Urban Governance and Informal Settlements (original) (raw)
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Sustainability, 2019
Informal settlements i.e., slums emerge from the interplay of multidimensional factors related to urbanization and sustainability. While the contribution of urban factors is well understood, the role of external drivers, such as uncontrolled migration to urban areas, is rarely addressed in research or policy-making. This study develops a novel conceptualization of slums by reviewing the pushing and pulling factors of migration and their contribution to informal settlements through 1) a socio-ecological system approach and 2) the concept of adaptive capacity. Further, it advances the discussion around synergistic and coherent policy-making in the urban context by reviewing three urban agendas and further using water as a case with the concept of cross-cutting domains. We show that the emergence of urban challenges can, and should be, linked to the root causes of flows into urban areas. Understanding these linkages through a socio-ecological system framework opens a window for knowledge-based policy development and addressing the question of how to avoid unsustainable urban development. Urbanization is one of the phenomena where the excessive complexity and dimensions of problems should not hamper action but instead, actions should be encouraged and enabled with synergistic and integrative pathways for sustainable urban development.
Rethinking urban risk and adaptation : the politics of vulnerability in informal urban settlements
2014
Informal urban settlements are increasingly recognised as vulnerable to climate-related risks. Their political-legal status is known to influence their vulnerability, but the linkages between state governance and vulnerability in this setting remain under-researched. In particular, as more urban governments develop climate risk assessments, questions arise about how risks are defined, the politics behind the processes of risk definition, and the impact this has on local-scale vulnerabilities. The thesis proposes a new conceptual direction for urban vulnerability research. First, it draws on livelihoods debates to highlight the embeddedness of the livelihoods pathways that shape vulnerability in social and political relations. Second, the thesis shows how the idea of co-production, developed in the context of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and public policy, can be used to investigate the state politics of risk assessment in informal, urban areas. This theoretical frame generat...
Urban villages and informal settlements as protagonists of urban futures
Urban Design International , 2016
villages, defined as ‘communities engulfed by rapid urbanization,’ often are regarded as receding phenomena, destined to gradually disappear or abruptly be relinquished as their economic base in agriculture or craft is displaced by the industrial and services sector. However, resonances in structure and modus operandi link ancestral to informal settlements and to an informal economy that provides new employment opportunities. Hence, the complex mechanisms by which urban villages and informal settlements are able to resist as well as absorb urban development, merit renewed attention. In a series of collaborations with local academic and community partners, I have documented three urban villages, each exemplary for a particular model and context of development. The diverse spectrum of strategies and formats of resilience spawned by the three communities inform methods of enquiry into how cities might learn from urban villages. I examine three communities, situated in Amman, Valparaiso and Bangkok, exploring firstly their strategic responses to context and topography, and secondly, the pivotal role of inherited or remembered spatial typologies in processes of urbanization driven by feedback obtained continuously from the actions and experience of construction and inhabitation.