Combined Districting and Main Line Routing—A Method to Implement a Basic Drinking Water Supply Infrastructure in Informal Settlements

Abstract

The upgrading of large informal settlement areas takes place in sections for technical, economic and social reasons. On one hand, planning is faced with the challenge of taking individual structural and social conditions into account when dividing up the districts. On the other hand, the routing of the mains of a pipe-based infrastructure (water supply) must be selected in the context of the entire area under consideration and integrated into a superordinate network layout. In this paper, a method that combines these contrasting approaches is presented. Potential district boundaries are identified based on existing infrastructure and development patterns, as well as considering the routing requirements of a piped drinking water supply. Thereby, social factors can be considered in the decision-making process. Subsequently, an area subdivision is performed by a recursive partitioning algorithm. The choice and combination of different compactness measures influence the shape of the districts and, thus, the spatial organization. The geodetic height is integrated into the algorithm via an admissibility condition, so that the subsequent development of a district can take place via one pressure zone. By means of variations in the input parameters of the zoning, different planning levels can be generated, which finally lead successively to the upgrading of an informal settlement area.