IN_SITU - An investigation of functions and future strategies for Leprosy Colony

The world is urbanizing and many cities in developing countries are unable to accommodate the masses of new city residents. Slums are an immediate response to this process, and in India over 50% of the urban population lives in slums. Different ideas and methods of slum reduction have been present i...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Bratel, Johanna, Hellqvist, Stina
Formato: Second cycle, A2E
Lenguaje:sueco
Inglés
Publicado: 2012
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://stud.epsilon.slu.se/3855/
Descripción
Sumario:The world is urbanizing and many cities in developing countries are unable to accommodate the masses of new city residents. Slums are an immediate response to this process, and in India over 50% of the urban population lives in slums. Different ideas and methods of slum reduction have been present in India during the 20th century, which started off with a focus on slum clearance. As pure slum clearance eventually turned out to be unsuccessful in practise as slum dwellers remained unable to integrate in the formal housing market, but simply rebuilt their huts illegally, clearance in combination with resettling on a new location instead became the prevailing idea. This method is still in practice in India, and pre-fabricated residential buildings (often in form of multi-storey slab blocks) are built by the government all over the country. Through the work of many NGO’s, new ways of handling urban slums are however coming. Slum upgrading where the existing structures are upgraded insitu in collaboration with the slum community is an increasingly used method, although still in very small scale. SPARC, a major actor on the Indian NGO scene, has for example tried to use these methods in a slum upgrading project in Pune where only selected houses of poor quality were demolished and rebuilt, and the rest was upgraded. The problem is that these alternative ideas of slum rehabilitation are still rare, and the dominating methods of pre-fabricated, multi-storey projects are generally unsuccessful. On the wide-ranging level, one could say that they are unsustainable; socially (because they alter the slum dwellers’ social networks), economically (because they are not adapted to slum dwellers’ economic situation and income-generating strategies) and environmentally (because they don’t take existing structures and materials in consideration).