Overview of Kenyan Government Initiatives in Slum Upgrading: The Case of KENSUP and KISIP Projects

The goal of this paper is to explore the slum upgrading processes: the implementation of the Kenyan KENSUP project, associated successes and failures, and to draw possible lessons that can be learned from the initiative. The study utilized field work desk reviews to gather relevant information regarding slum upgrade processes in Kenya. The criteria used in the review process entailed exploring the context in which the KENSUP upgrading project was implemented, focusing on the legal frameworks, process of implementation, achievements, results, setbacks and failures in the processes in order to draw lessons for future programmes.

Functional Fiction to Collective Action: Speculative Participatory Serious Urban Design Gaming to Enhance Slum-upgrading Processes

<p>People who are marginalised in slum-upgrading processes can benefit from participatory design strategies. When marginalised slum communities confront and explore conflicting perspectives, values, assumptions and goals through negotiation within participatory design processes, the ability to harness the collective intelligence of people to work towards collective action can be enhanced. However, a tension exists in the participatory design literature between those participatory processes that seek to facilitate social outcomes such as social capital building, and those that seek only to implement an urban development or upgrading project (slum upgrading) as the outcome. Exploring new methods of design participation that integrate both social outcomes and design processes can help alleviate this tension by recognising a diversity of stakeholder perspectives on urban-related issues and help them work towards implementing lasting communal change that explicitly takes into account cooperative development action. The dissertation explores an innovative approach to participatory slum upgrading, which proposes bringing together speculative architecture, participatory design, and serious gaming approaches to help stakeholders to explore conflicting perspectives, assumptions and corresponding future visions surrounding architectural and urban issues. The research focusses on how these three areas can be brought together to help develop a new approach for designing participatory design tools for marginalised communities. The research explores how a “speculative, participatory, serious urban gaming” (SPS-UG) approach might be used to help marginalised communities consider past, future and present community experiences, reconcile dissimilar assumptions, and generate social outcomes and in-game design responses, while priming participants for further long-term, slum-upgrading design engagement processes. Empirical material for this research was gathered from a range of case study workshops prepared with three landfill-based communities and external partners throughout 2017, which utilised a new SPS-UG computer game I designed called Maslow’s Palace to evaluate the approach. The research shows that the SPS-UG approach was successful in guiding the design of a serious game to help reveal, develop and ground stakeholder knowledge, goals and values surrounding slum-upgrading issues. Through an exploration of social complexities involved in the participatory design process, participants were stimulated to share diverse opinions and aspirations and thus deepen their understanding of self, others, norms and institutions. The SPS-UG approach contributed to slum-upgrading outcomes for communities by aiding slum-upgrading ideation, framing the consideration of alternate views and possible futures, and scaffolding discussions about what the future might look like through visual representation of possible design alternatives. Finally, the research discusses key methodological insights, and the challenges faced when working with marginalised communities while pursuing social and slum-upgrading outcomes through a gaming approach. This is significant when considering how the approach might interface with other slum-upgrading processes outside of the scope of this research or function as a catalyst for the transformation of other physical urban environments and socio-cultural contexts.</p>

Functional Fiction to Collective Action: Speculative Participatory Serious Urban Design Gaming to Enhance Slum-upgrading Processes

<p>People who are marginalised in slum-upgrading processes can benefit from participatory design strategies. When marginalised slum communities confront and explore conflicting perspectives, values, assumptions and goals through negotiation within participatory design processes, the ability to harness the collective intelligence of people to work towards collective action can be enhanced. However, a tension exists in the participatory design literature between those participatory processes that seek to facilitate social outcomes such as social capital building, and those that seek only to implement an urban development or upgrading project (slum upgrading) as the outcome. Exploring new methods of design participation that integrate both social outcomes and design processes can help alleviate this tension by recognising a diversity of stakeholder perspectives on urban-related issues and help them work towards implementing lasting communal change that explicitly takes into account cooperative development action. The dissertation explores an innovative approach to participatory slum upgrading, which proposes bringing together speculative architecture, participatory design, and serious gaming approaches to help stakeholders to explore conflicting perspectives, assumptions and corresponding future visions surrounding architectural and urban issues. The research focusses on how these three areas can be brought together to help develop a new approach for designing participatory design tools for marginalised communities. The research explores how a “speculative, participatory, serious urban gaming” (SPS-UG) approach might be used to help marginalised communities consider past, future and present community experiences, reconcile dissimilar assumptions, and generate social outcomes and in-game design responses, while priming participants for further long-term, slum-upgrading design engagement processes. Empirical material for this research was gathered from a range of case study workshops prepared with three landfill-based communities and external partners throughout 2017, which utilised a new SPS-UG computer game I designed called Maslow’s Palace to evaluate the approach. The research shows that the SPS-UG approach was successful in guiding the design of a serious game to help reveal, develop and ground stakeholder knowledge, goals and values surrounding slum-upgrading issues. Through an exploration of social complexities involved in the participatory design process, participants were stimulated to share diverse opinions and aspirations and thus deepen their understanding of self, others, norms and institutions. The SPS-UG approach contributed to slum-upgrading outcomes for communities by aiding slum-upgrading ideation, framing the consideration of alternate views and possible futures, and scaffolding discussions about what the future might look like through visual representation of possible design alternatives. Finally, the research discusses key methodological insights, and the challenges faced when working with marginalised communities while pursuing social and slum-upgrading outcomes through a gaming approach. This is significant when considering how the approach might interface with other slum-upgrading processes outside of the scope of this research or function as a catalyst for the transformation of other physical urban environments and socio-cultural contexts.</p>

Disassembling connections: A comparative analysis of the politics of slum upgrading in eThekwini and São Paulo

This paper presents an innovative comparison that works creatively with the entangled spatialities of policy mobilities, drawing on a city-to-city cooperation between São Paulo (Brazil) and eThekwini (South Africa) municipalities for the exchange of slum upgrading expertise. The proposed comparative tactic entails tracing the establishment of this connection in order to disassemble the constituent flows and localities merged within it. Subsequently, by posing questions to one another, a relational comparison of the trajectory of slum upgrading policy in each locality is composed, unearthing the political and institutional conditions that preceded the existence of the connection per se. In that sense, both eThekwini and São Paulo are considered equivalent starting points from which local actors engaged in circulating ideas and mobilised slum upgrading policies. This paper not only brings a fresh approach to comparative methods – incorporating political contexts and their extensive overlapping networks of relations alongside a focus on particular policy trajectories – but also contributes to furthering global urban studies in two other ways. First, it provides insight into the processes by which policies are put on the move and localised (or not). Second, it demonstrates how repeated instances of urban practice may be unravelled by allowing each context of policy formation, with its distinctive trajectory of slum upgrading, to speak to one another. In this regard, the comparative analysis identified how, in both São Paulo and eThekwini, the consolidation of democracy was followed by the development of more technocratic approaches to the detriment of earlier slum upgrading initiatives focussed on community empowerment.

Continuity and Change of Urban Policies in São Paulo: Resilience, Latency, and Reanimation

It is usually considered that urban policy change happens gradually or abruptly, provoked by coalition shifts, political pressure, or by agenda changes in public policies. However, a broad set of urban policies in São Paulo, Brazil shows the relevance of the third kind of oscillating trajectory not yet accounted for by the literature. Departing from compared urban policies in São Paulo, this article shows incremental progressive trends due jointly to political competition (pushed by progressive governments) and policy production itself. While some programs entered the agenda to stay, others swung between implementation, latency, and reanimation. To investigate these processes, we compare four programs—(a) in situ slum upgrading and (b) bus integration (gradually imposing themselves), (c) cooperative housing construction, and (d) bus lanes/corridors (oscillating between latency and reanimation). The results challenge explanations of urban policy change, contributing to closer dialogues between urban studies and political science.

Who Knows Best? Participatory Design with Tenants in Wellington City Council's Housing Upgrade Programme

<p>Public participation is the cornerstone of a democratic society and it presents very specific challenges in relation to development projects. This thesis explores participatory design - the important interface between the design of a physical project and the people who are affected by it - in reference to Wellington City Council’s (WCC’s) upgrading of social housing. It asks ‘is there scope for widening tenant participation in the Housing Upgrade Programme?’ A literature review establishes a loose definition of participation based on seven principles: approaches to participation are diverse; often ‘under-done’; cannot be neatly packaged or predicted and therefore cut across professional boundaries; engage power relations; and they tend to cultivate choice in outcomes and bring into being a collective intelligence. From here the study engages action research techniques and case study analysis to further understanding of participatory processes. A comparative analysis of WCC’s current participatory approach and that of an Architecture Sans Frontieres participatory design workshop on slum upgrading in Nairobi, Kenya is conducted which reveals room for extension in WCC’s current approach and finds the Kenya workshop process exemplary. ‘A design experiment’ is then carried out which conducts some participatory exercises at a WCC housing site - Te Ara Hou apartments in Newtown, Wellington. These exercises contribute to a modest design proposal of additional housing units and a retrofitted community space for Te Ara Hou. All preceding steps then inform what is the ultimate outcome of the study; a set of eight generic principles to inform best-practice participatory process. These principles are then used to evaluate three cases which demonstrates how they might be applied in practice. These three cases evaluated are WCC’s existing approach, the ASF workshop approach and a proposed approach for WCC. The third case makes suggestions around how WCC could develop their participatory approach. Ultimately, the thesis finds that there is scope for widening tenant participation in the Housing Upgrade Programme, and the eight principles offer suggestions around how that might be done.</p>

Who Knows Best? Participatory Design with Tenants in Wellington City Council's Housing Upgrade Programme

<p>Public participation is the cornerstone of a democratic society and it presents very specific challenges in relation to development projects. This thesis explores participatory design - the important interface between the design of a physical project and the people who are affected by it - in reference to Wellington City Council’s (WCC’s) upgrading of social housing. It asks ‘is there scope for widening tenant participation in the Housing Upgrade Programme?’ A literature review establishes a loose definition of participation based on seven principles: approaches to participation are diverse; often ‘under-done’; cannot be neatly packaged or predicted and therefore cut across professional boundaries; engage power relations; and they tend to cultivate choice in outcomes and bring into being a collective intelligence. From here the study engages action research techniques and case study analysis to further understanding of participatory processes. A comparative analysis of WCC’s current participatory approach and that of an Architecture Sans Frontieres participatory design workshop on slum upgrading in Nairobi, Kenya is conducted which reveals room for extension in WCC’s current approach and finds the Kenya workshop process exemplary. ‘A design experiment’ is then carried out which conducts some participatory exercises at a WCC housing site - Te Ara Hou apartments in Newtown, Wellington. These exercises contribute to a modest design proposal of additional housing units and a retrofitted community space for Te Ara Hou. All preceding steps then inform what is the ultimate outcome of the study; a set of eight generic principles to inform best-practice participatory process. These principles are then used to evaluate three cases which demonstrates how they might be applied in practice. These three cases evaluated are WCC’s existing approach, the ASF workshop approach and a proposed approach for WCC. The third case makes suggestions around how WCC could develop their participatory approach. Ultimately, the thesis finds that there is scope for widening tenant participation in the Housing Upgrade Programme, and the eight principles offer suggestions around how that might be done.</p>

Do Slum Upgrading Programs Impact School Attendance?

This paper analyzes how slum upgrading programs impact elementary school childrens attendance in Uruguay. We take advantage of the eligibility rule that deems slums eligible for a SUP program if they have 40 or more dwelling units. Using a fuzzy regression discontinuity estimator, we find that students exposed to SUPs are 17 percent less likely to be at the 90th percentile of the yearly count of school absences. That effect appears to be driven by how SUPs impact girls. These interventions have effects that last for more than five years after their implementation. We discuss some critical urban and education policy implications of our findings.

Assessment of the Social and Economic Impact of Innovative Construction in Housing in Slum Upgrading: A Case of Mathare Valley, Nairobi

Background: Adequate descent housing is a universal human rights integral component. Resources’ costs and intensified rural-urban migration increase demand for sustainable housing. Modern knowledge-based-economy uses innovation. Construction industry uses product and process innovation to provide adequate and descent low-cost housing. Kenya adopted innovation practices of slum upgrading that uses cost effective locally available building materials. This study looked at the outcomes; social and economic impacts of innovative construction in housing in the Mathare Valley Slum upgrading project Methods: This post occupancy study used exploratorydescriptive research design. Random sampling was used to sample 384 users of low-cost housing projects in Mathare Valley, Nairobi County. Research instruments included semi-structured questionnaires and interview guides. Pilot study, validity and reliability tests ensured quality of study. Ethical considerations included university approval and consent. Statistical package for social sciences (SPSS) software version 21 was applied to compute the descriptive and inferential statistics. Findings: Slum-upgrading had significant-positive outcome on improved houses and community. Social impacts included communal facilities; assurance of security of tenure; and retained frameworks of establishments. Economic impacts included employment; affordable and durable units (p values <0.05). Upgrading process did not influence rent fees, was corrupt and led to displacement of residents. Conclusion: Slum upgrading process affected positively. Similar projects should consider residents in decision-making.