Urban Livelihoods in Afghanistan - the Afghanistan Research and ...

Synthesis Paper Seriespressure on households relying on irregularand poorly paid jobs, and the inability to payrent on time often leads to eviction andsubsequently to the loss of establishedneighbourhood networks.Housing certainly represents the mostimportant physical asset a household canpossess in urban Afghanistan — both in termsof saving rent and the potential for using itproductively, but also in providing a footholdin the urban economy. Given a chance, peopleare willing to go into much hardship and riskif only to own their homes. This is apparentin Jalalabad’s recently formalised settlement(see Box 1). 26 People will also allocate scarceresources to invest in improving their homes.In Kabul alone, investments in informalhousing are estimated to reach as high asUS$1.3 billion. 27The significance of secure and solid housingto livelihoods adds another critical argumentfor speeding up the search for a solution tothe urgent problem of tenure insecurity.Many households residing on insecure landunderstandably refrain from housingimprovements. Examples where suchinvestments in informal housing had beencompletely lost because of subsequenteviction were encountered in Jalalabad.However, where there is a perceived securityof tenure, as was the case in a newly emergedhillside settlement in Kabul, people put allresources available into the gradualimprovement of their dwellings. In fact,physical asset building in the Kabul case wasa deliberate strategy to secure tenure andto press the municipality for a guarantee tolet people remain on the enclosed land(settlers did not request for a formal title;they asked for the right to stay). It could beargued that tackling the problem of urbantenure in Afghanistan expediently andefficiently may require a general amnestyapplied to informal enclosures. This may beworth considering first, before thinking aboutBox 1. Regularising the informalA sustainable solution to the problem ofinformality in urban settlements and tenureinsecurity was found in one neighbourhood inJalalabad. After residents were able to preventeviction and bulldozing of their houses, themunicipality, in consultation with the Ministryof Urban Development (MoUD) and the localcommunity, decided to implement a land titlingprogramme leading to secure ownership of smallplots of land for urban residents. While this wasonly possible because the settlement is locatedoutside the original Master Plan for Jalalabad,the example shows that finding solutions to theproblem is possible. Households, however, wererequired to pay, but in spite of the 62,000 Afghanineeded to obtain a title and the huge additionalcosts to rebuild houses on allotted plots, theoriginal dwellers succeeded in raising the moneyas a group. This involved hardship, depletion ofphysical assets, taking on high debts and otherrisky money-raising strategies, but people werewilling to go through such adversity to have asecure place to live in. The whole area wasrestructured according to a newly produced mapdelineating new roads, marking the location ofpublic buildings, as well as social infrastructurefor future construction. Individual plots bestowedto each paying household were also identified.Although by the end of the study, people werestill waiting for water access, a health clinic anda school, the construction of boundary wallsdeliniating private space and a slow and gradualreconstruction of housing had commenced. Itneeds to be seen how quickly the municipalityand MoUD will be able to provide basicinfrastructure to the new settlement, but itsprovision had been part of the originalarrangement negotiated. What this positiveexample shows is that a regularisation of theinformal is indeed possible — if official actorsare willing to commit, and if local communitiesare involved in the planning process. Still, thevery precondition for the successful formalisationprocess had been the peripheral location of thesettlement outside the Master Plan of the city.Thinking beyond this central planning instrumentwould allow realising similar projects in otherinformal neighbourhoods. This is a necessary stepto take in order to find a lasting solution to theproblem of informal settlements in Afghanistan— not only in Jalalabad, but also in its otherurban areas.26 Schütte, S. (2006), Gaining Some Ground: Urban Livelihoods in Jalalabad, Kabul: AREU.27 The World Bank (2006), Kabul Urban Policy Notes Series n.2.24Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit