Shanties, slums, breeze blocks and bricks

Abstract

In 2005, the Zimbabwean government demolished huge swathes of low-income housing throughout the country's urban centres. This was one of the most radical reshapings of any country's urban housing patterns in the world's recent history. Yet any attempt to understand this event in relation to the current central concerns about the housing of the urban poor of agencies like UN Habitat, or the world's Millennium Development Goals, would only be partially helpful. So broadly are the parameters of what are deemed to be ‘slums’ drawn in such approaches that it has become difficult to evaluate where interventions should start and which policies might be most effective for improving living standards. The previous distinctions between housing types and problems for which housing specialists had argued—for example, that not all illegal housing types are slums—have slipped away. This paper argues that such distinctions proved to be crucial when analysing the demolitions in Zimbabwe, which centred on the legality of housing and not its inadequacy.

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