In my first post I mentioned Thailand's Baan Mankong slum upgrading project, and here I'll provide more insight into its processes. First, a little context.
Estimates of Thailand's slum population in urban areas vary, from 2 million cited by UN HABITAT's 2008 State of the World's Cities report, to 5 million reported in 2004 by the Community Organisations Development Institute (CODI), a key player in the Baan Mankong program. To put this into perspective, Thailand's population is approximately 64 million. Past Thai government policies towards the slum "problem" have included building flats, sites-and-services, land-sharing, and private provision of housing, as well as "camouflage", for example by erecting walls around slum settlements.
Baan Mankong is a government-sponsored project which was introduced in 2003, in conjunction with Baan Ua-Arthorn ("we care housing"), a more conventional public housing project. Together, the two projects had a target of providing 1 million new homes within 5 years, in order to achieve cities without slums. Baan Mankong was to supply 300,000 of these new homes. Whilst the target and timeframe were unfeasible, thinking on such a grand scale helped to provide the program the momentum it needed to scale up beyond the initial 10 pilot projects. As of June 2009, some 80,000 households had benefited (http://www.codi.or.th/housing/results.html).
Baan Mankong is a demand-side approach to housing that harnesses the collective capacities of community residents to obtain secure housing, with participation from outside actors, from the government (providing loans, approving physical plans) to architects (providing assistance in designing houses). To summarise the Baan Mankong process in seven steps:
1. The community must set up a community savings group for housing purposes (if not already in existence) so that residents can save towards a deposit for the government loan.
2. The community must elect from its members a Baan Mankong management team.
3. The community must decide on which kind of upgrading to undergo, on the basis of community needs and capacity, and decide which residents are eligible to participate.
4. Secure tenure must be negotiated over the current site, in the form of a collective lease or collective ownership. If tenure is not possible, then the community must search for a relocation site to buy or lease.
5. An upgrading plan must be drawn up, outlining phases of construction, and whether contractors will be hired or community labour.
6. The community must present the upgrading plans and the application for loans and infrastructure subsidies to CODI for approval.
7. When the loan is secured, the physical upgrading can begin.
This process evidently takes some time, though in many cases communities already had savings groups in place (thanks in part to CODI's efforts when it was still the Urban Community Development Organisation) and in certain situations where urgency requires speedy action - for example, when people are left homeless after a fire, like in Bonkai community on Rama IV road.
Undertaking Baan Mankong upgrading requires a certain amount of willpower - community residents need to be willing to take on a substantial loan to be repaid over 15 years, to work collectively with their neighbours to plan and undertake the upgrading, and to commit time. In many cases, upgrading requires the complete demoliton of their former homes and rebuilding. Often, assets need to be sacrificed: for example, those who owned multiple homes in the squatter settlement to be leased out for income, would only end up with one house post-upgrading. For these reasons, a trusted and accountable community management team is vital, to ensure that any disputes are resolved fairly, and to keep the project moving.
This is a very superficial outline of Baan Mankong, and in future posts I'll go into more detail about the various actors who are involved in the process - it's not just the community alone. But I hope I've demonstrated how Baan Mankong differs from conventional solutions to urban low-income housing, in which the state builds houses or flats for slum dwellers to move in to, all too often with little consultation with the beneficiaries about their needs and wants. With a participatory process, though not always easy, a much wider range of housing and community development possibilities are opened up.
Friday, May 28, 2010
An introduction
Welcome to this new blog, in which I will be documenting how the urban poor, in various Asian cities, are turning to collective action to resolve their housing problems and more. While my original interest was sparked by the Baan Mankong slum upgrading process being carried out in Thailand, there are many other examples of participatory approaches to community development in this part of the world, and I hope to share with you what these communities are doing, how and why.
Thailand is currently facing a political crisis which very recently erupted into a week of violence, and these political tensions have at their root the long-time disparities between rich and poor, urban and rural. To me, grassroots projects are one way of helping to overcome these disparities, and if they are done with the support of the state, then, even better (in most cases). I believe that participatory projects, even if they deal solely with housing, can spark off a belief in the participants in their ability to resolve other problems they may face, leading to a push for further community development through participatory processes. This is happening right now in various communities in Thailand. The ability to help themselves leads to a change in the relationship between the poor and the state, and can diminish their marginalisation by society. Grassroots, bottom up development, gives people an opportunity to change their status from being dependent on the government for solving their problems and meeting their needs, to becoming collaborators, able to work with the government to resolve the problem, if not quite as partners (yet), then as stakeholders with an active say and input into the process and outcomes. I'll be providing some examples of this as I go along.
To provide you with a little background on myself, I have studied the Baan Mankong project in Bangkok in a fair amount of depth, as it was the focus of my PhD. My research was a qualitative study of the Baan Mankong slum upgrading process: how it affected the communities which took part, the role of slum networks in promoting connections between the poor and the state, and how relationships between the urban poor and government officials have changed as a result. In this blog I'll offer some insights from my research, whilst also documenting housing and community development projects elsewhere.
Thailand is currently facing a political crisis which very recently erupted into a week of violence, and these political tensions have at their root the long-time disparities between rich and poor, urban and rural. To me, grassroots projects are one way of helping to overcome these disparities, and if they are done with the support of the state, then, even better (in most cases). I believe that participatory projects, even if they deal solely with housing, can spark off a belief in the participants in their ability to resolve other problems they may face, leading to a push for further community development through participatory processes. This is happening right now in various communities in Thailand. The ability to help themselves leads to a change in the relationship between the poor and the state, and can diminish their marginalisation by society. Grassroots, bottom up development, gives people an opportunity to change their status from being dependent on the government for solving their problems and meeting their needs, to becoming collaborators, able to work with the government to resolve the problem, if not quite as partners (yet), then as stakeholders with an active say and input into the process and outcomes. I'll be providing some examples of this as I go along.
To provide you with a little background on myself, I have studied the Baan Mankong project in Bangkok in a fair amount of depth, as it was the focus of my PhD. My research was a qualitative study of the Baan Mankong slum upgrading process: how it affected the communities which took part, the role of slum networks in promoting connections between the poor and the state, and how relationships between the urban poor and government officials have changed as a result. In this blog I'll offer some insights from my research, whilst also documenting housing and community development projects elsewhere.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)