Harare — Zimbabwe is very short of homes in urban areas and far too many families are having to cope with just one or two small rooms, which makes it very difficult to live decently.

There has been a lot of talk over the decades of how we can house all families decently, but action has always fallen behind the talk as urban populations grow at around 7 percent a year, fuelled by the flood of people leaving the land.

This rapid urbanisation is not unique to Zimbabwe. As economies develop and countries industrialise, the percentage of people earning a living from farming drops, until eventually it is well under 10 percent and even under 5 percent in the most industrialised countries.

There is little or nothing that can be done to reverse that trend and Zimbabwe's urbanisation is only halfway complete. We will be living with the problem for years to come.

We can make the problem, or the opportunity if we play our cards right, easier to manage by trying to spread the urban growth over many towns and cities, rather than see as we do now the bulk of rural migrants moving into the largest city and capital, Harare itself.

Some progress has been made here with new towns, such as Gokwe and Murehwa, established and encouraged, but we need to go further.

The fruition of plans to develop Chitungwiza, Norton, Ruwa and soon Mazowe have helped to disperse the population of the Harare metropolis, but more needs to be done along with some rigid planning to ensure the towns and cities of the metropolitan area are split by proper greenbelts, otherwise all we get is a huge urban sprawl under several authorities.

This sprawl is itself a major problem, driving up transport costs for most and making it ever more expensive to provide essential infrastructure, such as water mains, sewers and roads.

Local Government, Rural and Urban Development Minister Ignatius Chombo yesterday discussed the need for ever denser housing to cope with sprawl and to cut the costs of transport and services.

He is correct.

The idea that everyone should have a detached house on their own plot might be fine in small towns, but cannot be justified in a larger city.

Terraced housing, apartment blocks and cluster housing are the norm throughout the world.

One problem is that the self-help schemes that have produced the bulk of Zimbabwe's housing in recent decades will need to be changed and upgraded. Allocating stands and getting people to build their own homes, a room at a time, has been successful.

But we now need to apply this sort of idea to larger complexes. In other countries housing associations and the like have proved to be the most successful vehicle.

Building homes can, as President Mugabe noted in his opening remarks, be a source of economic growth and employment. What is needed is to get the building of homes to be self-sustaining, rather than the stop-go process we have seen in Zimbabwe.

This can be done.

One example is the incredible building programmes of much of Europe, east and west, after the Second World War. Most homes in central Europe, especially Germany, and western Russia were destroyed. Yet in just over a decade the population of these areas was adequately housed and where some thought was placed into design, these austerity homes were upgraded later.

China, faced with fast urbanisation and the movement of tens of millions of people a year off the land, is building brand new cities, some stand-alone and many others as satellites of existing cities.

In some countries more than 10 percent of the adult workforce were at one time involved in the construction industry, breaking the back of unemployment and creating wealth. Those builders helped fuel the construction industry they worked for because they too were buyers.

We hope the housing convention will come up with practical guidelines to create the necessary sustained building programme.

We also hope that delegates will understand that we cannot have a simplified one-direction approach.

There is no way that the central Government alone can do the job; at best it can ensure that the necessary laws are in place, help co-ordinate planning and try and ensure that investment capital is allocated to the sector.

Local authorities, the traditional providers of most homes, are quite unable to make a big dent now. But they have their part to play especially in ensuring a planning environment that makes it easier and cheaper to build.

The private sector has done well for the middle and upper-income groups, but has done little for the poor. Yet with some careful thought they could play a far greater role here.

A self-sustaining housing programme is going to involve everyone, and there is a place for everyone. The convention has to map ways opening doors to all forms of urban development, and has to accept that this will be complex.