Infrastructure Gaps Essay

Rapid urban population growth has outpaced the ability of city authorities to provide for housing and environmental. This is obvious in the proportion of the population that is living in slums. Cities such as Dhaka in Bangladesh or Mumbai in India are, realistically speaking, metropolitan or urban regions, spanning large territorial areas. Others like Metro Manila in the Philippines or Jakarta in Indonesia are really mega urban regions. The nature of the governments differs considerably. Jakarta's urban government has the status of a provincial government equal to that of other provinces in Indonesia. The metropolitan government in Manila coordinates among some 17 local authorities, the majority of which are municipalities with a few town councils.
Squatter and slum settlements have shaped mainly because of the failure of city governments to plan and provide affordable housing for the low-income segments of the urban population. Therefore, squatter and slum housing is the housing solution for this low-income urban population. In the mega urban regions or metropolitan areas, part of the problem would lie in the coordination among different authorities that are in charge of economic development, urban planning, and land allocation. Such coordination issues also happen between the city and national governments. (Ooi & Phua, 2007)
The economically more dynamic regions such as Asia have experienced strong growth because the state sector drives development agendas. National and city governments have generally adopted the position that economic development will take care of basic needs such as housing and environmental and health infrastructure. In cities of higher income countries such as Malaysia, private sector developers are more interested in building homes for the middle-income market. The proliferation of slum and squatter settlements shows, however, that planned economic growth has to be aligned with the planned development of health services, environmental infrastructure, and housing.
As Yueng said in his Paper The Urban Poor and Urban Basic Infrastructure Services in Asia Past Approaches and Emerging Challenges-
For the scale and speed of urbanization that has been taking place in developing countries of Asia, most municipal governments are unequipped physically, fiscally, politically, and administratively to tackle the problems of providing the basic infrastructure services to their people. In a situation of scarce resource allocation, the urban poor are frequently badly placed to compete for essential services. Biases in investment standards, pricing policy, and administrative procedures, more often than not, skew services in favour of the rich, denying the poor shelter, safe water, acceptable sanitation, minimal nutrition, and basic education. (Yeung,1991)
In many cities, such as in Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia, rapid development of new real estate comprising condominiums and shopping malls has led to gridlocked traffic conditions, severe environmental conditions (air, noise, and river pollution), unstable squatter tenements sandwiched between prime commercial complexes and high class condominiums, loss of heritage edifices, and neglect of human development (BT Lee, 2006). With the intensely competitive demand for land in cities, the urban poor will increasingly be marginalized. Many are now settling at the fringes of the most rapidly growing cities.