CHATHAM HOUSE - CGC's Sellman reports on a new approach to the global housing shortage

Originally published by Chatham House:

https://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/twt/uzbeks-ideal-home-show

A lack of affordable housing is a problem the world over affecting urban people from the poorest slums to those in the wealthy state of California. The consultancy firm McKinsey estimates that a third of a billion urban households now live in gravely substandard housing. As more people leave the land for city life, by 2025 this figure will approach half a billion.

The arrival of the coronavirus, which particularly affects people living in cramped accommodation, has added urgency to the problem, while at the same time swallowing up budgets that could have been used to build better homes.

Uzbekistan, a double landlocked Central Asian country of 34 million, is seeking to address the problem in a novel way. One legacy of rule from Moscow is a large but primitive public housing industry that has churned out thousands of soulless, five-storey, pre-cast concrete apartment blocks. The architectural majesty of the Tashkent Metro – a Soviet prestige project – stands out as a rare exception.

Since the death in 2016 of President Islam Karimov, who ruled the country for 27 years, his successor Shavkat Mirziyoyev has promised more open and responsive government, a market economy and up-to-date social services. The long-neglected housing sector has become a priority.

Mirziyoyev’s 2018 end-of-year address announced plans to refurbish 34,000 homes. He then removed barriers to people moving from the countryside to cities by abolishing the propiska, the old Soviet system of urban registration. During 2019, his administration worked with the Asian Development Bank and other international financial institutions to arrange funding for the building of 145,000 new homes each year for the foreseeable future.

The Uzbek Mortgage Refinance Company was set up to help people obtain housing credit. Previously, it had been impossible for most people to acquire a home loan. I heard that in one Uzbek city of 140,000 people, fewer than 300 residents – or 0.2 per cent of the population – qualified for mortgages.

Current demographic trends indicate that the shortage of affordable housing will only get worse. Uzbekistan is already the most populous country in the region, with high birth rates increasing pressures on the countryside. The lifting of urban migration controls has unleashed a huge pent-up demand for city dwellings.

Events have not smoothed the way for improved housing. As the COVID-19 pandemic cut incomes, on May 1 the large earthen Sardoba dam in northern Uzbekistan burst, destroying tens of thousands of homes and forcing an evacuation of the area involving 70,000 people.

The president announced the emergency allocation of $800 million to fund the building of apartment blocks in areas hit by the flood. Days later he fired a broadside against what he judged to be the low quality of building work and said that the design and construction of all government-funded building projects would have to meet international standards by 2021.

In the past, many ‘reforms’ across the former Soviet Union have died from institutional sclerosis or bureaucratic hostility. The task is huge. In late 2018, on a visit to the ancient Silk Road city of Samarkand and amid bouts of glad-handing about construction reform, my team witnessed how nine different contractors were constructing 32 buildings as part of a single housing complex. 

This was all being done without coordination and in complete disregard of international building standards. Only time will tell if the present changes prove enduring, but it is worth noting a bit of history. Ever since its independence in 1991, Uzbekistan has cultivated a paradigm for architectural design and construction that is strikingly at odds with most Uzbeks’ traditional way of life.

The Uzbeks, whose territory is home to two of Central Asia’s historic centres, Bukhara and Samarkand, inherited an intensely urban, communal and family-oriented way of life that had evolved over millennia. This world was built around family compounds with private rooms opening on to courtyards adorned with grapevine arbours and trees, and it helped cultivate a concept of urbanism that produced some of history’s great thinkers and artists.

In stark contrast sits the Soviet model: vast ensembles of standardized blocks. Invented in the Khrushchev era, these blocks discouraged any sense of community while condemning extended families to live in small and separated units.

These unsafe blocks could not have been more alien to the spirit of traditional Uzbek urban life. Nevertheless, the philosophy of building they represent – and galvanize – became deeply rooted in Uzbekistan’s construction industry, and constituted an insular world committed to the preservation of Soviet monoculture.

Given the strength of opposition to change, do the Mirziyoyev reforms in design and construction stand a chance? There are solid grounds for optimism. The president has promoted enlightened senior figures into key positions. Two national programmes launched in 2018, Obod Qishloq and Obod Mahallah – roughly translated as ‘a prosperous village’ and ‘a prosperous city district’ – are designed to raise architectural design and living standards and give communities a greater say in housing development.

These programmes are grounded in the understanding that it is not enough to simply build affordable housing that is safe and scalable, or just paste on to bland ‘international’ structures a few clichés of Uzbek ornamentation. Mirziyoyev and his colleagues are challenging their fellow citizens to look through a cultural and social lens to build on the best of the past rather than negate it.

Today there are approximately 8,000 registered foreign companies in Uzbekistan, with more than 1,000 international entrepreneurs from more than 30 countries in talks with the Uzbek government about bringing their expertise to the country.

Are there immediate steps that can push forward the reform process? In the post- COVID-19 world nothing is more important than to preserve and create jobs.

This can be done by integrating traditional labour-intensive building methods with modern practices that ensure worker safety and minimize negative impacts on the environment. In short, Uzbekistan needs to apply proven methods to preserve jobs while utilizing technology and innovative techniques to control costs in other areas.

Done correctly, this approach will improve design, ventilation, pedestrian circulation, sanitation regimes and access to critical infrastructure. Higher quality and economic viability can be partners, not competitors.