Physical Planning Activities in the Newly Created City of Hoima, Uganda: Opportunities and Challenges

Abstract

Recently some African cities have been scenes of high profile eviction campaigns. These campaigns have elicited heavy criticism from various quarters, domestic and international. Between half and three quarters of all new housing in sub-Saharan African cities is built on land that has been supplied through processes that, in one way or another, do not comply with formal legal requirements related to subdivision, transfer and development control. Such urban development processes are undoubtedly problematic, both for the authorities and for the residents of the areas developed through these processes: unplanned development results in sprawl, hindering the cost-effective extension of infrastructure and services; some developments are built in areas topographically unsuitable for residential use such as steep slopes and flood-prone sites; unrecognized areas do not generate revenue for local councils; residents experience varying degrees of insecurity; access by public transport and emergency services may be difficult or impossible; and the services and utilities available to residents may fall far short of what is desirable. However, in many respects these channels of land supply are highly successful: they continue to make a much larger contribution to urban development than formal channels, accommodating almost all new low-income and many middle-income households; many of the residential areas have regular layouts; there appear to be relatively few conflicts between actors involved in informal land delivery; and many house owners enjoy considerable defacto tenure security. Nevertheless, governments continue to regard informal processes of urban development as undesirable aberrations and persist in attempts to implement formal tenure, subdivision and development control policies and procedures despite their ineffectiveness. Often the laws and policies on which land administration practices are based are colonial imports. The extent to which indigenous tenure systems were understood, recognized and incorporated varied from colony to colony, but it was generally believed that only a formal system based on a European model could provide a framework for urban development and protect the rights of urban property owners (who at that time were mostly expatriates). Embedded in the model were culturally constructed ideas about the desirable form and appearance of cities and assumptions about appropriate roles for the state in regulating urban growth and development. These land administration systems, which were inherited at independence, are governed by formal rules, set out in legislation and administrative procedures. The legislative provisions and the administrative systems that were established to implement them proved quite unable to cope with the rapid urban growth that occurred after independence, but this did not lead policy makers and many analysts to abandon their view that states had both an obligation and the capacity to intervene comprehensively in land management. As a result, research has often focused on documenting and explaining the failures (and, more rarely, successes) of state intervention, thereby privileging formal state law over other socially embedded rules on which actors draw to regulate transactions in land.