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

I. Introduction

With poverty becoming an increasingly urban phenomenon, many cities are significantly challenged in their understanding and management of human settlements and their responses to their poorer residents. In this context, it is difficult to overstate the importance of the role of organized communities of the poor in defining, negotiating and addressing the issues of urban poverty. When these communities can engage directly with policy makers and government, experience shows it is possible to address some of the more complex issues associated with urbanization. Through this engagement, Shack/Slum Dwellers International (SDI), a network of urban communities in 33 countries, has found that concerns around land tenure, housing, livelihoods, service provision and citizenship can be identified, politically negotiated and resolved in a pro-poor way.

While governments in low- and middle-income countries keep records of those who live in formal housing and of most of the land in their cities, they have no records for up to 60 per cent or more of their poor urban populations, nor do their master plans formally acknowledge their presence on the land that they occupy. Lack of knowledge of the urban poor – their numbers, their history and how they contribute to the city’s informal economy – means that they are hardly acknowledged during planning for infrastructure and services. The process of enumeration, by which urban poor communities count themselves, document the lands they occupy and identify alternative lands for housing when needed, is at the core of the SDI approach. It is the basis on which communities mobilize to engage with their cities and find mutually beneficial solutions.

II. Background

Enumeration is a simple but powerful tool designed and executed by the residents of informal settlements, who own and use the information that they gather themselves. Through enumerations they survey and map themselves, and build the skills and knowledge to represent themselves and their needs to government. At the same time, they develop a critical collective identity that helps form the political basis for their engagement with government. For these reasons, the motto within SDI is “When in doubt, count!”

The potential for this kind of data to strengthen the collective voice and position of communities first became apparent during the fight against eviction in Janata Colony, Mumbai, in 1975, when community leaders realized the significance of collecting information about themselves and their settlements when negotiating with the authorities. Because of the forces aligned against them and the suspension of law during the 1975 Emergency, Janata Colony residents only managed to delay their eviction. However, their strength and organization helped them deal with the challenges of relocation to Cheetah Camp and meant that they got much better terms for resettlement.⁽²⁾

Based on this experience, the leadership, which went on to form the National Slum Dwellers Federation of India (NSDF) in 1974, decided that they needed a robust strategy both to protect themselves from future episodes of eviction and also to explore the potential for their voice to be heard in city matters. The rise in evictions and the poor success of past strategies of mass demonstrations, picketing and advocacy prompted them to look at new ways of engaging government and landowners. They decided to proactively collect information about various settlements, initially in Mumbai and Bangalore, so that they could negotiate with facts and figures and concrete solutions when they entered into discussions with government. Knowing, for instance, that in the Mumbai slum of Dharavi there are 800 people to one toilet seat has a different impact from a more general demand for rights. They called the initial questionnaire that they developed a “settlement profile”. The idea was to ascertain the number of structures in a settlement, the status of tenure, the land occupied, amenities available and existing community, social or political organizations working in these areas.

A few years later, in 1984–1985, the Mumbai NGO SPARC began to explore working with pavement dwellers. The city of Mumbai wanted to evict these households but did not actually know how many people lived on the pavements. SPARC saw the collection of information about the residents as a natural and obvious response to the Supreme Court judgement of 1985, with its threat of eviction. There were assumptions that the pavement dwellers were transient, on the pavement for a few days or weeks, and below the notice of the state in terms of their housing and livelihood needs. The information they collected challenged this myth. The enumeration resulted in a document entitled “We the Invisible”,⁽³⁾ which remains a milestone in the development of enumerations.

The pavement dweller enumeration attracted SPARC to the attention of the National Slum Dweller’s Federation (NSDF), and the two groups, along with the emerging federation of women’s savings groups, Mahila Milan, subsequently began to work together as the Indian Alliance. This coalition conducted many enumerations and created a national network of federations, so that each local settlement could form its identity, connect with other federations in the city and together link to other cities in their country and around the world.

Between 1992 and 1996, while the federations in India grew and expanded, they also started to hold international exchanges. First, a group from South Africa, and later groups from Kenya, Namibia and Zimbabwe, learned the community-building practices of NSDF and SPARC and began to undertake enumerations of their own and to form federations. The specific process varied in each country: in some instances, women’s daily savings groups were formed and they undertook the enumerations; in other instances, the enumerations led to the formation of daily savings groups. In almost all cases, the organizations that formed as a result of this process began a journey to develop the voice of the urban poor and to seek engagement with their cities to address deficits in their settlements.

Shack/Slum Dwellers International (SDI) was formally set up by eight national federations in 1996, and between 1996 and 2005 many other federations representing both cities and countries joined SDI and started using enumerations as a tool to begin working in their cities. The growth of SDI has taken place in waves, as older federations matured and passed on their knowledge and strategies to newer country federations, which became SDI affiliates.

III. The Methodology

IV. Legitimizing and Mainstreaming Data

For SDI, a fundamental objective of enumerations is to create internal organizational agreements within informal settlements about data and then to engage with government. A major challenge is for government to accept that the data collected by communities has the necessary legitimacy for implementing state projects and for policy making and execution. Often, the assumption is that only professionals can handle this kind of task.

The first time a government office actually commissioned an SDI federation to survey some informal settlements was in 1989. At the request of the Collectors Office in Mumbai, the NSDF and SPARC mapped the settlements along the city’s railway tracks. This set a precedent, and the government went on to commission SPARC/NSDF to undertake a baseline survey of settlements along the railways, home to about 18,000 households, which would be affected by a large World Bank-supported transport project, the Mumbai Urban Transport Project Phase II (MUTP2).⁽¹³⁾ The resulting data and cadastral maps were signed and validated by the Railway Authority, the state government and NSDF and used for implementing the MUTP2 project.

It takes time to achieve this kind of legitimacy. In this regard, in the experience of SDI, federations often go through the following phases. First, they need to develop the basic skills to successfully undertake an enumeration and to manage these data at scale and with accuracy. Second, they must seek engagement with city or state officials to demonstrate the viability, accuracy and value of this community-generated data. The information they present is often the first data actually available about these settlements and their inhabitants, making it valuable and unique. This is a long and often tough phase; the federation can face resistance not only from government bodies but also from professional data collection agencies whose task the federations have taken over. The arguments are several and the contestation can be heated and prolonged based on various political factors, assumptions about the poor and institutional resistance.

However, in most cases the legitimacy of the data finally becomes apparent. It is accurate and inclusive, and this often becomes apparent when enumeration data are compared to conventionally collected data. Communities own and check the data and have an internal rationale for wanting to ensure its accuracy. And unlike the situation with professionals, who leave the process after the data collection phase, communities begin to work with the data, making it the basis for dialogue with the city. This deepens the foundation and robustness of the project delivery process as well as the subsequent sustainability of the outcome. Also, most cities “lose” data; information, often gathered at great expense, may disappear when, for instance, there are changes in government or transfers of key staff. By contrast, communities own their data, and the federations always keep it both safe and accessible. Nothing is gained by federations maintaining secrecy; they make great efforts to share their information and practices as widely as possible.

The most valuable and convincing feature of enumeration data in terms of legitimacy is the fact that its usefulness is demonstrated time and again; it is reinforced through tenacious practice and repetition. Enumeration data help community federations to negotiate within informal settlements and develop resolutions between different factions, especially between owners and tenants within a neighbourhood, who often have a contentious relationship. Every project manager knows that the success of a project at the community level is ensured by the degree of local consensus. In the experience of SDI, a pro-poor housing or infrastructure project is much easier to complete well if undertaken by empowered communities themselves, with their national federations overseeing them and ensuring inclusive values.

A final but no less important and frequently used strategy to legitimize community data is through peer exchanges to other regions or countries, especially when there is initial resistance to the idea of community-collected data. In the course of these exchanges, government and city officials, NGOs and community members all meet with their counterparts and absorb how an enumeration process is initiated, designed and executed, and what its impacts are. This is an invaluable process for transmitting precedents across borders and facilitating new processes within a particular area. While a community-led enumeration might sound utopian or improbable on paper, when it is experienced the process is incredibly powerful and persuasive. Those who receive this kind of exposure can then copy, modify and expand what they have witnessed in ways that address their particular challenges, to produce their own solutions in their local area. For instance, when the settlements along the railway tracks in Nairobi were threatened with eviction, there was an exchange from Kenya to Mumbai of railway officials and community representatives, who met with their Indian railway counterparts affected by the MUTP2 project. This was an eye opener for both officials and community members, who understood why it was important for each to engage with the other in order to find a solution that worked for the community and the city.

One downside of sharing data with the state is the possibility that the data will be used against the poor. Eviction notices can result, and this is a strong fear for many informal residents; in many ways, they see invisibility as a shield against eviction. This can only be faced by organizing settlements as a whole and creating strong federations that can withstand these threats and negotiate instead for solutions and development investment. This places a great deal of responsibility on the national SDI affiliate to ensure that they strengthen local and city federations while taking on enumerations and surveys. Even well-intentioned professionals cannot guarantee that the information they collect on informality will not be misused.

Increasingly, city governments and other development actors accept that while the actual data that communities gather could also be gathered by other more professional agencies, the community information is more likely to be accurate. They also come to understand and accept that a unique aspect of community enumeration is the collective identity formed as part of the process; also the growing capacity of a community to set its priorities and negotiate its needs. These are necessary pre-requisites for producing a workable development strategy or project, whether in situ upgrading or a resettlement. Enumerations form the basis for entitlements and dialogue between the community and policy makers, making it possible to buy time, build the case and avoid many of the pitfalls and difficulties that have plagued many other housing projects to date.

By 2008−2009, SDI enumeration strategies had begun to attract the attention of many development agencies at city, national and international level. The understanding of these agencies was gradually being sharpened, and they saw that community-led and managed surveys were a crucial foundation for the formation of citywide federations, whose voices and aspirations were critical to successful development investments by the government. The positive chain of relationships between project success, empowered communities and enumerations had finally been understood.

Several strategies have emerged within SDI based on this understanding of the potential of citywide slum surveys to build citywide federations that can engage in development projects and policies at the citywide level rather than only at the settlement level. Ideally, this will replace the present practice in many countries where only pockets of informal settlements are involved in these activities. While this scaling up of SDI processes is desirable, federations have also been conscious of the need to maintain the integrity of their fundamental processes – their work on daily savings groups, enumerations and peer exchanges. Without this foundation, it would be all too easy for federation processes to become co-opted or diluted as they are scaled up.

The exposure of development agencies to the enumeration methodology has led to SDI playing a more strategic role as part of the Cities Alliance’s Land, Services and Citizenship initiative, financed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. As part of this initiative, SDI is assisting in the formation in Uganda of five city level federations that have the capacity to undertake both settlement profiles and household surveys.⁽¹⁴⁾ Through the institutional partnership with Cities Alliance, influenced by the Gates Foundation’s experience of working with organizations such as SDI and other similar networks, the space for using enumeration data to engage with local government is more quickly and easily created. A process is laid out in which communities’ needs and priorities define the development agenda funded by the initiative, which is a more pro-poor path towards universal access to basic amenities initially, and to overall development later.

A special exploration has also begun with the African division of the United Cities and Local Governments (UCLGA) to work in two selected cities (Lusaka, Zambia and Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso) where the mayor and the communities will map the informal city. Through a campaign within the UCLGA, mayors in Africa will hopefully be mobilized to support these community practices. Of course, these processes are very new and it is not clear how they will play out in the next few years. However, these initiatives demonstrate a growing, evolving strategy whereby a tool for data collection facilitates the organization of inhabitants of informal settlements and opens the space for a pro-poor dialogue and project development within cities.

V. Reflections on Enumeration: a Practical and Inclusive Approach to the Process of Development

Within SDI, there is deep and experienced insight into the fact that while developing accountability at the local neighbourhood level is important, most informal settlements operate in isolation and have very little chance of changing the greater circumstances within which they feel trapped. Owing to the manner in which both state policy and philanthropy operate, interventions are, by and large, sporadic and ad-hoc, based more on whims and chance than on a coordinated, considered, consistent effort or strategy. The power differential at work is significant; at the end of the day, residents of informal settlements are too often forced into the role of beneficiaries, unable to hold any real sway over the planning, design or timeline of a project. These agencies, because of a range of political, bureaucratic and financial constraints, are generally most interested in exploring improvements in less controversial areas such as health and education. They are particularly drawn to solutions that can be standardized easily and implemented fairly “cleanly”. However, the very nature of the illegality that encompasses land occupation can lead to forced evictions or the threat of eviction, and can negatively affect livelihoods and preclude formal access to water, electricity or sanitation. Messy and deeply political, security of tenure, access to services and livelihoods are the root issues underlying inequality, poverty and urban civic exclusion. Depending on the specific national context, they must be addressed at the local level, but also at city, regional and national levels; these are the spaces where the institutional and legal aspects of these concerns are decided.

Many attempts by valiant community associations as well as NGOs have failed to have a broad impact because they operate only at the local level. They have been unable to link to the national or global levels where, for many decades, the challenges of informal settlements were given little or no priority. Often, the larger development context was based on the assumption that if rural development is done well, there is no need to address urban poverty − people will simply not come to the city or will go back to their presumed rural homes. It was also claimed that giving services to the poor would legitimize their claim to their “encroached” land and encourage more people to come to the cities.

Today, urbanization is clearly shown to be irreversible (unless an economy is in crisis). More than that, it is closely linked to economic success. While the rate and scale of urbanization might be affected by national and regional policies and investment strategies, the inevitable outcome in cities in low- and most middle-income countries is that a large and usually growing proportion of the urban population lives in informal settlements and works in the informal economy. Many development actors remain blind to this – even though these informal residents and workers can represent half or more of a city’s population, and even though the formal and informal economies of a city are highly interdependent. But this demographic shift also provides opportunities to explore strategies that refocus the debate and encourage investment into these informal localities. Enumerations can be a non-threatening tool to begin to engage cities in these critical issues.

The importance of the informal and still invisible parts of the city was clear to the original federations that constituted SDI in 1996, and it has remained a crucial insight. However, as SDI has grown it has witnessed how challenging it is for affiliates to master the balancing act necessary to communicate this insight to others. They have to maintain a critical downward accountability to the locality and members, while at the same time creating a national and international voice for informal inhabitants, influencing policy and investment. Community-led enumerations remain the most valuable mechanism to link the numbers, the voices and the demands and aspirations at all levels, from local to global platforms.

This process begins with the way cities respond to federations of the urban poor. With the decentralizing framework evident in most countries, city governments have become the face of the nation state, dealing with the claims of the poor. Each national federation (and SDI) needs to change the all too common response to informal settlements, which is to evict the residents – thus destroying their habitats and livelihoods − because they are deemed illegal by planning statutes (which the rich often break with impunity) and are thereby excluded from the benefits of living in cities.

An enumeration undertaken by a community is of value, first, to the settlement where it occurs. It binds together those who live in the neighbourhood. When many neighbourhoods are surveyed, they further expand their identity to cover large numbers and can potentially produce a collective voice that cannot be easily denied. A strong political constituency is created. Since cities often hide behind exclusionary policies and norms, changing this status quo calls for community federations to work with federations in other cities, to demand changes by the regional and national governments that dictate policies from above.

This can be a slow struggle, and while enumerations provide the specific information on which claims and voice can be based, daily savings groups form the engine of the federations, providing the organizational strength to sustain this process over long periods of time. Bureaucratic demands cause many delays, and unless the organization has the capacity to survive this run-around, there is no change in policy. Over time, SDI has defined many strategies to leverage political pressure from one level of government to another or one agency to another, and this can be useful in cutting through these delays. At other times, it only happens through more direct political pressure from the residents of informal settlements. An example is the 2007 Black Flag Day in Dharavi, Mumbai where, through protest, residents demonstrated their organization, conviction and practical strength in numbers, when they peacefully disrupted major thoroughfares in the city by occupying the adjoining roads in their tens of thousands. This added power comes from the numbers and economic contributions of those living in informal settlements, a reality that enumerations help bring to light.

Often, and increasingly, international agreements on rights and the obligations of nation states towards their citizens are signed by national governments, but these are rarely used or interpreted in a way that applies to informal residents within the countries that have signed these agreements. It is easier to have a right on paper than to have it guaranteed in practice. Bringing the debate regarding informality to the global stage is often a valuable parallel activity of federations of the urban poor. SDI affiliates have understood through their experience that while the real engagement, solutions and practical outcomes have to be at the city level, advocacy at all three levels – local, national and international – is vital. When a local federation or a neighbourhood needs services and legitimacy within a city, city federations, national federations and SDI often have to undertake many advocacy processes to make that happen, asserting the rights to the city of those currently excluded.

Surveys and enumerations have strengthened the hand of local communities – they can go to the negotiating table with alternative solutions based on hard facts and figures. For federations, precedent setting is critical; it shows what is possible in the face of a pervasive, deeply held stigma against the poor and scepticism about their capacities. The experience of SDI demonstrates that when a community or city level federation manages to get an agreement with their city or pioneer a new process, other neighbourhoods or other city federations cannot automatically expect the same benefits. However, this breakthrough produces a precedent that somehow breaches the barrier that has hitherto excluded informal neighbourhoods from certain benefits, be they land security, improved housing or basic amenities. The precedent is set; it demonstrates that such an act is possible. This creates opportunities for federations to begin pressuring officials to explore similar processes and outcomes in other areas, other cities and other countries.

The Mumbai railway slum federation challenged MUTP2 for the right of communities to survey themselves as part of designing their own relocation. Since their houses were situated dangerously close to the railway tracks, in situ upgrading was not possible in this case.⁽¹⁵⁾ Now the same strategy is being used in other communities that have to accept relocation because they live on dangerous land or in spaces where land titling is impossible (for example on the pavement). This process was shared through exchanges with Kenya, and now Uganda and Liberia are exploring the same strategy.

VI. Going Forward

Enumeration is a process that unfolds, travels, adapts and morphs continuously. It is a challenge, but a useful challenge, to write and reflect on it. However, given the number of moving parts, the fast-changing local politics and processes, the many changes, transformations and refinements that are constantly taking place, by the time an account is written and published, it is already dated.⁽¹⁶⁾

Yet for those of us within SDI, sharing our processes and strategies, and their history and evolution, in a collective and cohesive way is critical for several reasons. These strategies demonstrate how to facilitate a genuinely participatory tool. Unless communities learn to design, own, manage and utilize the knowledge that is created from their own information gathering, these processes are not participatory. The way SDI conceptualizes its work can require a re-thinking of what a “participatory” process entails. Outside professionals and technical stakeholders have roles and contributions to make to these processes – they can bring added value and expand the possible use of the data sets in the immediate and longer term. But it is important that they do not use communities in an instrumental way; they need to work with them as valued partners, a process quite similar to what community federations seek to do with their city officials and administrations.

Governments and policy makers often take time to recognize the legitimacy of enumeration data, and even longer to accept that data and give it the stamp of official acknowledgement. But when they do, they put in place an amazing milestone of transparency. Data available to both people and the state can be the basis, as in Mumbai, for important decisions with the potential to produce significant policy and project impacts. These impacts are based on consensus and can be measured against the changes that actually occur. The use of enumeration data creates the potential for project and budget accountability that was often not previously possible for work in informal settlements. While it reflects the simplest of policy interventions, the universalizing potential is far reaching − data that is collected by communities and rigorously checked to make it official can lead to many innovations in policy formulation, project design and delivery.

These negotiations over legitimacy and data have many implications for community federations and, while obvious victories seem well celebrated, these very successes create internal and external challenges for the leadership of these federations. As the scale and volume of information gathering escalates, maintaining local control and ownership is vital; otherwise there is no difference between federations gathering data and consultants gathering data. It would be all too easy for the enumeration process to be co-opted. The rituals (including daily savings groups and community collection, tabulation and verification of data) that ensure ownership have to be maintained. Often, as engagement with government deepens and state demands rise, requests for quick project turnaround can tempt leadership to take short cuts and undercut the quality of community processes. Guarding the ownership, creating a voice and an ability to aggregate and disaggregate information requires vital back-stopping from NGO partners of federations, who are often faced with the possibility of becoming consultants themselves. Some federations are simply young and inexperienced, and SDI needs to support these affiliates until they have the capacity and confidence to take on this process independently. To date, SDI has navigated these kinds of challenges through the strength of the network as a whole and the quality of the leadership of national federations as well as the SDI network. A certain culture and set of expectations has been created and nurtured through frequent exchanges and close regional relationships between federations; if any one federation begins to feel pressured or compromised in terms of the integrity of its processes, other affiliates can step in with support and guidance.

Community-led enumerations − their scale, their uses, the quality of data collection and the measurement of its impact − continue to challenge SDI and its affiliates. Pressure to keep refining, sharpening and deepening the process of enumeration comes from the increased expectations of organized communities as well as from increased demand from city governments and national and international agencies. Communities of the poor are seldom seen as producers of solutions. It takes many kinds of capacity building from inside social movements for them to rise to the point of being able to demand a place at the decision-making table. Sustained capacity to produce relevant data through surveys, mapping and enumerations remains one of the powerful ways of achieving that goal.