SOUTH AFRICA - More than 55% of the urban population have been estimated to live in areas that are categorised as slums and informal settlements. These areas are largely the physical manifestation of urban inequality, both socially and economically. They embody the exclusion of poor urban households from cities’ formal economies and their environmental amenities, including green spaces.
Furthermore, people living in these areas are more vulnerable to the impact of extreme weather events that are associated with climate change.
Waste collection is poor, so pollution levels are high. This means that slums have a negative effect on natural ecosystems. Their presence could cause environmental degradation and deplete natural resources, such as timber. In other words, they represented an intertwining of the socio-economic and environmental problems of urbanisation, but many government attempts to upgrade slums in Africa focused largely on environmental issues and ignored social and economic dynamics.
Studies in Addis Ababa and Nairobi, however, revealed that people relocated from slums into new housing experienced a loss of community connection and, in some cases, could not afford life outside a slum.
This was echoed in research that I conducted in an area called Cosmo City, near Johannesburg, in that people who had been moved there from an informal settlement felt less safe and were battling financially.
My findings - and those from Kenya and Ethiopia - suggested that a community oriented approach was necessary. Merely moving people without taking their social and economic concerns into consideration was not the manner in which to deal with the issue of urban slums.
The Ethiopian government’s current approach was to clear slums and develop new housing in their stead. Households were relocated from shacks in slums to newly developed high-rise flats.
A recent study examined the environmental and social aspects of this clear-and-redevelop approach in Arat Kilo slum and the Ginfle high-rise flats in Addis Ababa. It found that the move had resulted in some environmental benefits, in that it had marginally reduced the amount of resources consumed by households, particularly water and energy (apart from petrol).
There was also a small reduction in the quantity of solid, liquid and gaseous waste generated.
However, the high-rise flats were strikingly less liveable. The study found that while 80% of those interviewed felt happy living in the slum, only 50% were happy in the high-rise flats. Also, 95% felt secure in the slum, but only 7% felt the same way in the new flats. Trust had also declined: 97% said they’d trusted their neighbours in Arat Kilo, but only 34% trusted their neighbours in the new flats.
Kenya’s government took a similar approach to Ethiopia’s through its Slum Upgrading Programme. It constructed high-rise blocks of flats to replace slums.
Over the years, since 2010, portions of Kibera - Nairobi’s largest slum - had been cleared and households relocated. Most recently, Kibera residents had been moved into 822 housing units, in 21 blocks of four-storey buildings in Soweto East, a zone of the slum.
There were plans to develop another 2 072 housing units on cleared parts of Kibera in the next few years.
However, about half of those who officially received housing in the new flats in Soweto East no longer lived there. These units had either been given away, sold or rented out.
One beneficiary told the study’s author that she still bought her groceries in the slum, as they were cheaper there. She also spent her weekends in the slum, visiting her friends and neighbours. She had lived in the flat for about three years and didn’t know any of her neighbours.
This all suggested that Kenya and Ethiopia’s governments were ignoring social and economic factors when relocating people from slums.
In South Africa, where I recently conducted a study, qualifying households within informal settlements were relocated to new, fully subsidised houses on a serviced plot in newly established areas.
Beginning in 2005, almost 3 000 households were relocated from Zevenfontein informal settlement to the new housing development, Cosmo City. The two areas were about 11km apart. I found that the residents loathed some aspects of the new neighbourhood.
One woman told me: “Zevenfontein was better than Cosmo City because here money speaks There, I can fetch wood from the bush and come to cook. Here, being unemployed is a challenge because you use electricity Some people will say that Cosmo City is better because there is electricity here, but the crime is too high. One is not free.”
Her concerns were echoed by other people whom I interviewed.
Only the Addis Ababa case study showed some environmental benefits. All three examples came with social and economic downsides for residents.
It is important for any upgrading of slums and informal settlements to not only improve environmental quality, but also to boost people’s overall quality of life.
One way to achieve this is for every slum upgrading project to be fair, inclusive, empowering and to include those whom it will affect. Productive community involvement is crucial.
It’s also necessary to include empowering poverty alleviation programmes, as well as those that harness social capital in existing and new communities. - The Conversation
