The context of policy

Cities and development

Raymond Apthorpe

This article criticizes a number of

assumptions
inherent in urban
research programmes, including
the Western, urban and economic
biases in such research. The article
argues for a multiiisciplinary and
holistic approach to settlements
issues in developing countries
and, inter alia, suggests that policy
studies
take account of the
difference between rhetoric and
practice, the dangers of using
models, and the meaning of
development terminology.
Keywords: Physical planning, Third
Wotld, University research
Raymond Apthorpe is Professor of
Sociology and Social Anthropologyof
Development at the International
Institute of Social Studies, PO Box
90733, 2509 LS The Hague, The
Netherlands (Tel: 572201).

Some themes of this article were included

in my contribution to a Habitat lntemational
Conference on rapid urban growth in April
1981, The Hague. I have also drawn frcm
discussions on settlements and planning at
The Institute of Social Studies with Bert
Helmsing, Mike Douglass, David Dunham,
Joao Guimaraes, Nora de Guzman, Jos
Hilhorst and Henk van Roosmalen.

0284-2751/83/020185-09$03.00

This article is a plea for broader contextual foundations for descriptive

and diagnostic analysis, more awareness of policy as policy discourse and
for a multidisciplinary approach to urban issues in development studies.
This necessarily involves a discussion of boundaries and contexts which
many single-disciplinary approaches assume are immutable. Applied to
policy and planning questions about, say, urban growth and urban
decline, such a holistic approach would, for instance, take national and
rural as well as urban perspectives as simultaneously as possible and in
one and the same research programme. The complexities of most
problematic issues for policy present themselves all at once. It cannot
make much practical sense, therefore, to pretend and proceed otherwise.
Migration is a topical if random example. Immigration into cities - and
indeed into countries -has broader implications than, for instance, those
pertaining directly to the migrants themselves and their individual
qualities and characteristics. Immigration of younger people and families
into a city or country with a declining and aging population affects the
overall population composition and thus has an economic significance
with implications for social as well as economic services and the costs and
perhaps the productivity of both. Again, city growth or decline may have
less to do with migration itself than, say, the overall urban sex ratios with
which migration rates may or may not be closely associated. There is thus
a complex of demographic and economic as well as social, physical and
political factors to be grasped.
This article reviews some aspects of this holistic approach to a variety of
public policy and planning research questions about settlements,
settlement patterns and regional development. Human settlements may
be labelled as rural or urban or both. Commonly rural/urban
distinctions are relative and overlapping, not exclusive. For instance the
agricultural share in the total occupational profile in some African towns
and cities can prove on inspection to be greater than one might first have
been inclined to suppose. At the same time, the non-agricultural share in
occupations and incomes in many rural areas in Asia and Africa has been
found to be much more prominent than, until recently, peasant studies
tended to suppose.
Do studies of Third World settlements and settlement patterns stand to
gain more from what has been called a three worlds and
multidimensional
approach rather than a Third World, and falsely

0 1983 Butterworth8 Co (Publishers)Ltd

185

dichotomous or dualist approach? Such a multifocal emphasis assumes

neither Western nor Non-Western forms to offer the principal
standards of comparison. A huge range of situational and dimensional
contrasts and comparisons have to be worked out including: sedentary/
non-sedentary,
irrigated/non-irrigated,
dispersed/nucleated,
nomadic/
pastoralist, pastoralist/partly
sedentary, long settled/recently settled,
ethnically mixed/ethnically uniform. These are just some. Others would
include landscapes with lower/higher rates and kinds of population
growth, security and periodic m~kets/poor security conditions and no
periodic markets, and so on. A checklist like this is, and indeed must be,
very long indeed.
Some individual descriptive,
explanatory,
policy and planning
questions will be reviewed in this article. Moreover some fundamental
structures of thought come to the surface at times and recur in all of the
questions under examination. One of these relates to interests and
classes as in the common phrases: a conflict of interests and a contradiction of classes. Typically, the former is used of situations in which,
potentially at any rate, leadership, planning and administration (planistration) could play an effective role. A contradiction of classes on the
other hand relates to situations and tendencies which are supposedly
beyond reconciliation or solution by planistration. Such contradictions
reflect forces of history which are greater than human forces.
Of course either a conflict or a contradiction could be or could
become a paradox or a crisis. The former is something one can live with
and the latter something one cannot, at least for long. For whom a
contradiction turns into a crisis is a matter to be determined. As
Geoffrey Kay puts it:
In recent years it has become the practice to treat the level of employment

as an
indicator of capitalist success, and the high unemployment
of the interwar period
is seen as unambiguous
evidence of a crisis. But for whom was it a crisis?
.
unemployment
does not threaten capital in itself . . . on the other hand it . .
weakens the working class because of its immediate and total dependence on wage
Iabour _ . . the depression that periodically interrupted accumulation before 1945
unfailingly rebounded to the advantage of capital. . . slumps have been periods of
capitalist
renovation:
the weakest
firms collapse,
aiding the process
of
concentration
and centralization
. . . areas of production where working working
class resistance was strong such as coal, steel, railways and the docks were run
down and new industries,
such as chemical and electricat en~nee~ng,
which
employed labour in a different kind of way, were expanded rapidly. In the midst of
the crisis Ford moved to Dagenham.*

As for example in Colin Leys, Underdevelopment in Kenya: The Political

Economy of Neo-colonialism 1964-1971,
Heinemann, London, 1975.
ZG. Kav.
~veiopment
and
Under
A . Marxist
Analysis,
~evefop~ent:
Macmillan, London. 1975. o 173.
See for example, Eleanora de Guzman,
Slum squatter settlement in Metro Manila,
a case study, Master of Development
Studies Thesis, The Institute of Social
Studies, The Hague, 1980, (unpublished).

186

The argument is that for whom a crisis is a crisis will depend partly on
whether it is merely a period of recomposition or something after which
things are never the same again.
In effect a somewhat comparable position is one which emerges from a
great deal of work on poverty in urban locations. Expressed in the
broadest terms this argues that: poverty programmes aiming just to
equip the poor themselves to adjust to their misfortune do not even
attempt to look for any solution for poverty as a generic problem.3

Some basic descriptive questions about settlement patterns

Something which has been only poorly described can scarcely be
compared or contrasted in any adequate way with something else. So, if
even the descriptive validity of generalizations in settlements studies is

CITIES November 1983

The context of policy

Capital
cities of colonies and former
colonies whose size and function has
above all been influenced by forces outside
the country are commonly called primate
cities.
sAn ESCAP Experts Group on the Physical
Planning of Rural Centres, 3 October 1978,
inter a/k stressed that in any manual d the
subject of rural centres, construction or
improvement, emphasis should bs put on
the diierent functfons or centres for different categories of rural people e.g. big and
small farmers. See also, DHV Consulting
Engineers, Guidelines for Rural Centre
Planning, Amsterdam, 1979.
6Ses for example, Carol A. Smith, ed,
Regional
Analysis (Vol 1, Economic
Vol
2,
Social
Systems),
Systems,
Academic
Press,
London, 1978. An
important earlier paper is L.W. Chtissman,
Marketing
on the Changhua
Plain,
Taiwan, in W.E. Willmott, ed, Economic
Chinese
Society,
Organization
in
Universitv of California Press, 1972.
pp 215iso.
For a discussion of these authorities in
respect of physcial planning, see Smith, ed,
ibid.
mis example comes from a publication of
the Physical Planning Department, Ministry
of Lands and Settlement, Government of
Kenya, Human Settlements in Kenya: A
Strategy for Urban and Rural Development,
1978.

CITIES November 1983

open to much doubt, explanatory generalizations built on them must be

more dubious still. It has become common practice to say that rapid
urban growth (on which planning circles more often than not put a
negative valuation) is the main feature of Third World settlement
patterns. But, we must ask, why, and for whom? While undoubtedly
some rapid urban growth is characteristic of some Third World urbanization it is, even of this, only one feature among others. Moreover not all
Third World urbanization is primate urbanization, although it still
appears to be primate cities which urban studies in Africa, Asia and, if
perhaps to a somewhat lesser extent, Latin America have researched.4
Another common practice in settlement studies supposes hexagons or
hierarchies of settlement to be the inherent, or incipiently inherent,
dominant norms. But here it has to be asked: under what circumstances is
or might this be the case, and with what costs and advantages to whom?5
The approach in non-Western regions which assumes (or even affirms)
such hierarchies or hexagons to be basic to Western but not nonWestern, regions has led to false comparisons in many kinds of development studies. Hierarchies and hexagons are not found everywhere in the
West, wherever precisely that may be. Neither, necessarily or otherwise,
are they found only there. In this regard the contributions to research on
central places in regional studies by W.G. Skinner and those derivative
and critical of him, not least other anthropologists, are invaluable.6
In addition to Western bias in the available description of settlements
patterns there is also (as in various concepts of hierarchies, optimum sixes
and thresholds) commonly an urban bias. Authors of Third World
urban studies constantly cite Christaller or Von Thtinen, but L&h
almost never.7 What seen from above may seem perfectly proper, and
properly hierarchical-functional,
from below may be either a hierarchy
of a very different kind or even something different altogether. It is
perhaps to be added that in any event a hierarchy may not be equally
hierarchical all the way up, or down, and some hierarchies are more
hierarchical than others.
Third World countries being predominantly rural in their population
distribution, depictions of their overall settlement patterns which proceed from an urban (usually a primate urban) starting point, are apt to
come to some conclusions which a rural-based description might not
suggest or support at all. A former colonys settlement pattern may
indeed appear today-to quote from a comprehensive national document
on one such countrys settlement pattern - to be incoherents if viewed
from an urban-based perspective. From an urban-based (again usually a
primate urban) viewpoint, such a countrys settlement pattern may
indeed relatively recently have been altered dramatically by city growth
and greatly influenced by a railroad. If, however, this same description
had proceeded not from an urban but from a rural standpoint, probably
much continuity would have been stressed rather than discontinuity (and
therefore perhaps also coherence over incoherence). Of course, even
much continuity is not exclusive of elements of considerable discontinuity
too. It is always interrelations of continuity and change which make up
the total picture (easier though it may be for some disciplines rather than
others to show this).
The processes of settlement formation and change in any long-settled
landscape did not start only with the onset of the colonial period even if,
as we see them today, primate cities and rural influences of various kinds
did. Descriptive generalizations must be carefully qualified. The settle-

187

The context ojpolicy

ment landscapes in former colonies may indeed comprise on the one

hand, a big city or two and, on the other, hundreds of small villages,
but that is not ail and such a static or pseudo-dynamic portrait is of little
value for policy and planning purposes. Both modernization and
dependency studies have overemphasized the impact of the West,
neglecting other forces and impacts which were at work during, as well as
before and after, the colonial period. These are not even well described,
let alone well understood, by being all branded as colonial-periodspecific.
Finally, some of the crucial research questions about basic sociopolitical and economic description must be questions about research
methods. Some methods of basic descriptive research apparently have
destinations of their own. The answers you obtain to your questions
about, say, the distribution of community power, may depend directly
very much on your methods of inquiry. It has, for example, been
established in a wide variety of work9 that reputational questions (who
are the most influential people in the community?) lead to elitist portraits
of community power, Issues-oriented questions (who is important in this
particular arena and in that?) asked of the same community will lead you
to more pluralistic results. Which method or methods, then, should you
use?

Descriptive questions are ~ndamental questions with as much depending on the purposes for which answers are sought as on the paths that are
taken. Description interrelates intimately with explanation in respect of
both the patterns of language and perspectives used and the selection
(and pre-selection) of the matter to be described.
Is urban growth or decline a product of circumstances and forces which
are to be researched in urban areas only? With notable exceptions,
studies of dense urban areas have tended on the whole either to compare
their social, economic and other features with those of non-urban scenes
(such as those which tend to explain urban life in large cities in terms of
anomie and estrangement, etc) or to establish them in more sul generis
but stitl rather similar terms.
A good example of the latter approach is Claude Fishers theory which,
starting from the position that urban-rural differences are usually minor,
builds on the work of:
non-materialists
such as Lewis and Cans and look(s) for an explanation in . .
the relationship
between ~pulation
concentration
and (both positively and
negatively
sanctioned)
deviance
- but without the mechanisms
of anomie
described
by Wirth, nor by denying the importance of ecological factors as do
Wirths critics. Cities accommodate
and generate
a variety of subcultures.
Because of size and because of con~ontation
with each other, these subcultures
are further differentiated
and their norms strengthened.
In complex interaction
with the countervailing
process of diffusion, these intensified subcultures proKin the Phili~jn~s see, eg V.A. Miralao
and N.V. Oacumos, Tf-te elitist-pluralist
continuum in the study of community
power, Philippine Sociological Review,
July-October 1969, pp 114-121.
Claude
S. Fischer, Toward a subcultural
theorv of urbanism,In&it& of urban and
RegiGnal ~vel~~t,
University of
California. Ekxkelev. Workino Paper No
211,1973. See al.& &laude S_Fishkr, The
public and the private worlds of city life,
American Sociological Review, Vol46, No
3, June 1961, pp 306-316.

188

duce the unconventional

behaviour associated with urban life. *O

A broader approach, applied to inner city economic problems

collapse of inner city employment
in so-called post-industrial

such as the
cities, was

that of a study of Lambeth (London) which asked: Is it the inner city

miasma that causes (inner city) unemployment? The answer it found
was1
is the result, not of the collapse of the
of Inner Areas but because Inner Areas have for 150 years or more been
the areas in which those most vulnerable to unempio~ent
live. Impose on that an
the main cause of inner area unemployment

economy

CITIES November 1983

The context of policy

aggregate level of unemployed that has been on an upward and steadily rising
trend since the mid-1950s and you perceive Inner Area unemploymerkl*

There is a danger that the attention devoted to inner area unemployment

and mismatch is a politically convenient taxonomic device. If you label
the unemployment problem, about which you are able or prepared to do
little, as an inner area problem, you somehow contain it and make it seem
smaller. If you diagnose the problem as one of mismatch you
simultaneously suggest: (1) it is the fault of the unemployed (the attempt
in the early 1970s to suggest high unemployment in the UK was the result
of earnings related benefits seems finally to have been wrecked on the
contrary evidence), and (2) that there is something simple you can do
about it - provide training.
Multifocal approaches to the setting and solving of problems take local
and regional contexts equally into account. The circumstances under
which values and attitudes are expressed in an inner city or any other
locality are not necessarily the same as those of the region of which, if less
immediately, they are also an expression. So, while some criticisms of
certain explanations of urban growth and decline say symptoms have
been mistaken for causes, and other criticisms of other explanations say
effects not causes have been treated, neither kind of explanation is
primarily concerned with causality. They have more to do with disciplinary and sectoral boundaries and limitations and the units of reference and
comparison selected.

Some questions about policy

1lPaul Cheshire, Is it the inner city miasma

unemployment?,
The
that
causes
Guardian,
12 November 1979. For a
comprehensive overview see N. Thrift,
Unemployment in the inner city: urban,
problem or struch~ral imperative?, in D.T.
Herbert and R.J. Johnson, Geography end
the Urban Environment, Vol 2, John Wiley,
Chichester, UK, 1979.
%ee Bernard Schaffer on public polii in
Bernard Schaffer and Edward Clay, eds,
Heinknann
for
Menoeuvn?,
Room
Educational Books, London, forthcoming
1983.
Agricultures
and
%ee
Apthorpe,
strategies, in Schaffer and Clay, ibid.
14For a critique see Martin Rein, Public
Policy and Social Science,
Penguin,
Harmondsworth, Herts, UK, 1977.

CITIES November 1983

To intervene or not to intervene and if so by and through which agencies,

at what level, when and in respect of which focal issues and resources
particularly? Is migration to or from the city a good or bad thing, for
whom, and with what effects? Should, and if so could, its flow or direction
be halted or changed significantly by government intervention? Does
failure so to intervene bring societies, economies and spatial systems to
the brink at least of structural breakdown (or not prevent this)? Would
any lack of evident sign of such drastic collapse be a ground for inadtion?
These are only some of the questions that are apt to emerge during, for
instance, a study programme on rural-urban relations and regional
development. When the participants return home at the end of such a
course they will undoubtedly be asked another question: Well, what
have you learned of practical value on your fellowship?
In short, the answer is that there are no omni-applicable formula
answers to the questions at the beginning of this section. However, this is
not likely to give ones bosses much satisfaction (or oneself due
promotion). One purpose of policy studies must be to address this kind of
question about, as it were, the expressions of demand for policy on the
would-be supply side.
Why does certain uncertainty tend in the perennial speech of public
policy to go as unrewarded as, simply, uncertainty; as if one had not gone
to the right institute to find the neat and tidy and above all seemingly
substantive solutions that proper study should have learned? Because a
great deal of public policy is declaration, utterance12 discourse,3 as well
as, and at times even more than, decision making.14 Policy is partly a
matter of making statements about general principles as well as of
evaluating outcomes of positions actually taken and implemented.
Because general principles and particular performances are so often very
189

The context of policy

IQn evaluationsee for example, Raymond

Apthorpe and Des Gasper, Policy evaluation and meta-evaluation: the case of rural
cooperatives, World Development, Vol 10,
No 8,1982, pp 651468.
%$ee Roland Batthes, on c/art& For an
intr~~~n
see the volume in the Fontana
Modem Masters series.
Y3ee for example, Josef Gugler and
William Flanaaan. Urbanization and Sock/
Change
in -West
Africa,
Cambridge
Universitv Press. Cambridoe. UK, 1978
(Chapte;
3,
kurat-urb&
migration
particularly); and Josef Gugler, On the
theory of rural-urban migration: the case of
Subsaharan Africa, in J.A. Jackson, ed,
migration, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, UK, 1969.
*aNot only of governmental policies; public
policy is the public outcome of decisions
whether these originate in the public or
private sectors.

190

separate
areas in human affairs, research into one is not necessarily at the
same time research into the other. Policy statements arc statements about
resolve, made to show dete~ination,
as well as statements about
policies. To be seen to have a policy may be more important than actually
having a policy.
The words which best show such resolve are those which proclaim
ideals so noble, so totally general and self-evident, that really no
exception whatsoever could be taken to them. Thus policy will be
recommended
to be integrated, democratic, just, honest, in the best
interests of all, and so on. The language of such prescription must be
eloquent to a fine degree if it is to succeed in being persuasive in and of
itself. Eloquence of this order, for this purpose, is itself a kind of jargon,
the technical jargon of absolute generality.15 Contrastingly, for actual
performances to be taken seriously, they must first be timed, measured,
monitored. So very much depends on how the evaluandum (the policy or
activity to be evaluated)6 is stated and, for example, whether organization has been identified with institutionalization in human affairs and
events. If it has then the way will have been opened principally to
structuralist analyses - which are more readily made of principles in
themselves than actual performances.
One area here, then, to which approaches to settlements could fruitfully be directed relates directly to interrelations or lack of interrelations
of principles and performances in respect of policies. To turn again to
migration, an important gap in this growing discipline relates to assessments of governmental interventions designed to prohibit movement of
people from one place to another, such as those reported for the USSR,
China and elsewhere. Have these prohibitions been enforced, and, if so,
how and with what outcomes? Where these policies have been pursued,
was this with the specific purpose of limiting the growth of unemployment
in cities or were their political aims only secondarily, if that, concerned
with employment policies?
A further research area is critical assessments of the deeming of
policies (or models, see below) to be economic, as if thereby they were
then properly and exclusively legitimate with for instance social aspects
or social policy being left for treatment as just an additional
consideration. For certain audiences it is common in many fields to find a
public policys general principles being justified in economic terms with
only its actual performance being said to be influenced or determined by
social matters. Unfortunately for development studies a great deal of
generalizing and would-be comparative work on, among other things,
migration has proceeded on these lines. Josef Guglersl studies are
particularly pertinent. Social anthropologists as well as economists try to
force resiliently recalcitrant data into economic/non-economic
straightjackets. The language of economism can be used with effect in both
academia and the public sector, regardless of university or governmental
departmental affiliation. This tells us more about the language of the
selling (and buying) of public policy in the public arena (policies
markets) than the scientific standing of individual disciplines and
departments and their practitioners and staff.

Development

planning research

Research questions about planning are, among other things, about the
work of the visible hand in development and underdevelopment and as

CITIES November 1983

The context of policy

such they relate more to performance than principle (see above).*

Development planners of many different persuasions look to models as
remedies for development problems because models questions are so
basic19 that to go even some way towards answering them helps with
actual policy. The UNCHS 1978 Enschede meeting, Training for
improving low income settlements, pointedly observed that development planning theory has become both overly academic and too
macro;20 well, so too has actual practice in planning in respect of at least
two kinds of models, model systems and actual models.
Model systems
Model systems in settlement planning studies - including those
hexagons and hierarchies of settlements mentioned earlier - are those
which in planning theory are said to constitute the best system or pattern
in principle. Non-conforming existing conditions are often written off as
being just deviations from or distortions of, these ideal forms, just
incidental or accidental dispositions called vagaries. It is when these
little irregularities are revealed to be nothing less than the actually
obtaining topography, climate, farming and physical communications
patterns that the unrealism in this approach becomes obvious. The
trouble here as elsewhere in development studies is that the good
pattern or plan is that conforming to the model with the bad being
exceptions. Really, this is not unlike an original sin theory of settlement,
a saints theory of settlements planners. This is a (technical) error even
more than a (moral) bias. Model systems are at least second (or third)
order abstractions and in this sense they have a certain truth of their own
and therefore can facilitate the making of comparisons. But they do not
permit the making of decisions in actual practice in, dare one say it, most
cases.
Actual models

%ee F. Braudel, On Hisfvry, University of

Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, lWCJ, p 40
(. . before establishing a common programme for the social sciences, the crucial
thing is to define the function and limits and
models the scope of which some undertakings seem to be in danger of enlarging
inordinately).
WNCHS,
Training for Improving
Low
income Settlements, Nairobi, 1979.
Wee Apthorpe, Distant encounters of a
third kind: problems of generalism in the
teaching of development studies, Bulletin,
Institute
of
Development
Studies,
University of Sussex, UK, Vol II, No 3,
pp 25-33. Jeffrey Harrod, Development
Studies: from change to stabilization, ISS.
The Hague, mirneo~1992.
2Tt.Y. Kwok. Urban studies and urban
planning, /nienYow, No 25, Hong Kong
University, October 1980.

CITIES November 1983

The actual models which are to be learned and copied as development

strategies include those model cases of development which are singled
out as lessons to be replicated. Here what has happened only too
frequently is that models have come to take the place of what, in the first
place, they were supposed only to represent.21 Even the best literature on
them tends to be extremely selective about their actual political,
historical, financial, and social contexts, seldom if ever giving the
slightest inkling of the setbacks that even success stories have faced at
some stages. Because they are transmitted in such a truncated and static
form, when after all some shortcoming is found the shock is just too great.
Either one simply cannot take it (so the model lives on, posthumously, as
a deep imprint on the mind) or one feels left completely at a loss.
Asked Is there a model for planners of Hong Kong to follow? R.Y.
Kwoks answer was:
If you mean other cities development as a model for Hong Kong, I would.
. say
that . . . Hong Kong . . . has only itself to follow as a model. Hong Kong has to
develop from problems of its own within its own resources and its own limitations.
The key principle to bear in mind on models for developing land in the most
efficient way is to consider each case unique and to develop a specific model when
the planners understand
its context and limitation in order to solve the specific
problems.22
The models questions which are now, as ever, so greatly in need of

The context of policy

research and rethinking

are themselves in part expressions or reflections
of instrumentalist
and technical approaches
to planning uninformed
by
analysis of the limits of planning. For one thing to take a solely technicist
view of planning
is to neglect eternal and philosophical
dimensions
of
doubt and discussion
and their constant
return. For another it is to
underplay
the extent to which planning
is itself a social, political and
economic
activity, subject to institutionalization
and bureaucratization
and so on just like any other. It is, in other words, to leave the planner out
of planning.
Economic

v physical planning

In another,
perhaps more conventional
area of research, much more
work has been done on the matching of economic and physical planning.
Matched and perhaps opposite approaches can lessen conflicts between
facet plans,
facilitate
trade-offs
and exchange
information.
Such a
dialectical
approach is therefore more decisionary
than visionary23 and
would be unlike the integrated or unified approach which lends itself to
being embraced
as a visionary end rather than a decisionary means. As
Edward
Said has remarked
in a critique of area studies in another
context, comprehensive
vision tends in both scholarly and political arenas
to rely for its coherence and force on the person, institution or discourse
whose
property
it is. Any comprehensive
vision is fundamentally
conservative
[seeing] every detail through the device of a set of [primarily
schematic and efficient] reductionist
categories. 24 The trouble with such
integration
or unification
arises when such coherence,
force and holism
and perhaps hierarchism
are presented as if they were not an approach
taken to a subject but on the contrary a property present in, indeed
dominating,
the subject. Displacement
of this kind is the dilemma, the
eternal dilemma,
of holism and generalism
in planning as in academic
studies.
Z3Bu1see Marshall Wolfe, Elusive development, UNRISD/UNCLA,
Geneva, 1981.
24Edward Said, Orientalism, 1978, pp 239240 as cited and discussed further in
Apthorpe, Territorial formations and rural
development: worms eye views, a plea for
in D. Belshaw and M.
description,
Douglass. A Reader in Regional Development, Heinemann
Educational Books,
London, forthcoming 1984.
For Hong Kong see for example, I.C.
Jatvie and J. Agassi, eds, Hong Kong: A
Society in Transition, pp 278-280. See also
A.G. Pacho, Slums and squatters in third
world cities Local Government Bulletin,
Vol VI, No 3, May-June 1971.
6ln the mid-1970s the Human Settlements
and Regional Planning group at the Asian
Thailand,
Institute
of Technology,
developed this approach distinctively in
urban planning.
z7For some critical discussion from one
angle of modernization models of urban
de;elopment see John Menington Town
and country in the transition to capitalism,
New Left Review, No 93; Monique Cohen,
John
English and Harold Brookfield
Functional diversity at the base of the
urban system in Peninsular Malaysia,
Journal of Tropical Geography, Vol 45,
December 1977, pp 22-29.

Meanings

Some further,
more particular,
questions
about planning
are directly
related to such displacement.
For instance, there is the common mental
practice,
by no means confined to planning,
which substitutes
social
denotations
of problems
for their actual social dimensions
or aspects.
Squatter
settlement
would be a case in point. Are squatters a distinct
social (and economic and political) as well as legal category (supposing
that they are legally distinct and separate in actuality)? In some cities the
employment

ratios,

extremes

and

ranges

of

incomes,

numbers

of

immigrants
and numbers
of women in employment
do not appear
significantly
different
for squatters
than for the city population
as a
whole. In other regards, such as age and other employment
figures, it
seems they do.25 Neither similarity nor dissimilarity
can be deduced
from the name planning ordinarily gives to squatter settlements.
The same applies to other housing problems.
On further inspection
some housing problems
prove to be land problems, some land appear to
be capital, and some capital appear to be labour problems.26 Precisely
which is which is not as a rule easilv, induced from the name which is more
useful for classifying indexes and the like2 than explanatory.
Part of the difficulty
with models of settlements
and settlement
patterns
as frames for living and working - as frames for physical, social,
political
and economic
activities - is that these frames are themselves
physical, social, political and economic processes, placing and displacing

CITIES November

1983

The context of policy

people and organizations. They are both space-forming and spacecontingent. For planning and policy studies to address this duality,
politicoeconomic
as well as sociophysical approaches are needed. All
generalizations offered must be qualified according to demands, costs,
and benefits for the different segments, groups, classes and categories of
people and communities. Mainstream development studies call these
social aspects. Cultural aspects would also include the meanings of
spaces and places but would still encompass different functions of places
and spaces. In this regard key sections of the Vancouver Foundation
Charter of the UN Commission and Centre for Human Settlements
would benefit from further elaboration and revision.

CITIES November

1983

193