Abstract
Informal settlements are on the frontline in the battle against climate change. Home to one billion people, their infrastructure deprivations pose challenges for the health and resilience of communities and ecosystems. Upgrading of informal settlements can improve urban services and infrastructure, strengthen tenure security, and empower local communities. This chapter examines the conceptual and practice relationships between climate resilience and in-situ upgrading. It critiques prevailing approaches, which centre upon threshold, coping, recovery, and adaptive capacities. Transformative capacity offers greater scope for addressing climate change impacts at a level commensurate with the size of the challenge, and for redressing the entrenched structural inequalities and deep socio-spatial injustices shaping cities in the Global South that perpetuate vulnerability and socio-spatial exclusion. Five elements are identified to advance transformative informal settlement upgrading: socio-technical innovation; a climate justice framing; greater attention to intersectional dimensions; inclusive governance and community empowerment; and fit for purpose finance.
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Notes
- 1.
The fifth measure—tenure security—is excluded from global estimates due to a lack of global agreement on the appropriate measure of this term (UN-Habitat 2016). As such, figures of one billion urban dwellers living in informal settlement conditions under-represent these characteristics globally.
- 2.
The second important element of a citywide approach is increasing the supply of formal housing concurrently with citywide upgrading (Payne 2005). This recognises that to reduce the formation of new informal settlements, and to provide housing for informal settlement households who may be affected by upgrading interventions, the supply of new housing which is affordable to low-income households is an essential part of housing and upgrading policy. Brazil’s ‘My House, My Life’ programme is a notable example: UN-Habitat (2013) Scaling-up affordable housing supply in Brazil: The ‘My House, My Life’ program. United Nations Human Settlements Program: Nairobi.
- 3.
While there are unique cases of relatively successful relocation (e.g. Cronin and Guthrie 2011), these are the exceptions rather than the norm.
- 4.
The Revitalising Informal Settlements and their Environments (RISE) programme is an example of leapfrogging informal settlement water and sanitation infrastructure to more environmentally sustainable socio-technical approaches. See: www.rise-program.org and Brown et al. (2018).
- 5.
For example, community-development funds (CDFs) initiated by the Asian Coalition for Community Action provide funding to informal settlement community groups across more than 100 cities (Archer 2012). Similarly, the Community-Led Infrastructure Finance Facility (CLIFF) provides capacity grants and revolving capital funds to non-profit and community groups to make investments in housing and upgrading (McLeod and Mullard 2006; World Habitat 2020).
- 6.
For example, based on empirical case study research in Malawi, Barrett (2014) demonstrates a stark mismatch; the areas most in need received relatively little finance, and therefore the ‘distribution of adaptation funds do not support the larger goal of climate justice’.
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French, M., Trundle, A., Korte, I., Koto, C. (2021). Climate Resilience in Urban Informal Settlements: Towards a Transformative Upgrading Agenda. In: de Graaf-van Dinther, R. (eds) Climate Resilient Urban Areas. Palgrave Studies in Climate Resilient Societies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57537-3_7
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