The Role of Technical Assistance in Incremental Housing
April 27, 2021
- By Prapti Jain
Guest Writer
(Prapti Jain is a final year student of MBA at IIM-Rohtak)
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Indian Housing Federation (IHF).
“We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.”
- Winston Churchill
Introduction
Rapid industrialisation and urbanisation have morphed the way we live. From village to town, town to city, city to smart city, the common man has always been moving in search of better livelihoods, income, and lifestyle. While this mobility has its share of positive impacts, it also poses several challenges for migrant workers, especially those in the economically weaker sections who travel to cities as semi-skilled and unskilled labourers.
Migrating to the cities provides access to higher incomes and improves the potential to access better opportunities of education, healthcare, and urban infrastructure. The need to ensure sufficient savings for sending remittance to family and also meeting the inflated expenses in the city prompts migrant workers to toil harder to make ends meet. Further, they grapple with the lack of affordable formal housing options due to distorted land markets which often compels them to live in temporary shacks and other informal settlements, typically known as 'slums’.
These settlements are more accessible to the urban poor and migrant workers because it is more affordable to build make-shift houses or pay rents as per the existing rates in the settlements. The informal settlements also enable flexible payment options and impose minimal regulatory obligations. It satisfies their fundamental requirement of a shelter. Such settlements also allow the residents to expand their house at an incremental pace when financial and other resources become available. Sometimes, their self-built first homes are made of temporary materials keeping in mind not just the cost of materials but also the looming threats of eviction or demolitions of houses which have no tenure rights. Often shelters in slums are constructed with different types of economically viable materials of limited durability like tin, tarpaulin and plastic, used to build semi-pucca structures. Though these structures are shelters for the occupants, they are also exposed to risks in the event of natural disasters like earthquakes, storms, floods, etc. The 2011 Census revealed that in urban areas, one out of every six persons, lives in sprawling slums where conditions are “unfit for human habitation”.
Access to tenure security and formal housing finance are fundamental in promoting incremental housing. However, the formal housing finance market has not been able to meet the requirements of informal housing due to the lack of suitable financial products, difficulty in assessing low-income household’s ability and intent to pay, lack of guarantee of consistent flow of informal incomes, etc. However, overtime, certain adequate housing solutions are being addressed through decentralised and piecemeal efforts of citizen sector organisations (CSOs), activists and community mobilisation. The state and local governments have also designed more inclusive policies for in-situ slum upgradation. However, a lot of ground remains to be covered, particularly in the realm of sustainable and scalable market-based solutions for incremental self-built housing for families that have land ownership and ones that don’t have ownership titles.
Incremental housing: Challenges and opportunities
As a practice, using an incremental housing approach to improve houses has become prominent and successful across geographies especially among low-income families. Incremental housing is a gradual step-by-step process in which owners themselves invest time and resources to construct their houses, whereby building components are improved and appended as and when funding, time, and materials become available. Such a long-term process reduces the financial burden on households and allows them to attend to other higher priorities. This model of housing not only addresses the issue of resource constraints at a point of time but also creates an increased sense of belongingness and well-being among the households that invest in this process, with the added advantage of community upliftment in a sustained way.
However, the incremental self-built housing approach has some shortcomings which need to be addressed. This section highlights the key challenges and some good examples of innovations that have taken place to resolve them.
1. Settlement-level planning
Firstly, while incremental expansion is entirely practical at the household level, it may conflict with broader urban planning objectives that promote well-being such as — desirable road width, the density of construction, and connectivity to trunk infrastructures such as water supply and sewerage. This challenge can be overcome by promoting settlement-level necessary planning in partnership with the slum dwellers.
For instance, a model that gained recognition in Brazil was the Favela Bairro programme in 1995. Under this programme, the communities were involved in project preparation through workshops, door-to-door visits by community leaders, organisation of assemblies and events where they ensured community participation and discussions in order to negotiate and co-plan the development of their own houses. The first phase of implementation of the programme had covered approximately 55 squatter settlements comprising over 25,000 people.
2. Technical and financial capacity
The second major challenge is the lack of technical expertise and financial capacity available within this segment of households. This lack coupled with variable short-term needs for materials forces low-income households to buy materials from local suppliers which is often more expensive than procuring in bulk. This challenge creates an opportunity for citizens, CSOs, and governments to come together to empower such communities in building suitable houses for themselves and ensuring a basic standard of living while acknowledging their resource constraints.
One of the successful models that act as a template for many such housing projects to date is the Ethiopia Addis Ababa Chika Housing Project that started in 1993. In this project, architects and designers belonging to different organisations were motivated to help residents of informal settlements in understanding the nuances of construction. They guided the residents as trainers rather than as designers and assisted them to acquire the basic design and technical skills needed in constructing houses in accordance with their own needs and preferences. As per the terms of this programme, families participating in a mutual self-help project undertook approximately 65 percent of the construction labour for each other’s homes under the supervision of architects. These 'Chika' style houses were constructed from several different materials, including stabilised earth blocks, wood and burnt bricks, while all the necessary services and conditions were provided for building them. The resulting houses were affordable, quick, and easy to build.
3. Market-based intervention to empower households
The third challenge is in obtaining holistic support to make construction-related informed decisions. There is limited scope to assess the bill of quantities (BOQ) and maintain transparency in estimates that contractors or masons make regarding the costs of construction. Additionally, the responsibility of undertaking technical appraisals before approving a loan application is entrusted with the financial institution’s own representative or an external technical personnel. Usually, the institutions find it hard to undertake the expense of hiring technical personnel. Moreover, it is challenging to easily determine the viability of the project construction if the site is flood or earthquake prone or if it is located on a sloping area.
There is a need for a market-based intervention that gives independence and tools to every household to self-build within the ambit of the available resources as per their preferences in the most efficient way possible. To cater to this specific need, mHS City Lab (Micro Home Solutions) in India has developed a technology-based solution called NEEV. It is a platform for digital project management solutions in the form of an android mobile application, specifically designed to support all key stakeholders working towards enabling safe and quality construction of houses.
NEEV supports housing by facilitating as a planning and budgeting tool by enabling the user to estimate the project costs and understand the breakup of estimates for foundation level and cost of local materials and labour. It intends to support financial institutions with a quick technical appraisal of housing projects and also help to identify potential clients looking for housing loans. It can provide customised inputs or suggestions for disaster risk reduction and monitor the quality of ongoing construction across typographies. NEEV also generates a customised construction manual that gives the instructions to build the right structures which are suitable to one’s budget and helps to plan practical construction schedules. The platform is a fresh intervention, exploring to develop and enhance its features, and is simultaneously pursuing opportunities to expand its reach and scope in the housing market.
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In incremental housing, households take the primary agency to meet their needs and expectations to not only build or expand but also to repair or enhance. The collaboration of all the stakeholders is needed along with innovative interventions for enabling and strengthening the process of self-built incremental housing.
References
Favela-Bairro Project, Brazil. http://web.mit.edu/urbanupgrading/upgrading/case-examples/ce-BL-fav.html
Berhe A., Soressa Y., Erena D., Hassen I., and Mamaru T. (March, 2017) “Housing in Ethiopia: An Overview”. The Ethiopian Institute of Architecture, Building Construction and City Development (EiABC) https://mdl.donau-uni.ac.at/binucom/pluginfile.php/596/mod_page/content/15/Housing%20in%20Ethiopia.pdf
“India census says 1 in 6 lives in unsanitary slums” (March 2013) Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/india-census-says-1-in-6-lives-in-unsanitary-slums-1.1403897#:~:text=The%20census%20report%20identified%2013.8,of%20India's%201.2%20billion%20people
Irshad M. and Ashraf A. “Digital slums in internet society” (February, 2020) The Pioneer. https://www.dailypioneer.com/2020/columnists/digital-slums-in-internet-society.html
mHS City Lab http://www.mhscitylab.org/
Webinar - “How and where can technology enable resilience in incremental housing production?” (May 19, 2021) Institute for Housing and Urban Development Studies (IHS), Erasmus University and mHS Global Impact.