Scott Jiusto

Proper Homes, Toilets, Water and Jobs: A New Approach to Meeting the Modest Hopes of Shackdwellers in Cape Town, South Africa

With the global need for new approaches to sustainable development in periurban “slums” as a backdrop, this paper reports on an innovative approach to community-based, in situ informal settlement upgrading in the Monwabisi Park community of Cape Town, South Africa. The program described is an experimental effort to combine the creative resources of parties that often have difficulty working together to nurture local self-help efforts that, with judicious and limited outside resources, can lead to sustained provision of improved community services and infrastructure. Starting with a local street committee’s creation of a children’s creche in 2005 and partnering with a small local NGO, the Indlovu Project has established a set of public amenities and a vision for the future that combines western sustainable development concepts such as permaculture with Xhosa cultural sensibilities regarding equity, ubuntu, collective decision-making and the nature of private and public spaces. The Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), a US university, has through an experiential science-technology-society educational program begun engaging students and faculty members with community members and city agencies to develop an integrated plan for transforming the eleven year old Monwabisi Park squatter camp into an “ecovillage” based on these local community perspectives and desires. This paper discusses the principles and strategies underlying the redevelopment effort; explores how students can be uniquely positioned as agents of redevelopment; and presents some of the unique strategies and services that are emerging through this collective effort.

Hard rain gonna fall: Strategies for sustainable urban drainage in informal settlements

Inadequate drainage of stormwater, greywater and sewage plagues informal settlement ‘slum’ dwellers throughout the developing world. Residents, local governments and others find drainage solutions hard to come by due both to physical challenges – densely packed shack homes and few roads or open spaces – and social challenges associated with the often contentious, turbulent and legally uncertain nature of informal settlements. While concepts of sustainable urban drainage systems (SUDS) and integrated water resource management (IWRM) hold promise for informal settlements, we find little practical guidance available for their application in these contexts. To begin filling this gap, we propose a simple model for understanding various informal settlement contexts and ‘upgrading’ strategies that affect drainage development strategies. We then use this model to report on a series of small projects in South Africa that illustrate social and structural dynamics and practical techniques relevant to implementing collaborative drainage efforts in informal settlements.

Squatting: Developing World

Global economic transformation and the rapidly growing population in the developing world are causing millions of rural people to migrate to cities and take up residence as squatters living in shacks in informal settlements. These communities are both volatile places that suffer serious deficiencies in basic services and social stability and places of vibrant creativity, experimentation, and contestation through which much of the future of urban form and governance are being negotiated and built. Squatters, local governments, and a diverse array of stakeholders worldwide are increasingly focused on finding ways to improve squatter camps through gradual upgrading.

Understanding Impacts: Community Engagement Programs and Their Implications for Communities, Campuses and Societies

As universities increasingly involve engineering students in sustainable development work through community engagement, challenging questions arise regarding how to effectively serve the interests of both academic and non-academic participants. To date the literature on community engagement strategies such as service learning, project-based learning, and community-based research has had more to say about student experience than about implications for the university more broadly, or—critically—about impacts on community partners and community wellbeing more generally. While the potential for “real world” impact animates student learning and makes engagement meaningful, broader impacts can be hard to conceptualize and assess; arguably the more potentially consequential the impacts, the more they are likely to be mixed and hard to understand. This paper presents a simple model for thinking about community engagement program design and assessment at various scales of impact, across both academic and non-academic communities. We illustrate the model with examples drawn from a program operating in Cape Town, South Africa, where students confront a paradoxical challenge: nowhere are engineering insights and contributions more desperately needed than in the burgeoning urban informal settlements of the developing world that are home to 1/7th of the world’s population, but the sustainable development strategies and cultural assumptions that academics carry with them often come undone in the social, environmental, economic, and institutional maelstrom that typically prevails in these areas. How then, if at all, are we as educators, engineers and/or community development practitioners to engage with students and community partners to advance sustainable development in such environments? How do we plan for and measure program success (of what? for whom?) in a context especially prone to failure of things built and relationships nurtured? How in short do we foster engagement that is thoughtful, collaborative, resourceful, respectful, hopeful, resilient and beneficial to all concerned?