Environment & Urbanization

This paper presents the findings of a two-year study of community finance systems (including community-based savings and loan groups, and larger city-based funds) that are operated by established urban poor community organizations in five Asian countries (Cambodia, Nepal, Philippines, Sri Lanka and Thailand), with support from their partner organizations. These five groups are the principal national urban poor organizations in their respective countries, and their community savings and city funds – as well as their other development initiatives – have all grown to national scale. The study, in which the chief researchers, data-gatherers and analysts were community members themselves, was managed by the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights (ACHR). It was conceived as an opportunity to look in greater detail at the different models of community finance these important groups have developed, in their very different national contexts, and to compare their various aspects, draw out some key elements and lessons, and see how these people-driven finance systems can be strengthened, scaled up and brought into the formal finance and development structures in their countries.

Decentralization reforms and rapid urbanization place increasing pressure on African urban authorities. In response, land-based finance has been gaining popularity within development discourses as a method of increasing local autonomy and financing local government infrastructure provision. This paper discusses the conceptual basis for land-based finance, the instruments that form part of this approach, and the actual application in several African cities. Drawing on three case studies (Addis Ababa, Harare and Nairobi) and a high-level scan of 29 developments in various African cities, we show how land-based finance is being implemented in practice and discuss the potential for wider uptake. We conclude that African city governments are using land-based financing, albeit in inconsistent ways. We argue that urban authorities should consider the more extensive and progressive use of land-based financing instruments, despite the constraints imposed by both technical and political conditions. A progressive agenda for local government finance in African cities should take land-based finance seriously, as well as the local practices and institutional arrangements through which it operates.

This paper describes the funding and financial services provided by the Akiba Mashinani Trust (AMT) to support the Kenyan Homeless People’s Federation (Muungano wa Wanavijiji). Muungano is a federation of autonomous savings groups with over 60,000 members from informal settlements across Kenya. Savings are critical because they enable wealth accumulation, demonstrate the capacity of the community to repay loans and hence leverage additional resources, and build social capital among members. AMT is able to use these savings as seed capital for revolving funds at the community, city and national scales. The funds offer informal settlers a range of financial products, including community project loans, which allow savings groups to finance social housing, sanitation and basic infrastructure in an affordable way. Therefore, unlike formal banking and microfinance institutions, AMT positions its financial services within a broader effort to improve the physical and social fabric of urban informal settlements. The experiences of Muungano and AMT demonstrate the catalytic impact of establishing appropriate financial services geared towards low-income groups – and crucially, how the savings of low-income people can leverage government resources to achieve more inclusive cities.

Participatory budgeting (PB) has been a major innovation in participatory governance worldwide, with more than 3,000 experiences listed across 40 countries. PB has also diversified over its 30 years, with many contemporary experiments (referred to as PBs) only tangentially related to the original project to “radically democratize democracy”. We propose a taxonomy to distinguish the logics currently underpinning PB in practice: political (for radical democratic change), good governance (to improve links between the public and citizens’ spheres), and technocratic (to optimize the use and transparency of public resources for citizens’ benefit). Illustrating these competing rationales through contemporary experiences, we reflect on the contributions of the good governance and technocratic frameworks to managerial and state modernization. Undoubtedly, these help explain PB’s growing attraction for proponents of the good governance agenda. However, rekindling PB’s promise for democratic deepening, we argue, requires refocusing on its deliberative quality. We draw attention to civic education and empowerment of participants as key components of PB practices intent on opening pathways towards alternative political systems – indeed, of materializing Henri Lefebvre’s “right to the city”.

In India, a new approach to finance has been transforming shelter options for low-income households and supporting community-led development over recent decades. This paper examines the financial architecture developed to support hundreds of community-driven efforts by grassroots groups working in alliance with the Mumbai-based NGO SPARC. Much has been written about this Alliance’s work, but its financial architecture has had little attention. This paper seeks to explain how grants given for grassroots community development in urban areas can produce new forms of entrepreneurial behaviour among the urban poor, showing how they can design and execute large projects with the expertise gained from more modest efforts. It also shows how this Alliance has managed, invested and revolved these grants and other sources of funding, including its own savings, to leverage resources and opportunities for inclusive city development.

This article explores the universal obstacles limiting sub-national governments from using municipal bonds. Specifically, it examines four case studies – Johannesburg, Douala, Dakar and Kampala – to understand their approaches to municipal bond issuance. The chief obstacle to municipal bond issuance for raising funds relates to the constitutional and regulatory systems in each country. This represents a significant departure from the commonly-held understandings that cities in the region are not eligible for long-term debt, lack capacity, or are not viewed as creditworthy by purchasers of municipal bonds.

The success of municipal bond issuance appears contingent on strong interlinkages between central and sub-national governments. This article critically reviews the powers granted to local governments under the countries’ constitutions, specifically the legislation that enables or prohibits municipalities from issuing bonds. Reform for a financially sustainable level of indebtedness for sub-sovereign governments is essential for the future growth of cities in sub-Saharan Africa.

This paper describes a proposal for affordable housing across all income groups on urbanizable mostly greenfield peri-urban sites served by a suburban railway station. Connecting to this arterial transit node, a bus rapid transit system (BRTS) of high frequency would provide a feeder service that penetrates areas too far to be otherwise easily reached from the station. Starting with an income profile of the city’s residents, we estimate what households can afford to pay for housing. Then, assuming cross-subsidized differential pricing of land for different income groups, we determine the financial viability of any particular site. Two specific sites in northern Mumbai are studied for their implementation problems. But the proposal is generic, and with altered assumptions could be applied internationally wherever the context allows.

The network of slum dweller federations known as SDI has innovated a form of local financing derived from the collective savings of urban poor groups. This addresses three shortcomings of conventional microfinance: its inability to reach very low-income people, its limited role in community mobilization for longer-term social change, and its constraints in terms of leveraging subsidies from the state and the market. SDI’s national and international urban poor funds have been used, among other purposes, for providing basic services and upgrading homes in informal settlements. Further, SDI’s model of federating urban poor communities and their funds at city, national and international levels has enabled mature federations, capable of financially sustainable projects, to cross-subsidize learning and precedent-setting projects in which full cost recovery is not feasible. This produces an outcome whereby the combined portfolios of all the national funds are able to match financial outflows with inflows. At the same time, the federations that co-manage these funds and the projects that they finance are able to escalate the production of social capital amongst the urban poor and to generate impact through changed relationships with government.

Economic decentralization in China has intensified the tension between higher-level and local governments in policy implementation. It is a core development right for local governments in urbanizing China to have construction land quotas determined in local plans. Negotiation around this quota can reveal the hidden rules and operating mechanisms of organizational structures in the urban development field. This paper undertakes a long-term tracing of a planning process in a case study area to reveal the conflicts and bargaining processes that occur when top-down enforcement of relevant policies deviates from or even contradicts local appeals and development goals. This study found that the local governments initially adopted a passive response in order to encourage the opportunity for informal bargaining to maximize their own benefits. The outcome was that higher-level government created incentives and offered flexibility in policy implementation to compensate local government. The role of the planning group in effective information delivery and technical support accelerated consensus reaching with compromise from both higher-level and local governments.

Global conversations around financing urban development typically neglect the importance of coordinating the activities of different stakeholders behind a shared vision for their city. In particular, low-income and other marginalized groups must be seen as entrepreneurs and partners in service delivery to enhance the efficacy of resource use and to reduce poverty. This paper explores the creation of non-traditional business models and alliances to invest in informal settlements. It presents examples from India, Kenya, Pakistan, Thailand and Zimbabwe, where local authorities, commercial banks and other formal actors have co-financed and co-delivered urban plans, housing and infrastructure through collaborations with organized groups of the urban poor. These groups make three critical contributions: financial resources, detailed information on the composition of informal settlements, and capabilities for collective decision-making and action. These contributions are underpinned by the financial and social capital developed through collective saving, and enable the delivery of complex urban improvements at scale.

Because current emissions accounting approaches focus on an entire city, cities are often considered to be large emitters of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, with no attention to the variation within them. This makes it more difficult to identify climate change mitigation strategies that can simultaneously reduce emissions and address place-specific development challenges. In response to this gap, a bottom-up emissions inventory study was undertaken to identify high emission zones and development goals for the Durban metropolitan area (eThekwini Municipality). The study is the first attempt at creating a spatially disaggregated emissions inventory for key sectors in Durban. The results indicate that particular groups and economic activities are responsible for more emissions, and socio-spatial development and emission inequalities are found both within the city and within the high emission zone. This is valuable information for the municipality in tailoring mitigation efforts to reduce emissions and address development gaps for low-carbon spatial planning whilst contributing to objectives for social justice.

Experiences of apartheid in South Africa have resulted in the association of shelter with citizenship, adding significance to the concept of “home”. This paper reviews experiences with grassroots efforts to make the government’s housing policy and programme more effective in addressing the needs of the urban poor. The experiences offer lessons relevant within and beyond South Africa. First, collaboration between state and civil society has been possible and has added substantively to the effectiveness of state programming. But, with a multiplicity of government agencies, the context is difficult. Housing construction has been constrained by delayed subsidy payments, and by a professionalization that limits opportunities for low-income residents. Second, community initiatives have had multiple incremental and positive influences on state policy and programmes, but substantive progress requires government adopting a more inclusive policy. Civil society agencies remain ambitious about the potential for securing substantive transformation, but this remains a work in progress.

Drawing upon examples of street vendors in Hanoi, this study explores gendered strategies to adapt to rapid urbanization, and how street vendors’ responses, in turn, shape the current informal food systems. The findings show that Hanoi’s informal food system is organized based on social, as well as economic, interactions and therefore the system’s power hierarchy and gender relations are different from those of formal systems, while providing livelihood opportunities for poor people in both urban and rural spaces. Women operate based on social relations rather than economic interactions, while men’s activities tend to be more capital-based and similar to the formal systems. As a result, men and women encounter different challenges in sustaining their activities in the face of policy and/or economic changes. The study concludes by highlighting adaptation capacity built upon social relations and describing the implications of integrating gender aspects for urban planning toward building more inclusive cities.

While considerable existing literature has focused on the lack of sanitation services in informal settlements, this paper argues for the need for well-maintained sanitation services in city public spaces. Specifically, the paper describes the impact of a lack of sanitation facilities in public spaces and its linkages to waste picker women’s sense of safety and security. Drawing on the experiences of waste picker women residing in an informal settlement in Pune, it focuses on women’s everyday improvisations and negotiations to cope with the unavailability or inaccessibility of sanitation facilities while they traverse the city, picking and segregating waste, and the impact on their income, health and psychological well-being. The findings show that the policy discourse on sanitation needs to be expanded beyond a focus on informal settlements to include a public sanitation component.

This paper describes research investigating UN-Habitat’s experience supporting communities and local government to undertake urban planning following humanitarian crises. Two case studies were examined: Banda Aceh, Indonesia, following the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami in 2004; and Tacloban, the Philippines, following Super Typhoon Haiyan in 2013. The study found that urban planning following humanitarian crises can empower communities and governments to manage their own recovery. However, they may lack the knowledge, experience, time, tools or technology needed to take the lead. Organizations supporting urban communities and local government to undertake urban planning following humanitarian crises should consider: the most appropriate speed, scale and depth of the intervention given the context and their own funding and capacity; building local government capacity through secondments or partnerships; establishing a recovery and reconstruction planning task force; appropriate strategies for working with affected communities and their leaders; and advocating for national government support.

This article explores the way land tenure, water flows, and water quality are legally, politically and socially framed in a site in Ouagadougou. It shows that urban agriculture is an important source of revenue for various individuals and groups, and a socio-political arena for state representatives, experts and farmers. The main stakes in these power relationships are the regulation, control and use of natural resources (especially water and land), but also residents’ nutrition and health interests. Public authorities produce and monitor the enforcement of legal standards of water use and hygiene, while farmers struggle individually and collectively to ensure efficient use of land and multiple water sources, sometimes challenging official norms. These competing interests lead sometimes to conflicts – over the use of the resources or the legitimacy of rules that regulate urban farming processes – that are negotiated through institutional or informal bargaining. Urban farming is thus a marker of socio-political and economic dynamics in Ouagadougou.

The residents of informal settlements face a diverse range of urban risks, from climate and economic shocks to local pollution and the threat of eviction. This article explores these risks by conducting Participatory Hazard Vulnerability and Capacity Assessments (PHVCA) in three informal settlements in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh. The assessment uncovers a variety of risks, which interact with each other and local vulnerabilities to produce complex risk profiles for residents. In this way, we highlight the importance of a holistic assessment of urban risk rather than focusing on single risks or specific sectors. The participatory approach also reveals household and community-level processes through which risks are experienced, negotiated and in some cases addressed, providing valuable insights into the ways vulnerable urban populations can be best supported.

Global discussions of risk in the disaster risk reduction literature do not necessarily reflect the range of risk as understood by residents in the urban South. This intra-urban comparison from Bharatpur, Nepal, where the Gorkha earthquake struck in 2015, shows how residents in two different wards perceive risks related to themselves, their families and their urban environment. The continuum of perceived urban risk includes events such as the Gorkha earthquake and the administrative change, as well as everyday concerns such as poor quality of infrastructure provision and economic insecurity. By contrasting the views of these residents of an “ordinary” city in the urban South, and comparing them also with the views of the local authority, this paper allows for an enriched understanding of how risk is understood, highlighting the breadth of concerns involved, and the tensions in understandings of the full spectrum of urban risk. Understandings and definitions of risk matter. If perceptions of risk from the local level are not included within the broader disaster risk reduction discourse, this shapes and in effect limits the risks that are actually managed through policy and practice.