causes of informal settlements essay

When planning falls short: the challenges of informal settlements

PhD Candidate and Research Assistant in Urban Design, The University of Melbourne

PhD Candidate, Australian-German Climate & Energy College, The University of Melbourne

Postdoctoral Research Fellow, The University of Melbourne

PhD Candidate in Urban Planning, The University of Melbourne

Research Fellow, McCaughey VicHealth Community Wellbeing Unit, Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, The University of Melbourne

Disclosure statement

Hesam Kamalipour receives IPRS and APA scholarships from the Australian Government. He is also a Doctoral Academy member at the Melbourne Social Equity Institute (MSEI).

Alexei Trundle receives research funding from the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat), and an Australian Postgraduate Award from the Australian Government.

André Stephan receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Hayley Henderson receives an APA scholarship from the Australian Government.

Melanie Lowe receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council and the National Environmental Science Programme.

University of Melbourne provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation AU.

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Informal settlements house around one-quarter of the world’s urban population . This means roughly 1 billion urban dwellers live in settlements that have emerged outside of the state’s control.

The Habitat III conference in Quito in October recognised informal settlements as a critical issue for sustainable urban development. But how did informal settlements come to make up such a large part of the world’s cities?

Resorting to informal housing

Rates of urbanisation can fluctuate rapidly and be hard to predict. This makes planning for urban growth a challenge, especially in developing countries, where more than 90% of urban growth is occurring. When data or government capacity is limited, housing shortages often result.

With formal housing too expensive or unavailable, urban migrants must improvise. Many resort to informal housing.

Informal settlements are generally undocumented or hidden on official maps. This is because the state usually sees them as temporary or illegal.

Over the past 50 years, governments have tried to deal with these areas in a number of ways. Strategies have included denial, tolerance, formalisation, demolition and displacement.

While efforts to improve settlements and anticipate future ones are becoming more common, the desire for eradication persists in many cities. Forced evictions in various parts of the world are putting the rights of informal settlement dwellers at risk .

Over time, however, it has been recognised that poverty and inequality cannot be simply eradicated through demolition or eviction. In the developing world, one-third of the urban population now lives in slums . In Africa, the proportion is 62%.

Many cities are looking for alternatives that formalise these areas through incremental, on-site upgrading. In addition to offering effective protection against forced evictions, it is critical to provide access to basic services, public facilities and inclusive public spaces.

We need to adopt integrated approaches that cut across urban scales and disciplines. These need to involve stakeholders from government, citizens and other organisations. Design thinking is essential in this process to meet the challenges of urbanisation.

The role of the New Urban Agenda

The Habitat III conference adopted a New Urban Agenda for the United Nations. This document presents a road map for sustainable urban development until Habitat IV in 2036.

While the quality of life for some informal settlement dwellers has improved over recent decades, growing inequality pushes more people into informal housing. As a result, the growth rate of informal settlements often outstrips upgrading processes.

The UN Human Settlements Program (UN-Habitat) was one of the key agencies involved in Habitat III. Since Habitat II, UN-Habitat has worked extensively on housing and slum upgrading . The New Urban Agenda incorporates lessons from this process.

An example is the need for innovative small investment models for informal housing and their inhabitants’ transport needs. The agenda also acknowledges the informal settlements located in hazard-prone areas. Their inhabitants often need more help with reducing the risks and building resilience.

The way forward

Dealing with informal settlements is an issue of inequality. This inequality is both social and spatial in nature, across cities worldwide.

It is problematic that spatial thinking does not have a high profile in the New Urban Agenda. While urban design by itself cannot reduce social inequality and urban poverty, much can be learned from cutting-edge practices that integrate design thinking into upgrading informal settlements.

One key lesson is that incremental housing (a step-by-step process of upgrading) can be a critical part of the solution. Incrementalism allows informal housing to be adapted over time. It also means community engagement is central to governments’ handling of informal settlements.

Another learning is that evidence-based, multi-scale and multidisciplinary approaches are essential to tackle the challenges of informal settlements. Such integrated approaches intervene at multiple scales to provide a network of public open space and access to affordable public transport and facilities.

Most informal settlements – but for a few exceptions located in hazardous areas – need to be upgraded incrementally and on the same site.

Are we prepared?

When it comes to the critical role of design thinking in the process of urbanisation, built environment professionals need to be prepared to tackle the challenge of informal settlements.

Incremental and on-site upgrading relies on a sophisticated understanding of informal settlement forms and adaptations.

Universities have a key role in equipping future built environment professionals with the skills and knowledge needed to meet the real challenges of urbanisation. Informal settlements are here to stay.

To better integrate these settlements into cities globally, they need to be recognised – politically, socially and spatially – and made visible through the gaze of mapping and research.

• Affordable housing
• Cities & Policy
• Habitat III
• Informal settlements
• New Urban Agenda

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Causes of Informal Settlement in Africa: A systematic review

2024, ADRRI JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN DEVELOPMENT

This paper presents the results of a systematic review aimed at identifying the underlying causes of informal settlements on the continent. Through a meticulous screening process, 92 papers were selected for qualitative analysis from an initial pool of 574 eligible items. The study elucidates that informal settlements emerge as a consequence of rapid urbanization and serve as stark indicators of urban poverty, proliferating in improvised forms within and around African cities. Key systemic issues contributing to the expansion of informal settlements include the lack of access to affordable housing, inadequacies in spatial planning policies, and deficiencies in land management systems, all exacerbated by the challenges of growing urban poverty. Despite variations across national contexts, countries grappling with informal settlement growth share common underlying problems. The findings underscore the enduring nature of informal settlements and advocate for a nuanced understanding of their complexities. Efforts to address these challenges necessitate a holistic approach that integrates the informal settlements into local government policies. Recognizing the resilience and agency of informal settlement dwellers, the study emphasizes the need for inclusive strategies that harness the economic potential of these communities. In conclusion, the study posits that informal settlements are unlikely to vanish and calls for heightened attention to be paid to these settlements within urban policy frameworks. By incorporating informal settlements into policy discourse and interventions, governments can strive towards more equitable and sustainable urban development trajectories across Africa.

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Informal settlements

In most African cities, more than half of residents live in informal settlements, with insecure tenure, a lack of basic services and infrastructure, and often unsafe housing. It is now widely recognised within policy and academic circles that such households tend to be best served by upgrading programmes that enable them to remain in situ, without disrupting their livelihoods and social networks.

Informal settlement upgrading is a significant poverty reduction mechanism, enabling low-income households to secure essential services at a lower cost, improve their social status, and overcome spatial inequality. It also helps address the needs of vulnerable groups, such as women-headed households and people with disabilities, as well as offering multiple opportunities for income generation.

City elites are increasingly recognising the potential that informal settlement upgrading has for enhancing their popularity. Our research closely analyses the politics underpinning such interventions. With multiple actors involved and a number of contentious issues shaping the challenge of upgrading, the complexities of the process and the overlaps with other urban development domains are a key focus in our work.

Within the informal settlements domain, we are focusing on the following cities:

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Revisiting the “Informal Settlement” Phenomenon

• First Online: 24 April 2018

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This chapter provides a broad theoretical overview of informality by outlining some popular misconceptions on informality: that informal settlements are solely a developing countries’ problem; that those myths are essentially long-gone; and, that the distinction between formality and informality still holds. This chapter briefly touches on each of these myths and offers a fairly broad conceptual framework arguing that as the backbone of any physical upgrading policy, enabling or enablement of informal settlements should reflect the juxtaposition of two simultaneous undercurrents, namely, the “ formalization of the informal” and the “ informalization of the formal.” As part of this debate, the chapter takes a hard look at a series of government policies that have been in vogue in response to slum or informal settlement upgrading including benign neglect, forced relocation or evacuation, self-help, public housing, redevelopment and eventually, enabling since the 1950s and 1960s. Showcasing the legality–illegality discourse as a hotly debated component of informal settlements, this conceptual framework revisits the formal–informal nexus by distinguishing between regularization vs. regularizing aspects of each policy.

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Arefi, M. (2018). Revisiting the “Informal Settlement” Phenomenon. In: Learning from Informal Settlements in Iran. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78408-3_2

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