How do representations of slums affect the governance of informality? In this post, I share with you some of the results from my latest publication “Governing informality through representation: Examples from slum policies in Brazil and South Africa” soon available in Cities!
1. Uncertainty
Slums are typically described by focusing on data gaps and uncertainty. The governing of slums is related in this way to the challenge of governing uncertainty. Lack of data in the case of informal settlements is partially a political choice. In the case studies analysed, this political choice can be seen in the non-publication and non-collection of statistical data about slums. The IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics) has been collecting data on informal settlements since the 1950s, however only in 2010 did it produce a dedicated profiling of favelas nation-wide. Statistics South Africa defines informal settlements as “An unplanned settlement on land which has not been surveyed or proclaimed as residential, consisting mainly of informal dwellings (shacks)” (Housing Development Agency, 2013). In this case, uncertainty is not a “fact” about slums, but the consequence of lack of surveys.
Informality is created and perpetuated through the production of statistics and the production of uncertainty in relation to specific statistics. At the conceptual level, uncertainty is rendered through the denomination of informal settlements as “subnormal agglomerates” by the IBGE. Subnormal suggests difficulties in measurement, a deviation from what is normal and can be inferred through statistical analysis. Accounting technology is central both to the quantitative representation and to the conceptual representation of uncertainty.
Uncertainty is so pervasive in the narratives of informality that is has become naturalised, a “fact” that governance must deal with. I argue that uncertainty is a representation rather than an unavoidable condition to be faced. Uncertainty is as much part of slums statistics as it is of any other statistics. National censuses require great efforts with regard to time, funding, trained administrators and labour force, and coordination (Espeland & Stevens, 2008). According to Espeland and Stevens, “This is why quantification is often the work of large bureaucracies. It is also why, when wealthy nation-states and international organisations try to impose quantitative regimes globally, some nations find it difficult to comply” (2008: 411).
The perception of uncertainty and lack of data may be challenged by enumeration and self-enumeration exercises. In Enkanini, an enumeration report was carried out by a local NGO (Community Organisation Resource Centre, 2012), and was used to inform the iShack project. Like in Enkanini, enumeration reports are used in many cases as a means of giving visibility to informal communities. As reported by Huchzermeyer (2009) and Appadurai (2012), enumeration has been used as a community mobilisation tool to give visibility to slum dwellers’ rights and knowledge.
2. Materiality of informality
The statistical information produced by the IBGE on informal settlements focuses on accounting of houses and house quality, access to water, electricity, sewerage, as well as house appliances such as refrigerators, television sets, private cars, and so on. Accounting focuses on measurable artefacts, which drives attention to the materiality of informality. As argued by Roy (2005), materiality contributes to the aesthetic representation of slums, as places of physical degradation. The aesthetic aspect of slum upgrading has been brought up also with regard to the interventions that preceded the FIFA World Cup of 2010 in South Africa (Huchzermeyer, 2006) and of 2014 in Brazil (Freeman, 2014). Such interventions aimed at rendering slums invisible in the case of Cape Town and safe in the case of Rio de Janeiro.
Additionally, I suggest that the focus on deficit invites a technical management of slums, one that focuses on techno-fixes of poverty, and on material upgrading. The technocratic approach hinges on the distinction between experts and non-experts, the technically trained, the engineers, the developers on one side, and the slum dwellers on the other side, in need of the expertise they did not have when they first set up the settlement and built their houses. The material deficit is associated to a knowledge deficit, which is attended to by raising awareness, educating and informing (Roy, Negrón-Gonzales, Opoku-Agyemang, & Talwalker, 2016).
The case of Enkanini is a point in case. The iShack project responds to a purported material deficit of slums dwellers (lack of electricity) by providing solar panels. The solution proposed is centred on the role of experts as providers of both the expertise required to build solar panels, and of the maintenance services given by the iShack project operators, which include repair services and the recharge of the small batteries provided with the solar panels when solar radiation is insufficient. The focus on energy consumption diverted attention from the claims of slum dwellers. The claim to access to the electric grid was represented as a matter of energy use, whereas Enkanini’s residents saw access to the electric grid as a means towards the formal recognition of the settlement (Zibagwe, 2016). The downfall of relying on technical knowledge in this case is not that the upgrading did not work, but that the demand of the slum dwellers for connection with the electric grid was not taken into account, which led the project to a halt and may run the risk of reinforcing the perception of the slum dwellers of being second class citizens.
It should also be noted that these representations and material upgrading policies have introduced important changes in slums. As discussed in the previous section, favelas have come a long way from the levels of material deprivation observed in the 1960s (Perlman, 2003). The persistence of informality thus needs to be understood as a nuanced concept. New forms of informality emerge, suggesting that informality is a highly adaptive phenomenon, and a way of life (AlSayyad, 2004).
3. The scales of informality
The level of analysis used in the representation sets the scope of policy intervention. If informality is represented at the individual and household level through a focus on human rights, educational attainments, and household or per capita income, upgrading policies will focus on providing services to individuals and households, such as land titles, water connection, electricity connection, etc.
The result of this analytical choice is that the impact of slum policies on community ties runs the risk of being disregarded. As Rodina (2016) reports, the introduction of private water taps in households in the township of Kayelitsha, Cape Town, disrupted previously existing community arrangements on the sharing of water resources. The owners of RDP houses were connected to the water system and charged for the service. Rodina explains that homeowners became afraid they would have to pay for the water consumption of all the neighbours with which they had hitherto shared water. As a result, sharing practices were abandoned, leading to the breakdown of previous solidarity networks and community ties.
The breakdown of community ties contributes to the reproduction of dynamics of social exclusion and segregation, as seen in the case of Khayamandi, Stellenbosch, where households that benefit from upgrading programmes exclude other households from the use of such programmes and create a new, lower class, of urban poor. Dynamics of social exclusion are recreated by the individualisation of services provision enacted through the personalised system of upgrading based on accounting technologies such as: the evaluation of individual cases, the use of waiting lists, and the representation of informality as a bureaucratically mediated incorporation in the predominantly White formal society. The technology of accounting plays a central role in the individualisation of informality.
In the case of Rio de Janeiro, the UPP programme focuses on the community level. Community participation has been a central element of slums policies, such as in the programme “Viver Carioca” implemented in Rio de Janeiro (Braathen et al., 2014). Participatory processes provide an alternative representation to individualised informality by enlarging the scale of analysis to the level of the community or group of stakeholders included in the participatory exercise. However, Braathen et al. (2014) argue that slum policy seems to benefit only those involved in the participatory process and fail to scale up to the community level.
In this case, the problem lies in the use of a specific level of analysis, and to the neglect of the relational character of poverty and informality (Lawson, 2012). As argued by Huchzermeyer, “eradication of informal settlements can be misunderstood as a blanket mandate to remove shacks, in the absence of solutions that eradicate poverty, vulnerability and promote inclusion” (2006: 44). The focus on the individual, or on the community, leads to a policy that solves the “problems” of slums, rather than to a focus on the social processes that create social exclusion.
4. Uncontrollability
The “problem” of slums has been represented in the cases under analysis as an ever increasing number of urban poor, growing population, migrants, and so on. The RDP programme is framed as being unable to service the growing demand for urban housing because of the increasing migration from rural to urban areas, and from the Eastern Cape to the Western Cape and the main cities. The same issue was flagged by Turner (1967) in Peru, and by Roy (2009) in India. The narrative of increasing population is backed by the representation of slums through population and household censuses, as exemplified in Table 1. The UPP programme feeds on the imaginary of increasing criminality and uncontrollable drug gangs, which is represented through the use of crime statistics (Oosterbaan & van Wijk, 2015). Although criminality has long been a challenge for slum dwellers (Pinto & Do Carmo, 2016), what is notable about the UPP programme is how this representation is mobilised to justify military intervention.
In this case, the challenge of slums is framed as a problem of controllability. Slum population and population growth are given visibility through quantification, thus ascribing a sense of objectivity to the Malthusian fears of the urban poor increasing out of control. According to this narrative, governance shortcomings and failures are attributed to the untameable population growth and criminal activities.
The narrative of the excessive growth or excessive housing demand of the urban poor aims at containing informality and containing the growth of the less desirable social groups. According to Roy (2017), the assessment of population growth is linked to the racial aspect that characterises inequality and informality. Both in South Africa and in Brazil, the urban poor are majority Black or Coloured, and the excessive growth of the poor population is seen as a demographic problem. In the State of Rio de Janeiro, approximately 33% of the population residing in favelas is white, while 65% is Black or “pardo” (IBGE, 2010b). In Khayamandi, the population is 95% Black and 5% Coloured, compared to 52% Coloured, 28% Black and 19% White in Stellenbosch (STATS SA, 2012).
5. Sustainability imaginaries
The technocratic character of upgrading policies, like the iShack project, is linked to sociotechnical imaginaries (Jasanoff & Kim, 2009). In the case studies analysed, the imaginary of sustainable and smart cities seems to inform some of the interventions.
In Enkanini, the smart grid imaginary played an important role in the definition of upgrading policies and in the choice of technological artefacts (solar panels). Upgrading can be seen as a public enactment of the smart city and sustainability imaginaries, rather than as a response to the needs of the urban poor. As Zibagwe argues, the solar energy initiative was perceived by Enkanini’s dwellers as “a dispossession of their upgrading discourse as well as a palliative response to their envisioned improved lives that were woven around connection to the national electricity grid” (2016: 4). The settlement at the time of writing is not connected to the electricity grid, and residents rely heavily on paraffin and gas for their energy needs, which pose serious health and security risks. The smart grid imaginary was not realised in material terms, since there is no electricity grid, but it offers an analytical lens to understand how representations of imagined futures influence slum policy.
In the case of Rio de Janeiro, walls were constructed around some favelas to stop access to the woods. Favelas were identified as responsible for the city’s deforestation and environmental problems (Novaes, 2014). The mobilisation of the environmental discourse that led to the construction of walls around favelas transforms an act of social and physical exclusion into an ethical issue, framed as “deforestation is bad for everyone” (Novaes, 2014). Informality is conflated with unsustainable urban practices, the poor run the risk of being held responsible not only for their poverty but also for environmental degradation, producing the unsustainable urban poor.
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