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Split households
12/2004
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Split households
City and countryside are not two separate worlds. One form of rural-urban linkage deserves particular attention. So far, development studies have not shown much interest in the survival strategies of families living in multi-locational settings.
[ By Einhard Schmidt-Kallert and Volker Kreibich ]
The past few decades have seen the major cities in most developing countries grow faster than ever before. Countless international conferences have grappled with the still-unsolved problems of mega-cities and yet we know very little about what is really happening in the urbanisation process beyond what is conveyed in statistical data. The “push-pull” model remains the dominant paradigm to explain urbanisation and over-urbanisation. It states that migration mainly occurs in one direction (from rural areas to the cities) because migrants expect better living conditions in urban areas.
There is a widespread belief that migrants usually make a once-in-a-lifetime decision to leave their home village and settle in the city. The assumption is that, by the second generation at the latest, the transition from a rural to an urban lifestyle will be complete.
This conventional paradigm is based on empirical observations of the urbanisation process in Europe, North America and Japan. Many academics and most practitioners presumed for a long time that the urbanisation processes in Asia and Africa followed similar lines. But even in Europe, the simple push-pull model never entirely reflected reality. For example, recent research on the industrial history of the Ruhr area provided evidence of urban subsistence production as well as of circulatory migration more than 100 years ago.
Reality is usually more complex and multi-faceted than simple models suggest, as has been pointed out before. In the early 1980s, the geographer T.G. McGee, for instance, presented a range of studies on the role of seasonal and circulatory migration in Asia. On balance, the mega-cities of Asia keep on growing, but not at a steady or even irreversible rate. In the course of a year, a city such as Surabaya experiences large fluctuations, both up and down. It may happen that there are suddenly 500,000 inhabitants less in Surabaya than there were six months earlier. Such data depend on the time of year and the stage of the agricultural cycle. People looking for survival options in the informal urban sectors normally do not cut all ties to their rural base. Rather, they return to their villages at certain times in the year.
Twenty years ago, the Indonesian regional planner, Joseph Oenarto, traced the life histories of garbage collectors in Jakarta in an impressive study. The poorest of them were living on the streets, constantly in fear of the police or street robbers. They still had family in their home village and returned there once a year when help was needed on the land. Doing so secured their physical survival. Perhaps even more importantly, retaining this anchor gave these people a sense of human dignity even though they were living at the very lowest level of society.
The push-pull model doesn’t hold for Africa either. In the late 1980s, Kofi Diaw and Einhard Schmidt-Kallert interviewed farmers in Ghana about their lives in remote resettlements on the Volta Lake. The interviews revealed a range of different survival strategies. One of the most interesting results was that many households were spatially split. One or more family members lived in the city, working for cash. When necessary, some of these could be called on by the rural segment of the household to help out with tilling the land and sowing. Several months later, the situation would reverse. After the harvest, the urban household members received yams and other produce for their sustenance.
Such households consciously live in two locations, which are quite isolated from each other. Their survival strategy takes advantage of both urban and rural opportunities. Although such multi-locational households do not often have a higher income at their disposal than those based in a single location, they do spread the risks better. Therefore this type of survival safeguard is not simply an interim phenomenon, it is a strategy, which may be upheld for generations.
Accordingly, it makes sense to take a closer look at decisions made and strategies followed by the individuals and households who bridge urban and rural environments in such multi-locational constellations. It is no exaggeration to say that focusing attention on this form of informal urban-rural interrelationships can be compared to the “discovery of the informal sector” in the 1970s. Without a grasp of informal urban-rural linkages, it is difficult to understand the urbanisation of developing countries, just as it is difficult to comprehend the social and economic reality of mega-cities without looking into the economic and social functions of the informal sector.
Since the break-up of the Soviet Union, similar structures have evolved on the fringes of Moscow, Minsk, Tbilisi and many other East European cities. A large number of city-dwellers would not have survived the crisis years without the subsistence production of their dachas or, in some countries, the reallocated plots of agricultural land. On top of such activities, some people also let out their Moscow apartments to wealthy foreigners for the summer, thereby taking advantage of yet another opportunity to increase their cash income thanks to a partly urban, partly rural lifestyle.
Survival strategies involving city and countryside in multi-locational households are an important field of research. Only through exploring the phenomenon from the perspective of those involved – the households and their individual members – can we fully understand the current dynamics between the major cities and rural regions in developing countries. In fact, a large number of recent studies have highlighted very different motives of the people concerned.
In 1999, Martin Raithelhuber presented an empirical study about urban-rural interrelationships in Nepal. He conducted field research in several villages in the western part of the country, one of which was more than five hours walk away from the next road. Even in this particularly isolated village, Raithelhuber found multi-locational households. In Nepal, the phenomenon is not by any means limited to the rural underclass. Wealthy households invest in urban property in preparation for a (partial-)move to the city at a later date. Only some of the household members move to the city. These may include an adult son with his nuclear family and schoolchildren, while the older generation continues to cultivate the land in the village.
Households, which are not wealthy enough to afford a house in the city, use similar strategies. They rent a room in the city, which they then share with several other family members or even strangers, in order to keep their rental costs as low as possible. Others create squatter settlements on the city outskirts or along an arterial road. All these situations point to a gradual shift from a rural to a multi-locational household, rather than to a clear-cut relocation.
The main difference between this strategy and temporary labour migration is the fact that nuclear families move to the new location rather than only isolated male household members. Core teams always remain in each of the locations, while some persons commute depending on the current work options.
In her study of interrelationships between former townships in Cape Town and the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa, Beate Lohnert has provided evidence of another way of utilising urban and rural opportunities. Young nuclear families move to Cape Town, but many of the children only stay there with their parents during the holidays; more than 50 percent of the children do not live in the city for the rest of the time. This has resulted in a division of labour which is very specific to multi-locational households and has become typical of South Africa. The rural section of the household has the function of looking after the small children, taking care of the elderly and the sick, and producing surplus food for the urban household members. The urban members earn the cash income and take on a mentoring role for new migrants. They also organise the exchange of goods, services and information.
According to Lohnert’s study, 60 percent of the inhabitants of the former townships are now living in such dynamic constellations. Most of them would rather return to their villages permanently – but only on the condition that they find gainful employment there. They live in a state of uncertainty, which restricts them from identifying with urban life and also prevents them, for instance, from investing in their urban accommodations.
According to Lohnert’s observations, multi-locational households are also responsible for the drop in agricultural productivity in their home areas. Split households can no longer exploit the full potential of their land, but do not give it to other villagers, preferring to have their uncultivated field watched over by paid guards.
Sometimes, urban households acquire arable land in villages in order to supplement inadequate cash incomes. In other cases, they want to invest redundancy payments received as a result of job cuts in the public sector. Initially, these farms are often administered by “managers”, who may be distant relatives. The farms are meant to become homes for the heads of the families after retirement. Again, various informal ways of allocating tasks and of moving between rural and urban environments are evident.
In fast-growing cities such as Dar es Salaam, even the educated and the well-paid retain strong ties to their rural homes, at least for the first generation. Lecturers at the university and senior local authority staff not only stay in close touch with their villages, they also own farms in the city’s vicinity. They have the resources (particularly cars, telephones and various contacts) that enable them to profit from their land as absentee landlords.
Taking the village of Nyantira on the outskirts of Dar es Salaam as an example, Aldo Lupala described a particularly complex constellation of urban-rural interrelationships. Cattle breeders from the Kurya tribe moved into the area from the Kenyan border. They acquired plots of land adequate for chicken farms and remote enough to be affordable. Young men are brought in from the home region to deliver the eggs to the urban markets. They are strong enough to transport 30 egg cartons and more riding bicycles on sandy tracks and forest paths to the city, 15 kilometres away. On their return trip, they bring along chicken feed and medication. The business is going so well that, after only a year or two, the bicycle suppliers are able to acquire plots of land and start rearing chickens themselves. The peri-urban economy of the Kurya migrants links rural production locations with urban markets as well as with the outlying tribal homeland.
To date, the importance of informal urban-rural interrelationships for the protection and development of livelihoods has been greatly undervalued. They help to spread risks and to transfer capital and knowledge. This flexibility of relationships within family networks and split households is usually reciprocal. It should be taken into account and applied to concepts of rural and urban development.
The informal exchange of services between urban and rural settings should not be condemned as an “exodus of the able“ or even an “evacuation”, but rather promoted in integrated regional and sectoral development concepts. Two strategies stand out in particular: opening up the rural areas to traffic in order to simplify and cut the cost of mobilising people and goods, and advising the senders and recipients of capital transfers on the value of productive investment compared with consumptive spending. Transferring capital and knowledge from the city could help to overcome one of the greatest stumbling blocks to the development of social and economic systems for small farmers, the drop in agricultural productivity and the lack of opportunities to earn a living in other sectors of the economy.
References
Diaw, Kofi and Einhard Schmidt-Kallert:
Effects of Volta-Lake Resettlement in Ghana. Hamburg: Institut für Afrikakunde, 1990
Lohnert, Beate:
Vom Hüttendorf zur Eigenheimsiedlung. Ist Kapstadt das Modell für das Neue Südafrika? Osnabrück: Universitätsverlag Rasch, 2002
Lupala, Aldo:
Peri-urban Land Management for Rapid Urbanisation –The Case of Dar es Salaam. Dortmund: SPRING Research Series 32; 2002
McGee, T.G.:
Labour Mobility in Fragmented Labour Markets, the Role of Circulatory Migration in rural-Urban Relations in Asia. In. Helen Safa (ed.): Towards a Political Economy of Urbanisation in Third World Economies. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982, p. 57-83
Oenarto, Joseph:
Case Studies of the Housing Process in Jakarta. In: Einhard Schmidt (ed.):
Squatters’ Struggles and Housing Policies in Asia. Dortmund 1989 (Dortmund Contributions to Spatial Planning vol. 48), p. 26-42
Raithelhuber, Martin:
Stadt-Land-Beziehungen in Nepal. Eine institutionenorientierte Analyse von Verwundbarkeit und Existenzsicherung. Saarbrücken: Verlag für Entwicklungspolitik 2001
Prof. Dr. Einhard Schmidt-Kallert
is a regional planner at the AHT Group AG in Essen and has been involved in many urban and regional development cooperation projects. He lectures at the University of Dortmund.
esk@aht-group.com
Prof. Dr. Volker Kreibich
heads the field of “Geographical foundations and regional development planning in developing countries” and the SPRING (Spatial Planning for Regions in Growing Economies) post-graduate programme at the University of Dortmund. He is particularly interested in informal settlements in major African cities.
volker.kreibich@uni-dortmund.de
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