Peter Nientied

The question of town and regional planning in Albania

Abstract Albania has been going through a period of dramatic political, economic, social and cultural changes. Town and regional planning, once powerful instruments of the state, are now almost meaningless. For the gradual development of realistic and relevant urban and regional planning in Albanias current critical times, planning needs to change its formalistic land use approach to a more realistic, basic, and integrated type of planning, rooted in community autonomy. To achieve this, the basic institutional context of town and regional planning has to be changed, however optimistic and far away this objective may seem to be in the present troubled epoch of the countrys history.

Local government training capacity in Romania: an institutional perspective

Abstract The article deals with the problems and prospects of local government training in Romania. Training for local government is seen as a rather new service that has to be developed, produced and delivered, like all public services. In the Romanian case, this service is delivered in a semi-public manner. Firstly, the paper will take an institutional view of the capacity of local government training and highlight that conditions in the general environment produce almost insurmountable problems for the small local government training sector to strengthen its capacity. Secondly, the capacity of the local government training will be considered from a market perspective. It will be highlighted that the market for local government training is still very imperfect.

Informal housing in Karachi

The theoretical debate on policies for low-income housing in Third World cities is polarised between two points of view: the convivialist and the Marxist (Lea, 1979; Ward, 1982; Nientied and Van der Linden, 1985). Turner, the main spokesman of the convivialist view, advocates a policy which respects and supports informal housing systems (Turner, 1976). Marxists emphasise, on the one hand, that under conditions of capitalist production, the idea of a policy along the lines which Turner proposes, would be welcomed by those in power since it would ultimately be ‘an economic and political means, necessary for the maintenance of the status quo and the general conditions necessary for capitalist development’. Government-organised settlement and upgrading of existing settlements would incorporate the ‘illegal’ market of low-income housing into the official market structures, and as a result poorer sections of the population would be easily bought out and displaced by better-off people (Burgess, 1978: p. 1107; Steinberg, 1982). Another effect that might be expected is the authorities’ tighter control of the lower-income groups once their settlements are legalised and the inhabitants registered etc. On the other hand, Marxists also argue that Turner’s ideas would never be fully adopted under capitalist conditions, since implementation of Turner’s recommendation that the government provide for and protect access to the ‘elements’ of the housing process (amongst which are such crucial items as land!), would imply government legislation against the very interests that underlie the power of the government and which the government is supposed to protect. Thus, the Marxist argument is capable of interpreting both adoption of or resistance against policies that Turner advocates, but expost.’ It cannot predict a policy situation: “Structuralism is capable of explaining both the grinding down of the working class by authoritarian governments and the improvements of conditions of the poor. Since nothing is precluded, nothing is explained” (Gilbert and Ward, 1982: p. 118). A close-reasoned Marxist interpretation of empirical situations is hampered by apparent contradictions with respect to housing policy. On the one hand,