EFFECTIVENESS OF NATIONAL STRATEGIES TO SECURE PARTICIPATORY SLUM UPGRADING A STUDY OF IRAN’S COMMITMENT TOWARDS ENABLING AND EMPOWERING COMMUNITIES WITHIN INFORMAL SETTLEMENTS (original) (raw)
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Participatory Slum Upgrading and Community-based Development: Practices and Challenges
This study aims to identify key issues that can either support or impede implementations of Participatory Slum Upgrading (PSU) and Community-based Development (CBD) projects occurring worldwide. Through extensive reviews of literature in urban planning studies, this study has found two broad sets of factors influencing practices of most PSU and CBD projects. The first set is identified as external influences, encompassing pro-poor policies, decentralization-enabled planning schemes, and the emergence of civil society. The second is identified as internal factors, covering individual, household and community characteristics, micro politics, and human and social capital-led collective actions. While the former gives an overall framework, direction and limitation to the project’s implementation, the latter drives on-the-ground upgrading processes that eventually contribute to various levels of success or failure in implementing the projects. This study concludes that the implementation of any PSU and CBD projects tends to be contextual and dynamic, which always relate to each project’s social, economic, cultural and political conditions of each local context. Key words: participatory slum upgrading, community-based organization, pro-poor policy, decentralization, civil society.
Improvement of Community Governance to Support Slum Upgrading in Indonesia
Jurnal Perencanaan Pembangunan: The Indonesian Journal of Development Planning, 2019
Urbanism's impact creates land scarcity as a result of an imbalance in urban land between supply and demand. As a developing country, Indonesia is still striving to overcome the slum area and provide decent housing for low-income groups. In fact, the city is owned by everyone, so slum people and other low-income groups have the right to the city to enjoy the results of development and its facilities and infrastructure, including decent urban living spaces. These areas are government challenges and opportunities to provide the best housing services for poor or marginal communities. Over the past decades, slum upgrading has become a global solution to overcome slum problems. It relies on the concept of ' self-help ' in which community participation is used as a means of improving and sustaining the quality of life of slum dwellers. The number of researches was carried out to analyze the level of community participation in slum upgrading, but not many analyze the level of governance in slum upgrading. The purpose of this research is to analyze the performance of Indonesian governance in achieving successful slum upgrading by using a single case study of one of Indonesia's slum upgrading projects, namely the Neighborhood Upgrading and Shelter Sector Project (NUSSP). The transition from centralized to decentralized governance has become the biggest challenge in implementing slum upgrading in Indonesia, especially on issues of political engagement, coordination, and cooperation, financial sustainability, tenure security, continuity, and institutionalization. This research has led to the conclusion that transitional Indonesia requires a unified strategy that combines some forms of centralized governance with some forms of decentralized governance. Finally, the concepts of ' self-help, ' ' less governance, ' and ' development from below ' proposed as the original concepts of slum upgrading could not work independently. Strong intervention, adequate governance and ' development from above ' are really needed to achieve successful slum upgrades.
Strengthening community-based organizations for slum Development
Efforts aimed at urban poverty reduction and service delivery improvement depend critically on slum dwellers' collective agency. This study aims to examine key challenges of CBOs in bringing and performing collective action and factors which promote CBOs to contribute for social change. Through extensive reviews of literature in urban slum upgrading studies, this study has found two broad sets of factors influencing CBOs performance. The first set is identified as internal factor is key challenges of CBOs being lack of effective leadership and communication. The second set is identified as enabling factors which enhance CBO to achieve their collective actions. This study concludes that in the implementation of community development project CBOs are indispensable actors as they are at the forefront in their community and are best positioned to engage with all community development interventions. The urban practitioners and NGOs need evaluate their approach to empowering urban residents in partnership with CBOs. In order to sustain CBOs the NGOs should recognise and limit their role beyond the facilitator to avoid ongoing dependence.
Environment and Urbanization, 2018
Institutionalizing slum upgrading as part of government-led citywide or national programmes can overcome the limitations of piecemeal, "bottom-up", ad-hoc upgrading projects. This article presents a case study of 15 years of practice to institutionalize participatory slum upgrading in Afghanistan. The article explains the main approach and tools used in Afghanistan to mobilize residents into Community Development Councils (CDCs), undertake neighbourhood action planning, and implement civil works projects in a co-production process to improve access to basic urban services and strengthen local governance. The findings provide original insights into key elements for institutionalization in fragile contexts: (i) building support of the international community, donors, and development banks for urban investment; (ii) the role of community contributions; (iii) the need to embed upgrading with improved tenure security and municipal revenue generation; and (iv) the importance of reliable and recent data to guide decision-making and build political support for in-situ settlement upgrading. Keywords Afghanistan / co-production / fragile cities / local governance / participation / reconstruction / slum upgrading / urban I. IntroductIon Rapid urbanization since the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001 has dramatically reshaped the spatial and demographic profile of Afghanistan. The urban population increased from an estimated 20 per cent of the total population in 2002 to 33 per cent in 2015. (1) In absolute numbers, this represents a significant increase from 4.6 million in 2002 to over 10 million people in 2016 living in cities. Projections indicate an average urbanization rate of 3.14 per cent over the coming two decades, with half of the Afghan population living in cities by 2060. (2) Much of the urban population growth has been driven by refugee returnees, over 5.8 million of whom returned to Afghanistan between 2002 and 2015. (3) 2016 witnessed a surge in the return of both registered refugees and undocumented Afghans from Pakistan, with over 370,000 Afghans returning between January and November. (4) Returnees are drawn to the relative safety and economic opportunities of urban areas. Matthew French is a development practitioner with the Monash sustainable development Institute, Australia.
Upgrading Slum Infrastructure: Divergent Objectives in Search of a Consensus
Third World Planning Review, 1983
UPGRADING SLUM'INFRASTRUCTURE 1. The 'Housers'; who are mainly interested in self-help housing improvement and see slum infrastructure programmes as means for increasing land tenure security, thus directing more of the people's savings toward building their own houses. 2. The 'Municipal Engineers', who are primarily interested in public health, and see such programmes as means of removing serious health hazards through the provision of clean water, through the collection of refuse and sewage, and through increased public safety. 3. The •Communio/ Builders', who are mainly concerned with community organisation and development, and see infrastructure improvements as issues of common interest around which slum dwellers can organise effectively. 4. The 'Politicians', who are mainly concerned with extending and consolidating their ability to rule and perceive slum infrastructure programmes as an effective way to assist the poor visibly without incurring vast public expenditures, and without unnecessarily alienating the support of the middle class or the land-owning groups. 5. The 'International Futiders'; who are primarily concerned with disbursing capital for development projects, and see such programmes as a means of providing a form of international assistance which can reach the poor. For them such programmes are appealing because of their low levels of per capita expenditures, because they do not distract attention from rural development efforts, and because they can be justified economically as generating increased property values in improved areas, over and beyond the initial capital investment in infrastructure, which should, in their view, be recovered from the slum dwellers themselves. 6. The 'Slum Dwellers'; who are primarily interested in not getting hurt by heavy-handed government intervention and see infrastructure programmes as an effective means of getting 'something' from the government, which is clearly better than 'nothing', but falls short of what they can see as possible to have. 'The housers are primarily interested in housing the poor. Although professionally they may have been trained as architects, they see the efforts to construct public housing for poor families as basically hopeless, in view of past performance, and in the face of impossible financial requirements which are never likely to be made available. Their fundamental contention is that as government has failed in providing adequate
NATIONAL SLUM UPGRADING PROGRAM An Uphill Battle
2018
Developing and managing a national slum upgrading program starts with allocating work-space, recruiting personnel and preparing administrative and financial bylaws. Then it proceeds to preparing and implementing a national strategy and action plan that seeks to create a knowledge base, identify programs and projects, build the capacity of stakeholders, foster partnerships, and identify cost and sources of finance. Initiating and monitoring projects to be implemented by local government reveals the complexities of dealing with stakeholders, of identifying intervention tactics, and of managing public finance. Simultaneously, the practical experiences, personal views of leaders, and the wider social and political setting provide day-today challenges that take their toll on accomplishments. Finally, the policy framework, including institutional mandates, laws, and regulations provide a restricted environment and uncover deeply ineffective development mechanisms. This document critically describes and interprets the intricate landscape that structures the future of slum upgrading, and urban development in Egypt at large.
Community-supported slum-upgrading: Innovations from Kibera, Nairobi, Kenya
Slum upgrading is accepted as a priority for sustainable development. While there are clear challenges to upgrading, local support and community engagement are seen as essential to success. Typical " top-down " approaches led by institutions with power and resources may fail to generate local engagement. Conversely, initiatives led by non-governmental organizations (NGOs), community-based organizations (CBOs) or other self-help groups may garner good community support but may lack institutional and material resources to meet objectives. A hybrid approach that engages the community while mobilizing the resources of governments and large agencies can overcome some of these limitations, but it is not without complications. We examine the process and impact of a slum upgrading pilot project in Kibera, Nairobi, Kenya, that operationalized this hybrid approach by adopting an adaptive management model to promote community engagement. The project was part of the Government of Kenya's Kenya Slum Upgrading Program and involved the Kibera Water and Sanitation Project led by UN-Habitat's Urban Basic Services Branch. The project showed significant early success in building community engagement, but it also encountered significant challenges. We assess the project's success in building community engagement by (a) analyzing documents that reflected the institutional discourse related to the project, (b) examining the record of the implementation of the project, and (c) conducting field surveys and interviews to assess community perception of the project. Survey results show that critical infrastructure in the community has improved over the course of the project and expectations for continued improvement in the future have developed. The study concludes that using an adaptive management approach and strongly promoting community involvement should be the aim of institutions delivering slum-upgrading projects and that this can result in effective, successful development outcomes. While the approach does present significant risks of creating unrealistic expectations, the benefits to project management are clear.