Squatter Settlements


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Urban Squatter Housing in Third World


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Study with special reference to Delhi.




Informal Settlements


Book Description

Informal settlements are a shameful feature of poverty and inherited inequalities in South Africa. Defined in this book as 'settlements of the urban poor developed through the unauthorised occupation of land', they are regarded by many as unhealthy and overcrowded blights on the urban landscape 'squatter camps' in common parlance. Yet census data tell us that 16.4% of households across the country live in informal settlements, mostly in urban areas where an insecure foothold on the land enables these households to access the economic opportunities, social and economic networks and basic amenities that are essential to their survival.




The Illegal City


Book Description

The Illegal City explores the relationship between space, law and gendered subjectivity through a close look at an 'illegal' squatter settlement in Delhi. Since 2000, a series of judicial rulings in India have criminalised squatters as 'illegal' citizens, 'encroachers' and 'pickpockets' of urban land, and have led to a spate of slum demolitions across the country. This book argues that in this context, it has become vital to distinguish between illegality and informality since it is those 'illegal' slums which are at the receiving end of a 'force of law', where law is violently encountered within everyday spaces. This book uses a gendered intersectional lens to explore how a 'violence of law' shapes how 'public' subjectivities of gender, class, religion and caste are encountered and negotiated within the 'private' spaces of home, family and neighbourhood. This book suggests that resettlement is not a condition that squatters desire; rather something that is seen as the only way out of the 'illegal' city. The wait for resettlement is a temporal space of anxiety and uncertainty, where particular kinds of politics around law, space and gender takes shape, which transform squatters' relations with the state, urban development, civil society, and with each other. Through their everyday struggles around water, sanitation, social and political organisation and the transformation of their homes and families, this book shows that the desire for the 'legal city' is also the irony and utopia of home, which will remain an incomplete gendered project - both for the state and for squatters.




Informal Settlements, Environmental Degradation, and Disaster Vulnerability


Book Description

The collection of papers in the book Property Rights and the Environment: Social and Ecological Issues, (*) and this companion volume examine the relationships between people, the environment, and property rights and the ways in which a given social and ecological context affects those relationships. The papers are products of a research program at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Stockholm. The main objective of the program was to convene social scientists and natural scientists to address research questions in their full social and ecological dimensions. The program's participants addressed five general issues related to property rights and the environment: (1) the design of governance systems for sustainability; (2) the relationship between equity, stewardship, and environmental resilience; (3) the use of traditional knowledge in resource management, (4) the mechanisms that link people to their environments, and (5) the role played by population and poverty. This volume presents case studies that address questions of design application in those five areas. (*) Also available: Property Rights and the Environment: Social and Ecological Issues. (ISBN 0-8213-3415-8) Stock No. 13415.




Spatial Justice and Informal Settlements


Book Description

Spatial Justice and Informal Settlements links the discourses of informal urbanism with spatial justice in the context of in situ governmental programmes oriented around public open space and designed to upgrade informal settlements in Latin America.




A House of My Own


Book Description

"A fairly comprehensive monograph, highly suitable for classroom use, that offers a wide range of information fit into traditional anthropological categories. . . . an interesting study of cultural integrity and pattern in a setting of what appears to be complex sociopolitical chaos." —American Anthropologist "Whether or not one accepts Susan Lobo's optimistic analysis, her ability to translate the apparent chaos of shanty-town lives into such neat patterns and to help outsiders view life as the inhabitants do are important contributions." —Inter-American Review of Bibliography "An extremely competent ethnography, simple and straightforward." —Anthropos "A pleasure to read, a mine of information which will be useful in teaching students to formulate their own hypotheses." —International Journal of Urban & Regional Research "Very well written and provides a great wealth of the liveliest sort of ethnographic detail." —Latin American Research Review "Lobo's study of two squatter settlements in Lima provides a solid, well-written, detailed, traditional ethnography of poor families in a Third World urban setting." —Hispanic American Historical Review "This well-written account . . . has a lot of heart and feeling for the human face of the urban poor." —International Migration Review




Upgrading Informal Settlements in South Africa


Book Description

More than 1.2 million households in South Africa live in informal settlements, without access to adequate shelter, services or secure tenure. There has been a gradual shift to upgrading these informal settlements in recent years, and there have been some innovative experiments. Upgrading Informal Settlements in South Africa: a partnership-based approach examines the successes and challenges of informal settlement upgrading initiatives in South Africa and contextualises these experiences within global debates about informal settlement upgrading and urban transformation. The book discusses: · The South African informal settlement upgrading agenda from local, national and international perspectives · South African ‘city experiences’ with informal housing and upgrading · The role of partnerships, actors and capabilities in pursuing an incremental upgrading agenda · Tools, instruments and methodologies for incremental upgrading · Implications of the upgrading agenda for the transformation of cities The book has been written and edited by a wide range of practitioners and researchers from government, NGOs, the private sector and academia. It covers theory and practice and represents a vast accumulated body of housing experience in South Africa.




Learning from Informal Settlements in Iran


Book Description

This book explores the tenacity of Iran’s informal settlements against the backdrop of the World Bank’s USD 80 million loan for physical upgrading. Arefi seeks to identify and unravel the distinctive models, policies, processes, and outcomes associated with it, and explains why—despite obvious challenges—informal settlements remain popular in Iran, and also how understanding them in a broader theoretical context helps rectify existing redevelopment policies in order to develop more effective ones.