Training for the improvement of slums and squatter areas in urban and rural communities

• Published in: Habitat International
• Main Author: C.C. Benninger
• Language: English
• Published: 1979
• Subjects: North Atlantic
• Online Access: https://architexturez.net//doc/10-1016/0197-39757990019-5; https://doi.org/10.1016/0197-3975(79)90019-5

Training is one of the greatest bottlenecks in our development process. At a national level in India, the Dantwala Committe 1 reported that our scheme under the Sixth Five-Year Plan to extend plarming to all rural blocks is not feasible simply because there would be no personnel to carry out the task. In urban areas the picture is no different. While one may assume that the lack of capital is the major limitation of urban development, the fact is that our budgets lapse year after year in key sectors such as housing, water supply and transport. There are simply not enough adequately trained people to manage these large and complex systems. This was also a major finding in our World Bank projects for Calcutta and Madras 2 It is no surprise then that the urgency of this problem should be felt in other countries and in fact should represent a problem of international concern. This was expressed in the Declaration of Principles of the Vancouver Habitat Conference. 3 The paucity of trained manpower is the critical constraint on our development plans. The shortage of manpower represents one dimension of the problem, but the character of our manpower represents another. Our present training programmes are narrow in scope and carry a burden of tradition. On the whole they are courses in physical planning geared to train architects and engineers to take up larger and larger projects. The roots of this profusion can be traced back to the reform movement in the late 19th Century and the Garden Cities movement which followed. These movements solidified into sets of principles such as those stated and recorded at the meetings of the Congres Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) and as practised in the new towns which came up in the last thirty years. The principles were largely tempered by conditions found in the industrialised North Atlantic region and were the inheritance of a capital-rich, middle-class society adapting to the pressures of urbanization. They call for neatness, fresh air, order, open spaces, green ...