Planning and Urban Informality—Addressing Inclusiveness for Climate Resilience in the Pacific

Abstract

The Pacific Island Countries (PICs) are well documented as being amongst the most vulnerable countries in the world to both the long term effects of climate change and to short-term natural disasters. The proportion of land area located in low elevation coastal zones (LECZs) is four times larger than that of Asia, and the urban population living in LECZs is almost double that of the rural populations. In countries where there has been little to no forward planning or investment in service infrastructure to open up new and safe land for many decades, and where registering land in the formal administrative systems is cumbersome, costly and time consuming, urban low income earners have few options but to rent in the existing housing stock (leading to chronic overcrowding) or to pay for the use of customary land and self-build their houses in unplanned, extra-legal settlements. The trend of unplanned and unauthorized settlements continuously expanding onto hazardous and unsafe land has been documented in many of the Pacific’s urban and peri-urban areas. The damage and losses incurred by extreme weather events in the past three years alone have pointed to far heavier damage to the housing stock of the urban poor living in urban informal settlements than in adjacent formal city neighborhoods. The paper scopes the extent and nature of urbanization in the Pacific region and documents the rapid expansion of unplanned settlements—increasingly located in low elevation coastal zones at risk of sea level rise and coastal erosion‚ that are a consequence of a number of factors including inefficient and costly land registration systems; inappropriate normative and static spatial planning instruments; and lack of serviced subdivisions, both safe and affordable by low income earners and close to employment centers. It goes on to identify that the dearth of location specific climate risk data, the lack of policies at national or local levels, and a commonly-held antipathy towards urban settlements have contributed to planning systems and approaches that are not only failing to meet the housing needs of the burgeoning urban populations - and in particular low income groups with limited options, but inadvertently are contributing towards the rapid expansion of informal, unplanned urban settlements into hazard prone areas. The paper identifies a number of possible entry-points for planners and urban managers to break this cycle of urban deterioration, founded as it is on exclusion and multi-dimensional vulnerability. It concludes with a suggested set of key approaches as guidance for practitioners to better understand and plan with rather than against informality in the urban Pacific.