Making Children Matter in Slum Transformations: Lessons from India's National Urban Renewal Mission

Abstract

This paper looks at two successful slum redevelopment projects under India's flagship urban renewal mission, which mandate citizen participation and inclusive planning to create planned equitable cities. It examines how children's concerns are addressed and children's well-being is affected in the best of projects. The two case studies represent different design and planning approaches to in-situ redevelopment: (1) replacing the slum with flats; and (2) selective infill houses. The paper, in discussing the planning and design process adopted by the two projects, seeks to answer the question: what can urban design learn from children's use and activities in the urban space of slums to provide qualitatively superior local areas, and from children's perceptions of slum upgrading and redevelopment?

Acknowledgements

As the principal investigator of that research, the author thanks the ACE research team for their valuable contribution in developing in-depth case studies; and non-profit organizations COSTFORD and MASHAL for providing valuable insights and allowing complete access to the project sites in Thiruvananthapuram and Pune respectively. All figures presented in this paper are the copyright of ACE.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

^1. Infill housing in this context involved selecting obsolete or impermanent or makeshift structures and replacing them with a new house of floor area 270 square feet on the vacated site.

^2. The Hindi word pucca means stable, permanent. A pucca house is a superior house made of durable materials such as bricks, stones, reinforced cement concrete etc.

^3. The Hindi word kutcha means crude or rough and when used in the context of housing refers to a house, the walls and/or roof of which are made of easily available, cheap, fast-decaying materials such as unburnt bricks, bamboo, mud, grass, reeds, thatch, loosely packed stones etc. The BSUP infill housing projects sought to replace kutcha houses with pucca ones.

^4. Five Year Plans are centralized and integrated national economic programmes that guide India's economic development monitored by the Planning Commission.

^5. Affordances are meaningful information about functional possibilities that a person picks up from the environment and may use them to fulfil some need, activity or interest. Places that afford doing things in it and with it interactively engage children.

^6. Kudumbashree is a society comprising local women's groups at the neighbourhood, area and ward level in Kerala that serves as the community wing of Local Governments. It plays significant roles in development activities, particularly as the state nodal agency for all poverty eradication programmes.

^7. COSTFORD (The Center of Science and Technology for Rural Development) is a non-profit organization based out of Kerala working towards improving the lives of the poor by applying appropriate technologies in construction.

^8. MASHAL (Maharashtra Social Housing and Action League) is an NGO based in Pune. It primarily works in the area of housing for the urban poor.

Additional information

Funding

The author would like to acknowledge the Bernard van Leer Foundation for supporting the six city assessment of BSUP projects in India from the perspective of children's well-being which this paper draws upon.