Examining responses to informality in the Global South: A framework for community land trusts and informal settlements
Introduction
In 2009, the Caño Martín Peña Community Land Trust (CMP-CLT) received ownership of 200 acres along the banks of the Martín Peña Channel in San Juan, Puerto Rico (World Habitat n.d.). They sought to transition vulnerable informal settlements into safe, affordable housing alongside environmental remediation efforts. The formation of CMP-CLT represented one step in a contested journey to provide housing security and improve quality of life for thousands of families. The project embodies a limited instance of how the community land trust (CLT) model, which has primarily been applied within U.S. and European contexts, could be adapted to respond to housing informality and affordability concerns in the Global South (GS).
This paper explores the possibilities for and impediments to the CLT model as a policy approach for informal communities in the GS. Worldwide, one in eight people inhabit informal settlements (U.N. Habitat, 2016) and frequently lack property titles and basic infrastructure. Government and policy actors have pursued several strategies to address informal settlements. Although their efforts have alleviated some affordable housing pressures, they have not resolved the problem (Gilbert, 2001; McBride & French, 2011): close to one billion people remain in informal settlements, often burdened by social, economic, and spatial exclusion and stigma (Davis, 2006). Could CLTs offer a secure, community-empowered response?
We begin with a review of existing theories of urban informality, as well as three prevalent policy responses. Next, we discuss the origin, theory, and practice of CLTs and review two instances of CLTs in the GS. Subsequently, we examine the potential for and impediments to CLTs as an informal settlement strategy relative to existing approaches. We also offer a conceptual framework for the application of CLTs in the GS. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of the model for the GS.
Section snippets
Informality debates and policies
Informal settlements are self-produced communities, classified as informal due to their lack of compliance to codes, laws, and regulations. They are frequently viewed in stark terms: for instance, as unsanitary places with accumulated poverty (Davis, 2006) or an alternate urban reality for the entrepreneurial poor (De Soto, 2000). Postcolonial scholarship has dismissed dichotomous characterizations, however. Rather than defining informality by its status outside the state, scholars interpret
Review of the CLT model
Existing informality policies reveal substantial gaps related to community empowerment, wealth-building, quality of life, and long-term security. Thus, we examine another affordable housing strategy that emphasizes these features.
Property ownership is often considered binary: one owns or rents a home. There is, however, a third option that defines ownership not as a monolith, but a bundle of entitlements that can be distributed among multiple parties (Institute for Community Economics, 1982).
CLTs in informal settlements?
CLTs offer potential for change in informal settlements, but how do they compare to existing policy approaches? We compare CLT attributes against existing informality policies in Table 1, demonstrating their potential to respond to a wider array of policy concerns in a more consistent manner. Unlike existing policies, the CLT offers both immediate and long-term affordability and security. Its emphasis on community control and engagement enables the CLT to retain important social networks,
A framework for CLTs and informal settlements
Based on our policy assessment, we propose a conceptual CLT framework for GS informal settlements. A conceptual framework can offer communities, governments, practitioners, and researchers guidance on potential opportunities and challenges associated with the CLT model. The framework identifies five necessary conditions for successful CLT implementation and long-term viability (Fig. 1). The omission of one or more of these conditions could weaken—or even preclude—CLT adoption.
Community
Conclusions
There is no “one-size-fits all” policy model to address urban informality in the GS. Informal settlements are heterogeneous and exist in diverse contexts. Accordingly, policy responses need to be varied to respond to the complexity of informal settlements (Walker, 2016). Legacies of power imabalances and dispossesion have long dictated property rights in the GS. The CLT model offers one response to diminish the long-lasting consequences of such processes.
We have examined the potential of and
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Patricia Basile: Conceptualization, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing. Meagan M. Ehlenz: Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing.
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2023, Land Use PolicyCitation Excerpt :The widely cited definition of informality as activities that “fail to adhere to the established rules, or are denied their protection” (Feige, 1990, 6) points to various causes of informality identified by the literature: (i) the unwillingness and/ or inability of residents to adhere to regulations, (ii) the unwillingness and/ or inability of government agencies to enforce the same, or (iii) a combination thereof (Harris, 2018). According to Basile and Ehlenz (2020), post-colonial scholars are inclined to interpret this kind of urban informality as a distinct “mode of urbanization”. There, the state, the laws and the norms may produce informality through their decisions about what land regulations are enacted, where, when, and whether those are enforced (Fernandes and Varley, 1998; Goytia and Pasquini, 2013).
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2022, Habitat InternationalCitation Excerpt :The case of Singapore could offer a warning about urban planning strategies exclusive of informal housing regarding public health issues, since many countries in the Global South confront even more challenging situations in relation to increasing population density and inadequate living infrastructure. Urban informal housing refers to unplanned housing areas or housing that violates building codes within the urban context (Balise and Ehlenz, 2020; Zhu, 2020). Roughly one-quarter of the global population lives in informal housing areas, such as slums, urban villages, self-built housing, and clustered dormitories, making the health risks of informal housing an important public issue (UN-Habitat, 2015).
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2021, Journal of Transport GeographyCitation Excerpt :Usual top-down institutional mechanisms of infrastructure provision is problematic in informal settlements because of the poor ability of municipal authorities to deal with land title disputes (Hill et al., 2014), transporting building materials (Meeks, 2018), and higher costs when compared to rather planned settings (Benna, 2019; Foster and Briceño-Garmendia, 2010). Lacking adequate walking infrastructure poses serious problems to informal settlements dwellers, which range from being the most vulnerable to road accidents (Beard et al., 2016) to the most disadvantaged to access schools, jobs, health services, and everyday resources (Basile and Ehlenz, 2020). In the city core areas, municipal authorities are often responsible for the provision of walking infrastructure (McCue, 2017).
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