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By Root 1744 0

hills on former farmland at the edge of a ravine are being lashed with roads, electrical poles, and utility trenches, the interstices divided into tiny lots. This project, known as Operación Urbanística Nuevo Usme, is creating future arrival cities for villagers who have not yet made the move. This approach, known as “sites and services,” was popular with World Bank officials in the 1970s but was largely abandoned because the pre-servicing of the land made it so valuable that the village-migrant poor could no longer afford it; the Bank and other institutions switched to costlier slum-upgrading projects. But the Bogotá project (and others like it in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and Pereira, Colombia) has turned this approach on its head by employing a sort of land-development judo, in which the resistive pressures of property speculation are flipped around and turned in favor of the arriving villagers.10 The project will provide foundations for 53,000 homes self-constructed by 200,000 newly arrived people over 900 hectares of land. The location has been chosen for its proximity to the city, easily served by fast and low-cost transit lines that already exist and sewage and water lines that do not need to be extended far.

Rural migrants will be provided with serviced and fully owned foundations, at prices similar to what they were paying for bare patches of non-legal land in places remote from the city. The owners of the land, in return, will be paid nominal prices for their farm fields but will be given housing plots they can sell or use, so they can participate in any increase in land value. It is somewhat less money than they’d make by developing the land themselves, but it exposes them to less risk. The state pays the up-front cost of development but will recoup it by participating in the land-value increase by building shopping, commercial, and housing facilities on some of the land. As a result, a better quality of arrival city, one that is capable of growing into a thriving high-access center with its own middle class, is built using the proceeds from its own future success.11

It is too late to employ such techniques in a place like Karail, but other value-capture instruments can be employed to help the poor in existing urban areas. One reason so many slum-rehabilitation plans fail is because they are based on moving people into what seems to be higher-quality housing while ignoring the larger function of the arrival city. The original slum houses in places like Karail, however squalid, offer the considerable benefit of being flexible: rooms and floors can be added as family needs change, and portions can be turned into shops or small industries to provide entrepreneurial income. They are also connected to networks of families, transportation routes, and relationships that are crucial to building prosperity and permanence. In a serviced apartment block, however intelligently designed, this is often lost, and residents are reluctant to move into a home that is merely a house.

But this, too, can be turned on its head. In Mumbai, several apartment-block rehousing projects have been supported (and even proposed) by slum-dwellers for a number of reasons: because the existing slum housing is in a dangerous, small, steep, or flood-prone location; because it is poorly connected to transportation or laid out in inaccessible ways; because it is adjacent to dangerous or smelly industries, like leather-tanning. In all these cases, researchers have found that slum-dwellers prefer to move not just because it is a tangible improvement in the quality of housing but, more important, because it is an improvement in the resale value of the housing. Slum occupants, as we have seen, are as eager to leverage their housing investment into business equity or better future housing as any middle-class Westerner (in fact, sometimes more so, because property is often their only asset), and Mumbai slum-dwellers, 85 percent of whom “own” their housing, legally or otherwise, are eager to take part in a calculus of improvement.12 Indeed, in some instances,