Inclusive Urban Development Research Articles

Inclusive Urban Campus Development: A Case for Okahandja, Namibia

As a result of the high rate of urbanization and the attendant growth in housing demand and proliferation of informal settlements in sub-Saharan African countries such as Namibia, the development of cities has become a priority concern of the governments given the obvious socio-economic and environmental challenges that impact sustainable infrastructure/services, quality of life, health and well-being of the citizenry as referenced in the United Nation Sustainable Development Goal (UN SDG) Number 11. Whereas the governments are conscious of these daunting challenges, they remain unable to decipher sustainable solutions to them. The consequence is the perennial proliferation of informal settlements, housing shortages, and urban poverty, pressure on infrastructure and services, and unemployment. Although dubbed a “Garden Town” Okahandja does not have an urban structure plan of development. This study aims to investigate the feasibility of socially inclusive urban infrastructure campus development using Okahandja as a platform. Recent research has revealed such trends as the smart city concept which embodies a sustainable approach to Inclusive Urban Campus (IUC) development towards a holistic community planning in third world countries. Dololo site in the south of Okahandja stands out as an opportune urban campus platform for diverse mixed-use including residential, business-related (entrepreneurial), educational, recreational, and others. The research employed a novel multi-focused workshop methodology for data collection with community engagement and stakeholders’ interactive participation as a key strategy to enhance the bottom-up development approach. The objectives were to identify the town planning and integrated development dynamics of Okahandja, the policy bottlenecks, expose sustainable forms of socio-cultural integration and formal housing delivery. Ultimately, the feasibility of Dololo as a platform for the inclusive urban campus initiative was not in doubt. Infrastructural development and community need to accommodate education, Small and Medium Enterprise (SME), Vocational Training Center (VTC), informal trade, housing, health, youth centers, cooperatives, roads, and transport are identified as key to the IUC development.

Predicting Neighborhood Change Using Publicly Available Data and Machine Learning

Gentrifying and declining neighborhoods affect nearly all major cities in the United States. Although gentrification tends to increase the economic value of a neighborhood, its subsequent impact on demographics and affordability often draws criticism from the local population. Additionally, decline in living conditions create socioeconomic stress across affected neighborhoods. Current rules-based approaches for identifying these neighborhoods are backwards-looking and do not allow local policymakers to get ahead of neighborhood decline and gentrification to mitigate their effects. This paper proposes a methodology for identifying neighborhood change in near real time by using machine learning. We define four neighborhood change types – gentrifying, declining, inclusively growing, and unchanging – and leverage publicly available US Census American Community Service (ACS) data, Zillow home value and rent data, and US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) data to predict which of these categories a census tract is likely to be a part of in the coming year. We train individual models across eight different metropolitan core based statistical areas (CBSA). The average performance of our models was 74% accuracy and 74% precision, an improvement over the rules-based baseline of 61% accuracy and 61% precision. These results suggest a promising application of the data to enable community intervention to produce more inclusive urban development strategies. The approach outlined in this paper can also be expanded to other metropolitan areas, to determine whether these results hold for those areas. The methodology enables supplementing data from the study with more Metropolitan area focused data, when available, to improve the precision of the models. This can provide reliable results for the policymakers looking to mitigate adverse consequences associated with neighborhood changes.

Exploring the connection between spatial justice and land tenure security: insights from inclusive urban (re)development schemes in Recife, Brazil

The potential of spatial justice to promote land tenure security has not fully been ascertained in the existing literature. Yet, it is argued that spatial justice embeddedness in rules and processes of urban (re)development promotes integration of all urban dwellers in the urban fabric and enhances their security of tenure. This study builds upon this promise to ascertain how the pursuit of spatial justice alongside the urban space (re)development can result in the increased security of tenure for the poor and low-income urban dwellers. Through the meta-synthesis of studies on spatial justice and land tenure security, and the implementation of the inclusive urban (re)development schemes in Recife, Brazil, we derived four aspects of spatial justice: epistemological, ideological, axiological and material. The pursuit of these aspects in the management of Recife city has concomitantly advanced the perceived and de facto tenure security for the poor and low-income urban dwellers who live in the informal settlements (favelas). The axiological and material aspects are directly connected to tenure security which has been spurred by the emancipation movement claiming for changes in urban management. This emancipation movement corresponds to the ideological aspect of spatial justice which influenced the passage of new urban (re)development schemes that recognise the rights to land and housing and basic urban amenities for all categories of urban dwellers. The adoption of these schemes which recognise these rights, the participation of the poor and low-income groups in crafting and implementing the urban (re)development plans, and the integration of the favelas in the city are the main patterns of spatial justice relating to the axiological and material aspects from which tenure security emerged. This study concludes that the pursuit of spatial justice encounters the exclusive urban (re)development rules and processes which threaten security of tenure emerging from conventional approaches embedded in social norms, political institutions, and land registration processes which are generally acclaimed to protect the individuals’ property rights. This makes spatial justice a substantial driver of tenure security for all urban dwellers, especially the poor and low-income dwellers.

Incorporating a resilience lens into the social and urban transformation of informal settlements: the participatory upgrading process in Villa 20, Buenos Aires (2016–2020)

Based on the experiences of the socio-urban integration of Villa 20, this article suggests that upgrading processes are inherently complex and challenge traditional public policy implementation practices. The case presented demonstrates that, when complex urban problems are addressed through citizen participation, they contribute to improving urban governance, providing comprehensive responses, and may ensure the long-term sustainability of the introduced changes. Incorporating a climate resilience lens into the upgrading processes of informal settlements has not been a priority in government-led programmes to date. However, when these processes have at their core a deep participatory and collaborative approach, they offer a window of opportunity not only to transform government practices and policies, but also to influence urban designs, bring technological innovation, support alternative construction practices, and adopt a more sustainable and inclusive urban development pathway.

Decentralisation, entrepreneurialism and democratization processes in urban governance in Tamale, Ghana

ABSTRACT A concept of urban governance involving decentralization, entrepreneurialism and democracy (DED), and designed to promote sustainable and inclusive urban development, is proposed as an instrument of participatory, multi-stakeholder engagements and relationships, on the one hand, and the alignment of policy with gaps that emerge from practice, on the other. This concept is used to assess urban governance practices in Tamale, Ghana. The study identified substantial policy–practice gaps, especially with respect to the application of decentralization and democratic governance principles, although entrepreneurism made clear contributions to the development in particular of informal sectors that dominate the city’s economy.

Can In-Kind Compensation for Expropriated Real Property Promote Spatial Justice? A Case Study Analysis of Resettlement in Kigali City, Rwanda

Kigali city authorities have recently adopted an in-kind compensation option to mitigate some patterns of spatial injustices, reflected in the displacement of expropriated real property owners towards urban outskirts, where they can afford new properties using the in-cash compensation they receive. This study assesses whether this form of compensation promotes a spatially just and inclusive urban (re)development. It applies an evaluative framework comprising a series of indicators connected to three dimensions (rules, processes, and outcomes) of spatial justice and its four forms consisting of procedural, recognitional, redistributive, and intra-generational justice. It relies on data collected through field surveys and a review of literature on expropriation and urban (re)development processes in Kigali city. The findings reveal that the adopted in-kind compensation exhibits some aspects of spatial justice connected with the access to decent houses, basic urban amenities, and increased tenure security. However, these findings unveil deficiencies in procedural, recognitional, redistributive, and intra-generational justice, portrayed in the lack of negotiation on the compensation option, non-participation of expropriated property owners in their resettlement process, overcrowding conditions of the new houses, and loss of the main sources of incomes. Some options for a better implementation of the in-kind compensation are suggested. Two strands of procedural and recognitional justice, namely negotiation and community participation, are central to their successful implementation.

Slum upgrading and placemaking: improving informal settlements and creating places

Since the creation of UN-Habitat in 1978, development agendas have shown an increased global focus in cities and urban challenges. Fast-growing urbanization rates the world over, urban challenges, and in particular slums, critically hinder human progress. Despite the international recognition, conventional approaches to the slum question fail to accomplish solid results. Evidence has it that Latin America has become the world’s signpost in integral, inclusive urban development. The few comprehensive, yet crucial, slum upgrading programs being implemented in the region attest to that. We see the potential in this region to lead to a better future for slum upgrading––ergo, for human development. For that purpose, we have selected ten representative Latin American slum upgrading programs to help us illustrate our proposed methodology for achieving more comprehensive and sustainable results in slum upgrading practices.

Access to Affordable Houses for the Low-Income Urban Dwellers in Kigali: Analysis Based on Sale Prices

The government of Rwanda recently passed housing development regulations and funding schemes which aim at promoting access to affordable houses for the low- and middle-income Kigali city inhabitants. The existing studies on housing affordability in this city did not yet discuss whether this government-supported programme is likely to promote access to housing for these target beneficiaries. This study applies the price-to-income ratio (PIR) approach and the 30-percent of household income standard through the bank loan to assess whether housing units developed in the framework of affordable housing schemes are, for the target recipients, affordable at all. It relies mainly on housing prices schemes held by real estate developers, data on households’ incomes collected through the household survey and a review of the existing studies and socio-economic censuses reports. Findings reveal that the developed housing units are seriously and severely unaffordable for most of the target beneficiaries, especially the lowest-income urban dwellers, due to the high costs of housing development, combined with the high profits expected by real estate developers. The study suggests policy and practical options for promoting inclusive urban (re)development and housing affordability for various categories of Kigali city inhabitants. These options include upgrading the existing informal settlements, combined with their conversion into shared apartments through the collaboration between property owners and real estate developers, the development of affordable rental housing for the low-income tenants, tax exemption on construction materials, progressive housing ownership through a rent-to-own approach, and incremental self-help housing development using the low-cost local materials.

Monitoring inclusive urban development alongside a human rights approach on participation opportunities

ABSTRACT Visions of a society for all are closely intertwined with the question of how to develop inclusive communities. Social innovations are able to facilitate inclusion and catalyse the improvement of participation opportunities, especially in urban settings, as this is the place where positive and negative transformation becomes noticeable first. New legislation on international, national, as well as on regional and communal levels has set new goals and standards regarding social inclusion in urban structures, and monitoring and reporting efforts will show whether these requirements are met or not. In recent years, social monitoring and reporting systems have evolved and gained a human rights-based perspective by denoting the actual life-situation of people affected. On the basis of the human rights approach to participation, Germany started to reconfigure its reporting system. First municipalities have started to implement it. This Paper reflects on two different approaches to implement the new federal reporting system on a local level. Based on a generic context-understanding guide of innovative processes, collaborative municipal reporting is analysed as a social innovation itself. It especially tries to single out the benefits collaborative and interdisciplinary modes of work may hold for city administrations in the field of social reporting efforts.

Podejście zespolone: włączający, inteligentny i ekologiczny rozwój miast

The subject literature provides knowledge about various contemporary concepts of urban development, emphasizing a variety of goals and priorities of this process. Although sustainability should be a key objective of development policy, the methods of achieving it seem to be diverse. As a result, there are many theories describing development processes on a local scale, but there are no scientific attempts to summarise them or to comprehensively evaluate them. In the presented article such an attempt was initiated – the evolution of the concept of sustainable development in the context of transformation of the role of man in socio-economic and political processes from homo-oeconomicus to homo cooperativus was outlined and the assumptions of contemporary concepts of urban development (smart city, eco city and compact city) were identified and evaluated in terms of their cohesion and implementation of sustainable development principles. On this basis, a conceptual framework for an inclusive urban development model was defined, considering their key values in a synergic way.

Law and Inclusive Urban Development: Lessons from Chile’s Enabling Markets Housing Policy Regime

Abstract This Article addresses the recent international trend in development theory and practice towards an “enabling markets” approach in housing policy. This approach delegates to housing markets the responsibility of providing affordable housing and therefore limits the role of government to stimulating the private sector through targeted subsidies. I ask whether an enabling markets policy constitutes an adequate regulatory strategy for the provision of sustainable housing solutions for the urban poor. I explore this question through an in-depth case study of Chile’s housing policy regime, which was a pioneer in the implementation of an enabling markets strategy; for over four decades, successive governments have been able to provide access to housing to a vast portion of low-income residents, in the context of a regulatory framework that favors private real estate development. However, this success story is marred by an important failure. Through its market-based regime, Chile has routinely clustered low-income families on cheap land, usually located at the periphery of the country’s urban centers, and often in areas with poor public and private services. The main argument I present in this Article is that Chile’s commitment towards an enabling markets regulatory regime has helped to reinforce the pattern of urban exclusion, and has prevented the government from experimenting with alternative policy strategies that may be more effective in promoting inclusionary housing. The main limitation of the enabling markets strategy is that it assumes that the delivery of targeted subsidies will generate an adequate supply of affordable housing for the low-income sector. The Chilean experience shows that this assumption is false, because subsidies are rarely sufficient to enable beneficiaries to compete for well-located housing, while private companies have strong incentives to agglomerate low-income housing in the least desirable urban areas. I argue that, in order to promote urban inclusion, governments need to experiment with an alternative policy strategy that I call a “planning housing markets” approach, which involves using land-use governance mechanisms to ensure that low-income housing is fairly distributed within cities.

Urban Transformations and Land Governance in Peri‐Urban Khartoum: The Case of Soba

AbstractThe New Urban Agenda and SDG 11 promote inclusive urban development, but limited empirical knowledge exists on how such global rhetoric plays out on the ground. This paper contributes to the inclusive city debate by focusing on the case of Soba, a peri‐urban area at the fringes of the capital of Sudan. Based on an explorative study of secondary material, semi‐structured interviews and structured observations it aims to systematically analyse the dynamics of peri‐urban development. Findings show how the rising pressure on land results in commoditisation, (informal) land‐use changes and a multitude of other land transformations. The paper concludes that the mismatch of urban land policies has resulted in increasing fragmentation of urban space and socio‐spatial discrepancies between those who can afford to buy land or transform it into urban uses and those who cannot. It sheds fresh light on the challenges of the inclusive urban transition agenda.

Resituating Africa’s Urban Informal Food Sector

The complex dynamics of the informal food sector in urban Africa are poorly understood. Urban informal food systems are beginning to receive attention from scholars and policymakers, but the notable absence of detailed empirical information and necessary theoretical engagement with their emergence, structure, and operation has thus far limited efforts to understand the central role that they play in urban development processes. This Special Issue brings together a diverse collection of case studies from seven countries across the Global South—China, Jamaica, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, South Africa, and Uganda—to explore these dynamics by placing Africa’s urban informal food sector in comparative international context. This introduction provides an overview of how this Special Issue contributes to debates about the origins of informal food economies in cities in the Global South, the potential of the informal food sector to contribute to inclusive urban development, the relationship between informal food vendors and the state, and interactions between formal and informal food systems, all of which have important implications for theorizing urban governance and development in Africa and beyond.

Towards inclusive urban development? New knowledge/creative economy and wage inequality in major Chinese cities

Capitalist economic development and urbanization in recent decades has seen the rise of a knowledge-based economy and a widening income gap. Attempts to pursue a creativity-led urban development strategy amidst the ascent of a knowledge-based economy have led to the popularity of inclusive growth urban and regional policies. However, policy acceptance of the concept of inclusive growth and its cognate variations appears to have run ahead of serious empirical substantiation of a growth-inclusion nexus. This paper contributes to the emerging literature on inclusive growth and urbanization through an investigation of the patterns and determinants of industry-based wage inequality across 35 major cities in China during the period of 2003–2013. The empirical analysis identifies a distinctive process of simultaneous tertiarization and industrialization that contributed to the rise of wage inequalities in Chinese cities. It also reveals the significant role played by the Chinese state as enterprise owner, public employment provider, and social welfare supplier, in ameliorating income inequality in urban China. Our analysis draws attention to the contextualized nature of urban economic growth in order to understand its implications for inequality/inclusiveness.

Pathways for Sustainable and Inclusive Cities in Southern and Eastern Africa through Urban Green Infrastructure?

Cities in sub-Saharan Africa are currently confronted with a multitude, and hitherto unexperienced, magnitude of transformative phenomena such as rising inequality, exclusion, poverty and increased residency in informal settlements. These stressors are posing challenges to cities in terms of housing, infrastructure and provision of basic services as well as climate change adaptation. Despite the high dynamics and novel characteristics of city transformation, this urban transition seems to take place rather ‘quietly’ and has, so far, obviously hardly been understood or appreciated by researchers and governments. Subsequently, the multifaceted and extremely challenging problems associated with the process of urbanisation cannot be adequately addressed. Green infrastructure (GI) is currently emerging as a concept for cost-effective urban sustainability and livelihood security. Preservation and provision of accessible urban green spaces is increasingly recognised as an essential part of the liveability of cities. Extensive literature review revealed that the systematic integration of GI concepts in urban planning is seen by an increasing number of researchers as an essential approach to tackle major current and future challenges. Based on the literature review, we suggest that broadening the concept of urban GI by linking it to governance and rights-based conceptualisations will have the potential to unlock more resourceful paths for sustainable, green, and inclusive urban development of cities in Southern and Eastern Africa.

Participatory planning for climate resilient and inclusive urban development in Dosquebradas, Santa Ana and Santa Tomé

Urban governments need to take actions to reduce disaster risks and incorporate climate resilience into their development strategies and plans. But most local governments, particularly small- and medium-sized cities in the global South, lack the knowledge and capacity to do so. This paper presents the findings from a project that engaged local governments and other key stakeholders to develop a participatory planning process for climate resilient and inclusive urban development. The project took place in three small- to medium-sized Latin American cities: Dosquebradas, Colombia; Santa Ana, El Salvador; and Santo Tomé, Argentina. By engaging government officials and politicians, academics, technical specialists, and representatives of civil society organizations in interviews, workshops and focus group discussions, this project sought to identify a range of feasible options for climate resilient and inclusive urban development. In each city, this process provided rich, context-specific details to identify strategies and plan projects with the buy-in of city government and other key actors. The overall goal was to bring in a resilience lens to assess current and planned urban development projects in each city and reach a consensus on feasible and inclusive resilience options for development.

Urban Land Grabs in Africa?

Africa is rapidly urbanising. New dynamics of investments and mobilities ensue the expansive urbanisation, generating transformative effects on the continents urban land and built environment. The transformative effects are also on the future prospects for sustainable living conditions for African urban dwellers. This special issue of Built Environment has collected articles that carefully observe these effects, in order to explore whether these are indeed leading to ‘urban land grabs’, which take place in new forms of commodification and speculation of land and properties. We recognise that the trend of commodification and speculation is likely to intensify, as the new modernisation agenda is being propagated in the name of pursuing urban sustainability and resilience, corresponding to the New Urban Agenda and Sustainable Development Goals. At the same time, inclusive urban development is also debated in these international agendas, as ordinary citizens increasingly confront livelihood and land use changes, spatial alteration and social segregation, or physical displacement. In this context, we know little about how African urban dwellers’ experiences could be understood and used to envision genuinely sustainable and inclusive urban development. In this editorial, we give an overview of various emerging urban land investments and how they are experienced by urban dwellers. As shown in all the articles of this special issue, we argue that the far reaching impact of increased investments and mobilities leading to commodification and land speculation as well as the urban dwellers’ agency to navigate the impact deserve more attention in discussions on sustainable and inclusive urban development in Africa.

Who is in 'the Public'? Infrastructure of Displacement and Urban Resettlement in Mozambique

This paper explores possibilities of inclusive urban development by examining the relationships between physical infrastructure, displacement and resettlement. It pays particular attention to the notions of 'development' and 'the public'. Infrastructure as public works often justifies the displacement of people for the sake of the wider population's 'development'. It can also serve to benefit the displaced people if it includes them in the 'public' that participates in the 'development', especially in the form of ensuring a sound resettlement experience. The question is: how can this inclusion be envisioned and practised? To answer this question, this paper examines recent experiences of development-induced displacement and resettlement in Mozambique by using two examples: the Maputo?KaTembe bridge and its resettlement programme, as debated at the recent National Conference on Resettlement and in published sources, and the resettlement programme of the Limpopo National Park, based on primary field research. The paper analyses these resettlement experiences through three major accounts of infrastructure centred on state-building and formalization, co-production and heterogeneity, and open source and sharing urbanism. The paper argues that recognizing the heterogeneity and sharing aspects of infrastructure development in the post-resettlement context is key to reconstituting the public and promoting inclusive urban development in the major infrastructure development that accompanies displacement and resettlement.

Participatory energy: Research, imaginaries and practices on people' contribute to energy systems in the smart city

Scholarly research on smart cities already signalled that citizens' engagement is a fundamental requisite for the achievement of a sustainable and inclusive urban development. Accordingly, transition towards a fossil fuel free future is not to be understood as a matter of techno-economic innovation but as a process in which the ‘social’ and the ‘technical’ are inextricably intertwined, and technologies co-evolve with programmes of governing. Research findings from a recent bibliometric study reveal a very different picture where city dwellers are rarely the subject of research into future energy plans for transition towards a fossil future free future. Instead the research publications tend to concentrate on technological innovation for energy production and consumption. The findings are a concern given that the transition towards a fossil fuel free future will have a greater likelihood of success with public engagement and public acceptance. The paper explores the current transformation of sociotechnical imaginaries towards a more participatory idea of smart cities that emerge from real-world practices; and the resistances and resiliencies to this transformation in research domain. We discuss the evidences emerging from the research on communities energy against the literature on smart energy system.

Indicators for Measuring Spatial Justice and Land Tenure Security for Poor and Low Income Urban Dwellers

There exist various indicators that measure land tenure security for urbanites. Most of those indicators measure the degree to which land titling promotes the security of tenure. Based on the reviewed literature, it is admitted that land titling is not a panacea to land tenure security. Measuring the degree of land tenure security should not rely only on the legalisation of landownership. This paper makes a meta-analysis and conceptual modelling to connect spatial justice and land tenure security. It discusses the potential of inclusive urban development grounded on the claim that spatial justice enhances land tenure security. A comprehensive framework of indicators which can measure the degree of land tenure security from a spatial justice lens is thereafter derived. The meta-analysis and conceptual modelling were coupled with research synthesis to perform an in-depth review and qualitative content analysis of the literature on concepts of spatial justice, land tenure security, and urban (re)development processes. This study proposes 60 indicators which measure the degree of spatial justice and land tenure security along a continuum of spatial justice and land tenure security. Those indicators provide a more holistic approach for measuring land tenure security from a spatial justice lens than the separated sets of existing indicators.