The Right to Land - The "Question" of Housing

Housing is a major problem in developing countries. Lagos, in Nigeria, is one of the most congested and unplanned densely populated urban centers in the world. Ibare is an informal/illegal/ settlement area home to more than 50,000 low income slum dwellers. The aim of today's workshop is to design a sustainable housing solution to this community.

Our group/G-1, as a Local Government/ discussed with different stakeholders from UN-HABITAT, Local Community members, Local Engineers and Academic Scientists to sort out the best path to come up with reliable and long term solution.

At first, we considered the problem from the economic perspective. Nigeria, with oil driven economy, may not face funding problem to improve the lives of its 50K citizens with acute poverty. An idea from UN delegates/G?/ gave us a positive signal to fund part of the housing project.

Most of the community dwellers are living on a daily income of less than 3€. Most of their income goes to housing rent. If their housing problem is alleviated, they are eager to gather for a long term solution. We/as a local gov't/ planned to fund the housing project fully for now,as a long term loan for them. The immediate plan we sketched looks like the following:
1. The goverment will fully fund the project, partly from UN
2.The Local Engineers will provide feasiblity study and the total cost analysis
3.The Academics Scientists will design a business model that can be run by, and suitable for, the local community. Most of the community members are not educated and need some empowering/training/given by the academic stuff.
4. The first phase project, housing project for 1000 households/on average 5000 residents/ will be kicked off. Most of the local community members will get involved in the construction project.
After the training, most of the community members will be organized in Cooperatives for a long term business. The income will help them to pay their loan and make their living.
The business model is decided by the local community and the academicians.
The houses, agreed by the community members, will have certain shared services like water, gym etc.
5. The coming phases take inputes from the first phase, and modify its contents accordingly...

The problems we faced,
We had no practical experience on the nature of the problem and the different stakeholders we were negotiating with. Our fear was that we may end up in infeasible solutions.

Conclusion
Overall I was able think the problem in a dimension I haven't seen before. I got brief, even if not full, insight on how practical community issues will be tackled, how the influential stakeholders are negotiated and the invaluable participation of the local community as an incentive to make it their issue.

Natural Hazards and Risks in Urban Environment

A lecture by Dr. Philip on Risks in Urban areas gave me a wider insight to the risks in urban areas, which are associated with dense population and economically importance than rural areas.

The ovious natural disasters may cause damages if they are not well noticed beforehand. Earthquakes, volcanoes, drought etc may be among them. I have got a different way of seeing the risks, specially those which are taken by careless decisions. There are instances like investing/settling in an area prone to flood, settlements near by mountains where land sliding is common, city planning which makes infrastructures which may cause much damages like air ports in center city etc.

Relocation after a certain disaster is noticed may be a serious case. Because of its demanding socio economical impact, relocation seems an unlikely happening.

In analysing the Hazard Weighting for EU cities in our group, we first put the disasters in order of importance. After that we assigned their weights, percentage figures which are agreed upon by most of the group members.

If I made the same discussion with the dwellers and all stakeholders of my home town the probable results would be

• Drought - 40%
• Flood - 30%
• Land slide - 20%
• Storm/Cyclones- 5%
• Forest Fires - 2%
• Extreme Temperatures and storm surge - 1% each
• Earthquakes, Tsunami and Volcanic Eruption - 0%