Introduction

Throughout the Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) region, public resources are commonly used to solve the physical and social integration problems of illegal city neighbourhoods. These settlement upgrading programmes, as they are known, are integrated interventions financed with resources from central, state, and local governments but mostly executed by local governments. The concepts, working methodologies, and implementation mechanisms of these programmes have evolved since they were first introduced in the early 1980s.

Guiding this evolution are the lessons learned over the past three decades by agencies working to eliminate the problems of irregular settlements in the LAC region. Although they were drawn from local experience, these lessons have global significance. Among the most important lessons is that to be effective, settlement upgrading interventions need to be integrated - covering the physical, social, and economic problems of neighbourhoods - and designed and implemented with the full involvement of the community. The many contributions of these programmes to the development of the cities can be summarised in three words: they build citizenship. As neighbourhoods integrate physically and socially into the formal city, their inhabitants gain rights and obligations. They are able to access potable water and sanitation and must pay tariffs. With improved access to roads and public transportation, they become more likely to fully integrate into the formal labour markets and to obtain public goods offered by other neighbourhoods in the city. Inhabitants benefit from better access to health, education, and recreation services, which allow them to maintain and increase their human capital. The development and strengthening of the community organisations further builds social capital in the neighbourhoods. Land tenure regularisation, in addition to providing beneficiaries with a formal address, provides them with legal protection of their property rights and increases the market value and liquidity of their real estate assets.

Despite the proven success of such initiatives, there is still much work to be done in turning all informal settlers into full citizens. The main challenge faced in settlement upgrading programmes is that of scale. Only a small part of the population has benefited from the investments in infrastructure, urban services, and tenure regularisation: directly, the inhabitants of the settlements where the interventions are implemented, and indirectly, the inhabitants of the surrounding neighbourhoods. Nonetheless, in the majority of cities, the number of households living in informal settlements is on the rise, and in certain cities some formal neighbourhoods are beginning to exhibit problems similar to those of the informal neighbourhoods. Thus, the scope and scale of the interventions must be expanded to extend the benefits of citizenship to all inhabitants of informal settlements and to prevent others from gradually losing these benefits. How can this objective be accomplished? First and foremost, more affordable housing must be built to prevent the proliferation of informal settlements. The experiences reviewed in this volume indicate that in order to increase the availability of low-cost housing for households living in overcrowded conditions or sharing houses with others - the most likely to move to informal settlements - it is necessary to provide land for residential use at prices affordable to these households and support their efforts to incrementally build their houses. Other citywide interventions are also needed to improve the provision of public transportation and health and education services to these households to improve their living conditions and access to city employment and services. Clearly, such interventions require a change in the scale at which the problems are analysed and solved; thus policymakers need to look beyond the neighbourhoods to the city or metropolitan level.

The same is true for interventions that seek to provide inhabitants of informal settlements with the basic conditions they need to access and fully exercise their citizenship rights. Two conditions are paramount: earn sufficient income to sustain a minimum quality of life and enjoy a safe, harmonious existence in a community. It is not enough to give households access to serviced plots of land if they do not have enough resources for food and clothing. As the informal neighbourhoods are more fully integrated into the formal city, the beneficiaries acquire new financial obligations, including fees for potable water, sewerage, and electricity services; land taxes; and contributions to community organisations. Interventions therefore must promote, facilitate, and expand beneficiaries’ ability to cover these expenses and integrate into the city economy. Programmes have ranged from the development of the human capital through education and vocational training to the improvement of public transportation so that inhabitants can access more jobs within reasonable travel times. Improving the productivity and stability of the informal economic activities that provide employment to this population also contributes to this objective. To be effective, these interventions must be designed and executed at the city or metropolitan level rather than simply at the neighbourhood level.

Safety is another basic condition for exercising citizenship. The freedom to congregate in and otherwise use a city’s public spaces and services is an essential right. Relinquishing public spaces to gangs and antisocial groups - as when citizens withdraw into their houses or gated communities - constitutes a partial renouncement of citizenship. Interventions are needed in the neighbourhoods and throughout the cities to ensure safe environments on the streets and in the parks. Some of the interventions are the responsibility of the government, while others must be agreed upon and executed by the community.

The physical and social deterioration seen in housing built by the state for low-income households impacts the entire city. These neighbourhoods, built on the periphery of cities to save on land costs, had from their inception poor access to the cities - the result of their distance to the city centres and limited public transportation - and lacked adequate services. These factors, combined with the almost complete absence of nearby employment opportunities, have resulted in a partial and fragmented form of urban citizenship for residents of these neighbourhoods. They physically live in the city, but they have only limited access to urban employment and services. Because most housing complexes were designed for households of only one income level, residents are socially isolated as well. In short, the neighbourhoods have gradually turned into ghettos. Apartment buildings of social housing are particularly susceptible to decay, as most lack an organisation to manage the property’s common areas.

Solving these problems is a huge task, both financially and organisationally. International experience indicates that fully integrating these neighbourhoods into the life of the city requires no less than rebuilding the deteriorated social relations, the public spaces, and the neighbourhoods’ connectivity with the city. To prevent the emergence of these problems in the first place, it is necessary to build fully serviced neighbourhoods in more centrally located areas, which have multiple functions (housing, commerce, services, light manufacturing) and satisfy the needs and preferences of households with different income levels; in sum, these neighbourhoods should offer the benefits of urban citizenship near their homes.

The rapid horizontal expansion of cities surpassed the capacity of local governments to provide adequate infrastructure and services (as required by urban development plans and regulations) to newly developed outlying areas. Outside the high- and middle-high-income neighbourhoods that can afford to pay for these services, large sections of formally subdivided lands lack standard infrastructure and urban services. The inhabitants of these areas also face diminished urban citizenship rights and usually have more obligations than rights. Settlement upgrading programmes have made these problems more glaring by providing inhabitants of informal settlements with better urban services than inhabitants of nearby formal, yet substandard, areas, who own their houses and pay taxes for public services they do not receive. The full integration of these substandard areas is crucial for the development of the whole city.

The lessons learned from the execution of settlement upgrading programmes are very useful in the quest to improve the lives of informal settlers; however, they also pose a clear challenge to governments to increase the scale of their interventions in accordance with the size and dynamics of the problem. Attaining this scale depends not only on devoting sufficient resources to settlement upgrades and using them efficiently, but also on diagnosing the problems and implementing the solutions at the most appropriate territorial scale: the metropolitan region for the integration of the population into the urban economy; the city for providing access to serviced land for housing and improved citizen coexistence and safety; and the neighbourhoods for the building of harmonious communities in the newly urbanised areas. Accomplishing this objective ultimately depends on facing these issues as an integrated urban development problem that involves all spheres of public management. There are indications that this approach is gaining traction in the LAC region and that progress is being made to solve the problems discussed in this volume - that is, government officials, community leaders, and specialists are beginning to acknowledge that, although the problems of the informal settlements affect mainly low-income households, they are essentially problems of the whole city.

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