Why upgrade communities?
It's cheaper, it's easier, it reduces rather than increases poverty, it improves the lives of the working poor as it improves the whole city . . .
About two-thirds of the 11,000 families who have been evicted from their homes in the past five years have been resettled. A small percentage of these families are doing all right at relocation sites they’ve chosen and planned themselves. But many are camping out in shacks without water, toilets, roads or flood protection in remote resettlement colonies that are far from employment opportunities, support structures, schools and clinics. Resettlement has deprived these families of the means to develop themselves, deepened their poverty, compromised their health and their survival. But for lack of better ideas, resettlement continues to be the city’s automatic response to any land conflict that comes up in the city’s development.
Of the 569 poor settlements in Phnom Penh today, only a small percentage are on land likely to be needed for public purposes such as roads, flood control projects or government buildings. The other settlements provide much-needed affordable housing for the people whose hard work underpins the city’s economic growth. What if these people could fix up their settlements (in the same place or on land nearby) and by putting in basic infrastructure and upgrading their houses they could transform their slums into beautiful neighborhoods, proud parts of the city? As cities around Asia have realized through experience, helping people to secure their land and improve their living conditions inside the city, rather than chucking them out, is in the best interests of the city, the poor and the whole urban economy. Asian cities are filled with celebrated examples of community upgrading, but in Phnom Penh, upgrading is still an unknown strategy. Nobody knows how it works, what it looks like, who does the work or how much it costs. In recent years, individual communities and the UNCHS have made some improvements here and there, but these scattered efforts haven’t shown what can happen when the whole community (not just a few pit latrines or a wooden walkway) gets a face lift. So the idea came up of using the momentum from the UPDF and the CDS process to begin creating a stock of local examples of comprehensive community upgrading for people to see and learn from. Through a broad process of community discussions and prioritizing in all seven districts, three pilot communities have been selected to be improved, as a powerful training and learning opportunity within the CDS process. Here’s an update on the three pilot projects :
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$2,500 per family :
When you add up the real costs of resettling those 129 families at Akphivat Mean Cheay (including the cost of purchasing the new land, filling it, developing roads, drainage, water supply, toilets and planting on it, and including UNCHS staff costs, overheads and consultancies) it comes to approximately US$ 330,000, or about US$ 2,500 per household.
At that rate, resettling the remaining 50,000 poor households in Phnom Penh’s informal settlements would cost a staggering US$ 125 million!
And that figure doesn’t include any of the huge costs that are shouldered by the families themselves : moving costs, lost investment in their old housing, new house construction costs, lost employment, lost income and increased transport costs.
Who would ever call this a “sustainable” option?
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