shape it quite a lot. There is then a responsibility for doing this, and it is humanism. Humanism means that we understand our power, and that we accept responsibility for what we do with it. Therefore, any serious republican, democratic, social Liberal also must be an engaged and responsible Humanist.

Finally, one can only fully live out these other values in a secular public space. This is not the place to take on the question of faith. Organized religions may under certain circumstances be compatible with social, democratic and republican principles. Most of them will have a somewhat harder time with full-on Liberalism. And then they must necessarily have limitations on their humanism, if they take divine law seriously. So there are many ways in which people of faith can and do contribute to my values; but the public sphere is one in which their law has to be subsidiary to modern Liberalism and to the humanist concept of public shared responsibility. A liberal and secular society is wedded to expanding human rights and responsibilities and to an over-arching cosmopolitanism.   So I am a secular, humanistic, republican, democratic, social Liberal.

These are six good tests to apply to our analyses, allegiances and potential solutions.   They are prevalent in different proportions among groups and between countries. In practice, each issue challenges us where to put the cursor between these values. They need to check each other’s potential excesses. For the first four, there can be such a thing as too much or too little liberalism, democracy, republicanism, and socialism. When this happens, we are no longer sufficiently secular or humanistic.   Then we are in trouble.

When there is a specific issue that puzzles me, I try to test different approaches and solutions this way. And the nice thing about these general principles is that there are many practical ways to achieve them; they don’t require a certain specific policy or political system. Thus, these six values offer us a pragmatic framework. They also offer us a moral compass, helping us not to get off track, preventing us from slowly losing our bearings in a bewilderingly complex world.

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Toilets, Cities, and Economic Development: A Note on Emerging and Future Research

By Vinit Mukhija, Faculty Cluster Leader of Global Urbanization and Regional Development; Professor of Urban Planning


sanitation2


Current United Nations’ estimates suggest that more than a third of the world’s population (around 2.5 billion people) practices open defecation or lacks access to adequate sanitation. About a quarter of them are in India. Many of them live in its dense cities, and the country has the most people defecating in the open. Emerging research is helping to reveal the robust connection between sanitation and children’s nutrition, health, and mortality rates, education of females, household incomes, and economic productivity. The evidence, particularly from India, also suggests that the sanitation-related disease burden is more in dense cities.

In other words, as one of my urban planning students recently shared with me, “Toilets are trending” in development. This new emerging wisdom and salience of toilets in international development has several implications for urban planning and global health research. I am particularly interested in three ideas, and share them below.

First, I would like to see more research empirically examining the link between sanitation and economic development. Although the received wisdom has been that sanitation infrastructure increases with economic development, the arrow of causality may not be one-sided and an emphasis on toilets opens up opportunities for both new research directions and policy interventions.

Second, given the problem of limited access to toilets in dense cities and their informal settlements, a focus on the potential role of sanitation in development may suggest the need for new approaches in upgrading slums and informal settlements. In informal settlements with low density it is easier to add infrastructure, including private toilets, through in-situ upgrading and minimal changes in the layouts of the neighborhoods. However, in dense settlements, adding infrastructure, particularly toilets, is very difficult. In such neighborhoods, there may be a need and support for alternative upgrading policies, including slum demolition and redevelopment, and land readjustment to create space for “group toilets,” or toilets shared by a small group of three to five households.

Finally, I see a need and opportunity for in-depth case studies of innovative institutional practices in increasing use of and access to toilets. India is a great laboratory for such research. Although India has a significant problem of lack of sanitation infrastructure and open defecation, some states and districts are making noteworthy progress in improving infrastructure and becoming “open defecation free”. These states include Kerala, Himachal Pradesh, Sikkim, Maharashtra, particularly Kolhapur district, and Haryana. This is an institutionally, geographically, economically, and socially diverse group of states. Their rates and density of urbanization also vary significantly. However, what is common across this varied group is their apparent success in the provision of toilets. But what explains their success? What have these states done differently? I suspect that there are institutionally rich explanations of their accomplishments, and research that can help reveal their success will be very helpful for both development theory and the practice of development planning.