Gareth Manning, Staff Reporter

Henry, Alexander and Bailey

URBAN SPRAWL from King-ston and Spanish Town is spawning an undesired growth in population and shanties in rural towns, such as May Pen, stifling their potential for real development, planners argued at a recent Gleaner Editors' Forum.

Further, they said, the population swell has left the parish vulnerable to criminal elements.

Clarendon has experienced close to 140 murders already this year, which is nearly double its total number of murders in 2005. Close to 100 of them occurred in the 16 informal communities in and around the parish capital, explains Dathan Henry, superintendent of the Clarendon police.

"The problem that we have with all the informal settlements is a nightmare!" exclaims chairman of the Clarendon Crime Prevention Committee, William Shagoury. Policing them (the shanty towns) is even harder as their poor spatial design cannot accommodate proper roads and basic services.

"Every time you raid one of these communities, if you pick up 10 or 15 persons, about 50 or 60 per cent of them are from Spanish Town and Kingston," Henry said.

Earl Bailey, urban planner, tackles the problem from a different perspective.

"May Pen is having urbanisation put upon it without being prepared for it. It's really a rural town being forced to operate like an urban town," he stated.

Victim of kingston sprawl

According to Bailey, May Pen is the second victim of the Kingston sprawl. Spanish Town in St Catherine, which borders Clarendon on the east, was the first, and Mandeville in Manchester, which neighbours Clarendon on the west, will be next in line, he predicted.

"Every time the access to and from Kingston increases, the areas along the route suffer because you don't put in the required facilities to accommodate the cultural and physical expansion of Kingston," Bailey said, critical of Government's approach to development.

The expansion, he explained, has been forcing people to imitate city life in a rural environment that cannot accommodate it.

"May Pen doesn't have a release valve. It will get some release when they put the [Sandy Bay] to Williamsfield leg of the Highway to Manchester. But for now, May Pen needs to find a way to accommodate the development," Bailey adds.

So far, local authorities have not been doing such a good job of keeping up with the growth. May Pen's fast growth is already outpacing Govern-ment's ability to provide services, according to Joy Alexander of the National Environment and Planning Agency.

"It is going to be a challenge as the population continues to grow rapidly," she stated.

Shagoury sees the lack of basic social services in the informal settlements as the greatest threat to the development of the central town.

"There are areas in May Pen where there are probably 1,000 if not more houses in it, but I don't think more than 15 people are paying for water," he argued. "If 15 people are paying for water in that area, you can't lock off the water, and it is difficult for National Water Commission. If they were using the water sparingly it wouldn't be bad, but those who are not paying for it [the pipes] burst it and it just runs right back to the river," he said.

Challenge

It is a challenge May Pen's mayor, Milton Brown acknowledges, and he fears the situation might be exacerbated by Govern-ment's plan to construct a major airport on the southern plains of the parish. He is anticipating that the environs will need 6,000 more housing units by 2010.

"The water that is available now is overcommitted; we have more demand than we can supply," he acknowledged.

However, he disclosed that the parish council recently concluded talks with stakeholders, including the National Water Commission, which should see the completion of a sustainable development plan for May Pen and its environs by next June.

He says a move to prohibit the construction of housing without water-harvesting facilities is one of the strategies to be considered as part of the plan to lessen the water worries.

"If the parish can anticipate where settlements will emerge based on increase in the access patterns from Kingston, intervene before it happens," he advised.

"What May Pen is going through is going to get worse if we do not intervene now," he warned.

gareth.manning@gleanerjm.