The Oxford Handbook of the Modern Slum by Alan Mayne;

Author:Alan Mayne;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press USA
Published: 2023-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Institutional Structures and Responses

The characteristics and organization of slum landlords appear to have been similar in Britain and the port cities of Asia. Slum property could be profitable if rents were efficiently collected, costs kept down, and demand remained high, even with low-income occupiers in often casual and insecure employment. In Britain ground leases were often controlled by the large landowners, given the extreme concentration of land ownership in nineteenth-century Britain, and letting was organized through a chain of intermediate leases, with “house farmers” leasing, subdividing, and subletting. Slums in Indian cities seem to have been on land in fragmented ownership, by Anglo-Indians and traders of various religions leasing through intermediaries and renting in mixed uses to mixed castes. In both Britain and India slum landlords sought representation on municipal bodies, and ratepayer and landlord associations opposed public regulation and expenditure.

During the nineteenth century British public authorities increased their intervention in urban improvement, with some three hundred boards of improvement commissioners created by private acts before 1850. Local improvement acts were passed in Liverpool in 1864, Glasgow in 1866, and Edinburgh in 1867. Glasgow then created a City Improvement Trust in 1868, “imbued from the start with a fiery philanthropic evangelism, though tempered always by an unwavering sense of commercial expediency.”42 The improvement trust model implied a high public purpose, and in colonial situations had a perceived advantage of freedom from elected democratic control, which ensured their survival into the postcolonial period, usually renamed but still controlled by officials with little local democratic accountability. Port trusts were created in Calcutta (1870), Karachi (1880), Aden (1889), and Singapore (1908). In the early twentieth century the improvement trust mechanism was resorted to when the plague pandemic crossed continents, and became a preferred approach to demolishing congested areas, improving drainage, and facilitating communications. Slum clearance powers were based upon English legislation but were more drastic, allowing sweeping demolition with minimal compensation to the predominantly non-white property-owners. Bombay had the first improvement trust (1989), followed by Calcutta (1912), Hyderabad (1914), Lucknow and Cawnpore (1919), Allahabad, Rangoon, and Singapore (1920), and Lagos (1928).43 Singapore’s trust started as a department within the corporation, but was limited to back-lane improvement, having no powers for large-scale compulsory purchase or house-building. With the growth of state institutions in the twentieth century the term “trust” was supplanted by the terms “board,” “corporation,” or “authority,” although the functions remained similar.

The trusts for the two biggest colonial cities, Bombay and Calcutta, merit a little closer attention. The Bombay City Improvement Trust, created in response to the outbreak of plague, was active in opening crowded areas, cutting new streets, and reclaiming land, and was empowered to control development, buy land, and then re-sell it after planning layouts. It had autocratic powers to acquire and demolish any property simply by serving a notice, without compensation, which were understandably resented by both landlords and displaced tenants. By 1920 the Trust had demolished more dwellings than were built to replace them, thus adding to the housing shortage rather than alleviating it.

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