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Rural building course
334
Book Reviews
procedures adopted. The local level government unit in the state of Uttar Pradesh is called goan sabha, i.e. village assembly, consisting of two and/or more revenue villages. It is headed by a chairman, popularly called Pradhan. The Pradhan plays a key role in the political life of both the goan sabha and the Block. As a result, the author felt it necessary to describe him and his family in some detail in Chapter Five. His study reveals that a caste called Thakur, one of the largest families, has dominated the locality since at least 1880. The Pradhan belongs to the Thakur's caste. Chapter Six examines the economy of the village, including land ownership, cropped area, per capita income, changes in standards of living, economic conditions of agricultural labourers and students and the cost of their study. The analysis is based on the individual castes in the village. Given the information derived from a random sample survey of 102 households, Shepperdson presents the data on nutrition and health conditions of Basauli in Chapter Seven. The health inequalities within the village (in terms of social distribution of mortality, physical size, morbidity and health expenditure) between the various castes, income categories and classes are discussed in Chapter Eight. The conclusion are summarised in Chapter Nine. Certain weaknesses in this book are worth highlighting. Firstly, although Shepperdson assesses the health conditions using factors such as mortality, morbidity and crude death rates, he fails to address the problems related to the health-care delivery system in rural Uttar Pradesh. Government of India statistics reveal that in the last 40 years, India has made tremendous progress in increasing the number of medical personnel and hospital beds in government hospitals. From no more than 16.5 doctors and 31 beds per 100,000 population in 1950, these services have grown to 42.1 doctors and 74 beds per 100,000 in 1982. Health is a state subject in India; but the Centre guides, sponsors and supports major health programmes. Although the state of Uttar Pradesh recorded one of the highest Plan expenditures, out of total of Rs. 31,370 million, as high as Rs. 3,210 million in 1984-85, the state still had one of the lowest ratios of doctor per unit of population in the country, 1:4460. Secondly, he tends to overemphasise the issue of the caste system. This overshadows other important aspects of health and health planning in the rural areas of India. The book is otherwise very comprehensive and clearly written. A. Panneerselvam School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi JOHN WINDEN, WOLFRA PFORTE and FRITZ HOHNERLEIN, Rural Building Course. Intermediate Technology, London, 1995, £48.80 paperback.
The Rural Building Course consists of four volumes totalling nearly 900 pages. Originally published internationally in 1988 by the Dutch appropriate technology organisation TOOL, it has recently (1995) been republished, apparently unaltered, by Intermediate Technology Publications. The publication is the product of long experience gained since 1970 by the National Vocational Training Institute of Ghana. The rural building training undertaken by the Institute has been developed into a 4-year course and this four volume publication is the official text book for that course. The content of the four volumes is divided up as: • Volume 1: Reference. Includes an introduction to a range of building tools, with an emphasis on carpentry tools, instructions on maintaining tools and descriptions o f a range of building materials. • Volume 2: Basic knowledge. Basic m a s o n r y and carpentry techniques, such as various bonds and timber joints, are described followed by the basic elements o f putting together a simple building. • Volume 3: Construction. The largest o f the four volumes sets out in detail the building process, from selecting a site to fitting d o o r locks. A series o f appendices deals with some options for water and sanitation.
Book Reviews
335
• V o l u m e 4: D r a w i n g b o o k . T h e last v o l u m e c o v e r s a r a n g e o f ideas, f r o m u n d e r s t a n d i n g what a plan o r an elevation is to the e l e m e n t s which a building designer needs to consider. Every page of the books is laid out in the classic style of a technical drawing sheet, that is to say with a border and a title panel, clearly reflecting the publication's origins in a technical training institute. It uses a mix of simple, clear text with both three-dimensional and two-dimensional drawings. The balance of drawings and text is approximately 50:50, typically with a page of text facing a page of drawings. Compared with a number of other books on building construction that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, the Rural Building Course is refreshingly practical and free from the more zany "appropriate technologies'. The section on maintaining tools, for instance, is excellent and applicable to almost all situations. In considering the publication it should be remembered that it has been designed lot a specific course in a specific country. When published for a wider audience it would have been useful if the title could have been amended to something like A Rural Build#1g Course for Ghana or if, at least, the text on the rear cover and in IT publications catalogue could have made explicit the location-specific nature of the work. It has long been recognised that training materials in any field should be tailored to the needs and opportunities of local contexts. While the reviewer has no personal knowledge of Ghana, it appears that in the body of the text the authors have successfully targeted their recommendations to the local context which they clearly know well. But by republishing the work as, apparently, a generic rural building course the authors have, perhaps, been done a dis-service. While the book may be excellent for Ghana there are inevitably omissions and assumptions which limit its usefulness elsewhere. Omissions include such things as design for high winds and flooding, while assumptions include particular species of wood and dimensions and materials for masonary blocks. The cover of all four volumes, which was clearly not designed by the authors, shows a timber-frame building in construction, yet the book does not include mention of that form of construction. At some point a highly focused training document has been lifted out of context and presented as something else. The Rural Building Course is more precisely a training manual for one particular kind of construction: namely, small single-storey buildings with concrete block wails, timber doors and window frames, and sloping roofs covered with corrugated sheet material (aluminium, galvanised iron, or asbestos-cement). Clearly, this is a very common building type and, as such, the detailed information contained in the publication has a wide potential application but is not as comprehensive as the all-embracing title suggests. The selection of building technologies described also implies an underlying philosophy to the course, which is not at any point spelled out. For instance, nowhere is there a mention of the indigenous architecture, In the 90(1 pages, there are just two small drawings which, almost incidentally, show traditional Ghanaian flat-roofed packed-earth houses. One of these is used to illustrate the concept of foundations, yet in doing so it opens up a potential area of discussion which is not followed up - - what is wrong with traditional construction and how could it be improved. Similarly, what are the pros and cons of both traditional and modern construction, for instance, corrugated-iron roofs have notoriously bad thermal properties compared to flat, earth roofs. The experience of vocational training from other countries suggest that many rural men attend such courses in order to learn skills which they can sell in the cities rather than locally. In the case of builder training courses this is often reflected in a demand for training in plumbing, electrical installations and reinforced concrete construction. In this course, these subjects are not covered apart from brief mentions of reinforced concrete lintels and such small-scale items as manhole covers. Similarly, there is no mention of skills such as estimating quantities and basic bookkeeping which are clearly needs for the small-scale independent builder. The 4-year vocational training course described in G h a n a sounds pretty exceptional. Many projects involved in builder training are dealing with far shorter courses of a few days or weeks. While the volumes o f the Rural Buildin~ Course contain much useful information,
336
Book Reviews
people should beware of simply lifting items from the course and using them in isolation. The course from Ghana is a structured whole in which, for instance, the participants become used to interpreting information in drawings. Many rural people are poorly equipped for understanding technical drawings and a drawing which may be a useful educational tool in the context of a long-term formal course may be unintelligible elsewhere. The value of these volumes to a wider audience is primarily as an example of one training institution's response to its training needs rather than as a universal how-to manual. It has the potential to act as an archetype for text books for other training institutions. But if this was the intention of publishing it internationally, it would have been useful to preface the volumes with a clear description of the problems which they were trying to solve and why they chose some technical options over others. When taken out of their specific context of a training institute in Ghana, the four volumes have the feel of a number of publications which originally came out in the mid-1970s in the wake of Schumacher's assertion that the technical knowledge, by and large, exists and simply needs to be put on paper and disseminated. In all fields, it is being increasingly realised that the need is not for universal manuals which tell end-users how to do something, but rather for guidance on how local institutions can analyse local problems, choose from a range of solutions and if necessary adapt them, and finally develop didactic materials suited to their situation. The kind of detailed technical information contained in the Rural Building Course has its place, but only when the people using that information for training understand why that specific information is the most appropriate to be conveyed to their potential audience. The lasting impression of the Rural Building Course is that hard-earned experience in a particular context is being inappropriately disseminated to a wider audience. It is a shame that the decision to republish the volumes could not have been taken as an opportunity to restructure the knowledge as a series of potentially powerful resources for diverse situations. This could range from a slim volume on the maintenance of carpentry tools to a more theoretical discussion of the whole issue of builder training, and why one approach may be more appropriate than another in given circumstances.
Eric Dudley Cambridge, UK
R. A. NICKSON, Local Government in Latin America. Lynne Reinner, Boulder and L o n d o n (distributed by Euroscan Group), 1995, xii + 315 pp., £44.95 hb. Local government ranks among the less evocative subjects for research in Latin America. However, it is a very important topic and one that is currently attracting a great deal of attention from the development agencies. It is important because local government is, or at least should be, responsible for providing a series of vital public services. It is presently fashionable because conventional wisdom recommends that Latin American national governments delegate more responsibility to municipal and regional authorities. Only through greater decentralisation can efficiency be raised; only by increasing the amount of community participation can imperfect democracies be improved. Andrew Nickson provides the reader with a very clearly written account of local government in Latin America, covering its traditional problems and the changes that are hopefully now improving the way it is managed. The book is divided into two parts. The first contains nine thematic chapters on the history of local government, its legal status, its structure, how it provides services, how it is financed, its electoral base, its internal organisation, the role of citizen participation and intermunicipal relations. The second part contains 18 country profiles, describing local government in all of Latin America's Spanish- and Portuguesespeaking countries except Cuba and Puerto Rico. The first chapter is perhaps the best in the book. It examines the dubious legacy of Iberian rule and the subsequent failure of local government in the region to perform most of the
Book Reviews
procedures adopted. The local level government unit in the state of Uttar Pradesh is called goan sabha, i.e. village assembly, consisting of two and/or more revenue villages. It is headed by a chairman, popularly called Pradhan. The Pradhan plays a key role in the political life of both the goan sabha and the Block. As a result, the author felt it necessary to describe him and his family in some detail in Chapter Five. His study reveals that a caste called Thakur, one of the largest families, has dominated the locality since at least 1880. The Pradhan belongs to the Thakur's caste. Chapter Six examines the economy of the village, including land ownership, cropped area, per capita income, changes in standards of living, economic conditions of agricultural labourers and students and the cost of their study. The analysis is based on the individual castes in the village. Given the information derived from a random sample survey of 102 households, Shepperdson presents the data on nutrition and health conditions of Basauli in Chapter Seven. The health inequalities within the village (in terms of social distribution of mortality, physical size, morbidity and health expenditure) between the various castes, income categories and classes are discussed in Chapter Eight. The conclusion are summarised in Chapter Nine. Certain weaknesses in this book are worth highlighting. Firstly, although Shepperdson assesses the health conditions using factors such as mortality, morbidity and crude death rates, he fails to address the problems related to the health-care delivery system in rural Uttar Pradesh. Government of India statistics reveal that in the last 40 years, India has made tremendous progress in increasing the number of medical personnel and hospital beds in government hospitals. From no more than 16.5 doctors and 31 beds per 100,000 population in 1950, these services have grown to 42.1 doctors and 74 beds per 100,000 in 1982. Health is a state subject in India; but the Centre guides, sponsors and supports major health programmes. Although the state of Uttar Pradesh recorded one of the highest Plan expenditures, out of total of Rs. 31,370 million, as high as Rs. 3,210 million in 1984-85, the state still had one of the lowest ratios of doctor per unit of population in the country, 1:4460. Secondly, he tends to overemphasise the issue of the caste system. This overshadows other important aspects of health and health planning in the rural areas of India. The book is otherwise very comprehensive and clearly written. A. Panneerselvam School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi JOHN WINDEN, WOLFRA PFORTE and FRITZ HOHNERLEIN, Rural Building Course. Intermediate Technology, London, 1995, £48.80 paperback.
The Rural Building Course consists of four volumes totalling nearly 900 pages. Originally published internationally in 1988 by the Dutch appropriate technology organisation TOOL, it has recently (1995) been republished, apparently unaltered, by Intermediate Technology Publications. The publication is the product of long experience gained since 1970 by the National Vocational Training Institute of Ghana. The rural building training undertaken by the Institute has been developed into a 4-year course and this four volume publication is the official text book for that course. The content of the four volumes is divided up as: • Volume 1: Reference. Includes an introduction to a range of building tools, with an emphasis on carpentry tools, instructions on maintaining tools and descriptions o f a range of building materials. • Volume 2: Basic knowledge. Basic m a s o n r y and carpentry techniques, such as various bonds and timber joints, are described followed by the basic elements o f putting together a simple building. • Volume 3: Construction. The largest o f the four volumes sets out in detail the building process, from selecting a site to fitting d o o r locks. A series o f appendices deals with some options for water and sanitation.
Book Reviews
335
• V o l u m e 4: D r a w i n g b o o k . T h e last v o l u m e c o v e r s a r a n g e o f ideas, f r o m u n d e r s t a n d i n g what a plan o r an elevation is to the e l e m e n t s which a building designer needs to consider. Every page of the books is laid out in the classic style of a technical drawing sheet, that is to say with a border and a title panel, clearly reflecting the publication's origins in a technical training institute. It uses a mix of simple, clear text with both three-dimensional and two-dimensional drawings. The balance of drawings and text is approximately 50:50, typically with a page of text facing a page of drawings. Compared with a number of other books on building construction that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, the Rural Building Course is refreshingly practical and free from the more zany "appropriate technologies'. The section on maintaining tools, for instance, is excellent and applicable to almost all situations. In considering the publication it should be remembered that it has been designed lot a specific course in a specific country. When published for a wider audience it would have been useful if the title could have been amended to something like A Rural Build#1g Course for Ghana or if, at least, the text on the rear cover and in IT publications catalogue could have made explicit the location-specific nature of the work. It has long been recognised that training materials in any field should be tailored to the needs and opportunities of local contexts. While the reviewer has no personal knowledge of Ghana, it appears that in the body of the text the authors have successfully targeted their recommendations to the local context which they clearly know well. But by republishing the work as, apparently, a generic rural building course the authors have, perhaps, been done a dis-service. While the book may be excellent for Ghana there are inevitably omissions and assumptions which limit its usefulness elsewhere. Omissions include such things as design for high winds and flooding, while assumptions include particular species of wood and dimensions and materials for masonary blocks. The cover of all four volumes, which was clearly not designed by the authors, shows a timber-frame building in construction, yet the book does not include mention of that form of construction. At some point a highly focused training document has been lifted out of context and presented as something else. The Rural Building Course is more precisely a training manual for one particular kind of construction: namely, small single-storey buildings with concrete block wails, timber doors and window frames, and sloping roofs covered with corrugated sheet material (aluminium, galvanised iron, or asbestos-cement). Clearly, this is a very common building type and, as such, the detailed information contained in the publication has a wide potential application but is not as comprehensive as the all-embracing title suggests. The selection of building technologies described also implies an underlying philosophy to the course, which is not at any point spelled out. For instance, nowhere is there a mention of the indigenous architecture, In the 90(1 pages, there are just two small drawings which, almost incidentally, show traditional Ghanaian flat-roofed packed-earth houses. One of these is used to illustrate the concept of foundations, yet in doing so it opens up a potential area of discussion which is not followed up - - what is wrong with traditional construction and how could it be improved. Similarly, what are the pros and cons of both traditional and modern construction, for instance, corrugated-iron roofs have notoriously bad thermal properties compared to flat, earth roofs. The experience of vocational training from other countries suggest that many rural men attend such courses in order to learn skills which they can sell in the cities rather than locally. In the case of builder training courses this is often reflected in a demand for training in plumbing, electrical installations and reinforced concrete construction. In this course, these subjects are not covered apart from brief mentions of reinforced concrete lintels and such small-scale items as manhole covers. Similarly, there is no mention of skills such as estimating quantities and basic bookkeeping which are clearly needs for the small-scale independent builder. The 4-year vocational training course described in G h a n a sounds pretty exceptional. Many projects involved in builder training are dealing with far shorter courses of a few days or weeks. While the volumes o f the Rural Buildin~ Course contain much useful information,
336
Book Reviews
people should beware of simply lifting items from the course and using them in isolation. The course from Ghana is a structured whole in which, for instance, the participants become used to interpreting information in drawings. Many rural people are poorly equipped for understanding technical drawings and a drawing which may be a useful educational tool in the context of a long-term formal course may be unintelligible elsewhere. The value of these volumes to a wider audience is primarily as an example of one training institution's response to its training needs rather than as a universal how-to manual. It has the potential to act as an archetype for text books for other training institutions. But if this was the intention of publishing it internationally, it would have been useful to preface the volumes with a clear description of the problems which they were trying to solve and why they chose some technical options over others. When taken out of their specific context of a training institute in Ghana, the four volumes have the feel of a number of publications which originally came out in the mid-1970s in the wake of Schumacher's assertion that the technical knowledge, by and large, exists and simply needs to be put on paper and disseminated. In all fields, it is being increasingly realised that the need is not for universal manuals which tell end-users how to do something, but rather for guidance on how local institutions can analyse local problems, choose from a range of solutions and if necessary adapt them, and finally develop didactic materials suited to their situation. The kind of detailed technical information contained in the Rural Building Course has its place, but only when the people using that information for training understand why that specific information is the most appropriate to be conveyed to their potential audience. The lasting impression of the Rural Building Course is that hard-earned experience in a particular context is being inappropriately disseminated to a wider audience. It is a shame that the decision to republish the volumes could not have been taken as an opportunity to restructure the knowledge as a series of potentially powerful resources for diverse situations. This could range from a slim volume on the maintenance of carpentry tools to a more theoretical discussion of the whole issue of builder training, and why one approach may be more appropriate than another in given circumstances.
Eric Dudley Cambridge, UK
R. A. NICKSON, Local Government in Latin America. Lynne Reinner, Boulder and L o n d o n (distributed by Euroscan Group), 1995, xii + 315 pp., £44.95 hb. Local government ranks among the less evocative subjects for research in Latin America. However, it is a very important topic and one that is currently attracting a great deal of attention from the development agencies. It is important because local government is, or at least should be, responsible for providing a series of vital public services. It is presently fashionable because conventional wisdom recommends that Latin American national governments delegate more responsibility to municipal and regional authorities. Only through greater decentralisation can efficiency be raised; only by increasing the amount of community participation can imperfect democracies be improved. Andrew Nickson provides the reader with a very clearly written account of local government in Latin America, covering its traditional problems and the changes that are hopefully now improving the way it is managed. The book is divided into two parts. The first contains nine thematic chapters on the history of local government, its legal status, its structure, how it provides services, how it is financed, its electoral base, its internal organisation, the role of citizen participation and intermunicipal relations. The second part contains 18 country profiles, describing local government in all of Latin America's Spanish- and Portuguesespeaking countries except Cuba and Puerto Rico. The first chapter is perhaps the best in the book. It examines the dubious legacy of Iberian rule and the subsequent failure of local government in the region to perform most of the