Lisa Peattie

An idea in good currency and how it grew: The informal sector

Abstract The “informal sector” is an exceedingly fuzzy concept which has come into wide use because it seemed to address the interests of a number of very diverse groups: those interested in growth planning, those interested in alleviating poverty, Marxist structuralists, and those interested in economic accounting. The use of the concept has been helpful in directing attention to phenomena previously ignored. But adopting the term obscures analysis of central issues and is counterproductive. We should, rather, specify critical policy issues and design field research around these.

Realistic planning and qualitative research

It is common to find in planning both by government and via private consultants ideologically-loaded abstractions dressed up as practicality. There are plans for the year 2000, to which no channels of implementation exist; ‘New Cities’ of monumental character; ‘policies’ which bear a strong resemblance to the joint communiqu& of governments which disagree and which are not willing to declare their disagreement. This is particularly true of planning in the developing countries or less-developed countries (LDCs), and nowhere more so than in the field of housing. Here calculations of ‘deficit’ based on bad data relating to poor categories may be joined with ‘programmes’ constituting at best very partial solutions to the existing problems and at worst exacerbating them via slum clearance. There is a tendency to interpret such ‘paper plans’ and ‘show projects’ as representing a lack of sophistication. But surely there is more behind it than that. Unrealistic planning has behind it a huge weight of institutional interests of groups which benefit from the expensive projects, and by governments which need to appear as committed to progress, and to present a set of actions benefiting the few as a commitment to high standards for everyone. Thus to press for realism in housing and urban planning in LDCs requires not merely an intellectual grasp of the working of cities, but energy, tenacity, and moral commitment. It is not surprising, therefore, that Otto Koenigsberger has been one of the important figures in a slow movement towards greater realism in the way that housing and urban planning are thought about in the developing countries. Realism is grounded in a concern for the lives of people, as well as in common sense; for many years Koenigsberger has exemplified both. I want here to call attention to some particular developments in planning for the cities of the Third World developments with which Koenigsberger has had a good deal to do and to suggest their relationship to research. This is the development of approaches to housing and settlement policy which are less building programmes than intervention programmes. I will briefly indicate the types of research which have supported these programmatic approaches, and then discuss the way a commitment to these newer approaches requires a new approach to research as well one which relies much more heavily on qualitative methods than in the past.

Knowledge for Policy

Policy research, as currently practiced, rests on a set of intellectual conventions which assume that there is a linear relationship from research to problem analysis to policy advice to action, and that societal institutions may be conceived of as comprising three linked but essentially separate realms-the political, the economic, and the social. These conventions arise from existing programmatic and disciplinary interests, and, in turn, serve to render the interests served invisible. We propose an alternative framework for thinking about social policy which we call a claims perspective, which makes the actors and their interests explicit.

Development Planning as the Only Game in Town

Why is development planning a central activity of city government? This paper confronts this question through the study of a small city in the Boston SMSA Development planning in this city turns out to be a contentious business. Not everyone supports it, and it is difficult to do Yet despite a number of competing planning agendas and, in particular, popular demand for human services, development planning — i e., planning for business — consistently remains the central concern of city government While there are a number of ways to account for this, the centrality of development planning seems not to be simply the result of scheming special interests, funding availability, or professional imperatives. These explanations may be correct, but each alone appears to be inadequate An examination of a variety of development projects and of the competition among alternative planning agendas suggests, rather, that development planning is the logical outcome of the particular ways in which diverse constituencies and interests within the city are linked to each other Furthermore, planning for business seems to be the only way to get certain things done Consequently, for nearly everyone, development planning becomes the only game in town

An Argument for Slums

first done on a big scale, I think, in Frei’s Chile, and since then done all over the world under the tutelage of the World Bank. But there is a third great idea (less commented on than these): it is the availability of lots and lots of cheap housing-not to put too fine a point on it, lots of slums. When John Turner (1965; 1967a,b; 1968a,b; 1970a,b; 1976; 1978) and his anthropological colleague Bill Mangin (1970, 1971) declared that squatter settlements were not the problem but the solution, I believe that it was the self-help idea that the planning audience picked up from the statement. This was, I think, not the basic intuition. The basic intuition was that poor people benefit from being able

Making work : self-created jobs in participatory organizations

1 Making Work.- 2 Fishing Work.- 3 Ways of Potting.- 4 Teaching: Work in A Teacher-Controlled School.- 5 Principal Work.- 6 The New England Food Co-Op: Mixed Motives in Collective Work.- 7 Everybody Works: Sheltered Work.- 8 Participatory Organizations.- Contributors.

Moral Incentives in Cuba

In primitive societies, the technical order becomes embedded in the moral order through a kind of implicit, unformalized, trial-and-error evolution of customary behavior within what is bound to be, after all, a relatively small local group. In a modern society, this requires what has been referred to in the preceding chapter as societal planning.

The uses of kinship

Larissa Adler de Lomnitz. Como Sobreviven los Marginados. Mexico: Siglo XXI, 1975. 229 pp. Tables, figures, illustrations, references, and bibliography.

Anthropological Approaches to the City

60 Mexican (

Ways of Potting

4.80 U.S.).