Whether it's a shack outside a big city or a ten-room house in the suburbs, women spend much more time and work more in the home than men. But although they are the main consumers in this sense, they face many obstacles in getting adequate housing.

Aidenaire Carm lives in the slums of Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince, cheek-by-jowl with thousands of other people in their thrown-together homes. She sells bananas in the market for a living, if you can call it that. She is a widow with four children. Together, her family earns between $4 and $35 a month.¹ As evening comes she makes her way through the debris of a day's buying and selling, back to the shack that is home: one room for the five of them. She can smell the charcoal smoke, the bananas cooking and the rotting garbage. The noise is awesome — blaring radios, people shouting, dogs barking.

Aidenaire is one among the many millions in the world who have abandoned their rural homes to move to the cities. Over the last 30 years, the population of towns and cities in developing countries is growing at nearly twice the rate of its total population.² By the end of the century, almost half the world's population will live in cities.³

The urban explosion now taking place in developing countries constitutes one of the most radical and rapid social transformations in history. In less than half a century, the population of Latin America has gone from being predominantly rural to predominantly urban, and by the year 2000, urban dwellers will outnumber rural dwellers by three to one.⁴ By then, too, in East and South Asia, the percentage increase of people living in urban areas will rise between 230 to 300 per cent in a mere 50 years.⁵

Most of the migrants have been drawn to the cities by the prospect of finding a job and making a better life. Coming in poor they end up amongst the 50 per cent of the people in Third World cities who are unable to afford adequate shelter and who now live in slum and squatter settlements⁶ — in the favelas, shanty towns and barrios which cluster round the outskirts of cities, perched precariously on hilltops, or clogged in by a murky river.

The need to have a roof over your head is of equal importance to all consumers, whether young or old, female or male. So are many other housing requirements — privacy, security of tenure, clean water and sanitation, waste disposal, electricity, an adequate amount of living space and access to amenities such as shops, transport, schools and clinics. In all of these women have consumer needs which may be different from others.

For instance women are more likely to be consumers of poor housing. In Australia for example the groups who live in inadequate housing are pensioners, young people and single parent families — 90 per cent of which are headed by women.⁷ The increasing numbers of poor female-headed households is amplified in the number of homeless families headed by women. In Boston, USA, for example out of 1,200 homeless families, 90 per cent are female-headed.⁸

Housing needs money. In many of the large cities in Asia a basic house often costs between $10,000 to $15,000 which is estimated to be affordable by less than 40 per cent of the urban households.⁹

Women's lack of money and access to credit make them vulnerable to rocketing house prices. According to Becky Johnson of the Women's Education and Resource Centre, in New Hampshire, housing 'developers' along both coasts of the US are creating a new institutionalised class, that of homeless families. Citing Portsmouth, a town of 40,000 as an example, she reported that house prices there have doubled in less than three years and as a result home ownership is increasingly impossible for working class people. And, says Johnson, women are the worst hit.¹⁰

Various strategies for affordable housing have been proposed. One, which has been successfully used in Boston and San Francisco requires profit-oriented developers to study the impact of their development on the housing market and either construct a certain percentage of affordable units or make payment to a trust fund based on how many people they will displace. Another is real estate transfer taxes, assessed each time a property changes hands and used to help finance affordable housing.¹¹

Finding a place to live is one thing; keeping it another. Despite the large contribution that squatters make to a city, as bus drivers, hospital attendants, construction workers, cooks, maids and garbage collectors — filling in the gaps of the labour market cheaply — many authorities see only an eyesore in their shanties, an obstacle to grander development projects, and order in the bulldozers.

And eviction may not only come in the form of bulldozers. In South Africa, the politics of apartheid have created miserable living conditions for the black people by forcibly removing them from their homes and resettling them in semi-arid so called 'independent homelands' or bantusans. Says the World Health Organization, '...above all, the women and children ... bear the brunt' of poor shelter, insufficient food and isolation.¹²

The question of building design and women's particular needs for the use of space within and around the house is increasingly discussed. Notes architect Jos Boys of Matrix, a British women house design collective, 'While buildings do not control our lives, architecture does work together with other aspects of social and economic relations to put people in their 'place' and to describe symbolically and spatially what that place is.'¹³

Modern cities are planned to segregate different people and aspects of life: homes in the suburbs, offices downtown; people without children here, those with children there; old people in that place; no dogs allowed here. In some countries the pattern is even more rigidly imposed to separate people of different race, colour, religion and sex.

This physical separation also reinforces the division of labour inside and outside the home by tying women more closely to a locality than men. This comes about because women, even those who work outside the home, are still mainly responsible for childcare and running the house. As mentioned earlier, increasing numbers of households are now headed by women and whatever the family set-up they spend more time at home. Their requirements are a priority. Consequently we have to find new ways of organising and designing housing which fulfill a woman's needs — for work outside the home, for easy access to shops, schools, childcare facilities and so on — without enmeshing her further in domesticity.

Many of today's houses in the West, and their counterparts in the Third World, are based on family patterns which do not fit the shape of people's relationships. To begin with, the Western 'average' family of a man, woman and a couple of children is becoming increasingly rare. And so the translocation of that model to developing countries now seems even more absurd. Divorce, or migration of the men to find work, or death are the main reasons why many households are now headed by women. These reasons tell the story behind figures from the US Bureau of Census which show a decline in the number of 'normal' families — married couples with children under 18 — from just over 40 per cent of households in 1970 to 29 per cent ten years later.¹⁴

Despite this, the image of what constitutes a family and a family home remains pretty constant in Western planners' minds, and since their ideas and assumptions influence buildings and settlements around the world women increasingly feel the pinch of ill-fitting housing.

Women, wherever they live, need houses that are easy to manage, that facilitate the involvement of others, that are conveniently sited, that are close to work and to public spaces accessible to all; and that are served by cheap, reliable and safe public transport — in other words, a far more integrated set-up than we have now.

Design of 'improvements' such as in water and sanitation facilities must be demonstrably better than those they replace. For instance, although women in a part of Egypt spend about four hours a day fetching water, it makes better sense to them than to use the piped water supply.¹⁵ Why? Tradition is one reason; and the socialising around the well. Another is that while the taps bring water into the house, there isn't always a drain to take it out again. Children will not use newly installed latrines because the openings in the tops are too large and they are afraid of falling in. Culture plays a part in housing design requirements, too. For example, some people used to field and furrow find the idea of using a latrine right next to where they eat and sleep in the house positively disgusting. No amount of talk about germs and flies will convince them otherwise.¹⁶

For all their drawbacks, the knocked-together shantytowns do often hold a better mix of people, work, shops and community life. Overlaying their best points onto sturdy housing stock and sites could produce less alienating and segregated communities while retaining enough privacy and space for individuals and households.

For many people hanging on by their fingernails to an existence in the slums, an apartment block in a suburban setting may be seen as a sign of enhanced status, for the notion of an 'ideal' house incorporates not just their own origins but also their aspirations. The aspirations can be nurtured by what people perceive as 'sophisticated' or 'Western' lifestyles. 'But aspirations to improve social standing can cause problems with housing — leading people to install themselves in housing units which are functionally unsuitable, reports development consultant Susan Waltz.¹⁷ One of the examples she cites is of a Tunisian apartment dweller at the 'Feast of Aid' celebration trying to butcher a freshly slaughtered sheep in a tiny kitchen on the fourth floor of an apartment building.

Today, with people swarming into the cities, providing sufficient and adequate and affordable housing is one of the biggest headaches of city authorities. But it is necessary to add on to these concerns that of suitable design that takes into consideration women's particular needs.^{18 19}

Those higgledy-piggledy shanties ringing the world's big cities, where nothing is certain and everything is up for grabs may offer women their best opportunity yet to reach for what they want. The cities can offer opportunities for employment — a source of income²⁰ — but the squalor and hazards of poor housing can negate any gains they make.

Notes

1. Black, M. 'Overcoming the 'Problems of Life'', in UNICEF News, Issue 115/1983/1, p.6.
2. McNamara on the Crisis in Human Settlements. A Habitat Special Report, taken from the 1975 address of Robert McNamara to the World Bank's Board of Governors.
3. Intersectoral Action for Health: The Role of Intersectoral Cooperation in National Strategies in Health for All. World Health Organization, Geneva, 1986.
4. ibid.
5. Urban, Rural and City Population 1950-2000. Document ESH/P/WP.66, United Nations, New York, 1978.
6. 'Housing'. Special supplement in Community Aid Abroad Review. Autumn 1987.
7. ibid.
8. Johnson, B. 'Women Hit Hardest by Affordable Housing Crisis' in Listen Real Loud, vol.7, no.4, Winter 1986-87, p.2.
9. Economic and Social Survey of Asia and the Pacific, United Nations Economic and Social Council for Asia and the Pacific, Bangkok, 1987, p.124.
10. Johnson, B. op. cit., p.2.
11. ibid, p.3.
12. 'Apartheid and Health', World Health Organization, Geneva, 1983, quoted in Women and Health in Africa: Evaluation and Planning Centre for Health Care, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London, 1985, p.28.
13. Boys, J. 'Is There a Feminist Analysis of Architecture?', in Built Environment, vol.10, no.1, 1984.
14. US Department of Commerce, Bureau of Census. Current Population Reports Series P-20 = 388, Household and Family Characteristics, Table A (1982:2, 1984:2).
15. Fluery, J-M. 'A Motherhood Issue', in IDRC Reports', July 1986, p.7.
16. Black, M. 'First Dig Your Pit...', in UNICEF News, Issue 110/1981/4, p.14.
17. Waltz, S. E. 'Women's Housing Needs in the Arab Cultural Context of Tunisia', in Ekistics, no.310, Jan-Feb 1985, p.30.
18. Franck, K. 'New Households, Old Houses: Designing for Changing Needs', in Ekistics, op. cit., p.2.
19. Hayden, D. 'What Would a Non-Sexist City be Like? Speculations on Housing, Urban Design and Human Work', in Ekistics, op. cit., p.99.
20. Hosken, F. 'Shelter, Urbanization and Change: A Feminist View', in WIN News. Winter, 1987.