For whom is the physical development of the city planned? For whom is the city designed? By what practical means are the functions proposed in urban plans (up to the level of optimal per-capita provisions) to be realized? Can the financial backing and the point of support for carrying out urban plans be provided from the country's public revenue, through the payment of a kind of subsidy? In that case, from what source will the capital be provided that is needed for the production and reproduction which ought to raise the material standard of life and meet the city's service needs?
According to the documents of the Third Economic and Social Development Plan, the population of our country will reach more than 90 million by the year 1390 (2011). That is, if by then we can increase all the material means of life by 20 per cent of their present amount, we shall be able only to preserve the current level, and we shall not be able to contemplate even a little development or improvement of the present state of urban services. Has the time not yet come for us to draw on world experience and that of neighbouring nations, and not to set our raw notions, unbacked slogans, and dreams in place of tangible realities?
What Do the Realities Say?
The high birth rate and the marked fall in infant mortality increase the rural population, and in effect spend the meagre achievements of planning on the needs of this population — including the costliest of them, housing or shelter. The drawing of service boundaries and protective belts around cities has come to nothing; in fact, whenever the short period of the urban plans ends, these plans turn into waste paper. Cities for which experts have made extensive studies to determine the most suitable location and amount of land needed, and on which lavish costs have been spent, grow outside the proposed boundaries — with per-capita provisions and land-uses whose mechanism has, for all that, approached the city's problems in a fanciful and speculative way. Are we to determine their placement for imaginary citizens who are not to be found in the real world within the country's borders, and to hand over an important part of the city's development to a spontaneous process in a place outside the city's service boundary?
Who Are the Informal Settlers, and What Means Do They Have?
Permanent or seasonal rural migrants, alongside the most vulnerable strata of urban society who, through weakness of financial means, have no place within the official, legal, and service boundary of the city, have a considerable share in the growth of cities. They either settle on the fringe of the city or take possession of plots of land and, using legal instruments such as Articles 147 and 148 of the law, shape the subdivision threshold, occupancy, and building density to suit their financial ability; for the official city limit, with its per-capita provisions and standards, has been arranged for citizens who cannot afford urban services. The greater part of the rural migrants, although the city has no visible wall, rampart, or gate, remain behind the invisible gate of the official, legal boundary, and take up abode on the least-contested lands — including agricultural lands and gardens inside or outside the service boundary that cannot be subdivided, but around whose urban ordinances one can somehow work in order to take possession of them. This very thing has, in recent decades, produced informal settlement, or bad housing, inside or outside the city's boundaries.
Under present conditions, every urban-planning measure to improve the living conditions of this group — including the provision of water, electricity, sewage, educational facilities, and so on — counts as urbanizing the development of the marginal areas or formalizing it, and raises the price of land in that area. Consequently the next group of rural migrants cannot settle there, and settle elsewhere, founding a new informal settlement. This process is repeated at fixed intervals of time (the interval between the preparation of two urban plans).
Gradually the needs of their residents are raised, and the city authorities are forced to retreat and to issue permission for the use of urban facilities and services. At this very time, an important part of the lands within the boundary approved in the previous comprehensive plan remains barren, and the self-built neighbourhoods on the fringe join the cities. Since the city authorities cannot meet their needs, they are forced to divide the existing amenities among the settled citizens; in this way the city's per-capita service provisions are “adjusted,” and of the standard provisions nothing remains but figures in the tables of the urban plans. In later plans these neighbourhoods are raised as an undeniable reality and brought within the boundary, and their residents thereby acquire a considerable rent. This process runs throughout the country and is constantly repeated.
Under these conditions, instead of a passive response — the unwilling, imposed following of the urban plans behind the self-made settlement in the cities — one can approach this matter differently, and found urban planning upon the observation and understanding of realities, including the housing poverty of the city's ultimate population; and one can address part of it, through a comprehensive study of the city — including the consideration of the marginal and badly-housed areas — in the planning and design of cities, not on the basis of “standards” but on the basis of the city's residents. Note: In this article, throughout, “informal settlement” (haashiye-neshini), besides its literal meaning, has also been used in place of “bad housing,” or the use of “abnormal” or unusual and non-standard housing.
