No country in the region is immune from the spreading of informal settlements, reports UNECE study
Geneva, 19 September 2008 -- What are informal settlements? How serious are the challenges they pose to the cities and countries in the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) region? Do we have the tools to cope with the problem of informal settlements?
The Committee on Housing and Land Management, with its Working Party on Land Administration, has prepared an analytical study to answer these questions. The study will be discussed in Geneva at the Committee’s upcoming session (22-23 September 2008) and at a special workshop on 24 September. Experts will review existing policy options, identify case studies and develop principles and practical guidelines to help countries address the diverse and complex challenges of informal settlement formation and development. The workshop results and additional case studies will be included in the study, to be officially issued in the first quarter of 2009.
Informal settlements are a wide-ranging phenomenon: they encompass a variety of housing practices and experiences that do not comply with established norms and standards and have negative implications for urban and social sustainability. The term can, for example, refer both to dilapidated, rundown or substandard housing estates and to good-quality residential developments that violate certain rights or regulations (e.g. on public land, or causing environmental degradation).
Although by current estimations over 50 million people in more than 15 countries of the UNECE region live in informal settlements, substandard housing due to urban poverty and informal and illegal settlements in their many forms are a much more widespread reality, present in every country in the region.
In Albania, informal settlements contain up to a quarter of the population in major cities and 40 per cent of the overall built-up area. In the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, they are home to 11 per cent of the population in the 14 largest cities. In Belgrade, informal settlements account for 40 per cent of the residential areas. In Kyrgyzstan, an estimated 150,000 to 200,000 people have migrated to the capital Bishkek from the provinces in the past five years, resulting in a belt of informal substandard housing on the outskirts. Osh, the country’s second largest city, has seen a similar influx. In Istanbul, 70 per cent of the population lives in informal traditional housing (gecekondu). In the Russian Federation, while squatter settlements are not ubiquitous, 70 per cent of the population lives in substandard housing conditions, and many residential buildings are unregistered. The amount of dilapidated housing in the country accounts for a total of 93 million m2, of which 11.2 million m2 is considered in a state unfit for habitation.
“The UNECE study highlights that, notwithstanding differences, one crucial force underlying the formation of different types of informal settlements is uneven spatial redistribution of wealth” notes Marco Keiner, Director of the UNECE Division for Environment, Housing and Land Management. “Unequal redistribution of wealth can result on the one hand in capital (assets) accumulation at extremely rich or rich places, and on the other hand in asset-dispossessed areas of severe deprivation and social distress”.
The study points out that it is not only residents of informal settlements who are excluded from the wider social relations (as in the case of substandard informal settlements) or taking advantage of their class position by ignoring the existing social order (as in the case of upscale informal settlements). Informal settlements themselves are excluded from urban strategies, urban planning and other spatial and economic processes, demonstrating yet another reason why they have an adverse affect on the health of a city as a whole, and urgently call for intervention and the development of appropriate tools.
For more information on the study and the workshop, please contact:
Ms Paola Deda
Secretary to the UNECE Committee on Housing and Land Management
UNECE Environment, Housing and Land Management Division
Palais des Nations
CH-1211 Geneva 10,
Switzerland
Phone: +41 (0) 22 917 2553
Fax: +41 (0) 22 917 0107
E-mail: [email protected]
Website: http://www.unece.org/hlm/welcome.html
Ref: ECE/ENV/08/P15