The development of water, sanitation, energy, transport and communications infrastructure in the Global South often disregards the urban poor. At worst, investment in infrastructure can harm poor people’s tenure security. But it could – and should – be so different.
Virtually all the world’s fastest growing cities are in Asia and Africa. A number of international agreements, including the New Urban Agenda and Sustainable Development Goals, seek to promote inclusive urbanisation. Infrastructure investment can further this vision – but it can also undermine it.
So who benefits from urban infrastructure development? This depends on configurations of economic, political and cultural power that underpin social outcomes – and the ways these are normalised.
A person in Daami, a low-income settlement in Somaliland’s capital Hargeisa, provides a clear illustration of this: “There once was an organisation that supported the digging of latrines in the neighbourhood. But support was not sufficient. They said that every five households should share one latrine… [Then] the landowners put fences around the latrines and made them private.” Making toilets private means people must either pay the landowners to use toilets or lose access.
While the accessibility and quality of infrastructure are real challenges for people living in low-income urban settlements in the Global South, the affordability of infrastructure is often their greatest concern. For example, on average, 37 per cent of our respondents are dissatisfied with the affordability of communications services and one-third are dissatisfied with the affordability of transport services.
The financialisation of on-grid infrastructure forces marginalised people to resort to off-grid infrastructure. Although the main institutionalised grids for essential services can certainly be problematic, in urban areas off-grid provision may be even more expensive, less reliable and poorer quality. Just over half of all people in our research locations do not have water (for drinking, cooking and washing) piped into their house or yard, and 33 per cent do not have an electricity connection.
In Bangladesh’s capital, Dhaka, people in low-income settlements often have illegal connections to infrastructure grids. They say they have repeatedly asked the government to provide them with legal connections, but to no avail. A person in the city’s Kallyanpur slum sums up the situation: “The authorities don’t ask us what we need. They never ask.” Another person in the same settlement supports this view: “We want to participate and we want to tell them our experiences. We don’t have a way to do that right now.”
All too often, this lack of participation culminates in forced evictions, and some people experience repeated evictions. A person in Churu Farm, a low-income settlement in the Zimbabwean capital Harare, explains: “Some of the people in Churu Farm have been evicted… seven times from different places by the City of Harare… if I die today, it is not possible to say my children will inherit the house we live in from me.”
It is important to recognise that security of tenure in the Global South is complex: in some cases, informal or customary arrangements may actually provide greater de facto tenure security than formal titles and leases. Nevertheless, it is striking that, on average, 42 per cent of people in the low-income urban settlements we are studying have no legal right to use their house or land. The bottom line is that tenure policies and legal systems mostly fail to work for marginalised people.
Regardless of the legal status of a settlement, its residents must be recognised as people with human rights. Indeed, a rights-based approach to infrastructure development provides a practical framework for ensuring that infrastructure projects serve marginalised communities while also strengthening their tenure security.
Making rigorous human rights and environmental due diligence mandatory for all infrastructure projects would kick-start the process of transforming the infrastructure landscape in favour of people living in low-income settlements. If policy makers and decision makers insist on equitable community participation, the use of local knowledge, complete transparency and independent accountability mechanisms, they can empower the most marginalised. And if they insist on infrastructure financing being explicitly pro-poor – something that private infrastructure investment has to date generally failed to accomplish – they can reduce inequalities.
An inability to properly benefit from infrastructure takes both a physical and mental toll on people. During Sri Lanka’s energy crisis last year, a string hopper vendor living in the low-income settlement of Nawagampura in the country’s capital, Colombo, provided a powerful example of how this crisis was impacting them and their family: “We can’t do business with this price of a gas cylinder… I bought three litres of kerosene after waiting in line for five hours yesterday… We are going to be thrown into a financial disaster very soon.”
Minor reforms have not worked. Will governments and multilateral institutions really listen to the voices of the marginalised and genuinely strive to make urban infrastructure inclusive?
Sunit Bagree is communications manager in the School of Global Studies at the University of Sussex and a member of the Inclusive Urban Infrastructure team.
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