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Self-Made Cities estimates that more than 50 million
people, in over 15 countries, live in informal
settlements in the UNECE region as a whole. The
phenomenon is not new; some of these settlements in
Western Europe date back to the 1960s. In Italy, for
instance, the industrial recovery during the two decades
after the Second World War resulted in large internal
migrations from south to north. These migrations
produced numerous self-built urban villages near
metropolitan areas such as Milan, where the population
increased by 26 per cent between 1951 and 1971. In
Portugal, more than 130,000 families have lived in
shanty towns in the metropolitan areas of Lisbon and
Porto since the 1970s.
In the Balkans
Other settlements in the post-socialist countries of the
former Yugoslavia were formed in the 1970s and 1980s,
and their number further increased as a consequence of
the ethnic conflict of the 1990s. Klauderica settlement,
one of the fastest growing settlements in Serbia and
arguably the largest in the Balkans, accommodates an
estimated 50,000 people, among them refugees from Bosnia
and Herzegovina and Croatia. In the former Yugoslav
Republic of Macedonia, informal settlements are home to
11 per cent of the population in the 14 largest cities.
In the Caucasus, life in informal settlements adds to
the hardship of displaced persons and refugees. In
Armenia, about 40,000 families are without permanent
shelter, most of them refugees or victims of the 1988
earthquake. About 40 per cent live in temporary
structures such as domics, small caravans set up in
public places. In Azerbaijan, there are close to 1
million internally displaced people and refugees. Over
1,722 households have not been permanently settled some
14 years after the conflict that first caused these
people to leave their homes.
The other cases
In Central Asia, where the phenomenon has a much more
recent origin and is connected to the transition to
market economies during the early 1990s, the number of
affected persons is as compelling as for the other
cases. In Kyrgyzstan, for instance, 150,000 to 200,000
people have migrated to Bishkek from the provinces in
the past five years. Osh, the country’s second largest
city, has seen a similar influx resulting in informal
substandard housing on the outskirts.
Self-made Cities, jointly developed by two UNECE bodies,
the Committee on Housing and Land Management and the
Working Party on Land Administration, addresses the
question of informal settlements as a multi-faceted
challenge that calls for urgent policy action. Residents
in informal settlements cannot fulfil certain basic
human needs and the nature of the residences present big
obstacles to the achievement of the Millennium
Development Goals in many countries. In Central and
Eastern Europe, for instance, Albania and Romania stand
out, as half of the housing in those countries lacks
piped water. In other countries, only a very limited
share of the housing has bath or shower facilities
(Uzbekistan, 13.3 per cent; Bosnia and Herzegovina, 22
per cent; Kyrgyzstan, 24 per cent; and the Republic of
Moldova and Turkmenistan, 30 per cent).
Background Information
Definition
An informal settlement is a residential formation where
housing has been constructed without the required legal
permit for use of the land or outside any urban
development plan. In general, residents of informal
settlements lack the legal rights to the land and the
house where they live and become vulnerable to eviction.
In addition, because of their improvised nature, units
often lack basic facilities such as running water and
sanitation, which creates further challenges to public
authorities.
Types of Informal Settlements
Self-made Cities analyses the various causes of
formation of informal settlements, which include the
following: regional migrations that are the result of
rapid urbanization, war, and natural disasters; poverty
and the lack of low-cost housing; excessive regulations
by administrative authorities; inappropriate planning
and inadequate land administration tools.
The full text of the study is available at:
http://www.unece.org/publications/oes/SelfMadeCities.pdf
Swisslatin
(1.07.2009) |
