Sheela Patel

Community-designed, built and managed toilet blocks in Indian cities

This paper describes the ten-year programme of communitydesigned, built and managed toilet blocks undertaken by urban poor federations and women’s cooperatives, with support from the Indian NGO SPARC. This programme has reached hundreds of thousands of poor urban dwellers with much improved sanitation and facilities for washing; it has also demonstrated how such provision is affordable and manageable for all Indian cities. But this programme has also demonstrated to city authorities the capacity and competence of urban poor organizations, and helped change the relationship between the residents of slums and local government agencies. The paper begins by explaining why sanitation has been neglected, and describes the inadequacies in government sanitation programmes. It then describes the first experiments with community sanitation and the difficult negotiations in many cities, including Mumbai, Kanpur and Bangalore. Then it discusses the major community toilet programmes that developed in Pune and Mumbai. It highlights the innovations that allowed these to work better than previous public toilet blocks, the reasons why the urban poor organizations took on these projects, the lessons learnt and the ways in which community toilet blocks helped address other problems faced by the urban poor.

Beyond evictions in a global city: people-managed resettlement in Mumbai

This paper describes a resettlement programme in which 60,000 people moved without coercion to make way for improvements in Mumbai’s railway system. It also describes the resettlement sites and the attention given to minimizing the costs for those who were relocated. This resettlement programme was underpinned by strong levels of community organization among the population that was to be relocated; their involvement in the whole process included preparing the baseline survey of households to be moved, designing the accommodation into which they moved and managing the relocation process, including the allocation of units. The paper also outlines the difficulties that the relocation process created and the measures taken to address these. It suggests the factors that must be in place to protect low-income groups from the impoverishment that usually accompanies population displacements caused by infrastructure investments and central city redevelopment.

How to Meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGS) in Urban Areas

WHY HAS 50 years of development cooperation failed to address the needs of much of the population in lowand middle-income nations? Among the many competing explanations, one of the most plausible for urban areas is the failure of most development initiatives to consult and work with “the urban poor” in devising locally appropriate solutions – even though these people’s “needs” are the justification for the development initiatives and for all the agencies that fund them, and even though most international agencies claim to support “participation” and to be “pro-poor”. The discussions on how to meet the Millennium Development Goals present a new opportunity to address this. But to date, there is not much evidence that this basic limitation in development is recognized – let alone addressed. This issue of Environment and Urbanization is on how to meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in urban areas – both in the locations where those with unmet needs are concentrated (including individual “slums” and squatter settlements) and at a city-wide scale. There are hundreds of millions of urban dwellers whose unmet needs for water, sanitation, health care, schools will have to be addressed if the MDG targets are to be achieved (see Box 1 for a summary of these targets). These needs will not be met without changes in local governments and in other local organizations. Unlike most discussions on meeting the MDGs, the main focus here is not on large increases in aid or on debt relief or national poverty reduction strategies but, rather, on the local changes on which the achievement of most of the MDGs depend. Local government agencies, or the local offices of higher levels of government, determine whether citizens’ rights are protected and citizen entitlements are met. Their rules and procedures determine whether urban poor households can send their children to school and can afford to keep them there; whether they can obtain treatment when ill or injured; whether they are connected to water, sanitation and drainage networks; whether their neighbourhoods have street lights and electricity; whether they can build legally on suitable sites; whether they can avoid eviction; whether they can vote and have access to politicians and civil servants; whether they are protected from violence and crime (and corruption) by a just rule of law; whether they can set up a small enterprise and get a loan to help them do so; whether they can influence development projects. The performance of local schools, health care centres and water and sanitation providers determine whether many of the MDG targets are met

Knowledge is power – informal communities assert their right to the city through SDI and community-led enumerations

This paper provides an introduction to the practice of community-led enumerations as conducted by Shack/Slum Dwellers International (SDI). It sets out the historical context for enumerations, which came out of a need in India in 1975 to find a more long-term solution to evictions, and charts its subsequent evolution and spread throughout other countries. Enumerations can help to build a community, define a collective identity, facilitate development priority setting and provide a basis for engagement between communities and government on planning and development. This process allows communities of the urban poor to assert their rights to the city, to secure tenure, livelihoods and adequate infrastructure. The paper discusses some of the specific methodological issues, including the challenges of legitimizing community data, and the use of technology by slum(1) or shack dweller federations when appropriate.

Reducing urban poverty; some lessons from experience

Many donor agencies are recognizing the need to address the growing levels of urban poverty in Africa, Latin America and much of Asia. Many also acknowledge that they had under-estimated the scale of urban poverty. As they develop or expand programmes on poverty reduction in urban areas, there are many remarkable initiatives on whose experience they can draw. This paper reflects on the lessons from seven of these: three from Asia, three from Latin America and one from Africa. All these initiatives combined direct action by low-income groups themselves, working with local NGOs, with some support negotiated from one or more external agency in order to improve housing and living conditions, basic services and livelihoods. Each initiative sought to make limited funding go as far as possible-and most achieved partial or total cost recovery for some (or all) of their interventions. All used credit to allow low-income groups to spread the cost of capital investment over a number of years. These initiatives also changed the relationship between poor urban groups and local authorities, bringing about major benefits. However, official donors may find it difficult to fund initiatives such as these, especially through conventional project-cycle oriented funding for capital projects that is channelled through recipient governments. They may also find it difficult to fund initiatives that aim to change the policies and practices of local (or national) governments; also to support initiatives that are multisectoral, relatively cheap and require long-term support because they are long-term processes rather than discrete projects. Initiatives that generate cost recovery may also present them with difficulties. Most official donors will need to develop new channels to support such initiatives-for instance through support for intermediary funds for community projects located within these cities.

Slum/Shack Dwellers International (SDI) - foundations to treetops

This paper describes the formation and development of Slum/Shack Dwellers International (SDI), an international people’s organization which represents member federations of urban poor and homeless groups from 11 countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. It also describes the evolution of these national federations and how they grew to challenge conventional development thinking and to develop new, community-directed precedents for poverty reduction. These federations and the NGOs with whom they work formed SDI to support the many ways in which the federations (and their member groups) learn from and help each other, and to ensure that global institutions and events became more useful and relevant to the urban poor. The paper also describes SDI’s experiences with international agencies, including its involvement in the Global Campaign for Secure Tenure and the measures taken to ensure that its work and experience of the global provides benefit to and strengthens the local, adding value to the plans of the urban poor.

Street Children, hotel boys and children of pavement dwellers and construction workers in Bombay - how they meet their daily needs

Street children, hotel boys and children of pavement dwellers and construction workers in Bombay-how they meet their daily needs describes their situation. For instance, where they wash, defecate, sleep and who helps them when they are ill. It describes the circumstances which lead to children being in such a situation and the inadequacies of public provision in meeting their needs; and how involving these children in the survey became a means of establishing better contact between them and the government agencies and voluntary organizations seeking more effective public responses to their needs and problems.

The Mahila Milan crisis credit scheme: from a seed to a tree

The Mahila Milan crisis credit scheme describes a crisis fund set up by women pavement dwellers in Bombay, on which they can draw in emergencies; Mahila Milan is a federation of womens collectives. The article also describes the search for credit from formal financial institutions which can meet their additional credit needs, including permanent housing.

Editorial: Documenting by the undocumented

Environment & Urbanization Copyright

An offer of partnership or a promise of conflict in Dharavi, Mumbai?

The first part of this paper, by Sheela Patel, provides a backdrop to Jockins letter about the current government plans to redevelop Dharavi, a large inner-city township within Mumbai with hundreds of thousands of inhabitants and tens of thousands of enterprises. The second part is the text of an open letter by Jockin Arputham from the National Slum Dwellers Federation to the government and private developers that was released to the press in June 2007 and that received widespread coverage in newspapers and other media around the world. This open letter is an offer of partnership in such redevelopments from the organizations and federations of slum dwellers in Mumbai and elsewhere to government agencies and developers. But it is also a warning of the disruptions that the slum dwellers will bring if they are not involved in the planning and implementation of such redevelopments.