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The chapter presents a theoretical model that seeks to answer the question of why former squatter settlements tend to upgrade/redevelop at a slower pace than otherwise similar settlements originating in the formal sector. We argue that squatter settlers' initial strategy to access urban land creates a ‘legacy effect’ that curtails settlement upgrading possibilities even after the settlements are granted property titles. This chapter tests our model using the case of Cochabamba, Bolivia, and obtains results consistent with the theoretical model prediction. The chapters's results suggest that the commonly used ‘benign neglect while keeping the threat of eviction’ policy has profound impacts on how land is developed in the informal sector and this poses costly consequences for local governments after legalization.

Because of the inappropriate and excessively high demands of the formal requirements associated with low-cost housing facilities in most developing countries, many of those who comprise the urban poor have resorted to housing themselves through measures established by the informal sector. As the law could also intervene with such situations so that such informal settlements may be regularized, programmes that are provided are able to cover only some issues of public law regularization, for example that of community upgrading and private law regularization such as titles to land. This chapter therefore realises that formal law is interrelated with informal setups since these can be either a cause or a consequence. Using J. W. Harris' analytical framework from Property and Justice, this chapter aims to examine the nature of informal property law.

This chapter describes the ethnographic setting for the book as a whole by painting a picture of everyday life in South Africa’s informal settlements. It introduces the reader to each of the primary ethnographic sites, as well as the central characters in the narrative. It also provides background on peoples’ ontological orientations and vulnerabilities. The chapter illustrates the profound health inequality that marks the landscape of post-apartheid South Africa and details how people cope with environmental suffering, the privatization of social services (including the introduction of pre-paid electricity and water meters), and chronic unemployment. More than anything, this chapter details the realities of contending with the mutual pandemics of poverty and AIDS.

This chapter details the evolution of policies for the rehabilitation of informal settlements in Jordan, showing that they are contingent on the residents' degree of citizenship and the fact that policies changed after the peace accord with Israel in 1994. While illegal settlements built by Palestinian refugees were rehabilitated by the Housing and Urban Development Corporation, those built following Transjordanian rural depopulation were rehabilitated locally by municipalities. From 1980 to 1997, Jordan was the first Arab country to implement the developmentalist ideology recently fostered by the World Bank, which involved the residents of informal areas in all the stages of renovation of their homes and enabled them to become homeowners. This titling policy was subsequently abandoned in favor of a single policy of provision of services.

This chapter presents insights from practitioners with over three years of experience in the digital mapping of informal settlements in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi. Nairobi’s informal settlements are poorly documented and the state has limited reach in these areas. The projects reviewed here are initiatives intended to improve the provision of information and services in the informal economy, even when the state is absent. The chapter concludes that community-led geographical information systems (GIS) and open data can provide an alternative governance modality both in Nairobi’s informal settlements and in remote rural areas. A practical guide is offered for sustaining collaboration between citizens and state actors. Citizens, empowered with information communication technology (ICT) tools and methods, can fill in the information void found in “areas of limited statehood.”

This chapter examines how the capability approach is being integrated into the policies and priorities of the local government of the federal city of Buenos Aires in Argentina. It first considers three specific insights of the capability approach that are particularly relevant for urban integration policies: multidimensional and multisectoral perspective on policy; an institutionally integrated vision of wellbeing; and agency focus. It then explores each of these insights in the context of urban inequality reduction policies in Buenos Aires. In particular, it analyses the dynamic interaction between youth employment and education in informal settlements, and territorial characteristics; the role of civil society organisations in the dynamics of capability expansion in informal settlements; and the role of culture and religion in promoting agency and capability expansion. The chapter concludes with a summary of some of the features of ‘capability-promoting policy’ in the fragmented and unequal context of the Latin American city.

This chapter describes the many social actors involved in urban planning for two informal settlements in the same southern suburb of Beirut. It studies resident committees that support Hezbollah and organize basic public services in return for municipal financial support, and Jihad al-Binaa, the branch of Hezbollah in charge of building basic infrastructure. Hezbollah's refusal to invest in the urban renewal of informal settlements, because it considers that to be a duty of the state, is detrimental to economic development in this coastal area, which has great economic potential.

The term “Historic Cairo” means the specific zone that is the focus of numerous area conservation and upgrading projects under the auspices of different governmental and international organizations. The entire zone of “Historic Cairo” is bounded by the northern city walls and Galal Street to the north; Port Said Street and the Metro to the west; al-Mansuriya Street and Salah Salim Highway and al-Qatamiya Highway to the east and squatters south of the Qasr al-Sham' area expanding southward as far as the access to al-Munib flyover. The main problem of Cairo's historic areas is the physical deterioration of every ancient urban fabric. Historic areas and informal settlements alike depend on a vulnerable economy, and suffer alike from a low-quality environment due to population density, especially in informal settlements, thus enabling landlords to offer low-rent dwellings.

This chapter discusses the rapid urbanization in Iran which has resulted in the proliferation of unplanned, underserviced, and poverty-stricken neighborhoods often referred to as slums. It examines some of the general factors that influence informality and decay in Iranian cities, such as inflation and unemployment, income stagnation and inequality, and speculative land markets and restrictive land-use regulations. Iran’s largest port, Bandar Abbas, is used as a case study to explore the dynamics of urban growth, informality, and decay. The chapter also describes the city’s informal settlements, and provides speculations on the future of the low-income and underserviced settlements in Bandar Abbas by expressing optimism about current initiatives that are supposed to take a holistic and regional approach to addressing urban polarization in the port city.

This chapter deals with the Elyssar project, developed in 1995, which aimed to destroy large areas of informal settlements located in the southern suburbs of Beirut, whose residents had been displaced from southern Lebanon. The project was abandoned due to resistance from Hezbollah and Amal. The study of the cases put forward by the various social actors shows that notions of justice and law are based on the political agendas of each party. At the same time, ‘rights to the city’ are refused to stigmatized Shi‘is and rural populations.

The sanitation target of the millennium development goals (MDGs) was not reached and progress toward the sustainable development goal on water and sanitation (SDG6) is very slow. The lack of sanitation is especially persistent in cities in the Global South, as the world is rapidly urbanizing. This problem demands long-term fundamental transformations of urban sanitation services and infrastructures. This chapter analyzes the challenges and opportunities of innovations that have the potential to contribute to solving urban sanitation problems. The authors therefore use a sociotechnical systems perspective that draws on insights from innovation studies and the sustainability transitions literature. Such a systemic perspective enables the analysis of the interplay between technologies, infrastructures and their associated actor networks, and institutions and user and provider practices. The chapter presents the analysis of the case of sanitation in Nairobi, Kenya, building on qualitative data from 104 expert interviews. Based on the analysis, the authors show that innovative efforts should focus on improving alignments between the various sanitation service regimes in the city—for example, through making utility services work in informal settlements or improving collaborations in the efforts to scale on-site sanitation innovations. The chapter illustrates how factors hindering innovation development toward reaching SDG6 often go beyond technological aspects, but rather represent system weaknesses related to actors, networks, and institutional aspects.

The growth of informal settlements and lagging behind of economic productivity growth is indicative of the huge challenges of urban governance to address poverty and inequality. Based on a case study on urban food producer groups in the informal settlements of Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, this chapter observes a shrinking of development spaces for the urban poor. Therefore, it argues for a more comprehensive approach to self-building by the urban poor to sustain their livelihoods in Africa’s cities and provide input into the sustenance of urban productivity. Instead of investing urban resources into economic activities that exclude and marginalize the poor, an inclusive approach would be more recognizant of their livelihoods. Strategic urban governance would address the plurality of actors, including the poor, and their livelihood potential and contributions to urban productivity and liveable cities.

This chapter addresses the circumstances that ensued after the 2011 January revolution, resulting in the writing of this book. It addresses theoretical sociological questions concerned with post-traumatic and euphoric moments. It engages with debates on the anthropology of ethics. It equally addresses Cairo’s major urban disparities, evictions, and the question of the failing neo-liberal housing policies.

This chapter moves from the homestead to its symbolic antithesis, the township. The National Democratic Revolution gained traction in Natal’s townships—as opposed to more rural areas—because of the nature of urban sociality, which can be best understood with reference to colonial history. Despite the state’s efforts to maintain segregation, African populations developed in “white” urban areas during the early twentieth century. Concerned about the rise of political resistance, the state set out to regain control by forcibly relocating urban Africans into planned townships. Planners sought to resocialize urban Africans according to a model of European domesticity centered on the nuclear family. The forced relocations transformed kinship structure and the ancestor cult in a manner that made urban Africans amenable to ideas about individual liberty, equal rights, and class politics in a way that their rural counterparts never were. This history helps us understand why people in KwaZulu-Natal—particularly migrants—imagine there to be such a rigid moral opposition between township and homestead, despite the fact that the two forms exist on a relatively fluid continuum.

Twenty-first-century Johannesburg juxtaposes post-metropolitan suburban sprawl in gated estates, informal settlements, privately funded simulations of public city space (Melrose Arch), and heritage monuments (Freedom Square Kliptown) with art and urban renewal projects embedded in the urban fabric. These include new structures like Constitution Hill, renovated buildings like Drill Hall, revived districts such as Maboneng and Sophiatown, and informally reanimated derelict sites such as the former Albert Street pass office and squatter encampments, which highlight ongoing wealth disparity and inequality of rights and access amid the real estate boom. Key players in urban planning and artistic reanimation include the Johannesburg Development Agency, Joubert Park Project, Trinity Session, Centre for Historical Re-enactments, William Kentridge, Lael Bethlehem, Stephen Hobbs, Maja Marx, and Gabi Ngcobo.

This chapter analyzes struggles over urban space in Bandung, a city of some two-and-a-half million inhabitants. It focuses on a particular piece of land, a strip alongside a now inoperative railway line. As infrastructure, it falls within the ambit of government spatial control. Yet the area has become a settlement for ordinary people through an intricate combination of claims. The selection of this urban setting is not a claim that spontaneous privatization is generalized in Indonesia, in its urban areas, or even in Bandung. Instead, it is an example of how privatization can take place even where one would suppose that government control over space is rather strong. If privatization dynamics nonetheless unfold under the nose of government, these are dynamics worth studying in many other places. The chapter then presents a brief outline of the history of informal, unplanned urban settlement in Java.

This chapter focuses on the development of ‘favela chic’ and ‘favela gentrification’ in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It shows this to be related to aggressive state-led securitization policies and housing relocation programmes. Favela residents’ and gentrifying newcomers’ discourses are compared showing ‘sub-gentrification’ trends and a second trend of hyper-mobile international newcomers that lie at the vanguard of the gentrification of favelas in touristic areas.

This chapter details the stages of construction of an informal settlement in the countryside near Damascus. It analyzes the unified look created by the use of concrete blocks, then examines the negotiations related to passageways between houses, and describes the physical connections created between houses by the water pipes attached to artesian wells. It presents the complexity of informal urban landscapes in the countryside around Damascus, made up of groups of buildings and visible networks based on kinship and neighborhood relationships.

This chapter explores the precariousness of life in a Black township in Johannesburg after apartheid. The chapter begins with a brief social history of Alexandra township before analyzing the transformation of Alexandra into a ghetto of exclusion for the increasingly expendable Black working class. As factories closed and the Black middle class moved out, Alexandra became a site of concentrated poverty, abandoned factories, and informal settlements. Confronting a dual crisis of housing and unemployment, the urban poor increasingly survive through informal economic and housing strategies. These strategies, however, have intensified the fragmentation of the community. The chapter then turns to the Alexandra Renewal Project (ARP), a major “urban renewal” project of the post-apartheid state. Analyzing the successes and failures of the ARP highlights the limits of decolonization in a context of commitments to private property and the ongoing devaluation of Black life. The chapter ends by discussing efforts to overcome fragmentation and social movements in Alexandra today.

This chapter examines the politics of open defecation by focusing on everyday intersections of the body and infrastructure in the metabolic city which produces profoundly unequal opportunities for fulfilling bodily needs. Specifically, it examines how open defecation emerges in Mumbai’s informal settlements through everyday embodied experiences, practices, and perceptions forged in relation to the materialities of informality and infrastructure. It does so by tracing the micropolitics of provision, access, territoriality, and control of sanitation infrastructures; everyday routines and rhythms, both of people and infrastructures; and experiences of disgust and perceptions of dignity. It also examines open defecation as embodied spatial and temporal improvisations in order to investigate the socially differentiated efforts and risks that it entails. More broadly, the chapter seeks to deepen understandings of the relationship between the body, infrastructure, and the sanitary/unsanitary city.