Acton, ACT: ANU Press, 2017. xiv, 419 pp. (Tables, figures, maps.) Free, eBook: https://press.anu.edu.au/publications/series/state-society-and-governance-melanesia/kastom-property-and-ideology. ISBN 978-1-760461-06-5.
There has been much written on the growth and living death of urban areas in Melanesia over the years, starting perhaps with Nigel Oram’s classic study, Colonial Town to Melanesian City: Port Moresby, 1884–1974 (ANU Press, 1976). But it is only with the substantial and rewarding collection of articles reviewed here that the topic is finally receiving the weight and attention it deserves.
There are, as the editors and writers of Kastom, Property and Ideology understand, two major reasons why Melanesian urban development has been so haphazard. First, in planning and parcelling out scarce government resources, cities and their inhabitants have been largely ignored. Almost all the critical thinking, and most of the resources, have been targeted at rural areas.
Second, to the extent any Melanesian or donor government has put thought into cities at all, it has been of the wrong kind. One logical interpretation is that urban planning, such as it is, consists mainly of doing what foreign investors and other large-scale commercial enterprises want. More charitably, one might say that Melanesian governments and their advisors can contemplate only one vision of urban development, the model that predominates in the centres from which multinational investment and advisers flow.
The lack of funding and absence of forethought come together to produce the problems that beset Port Moresby, Honiara, and other Melanesian urban areas today. Cities have grown in size, but not in service. “Development” is a profoundly inapt term for what has occurred.
The articles in this book focus on the lack of affordable housing. Residential construction has not kept pace with population growth. Practically no solid housing has been built since the mid-1970s. That leaves almost nothing available for rent or purchase at a reasonable price, so almost all the new arrivals to the city are forced into what are still called squatter settlements.
Very few settlements offer security of title to the people living and working in them. There are continual conflicts over land ownership between the residents and both the state and customary groups. The state claims arise mostly from land grabs during the colonial period, generally sanctioned by laws enacted by the colonial administration itself. Current state law continues to support state ownership of those parcels.
There are also conflicts with and between customary landholding groups. As the book points out, much of the land on which settlements have been built is customary, but different groups claim to be the proper custom owners, and many of the residents in squatter settlements don’t belong to any of those groups. Some residents made agreements with customary owners that enabled them to move in; others simply appropriated vacant parcels. But, even where agreements exist, title can be in doubt if there is conflict within the customary ownership group itself or between different customary groups.
The lack of clarity over ownership leaves squatters vulnerable to forced removal. Customary owners have seldom actually pushed settlers off the land, but governments have frequently raided settlements, pushing settlers out of their homes, and even razing some settlements. The severe housing shortage in cities has forced fully employed individuals into settlements—people who, were it available, would be able to buy legal housing. They are not criminals or drifters: they educate their children, care for their wantoks, and are good citizens. But the illegality of their housing situation causes them to be portrayed as the opposite, and is used to justify the state’s acts of dispossession.
Even when they are allowed to stay, uncertain tenure causes problems for squatters. Many settlements lack basic services like water, paved streets, local schools, or streetlights. Police presence is sporadic; crime is frequent. Nor can settlers easily get business or home loans. The lack of resources and the insecurity of title make settlers unwilling or unable to invest in improving their properties or businesses.
Melanesian planners either ignore cities or abhor them. Ignoring them causes the malfunctions described in Kastom, Property and Ideology, and those malfunctions in turn buttress arguments about why cities should be abhorred. But the root cause of both the ignorance and the abhorrence is the persistence in Melanesian thought of a rural myth. Politicians, NGOs, and other donors, and even some anthropologists (though, thankfully, not the ones authoring this collection) still believe Melanesian cultures are agrarian. The best cure for the ills of the city, in this view, is for people to go back to their villages and take up gardening again. Would that they could. Many urban residents are members of families that have been urban dwellers for two or more generations. There is no village they could easily go back to.
What really must be done, as this book recognizes, is not to shut cities down, nor to develop them on the model of Sydney or Singapore, but to re-imagine urban life. Many years ago, in “Making Law in Papua New Guinea: The Influence of Customary Law on the Common Law” (Pacific Studies 14, no. 4 [1991]), I suggested this could happen quite naturally, as custom and customary law modulated, merged with, and influenced state law, to produce new varieties of land tenure, partaking of both custom and state norms and values, but unlike either. I suggested, more from hope than from hard evidence, that a new Melanesian vision of cities could and would develop. The reports in this volume both hearten and distress. On the one hand, people do find ways to modulate customary rules to meet changing circumstances. Less hopefully, however, the rigidity of state law, the corruption of public servants, lack of resources, and the narrow ideology of state agents are more than ever barriers to the kind of urban development that would fit Melanesian circumstances. This excellent collection captures all the complexity of this battle to determine the future of Melanesian cities.
Jean Zorn
The City University of New York, Long Island City, USA