What the Developing World can teach the US.

I am now recovering from the flu, and so can begin blogging again without falling asleep in the middle of a post.

As part of my recovery I have been reviewing the recent literature on squatting, and I am kind of astonished at how little the dialogue has moved in the past decade.

With the attention of development and urban scholars drawn back to slums by the popular success of Hernando de Soto and Robert Neuwirth in the 2000s I expected a new wave of interest in informal settlements and the history of squatting in the United States. After all, both authors spend considerable space in their books and articles rooting their discussion in the American experience. De Soto even consistently puts the preemption principle adopted by the United States as a model for the developing world to follow as a model to end squatter sprawl and the attendant loss of capital.
Instead research interest appears to only be turned to more closely examine the lessons the US can impart to Lima/Nairobi/Bangalore/etc. The conclusions differ, but the idea is the same; that America has an important lesson to impart to the developing world.

This is a very debatable point considering the extraordinary distances between the culture and locations under comparison.
The most cogent analysis that I have found compares the preemption policy histories of the frontier-era United States and modern Brazil. The comparison works largely because the analysis is kept within the shared problems of native people's rights, corporate speculative claims vs small holder settlements, and the government interest in getting fair value for the transferred lands. This narrative is complicated by the human rights and environmental concerns entailed in settling the Amazon Basin, but even more so the comparison is confused by the incoherent post-hoc solutions applied in the United States to catch up with an existing situation.

These comparisons are even messier when the authors try to derive lessons from the frontier-era policies of the US and apply them to the developing urban context of today around the world.

Aside from the differences in local legal, cultural, and spatial contexts, there remains the central unasked question about how successful America was at controlling squatting.

Not that I am prepared with a indicative answer to the question of American success in that regard, but I am ready to question strongly the effectiveness of a policy that constantly changes and takes more than a century to take hold and accomplish it's goal.

There is an old joke about a man who enters a diner and orders a plain doughnut with a cup of coffee. When he is done eating that one he decides he is still hungry, so he orders another. Done with that plain doughnut he is still hungry and so orders a jelly doughnut. When done he is no longer hungry, and thinks to himself, "I could have just ordered the jelly doughnut and saved myself the cost of the plain ones."
That's how policy discussions appear to me.

I need to explain why federal policies directed at a specific problem of distributing the sparsely populated public domain fairly and collecting the entailed fees is a terrible comparison to the current megaslums of the developing world.
But there are lessons in the American experience that can be brought to bear too.