Rebuilding Mayotte: setting off in the right direction
On Saturday 14 December, cyclone Chido devastated the archipelago of Mayotte, reopening the many wounds suffered by this territory, the poorest of all French departments. On these islands, where precarious housing (where a third of the population of Mayotte lives) and dilapidated – if not non-existent – infrastructure prevail, 77% of the population live below the poverty line (INSEE, 2018). In the aftermath of the disaster, local residents were hard at work rebuilding their homes using salvaged materials – which, alas, they already knew were obsolete –, while Prime Minister François Bayrou, inspired by the rapid construction of Notre-Dame, announced that Mayotte would be rebuilt in two years. In this guest column, Cyrille Hanappe, associate architect at AIR Architectures and director of the DSA Architecture and Major Risks programme at ENSA Paris-Belleville, responds to these risky promises by looking at his experience of Mayotte and of planning policies.
Cyrille Hanappe
‘Airlift’, ‘Marshall Plan’, ‘ rebuilding Mayotte in two years’, ‘prefabricated housing’, ‘ eradicating the shanty towns… Have we returned to the 1950s? All the announcements made by the French president and his prime minister since the devastation caused by Hurricane Chido are reminiscent of a world where the promises of modernity seemed capable of offering a radiant future to people all over the world, a world where public power was at the peak of its powers and no one doubted its total dedication to the public good and social progress…
A week after Hurricane Chido, many of the shanty towns in Mayotte have already been rebuilt by their inhabitants. Although they are in an even worse state than before, they provide their inhabitants with a precarious shelter that protects them from the vagaries of the weather, which are incessant at this time of year. However, the public authorities were quick to announce that these dwellings would be rapidly destroyed, if they were to be rebuilt.
It cannot be stressed enough that all the surveys show that the shanty towns of Mayotte are populated by a third of French people, a third of foreigners who have papers (and are therefore part of the working world) and a third of undocumented migrants. The problem of poor housing therefore concerns everyone in Mayotte.
Although 10,000 social housing units were promised for the island by 2030 by the public authorities in 2020, less than the half are currently at the design phase, with completion times which suggest that these objectives will not be met. Even if they were, there would still be at least a threefold shortfall to house all the Mahorais living in substandard housing.
The context has changed, including in the ‘third’ world, and while the world is richer than it has ever been, inequalities have increased in the same proportions: the number of refugees and people in exile on the planet now exceeds 120 million, and the urban model that is seeing the greatest development is that of the shanty town. Global warming is making a major contribution to the worsening of these problems, imposing different ways of doing things on everyone at a time when access to resources is becoming increasingly complex and the number of extreme climatic phenomena is multiplying.
The same French President explained to the Mahorais that if they were not in France, they would be ‘10,000 times more screwed’. We can question this statement when the proportion of the 40% of the population living in shanty towns is comparable to that of the least developed countries, when these same shanty towns have some of the worst living conditions in the world and when the solutions currently being implemented by the governments are the opposite of all the policies put in place by international humanitarian organisations, based on unconditional aid for all and the implementation of individualised and effective solutions.
Instead of repeating the mistakes that have led to the current situation, it would be a good thing if the government could turn to the only models that will enable us to overcome, step by step, the problems of poor housing in Mayotte. It was in the 1990s that Latin American countries (and Martinique under the leadership of Serge Letchimy) embarked on policies to reduce shanty towns – policies that no longer rely on the simple destruction of entire neighbourhoods without any real offer of rehousing in accommodation suited to the lifestyles of their inhabitants. Far from simplistic, mass solutions, it is by providing individual support to residents to gradually improve their housing, by strengthening neighbourhoods, paths and public spaces, by installing water, electricity and sanitation networks, and by securing land, that the shantytowns of Medellín, Mexico City and São Paulo have gradually emerged from their status as shantytowns to become integrated parts of their cities. Like everyone else, slum dwellers are part of an economic and social environment that provides them with stability and living conditions that enable them to combine family life, domestic economic activities and micro-agriculture (vegetable gardens and backyard animals); a subtle balance that enables them to maintain a lifestyle that they can try to improve day by day.
The cities that have embarked on these policies have done so in a context of weak economies, out of pragmatism and realism, aware that these policies are the only ones that are sustainable in the long term. Based on small gestures, always adjusting and fine-tuning, they at least have the advantage of not only offering citizens the despair of destruction to come.
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