El sistema de control constitucional y su relación con la supremacía de la Constitución

Prior to the involvement of international development agencies in the housing policies of developing countries, national housing policies featured the government as a direct

provider, although the effect of such action was very marginal to total housing demand. Government attitudes to housing constructed by the poor, who were mostly unable to afford even the cheapest options provided by the state, was either indifference or repression or oscillated between these two positions (Hardoy & Satterthwaite, 1989: 15). Direct housing development by the state was constructed to building standards and planning codes deriving from frameworks imposed by colonial authorities. In practice state-built housing benefited the elite and public servants rather than the poor households it ostensibly targeted. As a result, state housing policies were contradictory, paradoxically constraining housing

opportunities of the low-income households in spite of contrary claims (World Bank, 1975). This counterfactual logic underpinning conventional housing policies in the developing countries prevailed until the involvement of international agencies such as the World Bank

48 and the UN highlighted new theoretical and policy alternative (Turner, 1976; Wegelin, 1978; Pugh 2001).

Direct public housing was unsustainable and its inadequacies became evident, falling short of delivering the required housing for low income households and thus necessitating conceptual rethinking. At the core of the new thinking was the recognition that public funds were limited and were incapable of meeting the housing needs of the entire society.

Furthermore, it became clear that low-income households had financial and material

resources that could be contributed to housing development. Lastly, government could vastly improve the rate of housing delivery by lowering the planning standards and building codes and permitting the beneficiary households to build for themselves. This was conceptualised as the assisted self-help or site-and-services approach to housing (Harris, 1998)27. The underlying principle of site-and-services is to guarantee a minimum yet adequate standard in housing by lowering the existing building requirements and planning codes thereby

effectively lowering the overall cost of housing and in turn improving access to housing for low-income households. This approach also guaranteed security of tenure to beneficiaries in the belief that it would induce the progressive improvement of housing.

Reviews of the site and service projects however found them to be unaffordable for the target households, inequitable in the distribution of benefits, incapable of recovering costs, and maintaining unsustainable levels of subsidies, all of which constrained replication and scaling up (Mayo & Gross, 1987: 305). As a result of their peripheral locations, site-and- services effectively displaced the poor from the city centre and imposed additional transport costs even though they moved to new, higher quality sites. As a result, the slum upgrading

27 _{Harris (1998) argues that the emergence of this concept has been wrongly attributed to its application in post-} second World war and especially in developing countries. He traces this concept to Sweden in 1904 and thereafter other European countries as well as the USA. He states that aided self-help or site and services emerged in reaction to the high demand generated after the end of the First World War. Harris & Giles (2003: 183) note that although these two terms implied the same approach, aided self-help was in common use until the 1970s when site-and-services became popular.

49 concept emerged, favoured by international development agencies such as the UN and the World Bank. Slum upgrading inserted non-existent, or upgraded existing poor, infrastructure such as ―on-site sanitation (private or public latrines), water supply (usually standpipes), access roads and footpaths, street drainage, public lighting, solid waste collection, some community facilities‖ in already established settlements and sometimes formally regularized

occupancy (Kessides, 1997: 4). Some level of tenure security was provided in the upgrading approach ranging from certificates of occupation, resident permits, conditional stay grants and other intermediate forms of recognition of occupation. Werlin (1999) notes that slum upgrading was less expensive compared to site and services. Findings by Churchill (1980; cited in Werlin, 1999: 1524) of ratio of cost differences between slum upgrading, site-and- services and conventional public housing in the order of $38: $1000 – $2,000: $10,000.

However, the new thinking in housing – site-and-services and slum upgrading – generated a critique from some Marxists opponents, culminating in long running debate - the ―Self-help housing debates‖ between advocates and opponents of assisted self-help housing interventions (Jenkins et al, 2007). In sum, advocates, led by John Turner, viewed state assistance in self-help activities as a rational approach to ensuring incremental improvement of housing by low-income households. Based on evidence from research especially in Latin America, these new approaches made it imperative to revise the conceptualisation of housing as an object to a subjective one which changed progressively according to the phase of development and income and resource means of the household. Turner argued against direct housing construction by the State and for household autonomy, within limits, in the

development of housing. The limits recognised the State‘s relatively better capacity to develop basic infrastructure, and its authority in rule making over other facets of the housing process such as finance and building materials (Turner, 1976; Gilbert & Gugler 1992:118). Through such instruments, the State could minimise insecurities felt by squatters which

50 constrained them from improving their housing conditions. On the other hand, households were better placed to articulate their preferences, being aware of their means. Household decision-making was more effective than the centralised decision-making, also referred to as ―heteronomous systems, to address the housing needs of the poor. Houses delivered through centralised systems limited the adaptability of the dwelling for functions other than shelter and therefore its desirability by low-income households. That freedom of choice and its derivative dweller control in decision making was essential in housing for the low-income households which required government assistance or facilitation found in site-and-services and slum upgrading, and not substitution found in public housing projects (Turner, 1976).

On the other hand, opponents, based on Marxist critiques of assisted self-help housing and led by Rod Burgess28 viewed state-assisted housing to be ideologically disingenuous, masking the implicit class bias of capitalist societies. The Marxist view opined that capitalist formation in developing countries adapted pre-capitalist activities such as traditional housing construction practices and settlement planning of low-income households and re-articulated them in new subordinate and exploitative relations. Firstly, the dominant capitalist classes were able to reduce the cost of labour reproduction by utilising unpaid or low-paid low- income labour in assisted self-help housing. This condition of self-help housing extended the working hours of the poor beyond the normal working day. Secondly assisted self-help housing promoted the commodification of low-income housing and thereby opened

opportunities for the operation of market relations at such levels. By formalising through state participation the informality of the pre-capitalist traditional self-help housing approach, capitalist societies open the space for the dominant classes, owning lands and controlling finance, to assert their power. This further engendered the extraction of rent from the

28

Jenkins, Smith and Wang (2007: 164) indicate that the Marxist critique took its cue from the dependency theorists of Latin America with Emilio Pradilla as one of the pioneers of this critique. Rod Burgess brought this critique into the Anglophone literature.

51 underclass and thereby regulated the life of the underclass (Marcussen, 1990; Jenkins et al, 2007);

State self-help housing programmes are integrated with the interests of those fractions of capital tied to state housing and cheapened not by the elimination of their profits but because they involve the unpaid labour of their future owners. They do not eliminate the participation of ground rents, profits on productive capital and interests on finance capital in the final price of the house produced. Although the state can reduce the final price by ceding to the beneficiary a part of the ground rents and part of the interest on its own capital (in the form of subsidized interest rates), it cannot eliminate or minimize their participation in the way achieved in the artisanal form. State self-help housing projects therefore transmit to the final price of the house the greater part of the dramatic increases derived from land speculation and the explosion in global and national interest rates (Burgess, 1985: 278).

Furthermore, it was argued that self-help housing ultimately failed to facilitate housing for low-income households with the insertion of tenure regularisation with its associated costs that traditional housing practices excluded (Jenkins et al, 2007). Additionally, by emphasising the commercial values of housing, economic incentives were generated for houses developed for low-income households in site and services schemes which then rationalised the

extraction of such commercial values at the least cost to the original low-income beneficiaries. Consequently, it was argued that the expectation in self-help housing that beneficiaries would undertake housing improvements for its social value was illogical as it did not appreciate the inherent incentives to realise the intrinsic commodity value.

In capitalist societies, ―all housing objects‖ are commodities. The self-help housing system is a variant form of petty commodity production functioning within a total system of production where

industrialized production is dominating and the petty commodity form is dependent. Even when people build their own houses with discarded materials, they are commodity producers: the builder could realize the value embodied in the building by putting it on the market, and he will not invest more labour and materials in the house than he believes will be recoverable on the housing market. The idea that people may build houses just in order to satisfy their social and cultural needs without regards to the general laws of commodity production is a theoretical misconception, and an ideological

smokescreen. The same is true of the idea that the State would give support to people‘s self-help activities. In Marxist analysis squatter housing built under the self-help form of petty commodity production is understood to be uniformly of an extremely poor quality. All in all advocacy of self-help is exposed as economically unrealistic, politically reactionary and as ideological bluff (Marcussen, 1990: 11)

The debate on state-assisted self-help was criticised as being at cross-purposes, ―between two different epistemologies, which moreover produced a widening gap between theory and practice‖ (Nientied & Van der Linden, 1985 cited in Marcussen 1990:12). Jenkins et al

52 Marxist critique. In the light of the influence of the empirical evidence from Lima, Peru on Turner‘s views (Harris, 1998; Bromley, 2003; Harris, 2003; Harris & Giles, 2003) it is unclear the extent to which the pervasive ideological divide between liberalism and Marxism at the time affected Turner‘s early views on assisted self-help housing29

. Marcussen (1990) pointed to later global events of the 1980s and 1990s to note the blurring of the ideological divide underlying the Turner-Burgess debate. Whereas former socialist countries were

experiencing conflicts and contradictions of re-emerging ethnicity and clientelism, a capitalist country like Iran had undergone a revolution. Emerging economies in the Asian region were experiencing varying economic transformations with differing housing outcomes from capitalist transformation to entrenched third world conditions (Marcussen, 1990: 12). The Marxist view dwelt on abstract theoretical notions, distinguishing between the economic (market value) and social (use-value). It also lacked a critical analysis of the state thereby denying the reality of the complexity of the state. Furthermore, vested interests of elites fuelled the objection to site and services schemes because it challenged existing structures of privilege (Jenkins et al, 2007). Marcussen (1990), as well as, Keivani and Werner (2001a) proposed an analytical framework that recognised the various mechanisms by which housing was developed and allocated in developing countries.

The debate also did not take into account the differences between the espoused principles of assisted self-help housing and the experiences emerging from the

implementation of these principles. Rodell and Skinner (1983) noted that this difference arose from the difficulties governments encountered in operationalising the ―dweller control‖

principle because it implied concession of power by some interest groups and the acceptance of ―a realignment of their old influence‖ (Rodell & Skinner 1983: 14). Kessides (1997: 7)

notes that very few of slum upgrading and site and services projects piloted through the

29

Jenkins et al, (2007: 172) note that Turner shifted his position in the 1990s from a focus on the household to that of the community as the critical instigator in assisted self-help activities. They discussed how the fall of socialism culminated in Turner highlighting the market efficiency of the capitalist system.

53 support of the World Bank were expanded by country governments because ―domestic

political commitment to alleviating urban poverty through such efforts weakened in some countries‖. Accordingly, dweller control in assisted self-help housing was conceptually

redefined as direct labour by low-income households to preserve the dominant interest groups priorities and assuage any anxieties (Rodell & Skinner, 1983). Other criticisms of assisted self-help and slum upgrading derived from the operational difficulties of these approaches to achieving cost recovery and scaling up (World Bank, 1993). In the longer term, negative outcomes such as gentrification, declining maintenance and inequitable gender distribution of benefits were evident (Jenkins et al, 2007). There was concern that site-and-services

remained project-focused benefitting small geographic locations. On the other hand, structural constraints such as inefficient land markets and poor building technologies persisted (Kessides, 1997; World Bank, 1993, Choguill, 1995).

The self-help debate was inconclusive and inevitably overtaken by events of the 1980s with the collapse of communism (and by extension the diminishing of Marxist thought) and the rise of neo-liberalism. In parallel, the theoretical construct underlying self- help was overtaken by the development of ―enabling principles‖ for housing policy and reforms. The trajectory of housing programmes in developing countries became increasingly dominated by the two main international agencies, the World Bank and the UN. The two agencies pioneered the enabling principles from the late 1970s onwards, although not always in cooperation. The perspective of the enabling principles of housing policy as a generic framework, limits the recognition of its divergent antecedents in the World Bank and the UN and the associated differences that exist. However, these differences fundamentally influence the design, implementation and outcomes of policy reforms based on the enabling principles. These differences also affected the working relations between these agencies and the

54 agencies also had a significant effect on what outcomes were produced in projects involving the two agencies separately or jointly. Strassman (1997) draws attention to the differences between the UN and the World Bank which are ―generally hidden [to the public] but familiar to members of the ‗development set‘‖ – that is staff and consultants in international

development organisations (Strassmann, 1997:1730). Focusing on the nature of the relationship between the two organizations helps to draw out the potential for variable

outcomes of projects involving the two. McAuslan (1997) asserts that there is as much a need to focus on the ―inter- and intra-bureaucracy relationships [of the two agencies] as on the substance of programme, for ….. the two are inseparably intertwined‖ (1997:1727).