A/42/427
English
Page 249
The shantytowns have found their own technique, their own resources without any assistance from anyone else, and they solved their housing problems. The real problem is not that. It is the poverty, the lack of planning, the lack of technical assistance, the lack of financing to buy construction materials, the lack of urban equipment. To change this housing policy for human settlements, they should stimulate self-construction, instead of financing these large housing complexes. It would have been much better and would have cost less to help the people to carry out the self-construction.
Generally speaking, it seems clear that without meeting the basic needs of human beings, concern for the environment has to be secondary. Man has to survive, answer, and attend first to his basic survival needs–food, housing, sanitation–and then to the environment.
Walter Pinto Costa
President, Environmental and
Sanitation Association
WCED Public Hearing
Sao Paulo, 28-29 Oct 1985
non-government organizations in poorer neighbourhoods. By 1983, some 223 organizations had been formed by residents in low-income areas, plus 135 youth organizations and 99 women's groups.[1] In this way governments can become partners and sponsors of the people who are the main builders of their cities.
4. Housing and Services for the Poor
47. In most developing-world cities, there is little low-cost housing. Generally those on low incomes either rent rooms – whether in tenement or cheap boarding-houses, or in someone else's house or shack – or they build or buy a house or shack in an illegal settlement. There are many Kinds and degrees of illegality, and these influence the extent to which governments tolerate the existence of such settlements, or even provide them with public services and facilities.
48. Whatever form it takes, low-income accommodation generally shares three characteristics. First, it has inadequate or no infrastructure and services – including piped water, sewers, or other means of hygienically disposing of human wastes. Second. people live in crowded and cramped conditions under which communicable diseases can flourish, particularly when malnutritlon lowers resistance. Third, poor people usually build on land ill-suited for human habitation: floodplains, dusty deserts, hills subject to landslide, or next to polluting industries. They choose these sites because the land's low commercial value means they stand a better chance of not being evicted,
49. Landownership structures and the inability or unwillingness of governments to intervene in these structures are perhaps the
- ↑ UNCHS, 'Habitat Hyderabad Squatter Settlement Upgrading Project, India', project monoqraph produced for the International Year of Shelter for the Homeless, Nairobi, 19.
