LSE Law & Anthropology Seminar Series: Housing, Precarity, and Polylegality in Urban Papua New Guinea

The cities and towns of Papua New Guinea (PNG) are characterised by formal urban centres which are surrounded by much larger areas of informal settlements occupying land held under customary tenure. Formal urban areas are situated on land that was alienated during the colonial era (roughly 1877-1975), and that were, up until the postwar period, conceived by the Australian administration explicitly as European towns in which Melanesians were to be solely transient labour, quarantined in barracks and dormitories. These residential patterns were enforced through a range of “Native Regulations” and other laws designed to constrain the urban spaces Papua New Guinean people could occupy, and how they could occupy them.

Nearly fifty years after independence, towns and cities in PNG exhibit different forms of segregation and exclusion that may nonetheless be seen as extensions of the colonial legal regime. Formal housing in the city centres is largely affordable only to the Papua New Guinea middle class and expatriates on international salaries. The majority of urban residents live in the informal settlements. They do so under a variety of extra-legal leasehold agreements with customary landowners who may initiate or terminate leases at will. These landowners manage problems among their tenants with methods ranging from quasi-legal mediations with  to violent eviction and the destruction of houses, most of which have been built by the tenants themselves.

Focusing on housing in the city of Lae, this paper initiates an enquiry into the polylegality of how people inhabit urban space in PNG. By “polylegality,” I aim to convey an infusion of the legal not just with multiple legal regimes, but with the multiple spaces created through everyday practices of dwelling, and with the temporalities of a postcolonial urbanism that is still haunted by colonial law. Housing in the settlements is often described as precarious, and can indeed present impressions of life on the edge at times. But for most settlement residents, questions of precarity or security are always under construction, entangled with the immediacy of conducting their relationships within the settlement, and the multiplicity of modes of living that are available to them in the wider landscape of the city.