Unplanned settlements in urban settings Research Papers (original) (raw)

A total of 830 million gallons (MGD) of water is supplied to the 17 million population of Delhi by the Delhi Jail Board (DJB). The water is sourced from canals bringing water from Ganga and Yamuna from the foothills of Himalayas, 9 water treatment plants (WTP's) and about 4400 tube wells, covering 82% of households in the city as per official DJB data. The areas that are not supplied with the water, majorly fall under the category of illegal settlements like slums and unauthorised colonies. These settlements depend upon sources other than the DJB network for meeting their requirements of water. While majority of slums depend on the water tankers, extraction of ground water is rampant in the unauthorised colonies by installing bore-wells.
There are about 1797 unauthorised colonies in Delhi with an estimated population of 4 million, which is about 25% of the entire population of the city. Being illegal settlements, the unauthorised colonies are not provided with the water supply or other infrastructural services until they are regularised. Consequently, only 847 (about 50%) unauthorised colonies falling under the regularised category are supplied with the piped water by the DJB. As per the survey conducted by the Author as part of his Ph.D. on the Informal Housings, 67% of the residents are drawing underground water, while 31% are getting water from the DJB and a small section of 2% is dependent upon tankers. The survey indicated that a majority of the unauthorised colonies are largely dependent upon the illegal bore-wells to meet their water requirement. The underground water in Delhi is brackish and severely polluted, moreover, its extraction is illegal for the private use. Despite that millions of unregulated bore-wells are installed in the unauthorised colonies with possible ramifications on the health of the people as well as the depletion of the aquifers. While, the illegal water supply in the unauthorised colonies has its own issues the centralised water supply by the DJB lacks in the quantity, quality and cost effectiveness. The large size of the city results in the high pumping, storage and maintenance costs along with the substantial loss due to leakages in the supply network. Moreover, the supply is intermittent specially in summers and the water is also not potable in many cases. In the absence of centralised water supply in the unauthorised colonies and considering the related issues, it is imperative that a solution is worked out, to permit and regulate the underground extraction of water in these settlements and improvise the system to address the purification of impurities and recharge of the aquifers. This paper studies the existing supply of water in the unauthorised colonies and attempts to provide a regulatory model for the same.

- by Anawin Chiamprasert
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- Diversity, Urban Planning, Urbanism, Urban Design

This research aims to explore the transformative specifications of public space in unplanned settlements. The neglected state of some urban specification, particularly urban spaces is one of the current problems in cities undergoing rapid urbanization. Public spaces in unplanned settlements manifest the resultant of the socioeconomic condition in a specific context. The research employed the qualitative method and techniques such as unobtrusive observation, photography, mapping, and graphical analysis to collect, analyze, and interpret the data. The findings reveal a dynamic system of reproduction of the public spaces based on the mass-space proportions and private-public relationships with temporary, portable, and assembled components with low quality in the area. In this regard, the transformative character of the public spaces could categorize in four types including deform , less-form, soft-form, and anti-form spaces. The result of the research reveals that although there is a process of changing the private spaces to semi-private, paths and open spaces are more vulnerable under the pressure of users to privatize the spaces. The results of this research could help the policymakers and designers for real insight into the public spaces in unplanned settlements.

- by Rahman Tafahomi and +1
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- Privatisation Of Public Space, Slum Development, Public Space, Urban Informality

This paper examines how small property owners in low density residential areas could establish a cooperative to finance a demolition and reconstruction of their community in order to improve urban and economic conditions. A fee developer is contracted to oversee the project while residents become full or majority owners of high income generating commercial properties as well as new housing. This paper considers a hypothetical application to areas of unplanned construction on the Adriatic coast in Croatia.

The unauthorised colonies are illegal or unplanned settlements that started to emerge in Delhi, soon after the independence of the country in 1947. Considered as the bye-product of modern urban planning the emergence and spread of the unauthorised colonies was collateral to the successive Master Plans in the city. Despite the efforts of the concerned agencies to undertake planned development the unau-thorised colonies in Delhi have grown and transformed into mass affordable housings. At present in there are about 2000 of these colonies with 4 to 7 million population as per various estimates. The expansion of the unauthorised colonies in past decades has resulted in the emergence and evolution of different types of residential typologies. Initially, the settlement were characterised by the sparse built-up of single storied semi-permanent tenements, which have now evolved into high density of multi-storeyed apartments. While, the unauthorised colonies are considered as a problem in the domain of urban planning, however they are a manifestation of aspirations of the people and exhibit the capacity of people to generate mass housing by themselves. These colonies are exhibiting potential to act as the resource for meeting the housing demand which DDA has failed to provide.
This is an original paper based on the primary architectural surveys conducted by the author as part of his Ph.D. on the Informal Housing Stock Generation and studies the emergence and evolution of various residential typologies and its socio-economic relationships in the unauthorised colonies of Delhi with the objective to identify a reference to generate informal mass housings.

- by nisar khan
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- Space and Place, Urban Planning, Housing, Irregular/Informal Settlements Studies

Security issues imbricate a wide range of fears and agendas in cities of the global North and South. Everyday life experiences in informal settlements reflect, however, not only residents' urgent need for enhanced security but that the state is unable (and often unwilling) to provide it. Because approaches are dominated overwhelmingly by a focus on young men, our article foregrounds the unseen yet important aspect of security provision: the everyday security apparatus that is constituted by women. The principle argument is that women in Mathare, one of Nairobi's oldest informal settlements, provide security through a variety of practices that highlight the taken for granted and invisibilised emotional, reproductive and socioeconomic gendered labours of women. Informed by an ethnographic study, this article contextualises this women-led security provision, which is overwhelmingly invisible since it does not include the most taken for granted security functions, for example patrolling formations, equipment and the threat of violence. We begin by detailing the major security challenges as expressed by women in Mathare, before discussing the range of actions they engage in to enhance safety for all and the major constraints to doing so. Leading from immediate security challenges, our research identifies the everyday security efforts women engage in for community protection, and demonstrates the interrelated social-spatial issues constraining woman's efforts for safety, which policy security interventions should take into consideration. We suggest that perhaps it is prevailing notions of 'security' that are too narrow, which, as a result, fail to see women's contributions. The woman noise-maker has come, now we have no peace! (Police officer, from an Eastlands Police Station)

- by Rahman Tafahomi
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- Privatisation Of Public Space, Slum Development, Public Space, Urban Informality

This is a graphic report from an on-site field research of a changing incremental (mainly informal) settlement conducted in the Tondo Region of Manila, the Philippines with the Special Interest Group in Urban Settlement (SIGUS) of MIT School of Architecture and Planning in January 2006. This report is also made available of the SIGUS website by the author and SIGUS for downloading.

- by Non Arkaraprasertkul and +1
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- Anthropology, Southeast Asian Studies, Architecture, Space and Place

This paper through a use of syntactic descriptive tools explores a presence of Catholic morphological implications that are discreetly woven into the organic spatial con guration of Bernardines cemetery – culturally and historically signi cant a orested scape. A case study is approached as a sum of internal connections, able to communicate attitudes to death and memory in the nineteenth-century Vilnius, Lithuania.
The article involves overlaying axial network, topography, burial directions and chronological occupation data over each other, aiming at understanding correlation between them, and how they help to explain the con guration of unplanned burial ground.
Bernardines cemetery functioned as a suburban branch of overcrowded churchyard burial ground that was in need of extension. A chapel was built 15 years after cemetery foundation. Even today chapel is a central gure in the spatial composition of Catholic cemeteries – in Bernardines cemetery the centrality of the chapel is not that apparent. After processing topographical and syntactical analysis it was possible to detect network’s structural potential gathered around the chapel, its con gurative relation to the burial directions and the location on the highest altitudes of the whole plot. In this case spatiality of religious hierarchy was implemented discreetly, but a tight dialogue with the natural terrain enabled Catholic cemetery to be identi ed with a pagan forest necropolis.

- by Egle Bazaraite
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- Space Syntax, Lithuanian History, Lithuania, Cemetery Studies
- by Reihaneh Nadi
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- Privatisation Of Public Space, Slum Development, Public Space, Urban Informality

Problem's Context Despite the scholarships of architects/planners who have long claimed that the process of rebuilding after a disaster could be done using the formal methodology of architectural/planning per se, I seek to ask a deeper question from a community perspective (Arkaraprasertkul 2009, 2010). The research on post-disaster building should be based on the study of the relationship of space and people, rather than being led by nostalgia or the limited understanding of foreign planners who might not have any clue what is going on within the community of which they will take part in the process of planning and re-planning. This approach is necessary to define how space is utilized, justified and re-justified by the resident users, themselves the mediating agency between the physical form of their micro-communities and the ever-changing culture of Haiti? Ethnography ain't just a myth. The suggested primary research methodology is ethnography. It is widely understood that anthropology is an established discipline. Employing its methodology requires the deep and comprehensive study of the 'other cultures'; hence, the use of ethnography here in a housing research could be a 'lighter version' of ethnography. In my 2008 paper " Community-Oriented Urban Housing Design for Beijing: Strategies for LMRHD and Urban Design, " I have presented some basic study methods by which architects and urban designers can understand the dynamic of communities, such as participant observation and semi-structure interview (Wampler and Arkaraprasertkul 2008). From the study of the community, I have proposed an idea of a 'community-oriented housing': mixed-use, mixed-tenure and mixed-housing type development, humanized and walkable neighborhood, high-density, integrated open space, and environmental morphology; all of which are represented through a series of experimental designs. Familiarization The process of familiarization is extremely crucial to architecture. In other words, 'the site visit' is a pathway to preliminarily understand the quality of space alongside the requirements of program. Yet, it would be uneconomical for an architect commissioned to study and design a housing project to be willing to spend a week or a month 'deep-hanging out' in the community like an anthropologist to understand how things work in order to design the palpable built environment inside. Hence, the lighter version of ethnography for housing research requires architects to pay attention to what they observe and to be very keen to ask questions about the rationality behind certain activities that take place in the community, rather than to just look at the characteristic of the existing architecture and physical condition. That is, it is possible – and feasible – to conduct an ethnographic study of an urban community in order to derive the true understanding of the community for design. If we accept that ethnography

- by Non Arkaraprasertkul
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- Anthropology, Architecture, Ethnography, Chinese Studies
- by Peris S Jones
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- Human Geography, Urban Studies, Urban And Regional Planning, Applied Economics

This paper reports on the computational modelling research
investigating spatial organisations often associated with unplanned settlements. Such spatial agglomerates are composed of several collocated but autonomous units (agents) that share common facilities and infrastructure (e.g. circulation). Depending on the context, units in the agglomerate represent individual dwellings, apartments or abstract spatial geometry. The paper presents early prototype models that can be interpreted at various scale, and a computational model for
generating organic settlement layouts. The originality of the research resides within a new multi-agent algorithm for creating spatial organisations. The agglomeration process benefits from two distinct generative design strategies – self-organisation and adaptive development strategy. While the self-organisation accounts for the emergence of the global structure in the agglomeration, the adaptive development strategy ensures that the basic environmental and spatial requirements of each individual unit are satisfied.