The development of informal urban settlements is a perennial challenge for residents and municipal authorities—a challenge compounded by the absence of consultative processes and shared objectives. Alon Cohen Lifshitz presents two grassroots initiatives, seeking to give slum dwellers a voice and a stake in their own futures.

Preface

Urbanization and urban poverty are on the rise, especially in the Global South, where almost one billion people live in slums and informal settlements. Initiatives directed toward the alleviation of poverty and the regulation of urban areas have been ongoing processes for decades. But these have had little or no impact on improving the situation of either slum dwellers or slums. The role of communities in directing their own development in informal settlements has changed over the years and has been crucial in successfully addressing the problems of urban poverty and slums.  Community participation has become a key factor in collecting data, and the main force preventing demolitions and forced evictions. 

 The involvement of the slum and shack dwellers in improving their situation has given them power and has given them a platform for negotiating with authorities. The involvement of the communities has created a new discourse in urban planning; the need to respond to the real needs of the communities has encouraged participatory planning activities. But notwithstanding community participation in planning processes, the conventional method of urban planning with informality is facing challenges. 

 Slums and informal settlements

The growth of urban areas in the Global South has not always been within the framework of a city plan, or in line with the specific allocation of land for development. In the context of thousands migrating to cities on a daily basis, most will end up renting a shack in an informal settlement—or, if they are lucky enough, will find a vacant lot to build a shack of their own. This is the reality for many millions of urban residents, typically concentrated in informal settlements that emerged spontaneously in both the inner and outer parts of cities. People living in these settlements experience the most deplorable of living and environmental conditions. They face significant hardship and lack access to many urban amenities and services. Because informal settlements are usually located in the outer parts of urban areas, and because municipal authorities tend to neglect their existence, these settlements and their residents are also excluded from the economic social, political, and cultural spheres of the city.

 Urban Poverty

While there are strong connections between wealth and urbanization, (and, apparently, most rich people live in urban areas), urbanization has created a different form of poverty. This is especially true in the Global South with regard to the growth of informal settlements, in which many urban residents suffer from acute poverty. The situation of poor people in urban areas is closely related to their informality. The poor are unable to extricate themselves from poverty because it is difficult for them to access urban services. With poverty becoming an increasingly urban phenomenon, many cities are significantly challenged in their understanding and management of human settlements, and in their responses to their poorer residents. In this context, one cannot overstate the important role that organized communities of the poor can play in defining, negotiating, and addressing the issue of urban poverty.

 Knowledge is power

The policy and political options with regard to low-income populations living in slums and informal settlements are generally limited to just four types of policy responses, deployed sequentially or simultaneously in numerous cities across the Global South. These options are preventing them, removing them, upgrading them, or ignoring them.

The lack of accurate data about informal settlements is one reason why authorities often resort to demolishing these structures and evicting their residents. So far, municipal authorities have generally failed to develop the framework needed to collect the requisite data. Therefore, they tend to resort to bias estimations in order to lead to their preferable solution—most often forced displacement and evictions. 

In order to find the right way to understand the context of informal settlements and spur positive change, there is a need to improve the knowledge and data. No one knows the situation of the informal settlements better than the shack dwellers themselves. Thus, their participation across all phases of the data collection process is crucial. 

 According to SDI—Slum/Shack Dwellers International, a global social grass-roots movement of the urban poor, linked in a network of community-based organizations in the Global South— community planning activities build political capital for communities, both internally and externally. Within communities, activities like enumeration (household-to-household socio-economic surveys) and mapping create space for communities to identify developmental priorities, organize leadership, expose and mediate grievances between segments of the community, and cohere around future planning.

 Through its affiliations, SDI has developed an activity which is giving the slums and shacks dwellers the power, motivation, and hope to change their reality: the collection of data depicting a full picture of informal settlements, conducted by residents and with the support of the local federations of shack dwellers and local NGOs. The motive and idea behind this activity are very simple and based on the idea that knowledge is power.

 SDI affiliations in Namibia

This article focuses on two local organizations in Namibia, the Shack Dwellers Federation of Namibia (SDFN) and the Namibia Housing Action Group (NHAG).

Established in 1998 by a number of housing groups that had come into being in the preceding years, SDFN works to improve the living conditions of low-income people living in shacks, rented rooms, and without accommodation, with a particular emphasis on promoting women's participation. NHAG, the second organization, is a Namibian service organization and supports the SDFN in achieving its mission by facilitating changes in the livelihood prospects of urban and rural poor through pioneering pro-poor development approaches. NHAG and SDFN are part of Slum/Shack Dwellers International (SDI), and work with other SDI affiliations all over the world across a range of initiatives including exchange programs and collaborations, and by sharing best practices. 

 NHAG and SDFN take a broad perspective in their activities, through the profiling of the informal settlements, and implementing specific processes and enumeration within these communities with the objective of slum upgrading.

 The goal of this profiling initiative of the informal settlements in Namibia is to establish an information base, to be used to direct locally-driven settlement upgrading and tenure security in the urban and urbanizing areas of Namibia. In parallel, the information from the profiling exercises is fed into a national database, where it guides policy, strategic, and financial support.  Over the last thirty years, NHAG and SDFN have profiled more than 300 informal settlements across Namibia (about 40% of the entire population living in informal settlements), working with many of them through enumeration and slum upgrading. 

 The enumeration is based on an agreement of all stakeholders to lead a process that will change the reality of the shack dwellers, including the community, the organizations, the authorities, and sometimes the landowners and other concerned bodies. The process of enumeration is simple and encompasses field and desk activities that can be done by and with the communities with support by NHAG and other members of SDFN from other regions

The enumeration is based on an agreement of all stakeholders to lead a process that will change the reality of the shack dwellers, including the community, the organizations, the authorities, and sometimes the landowners and other concerned bodies. The process of enumeration is simple and encompasses field and desk activities that can be carried out by the communities, with support from NHAG and other members of SDFN from other regions. 

“The role of communities in directing their own development in informal settlements has changed over the years, and has been crucial in successfully addressing the problems of urban poverty and slums.”

 As a first step, and based on the profile that marks the boundaries of the community, the community pursues a sequence of activities including dividing the built-up area into blocks, numbering the shacks, marking each shack with GPS coordinates, and completing questionnaires incorporating general and personal data together with information about the development needs of the community. The community then analyzes the collated materials and data, deriving statistical information and conclusions that directly relate to the development of the community. These include the number of households, available services and infrastructure in the community, means of transportation, and the most pressing development needs for the entire community. 

 Enumerations provide the means by which data can be used to inform local planning, but also the process by which consensus is built. This guarantees that the inclusion of all residents is negotiated. Participatory enumerations also create opportunities for self-empowerment. Residents can initiate and retain control of the process, and thus ensure that it addresses their needs, aspirations, and basic human rights. Through such initiatives, residents gain confidence and a sense of ownership of the planning process—critical in initiating negotiations with the authorities.

 The next phase after collecting and analyzing the data is the slum upgrading, specifically the process of planning with the communities.  The collaborative planning processes in some cases involve students from planning departments in universities or teams of local young architects and planners. In some cases, professional architects also seek to collaborate in specific and relatively small projects of slum upgrading. 

 Slum upgrading

According to SDI, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to upgrading informal settlements. That said, even though each settlement is unique in its challenges and characters, they do share a number of common characteristics. Upgrading is any intervention that improves the physical conditions of a settlement, which in turn enhances the lives of its inhabitants. SDI affiliation organizations, operating across 33 countries, are working to enhance the lives of slum and shack dwellers in specific ways and at different levels of intervention. 

The theory of change of SDI is that the communities are not simply part of the process; rather, urban residents are the main agents generating the process of their social and geographical situation.  Whenever these communities engage directly with policymakers and government duty bearers, they are engaging with some of the more complex issues associated with urbanization. Through this engagement, SDI has found that concerns around land tenure, housing, livelihoods, service provision, and citizenship can be identified, politically negotiated, and resolved in a pro-poor way. 

Planning and upgrading in situ requires more effort from municipal and state authorities and demands a different, alternative understanding of the informal settlements. The focus is on developing potential opportunities, rather than treating slums and their residents as a problem. 

 Epilogue

 Finally, although informal settlements are unwanted and perceived as a burden on urban areas,  informal settlements are economically, spatially, and socially integrated with their urban contexts. Without them, most developing cities are unsustainable.

 Slum upgrading is not simply about providing water, drainage, or housing; it is also about putting into motion the economic, social, institutional, and community activities needed to reverse downward trends in an urban area. 

Ultimately, upgrading efforts aspire to create dynamic communities with a sense of ownership, entitlement, and inward investment in the area.

Informal settlement upgrading programs should be part of citywide reform and institutional building initiatives, and not separated reform programs. Addressing the informal urbanization challenge can be a win-win situation for all parties concerned; improvement programs do not only benefit the urban poor, but also the city as a whole. Additionally, effective approaches to informal settlement upgrading must go beyond addressing the specific problems of settlement, and should also deal with the underlying causes of urban poverty.

Alon Cohen Lifshitz

A planner and architect working with the NGO "Bimkom–Planners for Planning Rights.” He graduated from Glocal in 2019; his internship was with two organizations in Namibia and Kenya the “Slum/Shack Dwellers International.” Alon is passionate about working with communities and believes they should have a significant role in their development. Currently, he is also working with the NALA foundation, on projects addressing the eradication of neglected tropical diseases and other poverty-related illnesses.