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...for people to build their own houses, sometimes in a planned and sometimes in an unplanned fashion. Together these various habitats are negatively regarded by some of the better housed in Papua New Guinea as 'haunts of the feckless unemployed' (Connell and Lea 1993:81) and as 'havens for criminal gangs'. In recent years their expansion has been discursively linked to an escalating crime rate to justify the eviction of settlers in almost every major town (Goddard 2001; Koczberski, Curry and Connell 2001).
In contrast to the negative portrayal of urban settlements by urban elites, civil authorities, the police and local landowners, academic opinion has long been sympathetic toward them. Since the study of Rabia Camp by Hitchcock and Oram in 1967, urban settlements have been seen as innovative and autonomous responses to difficult urban conditions. In 1984 Norwood (1984:83), in a survey of urban villages and squatter areas in Port Moresby, stated that 'Contrary to popular myth there is no evidence that ... squatters are parasitic on the Port Moresby community in general'. More recently Connell and Lea (1993:119), citing studies by Walsh (1987), Kaitilla (1994), Vavine (1984), Chao (1985) and King (1992), have claimed that the employment patterns and incomes of settlement residents are not very different from those of the city as a whole.
Conscious of the wider social tendency to scapegoat and even demonise the residents of urban settlements, the trend among academics has been to normalise them. But in the absence of detailed information on the livelihoods of urban settlers it is difficult to know how much weight can be put on these normalizing statements. None the studies cited by Connell and Lea, for example, with the exception of Chao's, provides any detailed information on such issues as employment patterns and levels of income, and what Chao describes is a situation of severe poverty. Walsh (1987), in a general discussion of the growth and development of squatter settlements in Lae provides some snippets of information about Bumbu and Boundary Road settlements, but this is derived from the 1980 census and may be of little relevance today. Kaitilla's more recent study (1994) contains some information on a random sample of 158 households in Bumbu settlement, but his main interest was architectural, and the article focuses on the choice of building materials used for housing.
Other studies of urban settlements suffer from the same lacuna. Ryan's (1985,1989, 1993) studies of Toaripi migrants in Port Moresby provide some information on their settlement at Vabukori, but their major focus was on rural-urban links, and information on income, employment and education levels is lacking. Gewertz and Errington (1991), in their study of Chambri culture and history, give a brief description of a Chambri settlement in Wewak, but all we learn about their incomes and employment patterns is that only 17 percent of the adults living there have regular salaries; that only 57 percent of those who try to support themselves from the sale of craft goods make any sales in the course of a year; and that the average income was K199 per year (p. 105).
A more detailed source of information on the income and employment patterns of urban settlers comes from King's 1987 survey of 160 households in Port Moresby (49 of which were in the 'settlement' (1) category). Here we learn that households located in settlement areas have a 'higher proportion of people not employed ... a concentration of the least skilled jobs ... [and] a significant proportion of people being paid less than the urban minimum wage' (King 1992: 8-10). Even so, King concludes that these populations are only 'relatively disadvantaged' and are 'by no means a separate burden or a unique problem area' (p. 15).
In search of more comparative information on urban livelihoods I conducted my own small survey of 58 households in Port Moresby in 1995. Twenty of these households were located in settlements--most in Erima Settlement, a large planned settlement in the centre of Port Moresby. Here I found a lower number of wage earners per household, a lower level of wage income per worker, and a higher number of unemployed per household. (2) I also obtained information from the 1990 National Population Census (NSO 1994) that showed that the population categorised as living in informal 'Self-Help' and 'Makeshift' housing exhibited a significantly lower level of wage employment and a higher level of unemployment than that living in 'Low Cost' and 'High Cost' formal housing. (3)
What these data show is that there are significant differences between the employment patterns and income levels of settlement dwellers and those of other categories of urban residents in Port Moresby. Compared to those in formal housing, households in urban settlements exhibit significantly lower levels of wage employment, a lower number of wage earners per household, and a lower level of wage-income per wage earner. But this does not mean that settlements are 'haunts of the feckless unemployed'. Patterns of wage employment and wage income levels tell only part of the story. The livelihood strategies of urban settlers involve more than just formal wage employment. They involve informal economic activities and self-provisioning to supplement wage incomes, and the reproduction of culturally significant social relationships according to which income and other resources are redistributed. To gain a fuller understanding of urban settler livelihoods informal economic activities and the social organisational and identity factors that underlie them need to be taken into account.
Very little research has been done on informal economic activity in Port Moresby, (4) but the village-based organisational patterns and identities of urban settlements have long been recognised. Ryan (1985:261) describes how Vabokuri Settlement was divided into three sections, each associated with a particular village of origin. Social interaction was overwhelmingly with people from the same village who formed communities recreating their home villages and maintaining their relationships through the constant exchange of goods and service. Chambri Camp in Wewak was described by Gewertz...
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