ABSTRACT
The idea that environmental quality and pollution control are expensive luxuries to be pursued when a country is rich enough is slowly being eroded, at least with regard to industrial pollution. Attitudes concerning the cost of safe and hygienic collection and disposal of household and human wastes and the provision of safe water supplies are not so enlightened. It has taken 30 years or more for many governments to accept that illegal settlements and land invasions are not a threat to established institutions but a growing movement that emerges out of poor people having no other way to secure a house site. Most new urban housing and urban neighbourhoods in the Third World are developed in this informal way. While some governments still seek to prevent or inhibit such processes, most have accepted them, or at least do not bulldoze the settlements out of existence. Let us hope that it does not take another 30 years for governments to accept the need to work with the inhabitants of these informal settlements to tackle the environmental health problems – and also to understand how much improvement can be made to water, sanitation and drainage and to health in general at relatively low cost.
