Adapting to informality: multistory housing driven by a co-productive process and the People’s Plans in Metro Manila, Philippines
Introduction:
With the growing pressure on land and housing in rapidly urbanizing Asian cities, multistory housing has become one of the key alternatives for accommodating the increasing low income urban population. Considering the costs as well as complicated construction and management issues, most developments of this type have been facilitated in a top-down manner by public sector agencies. As in similar mass housing schemes across the globe, this has typically led to limited input from the beneficiaries during the planning process and has resulted in issues such as peripheral locations or inappropriate design as well as the dismantling of tight social networks and the spatial formations of informal settlements that enabled a mix of living and working spaces.
The People’s Plan is defined as ‘a resettlement option and community development plan formulated by People’s Organizations, with or without the support of NGOs, Local Government Units and National Government Agencies’. The process assumes that urban poor communities can take on a key role in all aspects of multistory housing development including: community organization and profiling; land acquisition; creation of developmental, architectural, engineering, site development, financing plans; co-management of construction works and input into those works as well as creation of community development plan including livelihood and estate management components.
Low-income housing in Asian and South-East Asian contexts: ‘adapting informality’:
Along with the rapid population growth in Asian cities, the issue of a housing backlog has been experienced by the majority of states on the continent, with 61% of its population living in informal settlements and slum-like conditions. With limited resources and encouraged by major international agencies such as the World Bank and the
UN, many low-income housing solutions from the 1970s in South and South East Asia were framed in line with the enabling approach aiming at the development of housing markets.
Multistory housing in the region: delivering ‘formal’ city:
Over time, the use of in-situ participatory upgrading approaches declined in many contexts, particularly in central locations of big metropolises. This was due to rising land values and increasing pressure from the growing middle class, as well as to ideological currents pushing the vision of a ‘global metropolis’ free of spatial structures resembling informal settlements.
Consequently, in recent years some states focused more resources and attention on massive top-down relocation schemes like Housing for All by 2022 in India, which facilitated development of apartment blocks located on urban peripheries. In South-East Asian countries similar approach typically occurred concurrently with the self-help approaches of the 1980s. Examples of top-down mass housing can be found in Singapore and Malaysia and such programmes have also been developed in Thailand and in Indonesia. Although the top down approach has been considered successful in states with ample resources such as Singapore, in many other contexts multistory housing has experienced a variety of problems.
Co-production: adapting to informality:
Since the 1970s co-production has been discussed as a promising approach to optimizing the delivery of goods or services through inputs provided by a variety of stakeholders. Typically, these included representatives of the public sector on the one hand and citizens or representatives of civil society on the other. Overall, the benefits of the approach were discussed in terms of decreased costs for the public sector and better outputs for the people.
Conclusion:
Overall, while the approach offers an opportunity for communities to access housing in desired locations, provide input on design and control various aspects of the delivery process, it is not free from vulnerabilities. The acceptance for incorporating informal processes is guaranteed mainly thanks to massive lobbying of civil society and is mostly visible within the project phases which are considered by public sector as not requiring high professional skills. Simultaneously, the communities which are willing to engage into the process still need to comply with a tedious administrative process operating with a complex legal and technocratic language.