Building workers constructing and appartment block for
inhabitants of Dharavi, Mumbai.
two-storey houses or terraces to apartment
blocks. In the 1990s, the Indian NGO SPARC
started working with the Indian National Slum
Dwellers Federation and the NGO Mahila
Milan towards the vertical development
of Dharavi, in Mumbai. This had become
necessary due to commercial pressure on the
land which threatened to evict slum dwellers.
The first 4-storey apartments were built for
the Markhandeya Housing Co-operative, with
HUDCO funding. Later, even higher blocks
were built, for example the Bharat Janata co-
operative (see: http://www.sparcindia.org)
5. Securing tenure.
Lack of tenure can prevent people from accessing
support for reconstruction and restrict housing
improvement and urban upgrading. There are many
forms of land tenure, and security does not always
need to come from having a registered title; some
countries instead provide right of occupancy letters
security (see Quan and Payne (2008) and Payne
(ed., 2002) in the Resources section, and http://
www.gpa.org.uk)
Tenure regularisation is a common component
of many urban upgrading schemes, and therefore
examples can be found in many countries. It
provides ownership rights to people who may have
been squatting before, or had shared or bought land
informally. This method for regularisation could be
applied to reconstruction sites where people have
no demonstrable ownership. Ownership does not
have to be on an individual basis; an upgrading
project in Voi, Kenya, for instance developed a
Community Land Trust model, where land was held
in communal ownership. A similar principle was
applied to a reconstruction project in El Salvador
(see Case Study).
Where there are no official attempts to
regularise tenure, squatters sometimes adopt a
strategy of building shelters with a light frame
structure; removable housing, which can be easily
taken away should the threat of eviction arise. This
principle can be applied in reconstruction too; one
project in El Salvador used a light steel frame to
construct removable housing, another in Kenya had
removability as a criteria in designing transitional
housing (see the Applications section).
An alternative approach has been to simplify
title registration. An outspoken advocate for this is
Hernando de Soto (1989) of Peru, who influenced
the Peruvian government to drastically change its
land registration and regularisation procedures.
Even if rules are changed, people need to be
made aware of the alteration and convinced of
the benefits of registering titles. This was not
the case in Peru, where a study by UN-Habitat
after the 2007 earthquake revealed a wide range
of forms of land and house ownership; it was
generally estimated that about 80% of the affected
population had no formal titles, and therefore could
not apply for a government reconstruction grant,
offered tp registered owners only.
A good source of information on land rights,
tenure and regularisation is the Global Land Tools
Network housed by UN-Habitat: http://www.gltn.
net.
6. Supporting affected people to make
informed choices.
People need information to enable them to
build back better - this also applies to housing
improvement. Information should be provided in
the right format, see PCR Tool 9, Communicating
Girl using a computer at a resource centre for poor farmers
in rural Bangladesh
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