Addressing the Urban Poor | Part 2: Addressing the hard way (manually) in Epworth, Zimbabwe

This is the 2nd of a four-part blog. You may want to skim through "Part 1: What's so interesting about an address" before continuing ... 

I first became aware of the challenges of providing addresses - and especially for residents in informal settlements, in the 1980-1990s when working as a young, recently graduated urban planner in the Department of Physical Planning, Zimbabwe.  In the euphoric, early years of independence from colonial rule, the government had a pro-poor housing policy and some individual politicians actively encouraged urban land invasions by the rural poor.   However, over time, official hostility towards the unstoppable waves of ‘squatters’ from rural areas who were flooding Zimbabwe’s cities and towns in search of employment and opportunity was on the rise.  A decades-long series of government-coordinated, squatter clearance drives were mounted, with forcible and uncompensated evictions of large numbers of people whom the authorities branded as being “squatters, vagrants and unaccompanied women”.  Tens of thousands of people were expelled from the cities by police and para-military police - armed with assault rifles, shotguns, batons and tear-gas canisters, to holding and ‘re-education’ camps and rural resettlement schemes. (The most notorious holding camp was at Mushumbi Pools in the Zambezi Valley with news media- reports of the displaced urban poor contracting malaria and in at least one case, being eaten by lions).

Porta Farm settlement - before and after demolitions, 2006
(Source: "GeoEye Foundation Satellite Imagery Confirms Human Rights Violations in Porta Farm, Zimbabwe"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2M8InoKxHwE)

Epworth, on the outskirts of Harare, was one of the largest and most socially organized of the first round of  early settlements facing demolition.  The settlement was home to around 63,000 people living on Methodist mission-owned land.  The Epworth residents successfully challenged their eviction orders and obtained a reprieve through the courts on the grounds that they were not squatters because they had proof of having paid land-rents to the mission landowner for many years.  Following lengthy negotiations, an agreement eventually was reached between authorities and residents on the parameters of what would become one of the first attempts at in situ settlement upgrading in Zimbabwe, primarily (from the authorities’ point of view) aimed at containing future expansion of the settlement and safeguarding public health in the surrounding city neighborhoods.  As the government’s Physical Planners responsible for the Epworth area and inspired by the teachings of John F. C. Turner and Robert Fichter (Freedom to Build), a small group of us initiated and set about planning and implementing a very basic settlement planning and services improvement program with the Epworth communities, all on the smell of an oil-rag.  We were shadowed by 12 Local Government Promotion Officers (LGPOs) who described themselves as “the Minister’s eyes and ears” and dutifully monitored and reported on our every action. 

Resident in Epworth, Harare, Zimbabwe.

(Credit: Ephraim Nsingo/IPS;  http://www.ipsnews.net/2009/01/zimbabwe-now-a-39factory-for-poverty39/)

This dramatic concession by the authorities required that every existing shelter and its occupants had to be recorded and as quickly as possible, before there was a change of policy.  A development freeze in Epworth was officially announced.  Any house or shelter that had been built prior to this public announcement was authorized as permanent.  Stern warnings were given that any newcomers after the announced freeze would be summarily evicted.  As there was only one named road throughout the entire 35 square kilometer settlement, a conventional house or lot numbering system based on street names was not possible within the short window of opportunity.  These were days long before satellite imagery was easily available.  We arranged for low altitude, air photography to be flown on a grid pattern across the entire settlement, ortho-rectified and then printed onto paper-based sepia maps (link provided for Millennials!)   In discussion with community leaders, the boundaries of the four main villages as originally laid out by the mission authorities were demarcated, namely Makomo, Muguta, Chinamano and Zinyengere.  Each of the original villages had contiguous ‘extension’ areas where lots were being sold off through informal verbal agreements by the original land renters to newcomers.  As such, our addressing system was simple: Village name, Area code (A = original or B = extension) and House number.  Thus, for example, a house/yard in Muguta Extension might be numbered as “Muguta B/128”.  Each dwelling unit and yard (identified by the main household and agreed by neighbors) was given a number on the printed air photos with allowances made in the numbering system for possible future infill.  We then painted the assigned number onto every house … by house, by house over a period of 3-4 months.    The LGPOs recorded the names and details of residents occupying each numbered house and issued a ‘pink slip’ to the head of household.  

A pink slip certified the existence of the household living at that address - its right to remain in Epworth and its future right to a clean water supply from a shared tube-well fitted with a low cost, manual ‘Blair pump’ and enough materials to build a ventilated improved pit (VIP) toilet.  In other words, fundamental rights to remain in the settlement and to receive basic infrastructure services – all made possible by a strong policy decision (driven in equal part driven by public health and political control considerations) and based on a low cost, low-tech (but labor intensive) addressing system. 

This is the end of the 2nd part of this four-part blog. "Part 3: Using disruptive technology in Kiribati, Pacific Islands" continues below.