Understanding the Poor in Asian Cities

Somsook Boonyabancha calls for a new approach to sustainable cities where people are made the subject, rather than the object, of development.

Unlocking People Energy

Pa Chan is a leader at Klong Lumnoon, a small community of 49 households on the outskirts of Bangkok. When I visited recently, she and a big group of community members were dredging out silt, water hyacinth and garbage from the small drainage canal running alongside the settlement. This is a monthly ritual here, and everyone pitches in. The canal used to run black and smell foul, but the people of the community began producing their own organic liquid compost and pouring it into the water, and now it is green and full of catfish. These people used to be squatters in Klong Lumnoon, but after a long and bitter struggle against eviction, they negotiated successfully to buy a small part of the land - and then designed and constructed their own housing and infrastructure, as a collective project. They did not just transform themselves from embattled squatters to proud house-owners, but learned how working together makes possible many things they could not do individually.

But let Pa Chan tell the story - right side column

We may have looked like a community of poor people eople living together

But let Pa Chan tell the story :

When I first came to Bangkok as a young girl, 35 years ago, I stayed in several places and finally ended up here. We may have looked like a community of poor people living together, but back then we didn't know each other very well and kept to ourselves. There wasn't much trust and there was stealing, jealousy, all kinds of problems. To the government and society outside, we were almost not human beings.

But then came the struggle against eviction and the slum upgrading program. We had to talk to each other, save our money collectively and work together as a group. At first, we didn¹t have much faith that a group of poor, uneducated people like us could take on such a big task: usually housing projects are developed by government agencies or people with technical knowledge. But we kept saving, kept coming together, and kept talking and helping each other to deal with the problems that came up. Eventually, we were able to persuade the landlord to sell us a portion of land. We set up a cooperative so we could own land collectively, and then began the work of laying basic services and building new houses.

At first, we thought we'd hire a contractor, but after some calculations, we figured that we could save three or four hundred thousand baht (US$ 7,000 - 10,000) if we did the work ourselves. So we divided ourselves into teams and set to work. Besides picking up construction skills, we learned a lot about each other's lives and families in the two years it took to build our new community. The construction process also became our community building, our trust building. Nowadays, everybody knows everybody here, and we live like a big family. I can leave my children in the community when I go out, and feel safe knowing they'll be looked after. When the building work is finished, we have plans to plant trees and vegetables so our community will be green and clean.

Development intervention
This is just one small example of what can happen when a development intervention emphasizes people as the key to making change. People like Pa Chan and her neighbours have come a long way from their decades of isolation, illegality and powerlessness. With these new relationships and this new confidence, Klong Lumnoon has become a secure, healthy and vibrant place to live. Its residents now have the confidence to take full responsibility for managing any aspect of their community's development - physical or social. And even a poor woman like Pa Chan has become a regular speaker and an important adviser to many other communities and institutions in Bangkok and other cities around Thailand.

Why can't we make a similar shift in how larger city development processes work? People are the spirit of any city. They are the creators: they provide the energy, the labor and the life that make cities function. It is time to look at them as the focus of city development. It is time to find ways them to get involved in our growing cities, so that they feel a part of whatever has been (or is to be) developed in their local constituencies - communities, wards or districts, along their canals or around their markets. How can people and communities play a part in the planning, the decision - making, the doing and the managing of their cities? How can they grow and be healthy as their cities grow? How can we begin a process where, little by little, the city begins to belong to people - whether poor or not? This calls for a big leap - a change in the city development paradigm. How can the system make room for the force of people's creativity to spring up and flourish so as to create this new urban development culture?

It is important to open up larger space for people to come together and to take up development activities in their localities - activities like house-building, community upgrading, canal-cleaning, and recycling or revitalizing community markets. When a housing project is to be developed, for example, the people affected should be able to determine how they want to live together, how the social system is to be developed, what form their new housing will take, and what kind of management system will be instituted. Rather than have architects, planners or developers just planning all this on paper for them.

Similarly, if some environmental feature of a city (like a canal, river, lake, mountain, historic site or shoreline) has become degraded, people who live within or around it can help develop it and, in the process, become its protectors and maintainers. This would give people a sense of sharing in the management of their city and it will build relationships between them and their improved surroundings.

Create space
If we see people as the subject of development, we have to create space for them to participate more actively and to have a stronger sense of ownership of what happens in their constituencies. Instead of the city being a vertical unit of control, these smaller units - people-based and local - can be a system of self-control for a more creative, more meaningful development.

When local development initiatives come from communities, people become the doers, and feel that the development of the larger environment is part of their communities, part of their lives, part of their achievement. Canal-cleaning activities in many communities have led to many others, such as cultural events celebrating the long history of living with Thailand¹s life-giving waterways. These activities are the urban people's way of respecting nature, since canals bring water, life, wealth, fish, transport channels, income-earning opportunities - and a vivid reminder of our unignorable relationship with nature, in the centre of the city.

Development interventions should try to create space for people to be the doers, for them to be able to lead the development process with confidence. We just need to understand the techniques to unlock this people energy and to channel it into a creative new force for city development. This must be supported by adopting flexible financial management mechanisms to allow people the freedom - as a group - to undertake development activities they initiate or need.

Canal-cleaning activities in many communities have led to many others, such as cultural events celebrating the long history of living with Thailand's life giving waterways

Individual people in Asian cities now have a clear bilateral relationship with the state, but often very few horizontal ones among themselves. How can a single politician – or a set of politicians or government officials – possibly manage all the needs and aspirations of a city’s five or ten million inhabitants even if given the power to do so? If we start building a lot of smaller constituencies within a city, where people start relating to each other – and sharing between constituencies – a lot of horizontal learning, linking, and creativity will start to happen.

A city is not a homogeneous unit. Cities are getting very, very big – many in Asia now number in the tens of millions – much too big to make sense monolithically. It is easy to fall into the trap of believing that only gigantic sized policy decisions and mega-projects can tame and streamline these teeming, out-of-control agglomerations of humanity. But this kind of thinking leads to many of the unsustainable development attitudes that we labor under today.

It is possible to turn this around. If, instead, we look at cities as collections of many small, diverse and overlapping constituencies and allow the people of each to take part in developing their lives, their areas and their ways of relating to each other – with proper coordination – then the human element and scale can reappear. Cities will begin to be manageable by their own citizens.

Asian cities are clearly bewildered by their recent explosion of growth, but they can draw on a long and rich history of how to manage coexisting interests and diverse populations with diverse needs. If we open up space for this enormous popular energy and allow it to play a stronger part in the larger systems in our cities, we will start seeing a lot of exciting new management systems emerging, and new directions in sustainable city development by the people themselves

Some related stories below

Land sharing at Klong Lumnoon

The small, canal-side community of Klong Lumnoon in suburban Bangkok was far from everything when the people first moved there 20 years ago.   But by 1997, the area was gentrifying and the land-owner decided to evict them and develop the land commercially.  

Some residents accepted the cash compensation the landlord offered and moved away.   But 49 families who worked nearby and had nowhere else to live held on.   In 2000, the eviction struggle got very hot:   two community members were thrown in jail and the others filed a court case against the land-owner, which they lost.   The battle raged on, but the people remained.  

Eventually, Klong Lumnoon residents linked with Bangkok's large network of canal-side communities, who showed them how to organize themselves, how to deal with the district canal authorities and helped them to form a savings and credit group.   Meanwhile, the eviction struggle continued.   Eventually, some senior community leaders from the network helped to negotiate a compromise solution, in which the land-owner agreed to sell the people a small portion of the land for their housing, in exchange for their returning the rest.  

With the District Office acting as mediator, the people even managed to haggle the land-owner down to a below-market selling price of just 750 Baht per square meter for their part of the site.   After registering as a cooperative, the community took a loan from CODI at 1% to buy the land, which the cooperative on-lends to individual families at 3%, using the 2% margin for coordination, social activities, hosting visitors and religious ceremonies.

An extraordinary thing about Klong Lumnoon is that at the end of this long and bitter struggle to resolve the conflicting needs of community and land-owner, these two adversaries have ended up friends.   The land-owner even agreed to contribute 200,000 Baht to build a new concrete walkway into the settlement.

The people at Klong Lumnoon worked with young architects from CODI to design an efficient layout for the 49 houses and to develop four low-cost house models for the 38 families who will have to rebuild their own houses in the new area.   The first three models were designed with rooms which can be finished later, after the families have paid off their land and housing loans and have some cash or building materials to spare. The people have also reserved four plots in the new layout for a community center, which the people designed in close collaboration with the young architects, using a series of beautiful models and drawings.   The center, which the people will build themselves, will also have a day-care center.  

 

 

EXTRA
The Maekha Canal Revival Project in Chiangmai province:
In this project the people actively participated in the cleaning of the canal and the re-blocking of their community to protect their canal and an ancient heritage site. Environmental development enhances people's tenure.

Another good example is the Samrong Canal Revival Project in Songkhla province.

 

 

How to reactivate citizen involvement in Thai cities, from the bottom up

There's a lot of talk of decentralization in Thailand, but cities still don't have much power, even though they have inherited the habits of a centralized style of governance.   But worse, a lot of us still believe that looking after the city we live in is the municipality's job - not yours or mine.   Thus while more and more of us are living in cities, more and more of us are becoming de-citizenized.

But city governments don't need to be the doers all the time.   The whole system needs to be opened up so that citizens in the city feel that this is their city, and that they are a part of the development, not just passive objects of that development, over which they have no control or ownership.   The city doesn't have to maintain all its drainage canals, for example, when the communities living along many of Thailand's urban canals have shown that they can do it very well themselves - as a group - with a few modest resource.

This is just one example of how responsibility for one aspect of city management can be decentralized to a citizens' group.   In the past ten years, besides taking care of canals and waterways, we've seen community people becoming important actors in the management of public parks and markets, of the collection and recycling of solid waste and the design and implementation of community-based welfare programs.   Opening up more room for people to shake off their passivity and get involved in these ways is the new frontier in urban management - and that's real decentralization, to the smallest unit of civil society.   Upgrading can be a very powerful tool to spark off this kind of decentralization, and the Baan Mankong program offers another - and much larger - way to activate the involvement of Thailand's poorest citizens in a range of city development processes, going well beyond their own housing.  

There are nascent civic movements in some Thai cities, but none as focused on doing as what Thailand's urban community networks are doing with upgrading.   When community people do the upgrading and their work is accepted by all the city actors, it becomes a process which enhances their status in the city, as key partners in solving city-scale   problems like housing and environment and land.   Change can only come from concrete activities like this.

Boon Kook :   Uttaradit's first community-driven relocation . . .

The inauguration of Boon Kook on March 29, 2003, was the starting point for Baan Mankong project and makes a very good example of how collective housing can be developed when various local partners cooperate to solve serious problems of housing - in this case to resettle 124 of the city's most vulnerable squatter households, all in immediate danger of eviction.  

•  The community network surveyed all the people with   tenure problems in the city, selected the most vulnerable to move to Boon Kook and helped start daily savings groups among them. The network also helped raise funds to construct Boon Kook's central house for elderly, poor or handicapped community members, which is part of the community's plan.   

•  The Municipality worked with the network to identify   good land and eventually bought the network's second choice land, for 6 million Baht, and gave it on long-term lease to the community cooperative, with support from the mayor.  

•  CODI provided housing loans to families who needed them.

•  The NHA developed roads and infrastructure on the new site, to NHA standards, constructed by private contractors.  

•  The new Boon Kook community planned the layout of their new settlement and are building their own houses collectively, in their chosen neighbor groups, using house designs they developed themselves.

•  Community architects helped organize the survey, and worked with the people to explore affordable house designs and community layout plans which allow them to live with their old neighbors and which include spaces for sorting recyclable waste, since many of the relocatees are waste-pickers.