The Global Urbanist

Traditionally land information held by most governments is stored in cadastres — records of plot boundaries and who owns those plots. Meanwhile urbanisation has rendered this level of information irrelevant. Often a slum community will straddle several plots, with a thousand families living, trading, worshiping and schooling across them. If our economic, judicial and governance systems are based only on cadastral information, it is no wonder we cannot solve urban poverty issues, regardless of how much money we throw at them.

This huge gap in the ability of developing-world governments to understand and govern urban centres is in large part an information gap. The cadastral format cannot reflect the reality of how land is organised in urban areas. How can a cadastre account for a thousand families living across three, ten or twenty plots of land? Or for families living in 10-foot by 10-foot spaces, with their primary toilet function twenty metres away in a 3-foot by 3-foot carton shade, and their kitchen on the sidewalk?

What does this all mean? The contract between citizen and state in Nairobi, Kampala, Cape Town, etc., cannot take place when that contract is based on the cadastre.

So what about geographic information systems (GIS)? If we were to change how land information is defined then the challenges of urban slums would not be so intractable. GIS allows one to capture, easily and cheaply, the actual use of space. Instead of governments recording only the plot boundary and the owner's name, they could have, for far less than it costs to survey the plot conventionally, the boundary, the size and type of structures, their actual arrangement, the location of trees and other features, and the names of the owners, tenants and other occupiers.

And fortunately this is not just about slums. For example, how does the Cape Town municipality manage water if they do not have a land information system that knows how to identify swimming pools? How is climate change reversed when plot owners are cutting down trees to put up gazebos? Because a public policy to plant trees at the outskirts of the cities is not enough if it is being undermined by private action.

It is not the cost of this technology that matters anymore. Since GIS can do away with conventional surveying, the number and sizes of real plots are no longer a constraint. And when they are done with the remote bombing of Baghdad and Afghanistan, and with putting navsat into every Bentley, Bimmer and Boxter, what else are we going to do with all this new satellite technology?

The first stirrings to change how urban land is managed is an experiment developed with the UN-HABITAT's Global Land Tools Network (GLTN), applying the Social Tenure Domain Model (STDM) in Uganda.

STDM is a computerised land registry system drawing on satellite imagery and resembles a cross between Google Earth and a traditional land registry. On the front end of this is a GIS and Microsoft Excel package used to capture enumeration and mapping information collected at the household level, one base lower than the plot-level information usually stored in cadastres.

In January, the GLTN and Shack / Slum Dwellers International (SDI) started a discussion on testing the newly developed STDM platform in Uganda. Through the GLTN's conferences and other interactions, the developers of the model studied SDI's enumeration experiences in Mumbai, Nairobi and Kisumu, and coded them into the GIS program to test the model.

The STDM experiment plugs into an activity already underway — the Government of Uganda, the World Bank's Cities Alliance and SDI's urban transformation program targeting slums in five secondary cities: Jinja, Arua, Kabale, Mbale and Mbarara.

Uganda has one of the most complex and unresolved urban land tenure systems anywhere. In the Kisenyi slum, in the heart of the city of Kampala, it is the Kabaka — the constitutional king of the Buganda kingdom — who owns the land. Over time, landowners have received land grants, held at the king's pleasure. They have parcelled it out and made their own leases to structure owners who have built a sprawl of 35,000 shacks rented by the month to the city's urban poor. Any attempt at slum upgrading is confronted with the question, "who among these layered interests is the beneficiary?"

The success of this experiment in land information systems is hinged on the ability of UN-HABITAT and SDI to get the Ugandan Ministry of Lands to buy into the model and absorb the enumeration data. If we can achieve that, then 200,000 slum families will appear in the government registry virtually overnight!

Thereafter if anyone invests in infrastructure or housing it won't disrupt existing patterns of occupancy since these will be known and recorded, shifting the meaning of ownership from property to usufruct. The title deed will be replaced by the use deed.

Shack / Slum Dwellers International is a confederation of country-level organisations of the urban poor from 28 countries in the Global South. Its mission is to link poor urban communities from cities across the South to transfer and adapt the successful mobilisation, advocacy, and problem solving strategies they develop in one location to other cities, countries and regions.

This article is adapted from the Shack / Slum Dwellers International Blog, reprinted with permission.