When I first emerged as a Canadian (I was born in 1966), the country’s population was 20 million. So the population has doubled in my lifetime.
Since Canada topped the HDI rankings in the late 1990s, however, the population has grown, house prices have surged and GDP (Gross Domestic Product) has exploded, yet the country has also slipped down the rankings, hitting 15th place in 2021. Does this mean there are more people, but fewer living as well as they did in the 1990s?
Source: Statistics Canada. Source: Macleans.ca.
Since 2000 house prices in Canada have surged far past growth in Canadian household disposable income, as compared to US households.
More than 1 billion people around the world lack decent shelter. Of these, the majority live in urban areas, usually in slums and informal settlements (UN-HABITAT).
The world’s megacities – like Mumbai, India, where more than 22 million live in the metropolitan region – have to find a way to provide housing that is both affordable and does the minimum possible amount of harm to the environment.
About one-third of the world’s urban dwellers live in slums, and the United Nations estimates that the number of people living in such conditions will double by 2030 as a result of rapid urbanization in developing countries.
The fast pace of growth of India’s cities presents an enormous challenge: how to house so many people with dignity and to a good standard. India’s city slums are notorious and recently became the subject of the Oscar-winning film Slumdog Millionaire (http://www.slumdogmillionairemovie.co.uk/).
With a population of 1.2 billion, India needs to find 25 million homes a year to meet current demand, according to McKinsey and Co.
Housing prices have risen by 16 percent a year for the past four years. While the middle class – estimated at over 300 million people – has piled into high-end apartments and houses, it has been the country’s low-income people who have been frozen out of the option of quality homes.
The concept of targeting those at the ‘bottom of the pyramid’ (BOP) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fortune_at_the_Bottom_of_the_Pyramid) has drawn attention to the estimated 23 million poor urban dwellers in India, and 180 million rural families, who have savings and want to own a home. Monitor India (http://www.monitor.com/in/) believes these people have annual earnings between US $1,400 and US $3,000.
The Indian manufacturing powerhouse Tata – which this year launched a BOP-focused car, the Tata Nano – has designed and is building, Nano Homes – small apartments outside Mumbai for US $8,600 (http://tatahousing.in/pages/home.php). It also hopes to expand to other major Indian cities as well.
The Nano homes are built on a modest scale: there are three sizes with the smallest measuring 67 square metres. They consist of a single room that doubles as a bedroom by night with a sink, bath and toilet behind a partition.
Criticisms include location – on the edges of major cities – where residents would have to commute long distances to get to their jobs.
Even so, Nano apartments are so popular buyers are being chosen by lottery.
“India’s housing crisis lies in the fact that the poor in the cities are priced out of the market,” Sundar Burra, an adviser to the Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centre, a Mumbai-based housing rights organization, told Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper.
“State supply of housing for the poor is woefully inadequate in relation to the need. Slums proliferate as a solution to this state of affairs.”
People can get a mortgage for the homes from Tata Home Finance.
Tata is not the only company targeting this market. India’s Matheran Realty (http://www.tmcity.in/) is building what it claim is India’s largest affordable housing project, Tanaji Malusare City, in the villages of Shirse and Akurle of Karjat (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karjat). The 15,000 homes would house 70,000 people and would sell for US $4,698.
Another developer, Godrej Properties (http://www.godrejproperties.com/), is building a BOP housing development outside the city of Ahmedabad with apartments costing US $11,749.
“(Property) developers have recognized that the real demand no longer lies in the premium segment and are opting to build smaller, no-frills apartments,” said Deepak Parekh of the Housing Development Finance Corporation (http://www.hdfcindia.com/).
It estimates the affordable housing market will be worth US$ 110 billion in India by 2013 and will account for 80 percent of India’s housing market.
“Affordable housing is not about box-sized, budget homes in far-flung places where there is no connectivity to workplaces and little surrounding infrastructure,” Parekh told HDFC’s shareholders. “Affordable housing has to be able to cut across all income segments and has to make economic sense in terms of proximity to the workplace.”
Published: November 2009
Resources
1) Building and Social Housing Foundation: BSHF is an independent organisation that works both in the UK and internationally to identify innovative housing solutions and to foster the exchange of information and good practice. Website:http://www.bshf.org/home.cfm
2) Tiny House Design Blog: The blog is full of ideas and plans for making small homes cheaply. Website:http://www.tinyhousedesign.com/
Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP’s South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South’s innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator.
Along with growing economies, the global South is seeing growing numbers of readers and a newly flourishing publishing industry. The creative economy – of which book publishing is part – is experiencing a jolt from a combination of expanding economies and urbanizing cities. Just as the first settled cities of ancient Mesopotamia (today’s Iraq) spawned literature and learning, so the rapidly urbanizing South is changing dynamics and creating the space and demand for books.
The creative economy is seen as the “interface between creativity, culture, economics and technology in a contemporary world dominated by images, sounds, texts and symbols” (UNCTAD). It has been shown to be an effective way for emerging economies to leapfrog into high-growth areas in the 21st century world economy.
Telling stories about local conditions and people’s rapidly changing lives is proving a commercial success formula. Fast-growing India is forecast to become the largest market for English language books within a decade. India’s economic boom, which saw 6.7 percent growth in 2009, and its expanding middle class are driving demand for books. India saw the number of literate people pass 66 percent by 2007.
“It is a forward-looking generation,” said Manish Singh, country manager for publisher Harlequin Mills and Boon, to The Guardian newspaper.
Estimates of India’s book reading market put the number of readers at just 5 million out of a population of over 1 billion people. But according to Anantha Padmanabhan, the director of sales in India for publisher Penguin, “that is set to increase dramatically.”
A survey by Tehelka (http://www.tehelka.com) found Indians are favouring stories about local conditions and set in the places where they live.
India’s most popular current writer is Chetan Bhagat, a former investment banker. He has sold more than 3 million books in the last five years. His latest, Two States, sold a million copies in four months.
Bhagat puts his success down to the way the stories are written. “This is not like the mature English literature market,” he said. “It needs an English that is highly accessible, simple, and with stories that are still interesting and relevant.”
Book prices in India have stayed affordable for the middle classes. A book can cost from US $1.85 to US $2.65 for a paperback – still a high cost for the poor, however, who live on a dollar a day.
In Egypt, around 30 percent of the population is illiterate and book reading has been historically very low: it has been claimed an average literate Egyptian reads a quarter of a page of a novel per year. From this low base, a best seller only needs to sell a few thousand copies.
However, in Egypt small-scale independent publishers are starting to make an impact. Mohamed Hashem – founder of the Dar Merit publishing house (http://www.zoominfo.com/Search/ReferencesView.aspx?PersonID=1007104230) – has built from scratch in 12 years one of the country’s most critically acclaimed publishers: all from a tiny apartment in a rundown Cairo building.
“We can’t compete with the big firms in terms of profits,” he told The Guardian, “but the new wave of authors will always be sitting here. Yes, we have poverty and limited resources. But we also have the future.”
Launched to counter what Hashem felt was an unimaginative book market, his stable of authors have shaken up the Arabic fiction world. The global success of Alaa al-Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Yacoubian_Building) is proof Hashem’s gamble on edgy talent was correct: rejected by two government-run publishing houses, the book went on to be a hit in English and Arabic and has been made into a film.
Hashem is being credited with unleashing a wave of new talented authors that has pushed literature out from being the preserve of a select group.
One of its successful authors, Hamdi Abu Golayyel – winner of the country’s top literary prize, the Naquib Mahfouz medal – believes “Merit has changed the way pioneering literature emerges in Egypt.”
“Before, you had the innovative writers – there are normally no more than five or six in a generation – meeting together in mutual isolation, because popular opinion rejected them.”
Merit “had the drive and ambition to support and distribute new and younger authors properly. Today innovative writing is wanted by the people.”
Hashem’s secret in attracting talented writers has been more than just business savvy: he also gives them “the freedom to write in my own way,” according to writer Ahmed Alaidy.
The writers also have a credibility advantage: they are writing about their circumstances rather than just imagining what it would be like. Writer Hani Abdel Mourid comes from Cairo’s traditional garbage-collecting neighbourhood; another author, Mohamed Salah Al Azab, has written a book named after the folding seats on Egypt’s lively minibuses.
Demographic changes and Cairo’s relentless expansion are being cited as the catalyst for the new writing.
“The fact that the city has grown the way it has,” says Samia Mehrez, a literature professor in Cairo, “the fact that what we used to call the periphery is now the centre, that is very important.”
“The year we started, we published five titles and the number of people interested could be counted in the dozens,” he told The Guardian. “Now we have 600 titles under our belt, and thousands are interested. It’s my duty to try and expand that circle. We’re chipping away at a wall, and slowly we’re making progress.”
Published: May 2010
Resources
1) Creative Economy Report 2008. An economic and statistical assessment of creative industries world-wide as well as an overview of how developing countries can benefit from trade in creative products and services produced by UNCTAD and the Special Unit for South-South Cooperation in UNDP. Website:http://www.unctad.org/en/docs/ditc20082cer_en.pdf
2) Global Creative Economy Convergence Summit 2009: The summit is about the successful and emerging creative technologies and initiatives that are driving economic growth locally, nationally and internationally. Website: http://www.gcecs2009.com/
5) Jaipur Literature Festival: Described as the ‘greatest literary show on Earth’, the Jaipur Literature Festival is a sumptuous feast of ideas.The past decade has seen it transform into a global literary phenomenon having hosted nearly 2000 speakers and welcoming over a million book lovers from across India and the globe. Website: https://jaipurliteraturefestival.org/
Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP’s South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South’s innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator.
With India’s urban economy experiencing rapid growth, its slums – once seen as the most undesirable places to live in the country, if not on Earth – are attracting the attention of affluent residents and developers inIndia’s rapidly expanding cities. The prosperity inIndia’s cities has made these areas’ proximity to business and entertainment zones highly desirable. In turn, this has led to slum dwellers either upgrading their homes and in the process boosting their value, or being offered the opportunity to sell their rudimentary dwellings to real estate agents and property developers.
For some, this could be a great leap forward in income and opportunity; for others, it could mean exploitation and hard choices, weighing up the cash boost against moving out of the slum area.
How to best handle slum areas in urban and peri-urban communities will be a major challenge for most countries in the South as they continue to urbanize.
India’s phenomenal economic growth rate – forecast to be 7.9 percent this year by the Asian Development Bank, after averaging 7.7 percent per year over the past decade – has been the force behind an expanding middle class population, now estimated at 50 million people (McKinsey). Forecasts see it swelling from 5 percent ofIndia’s population to 40 percent by 2025.
With 30 percent of the population living in urban areas and cities contributing 60 percent of the country’s GDP and 90 percent of government revenues (Wall Street Journal), city-dwellers’ fate is critical to the functioning of the economy.
According to the 2001 Indian census, slums make up 25 percent of all housing and 26 percent of urban households lack access to sanitation facilities.
But Indu Prakash Vaidya, a 32-year-old housewife, is part of new trend inIndia’s city slums. Vaidya lives in a small shanty house in Mumbai with no running water, no sewage services and a jerry-rigged electrical connection.
Vaidya’s home is a just a single room for the five people in her family. They sleep on the cement floor and the ‘kitchen’ is a two-burner gas stove. The dwelling is so poorly constructed that they have to move around inside the room when it rains outside to avoid getting soaked.
But her humble home has been valued at US $24,000 by people looking to buy it.
According to real estate agent Hari Ram, the average price of a 91 square metre shanty home in Mumbai is now US $46,000.
“Shanties as small as 120 square feet… are as expensive as US $93,000,” Dinesh Prabhu, a construction company owner, told NDTV television.
Sixty percent of Mumbai’s 21 million people live in slums. And many are now finding themselves the subject of a property boom. This has led to the bizarre spectacle of luxury high-rise buildings sprouting up in a sea of slum housing. The slums are attracting the attention of those with money because many busy city workers face long commutes and are desperate for homes closer to work and entertainment areas.
The value of living close to the action is summed up by one slum dweller:
“People would kill to be in a place like this,” said slum dweller Sundar. “There are four local train stations close by. And the bus stop is a stone’s throw away.”
Some say this real estate boom offers enormous potential for the poor.
“All I can say is, given the current real-estate rates, those slums are invaluable,” said Sharad Mahajan of the Pune-based nonprofit organization Mashal (http://mashalindia.org). Mashal focuses on the problem of urban shelter and also implements housing projects. It has been working in the Dharavi slum area with theMaharashtra government on its redevelopment. The slum is well-known for its representation in the film Slumdog Millionaire, and the area is next to the Bandra-Kurla Complex business district of Mumbai. Mashal has been mapping the area, home to 60,000 families, to make sure the redevelopment is fair to the families living there.
Land tenure is an issue however. Many slum dwellers do not have official title to the land they live on. Over time, they have become semi-official places to live as governments have hooked many up to electricity and drinking water. Issues of corruption and exploitation are also other problems that need addressing if this real estate windfall is to actually benefit slum dwellers.
Typical slum dwellers are day labourers and poor migrants. But others are people who good easily afford to live somewhere else but don’t want the long commutes to work.
“It is simpler and less expensive to live here,” said Sankaralingam, a plastic merchant, who estimates his annual income at around US $9,300: an amount that could get him a home somewhere nicer.
For Indu Prakash Vaidya, the dilemma – to sell or not to sell – makes for some painful choices. While her current home is prone to flooding during the rainy season, she feels she would have nowhere else to go if she sold the home.
Yet the pressure to sell is great and elemental.
“I have three children, and their education and well-being need to be taken care of. Financial constraints can push me to sell this shanty in the future, then where will I live? I will have nowhere to go,” she told NDTV.
Published: December 2011
Resources
1) New documentary Urbanized gives a passionate over-view of the challenges facing the rapidly urbanizing world around us. Website: http://urbanizedfilm.com/
Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP’s South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South’s innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator.
David South Consulting 
You must be logged in to post a comment.