Dual approach crucial for housing
Fascinating insights how Brics cities can become smart urban centres
Brazil’s national housing programme has a two-fold strategy – to introduce completely new housing estates and to upgrade existing slum areas.
The dual approach has been driven by land availability constraints as well as taking account of people’s preferences.
The head of the urbanisation programme in the country’s national housing secretariat, Alessandra d’Avila Vieira, said the national policy was based on these twin backlogs – a housing backlog and what she called a qualitative backlog.
Speaking on the sidelines of last week’s Brics cities, urbanisation and local development forum in East London, Vieira said the qualitative backlog was for those who already had a home within the slum areas.
“You don’t have to build a new house, but you have to provide sanitation, improve the urban system like health and education.
“Or it can even be that you improve the house – with a bathroom or with a roof but you can maintain the fact that the people live in that place.
“It’s more effective in terms of social inclusion. We have very little land available especially in the big cities and the land management is always a tricky thing when you’re talking about housing and inclusion. It is better to keep people where they’re already living.”
Of building new houses, Vieira said sometimes residents were not happy with the location of their new home.
“It depends where we build new houses. If you give a new house but you don’t have enough space or affordable land in the middle of the city and you give people a space which is not well-located, sometimes they won’t want that.
“They don’t want to go far. Sometimes you make a big project far away and it’s not near the jobs, the schools for their children and they simply don’t stay in the new houses. We have to balance this.”
The country had vulnerability criteria for people who required moving to new homes but nobody was forced to move.
“Sometimes we have evictions because of property or environmental or risk reasons – sometimes you can’t maintain people where they are already living.
“You have to balance this. And do it city to city.”
The biggest challenge in the country’s housing sector was lack of capacity to implement urban development projects within local government including land management practices.
Fascinating insights into how Brics – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – cities are becoming smart urban centres were also shared during the discussions at the ICC.
Chinese government delegate Liu Hong Min said her home city of Beijing, with a population approaching 21 million people – was setting a good example of how smart technology could add value to residents’ experience of their city.
“Normally, I go to the office by subway. At first, I would buy the subway tickets with cash and show my ticket to the conductor at the subway entrance.
“Later, I used a subway card by depositing the money in this card and every day I would swipe my card through the entrance, where there was no need for a conductor to check the ticket. Now … I’ve downloaded a subway e-transport application on my mobile.
“Every day, I just swipe the application code and I easily get in and out of the subway. The subway fees will automatically be charged from my e-wallet.
“Normally on weekends, I would drive to restaurants and shops across Beijing.
“The parking lot has an electronic system to register the time when you drive in and out of the parking lot.
“According to the time duration, it will charge me the parking fees automatically either through an e-parking application or via my e-wallet.
“Sometimes, in the morning, I need to take my daughter to school by bus. Even at home, I can check on the bus e-app how many minutes the bus will take to reach my nearest bus station, which station the bus is at right now and how many buses are on their way. No matter what transport I need – whether subway, car or which bus I take – it will always provide an e-solution to tackle this problem.” Hong Min said.
Brazil’s national policy was based on the housing backlog Alessandra d’Avila Vieira