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Incremental housing is a gradual process whereby residents incrementally improve or extend their houses by themselves, whenever funding or time becomes available. This approach has attracted attention as an affordable way of improving poor living conditions in slums often with sites-andservices scheme. In many cases, this approach is coupled with an emphasis on self-help sweat equity, which can be strengthened by active community involvement. This study seeks to suggest a way of combining a scheme of empowering self-reliant communities with incremental housing. Based on the lessons from previous slum upgrade projects in Jinja, Uganda, this study points out the necessity of 1) more sustainable approach with self-help incremental housing than one-time grant-based projects, 2) an assisted way of empowering community and providing training schemes, 3) a temporary shelter for original dwellers who are affected by slum upgrade projects, and 4) an inclusive scheme for tenants who are frequently ignored in many slum upgrade schemes. This study proposes a 'Self-Reliance Centre (SRC)', which is designed to function as a space for community empowerment, a training centre, and a temporary shelter for incremental housing scheme in slum upgrade. As an assisted self-help approach, the SRC in incremental housing has a feature of initial involvement by public sector to invite eventual self-reliance of communities for sustainability in incremental housing.

One positive impact of smart cities is reducing energy consumption and CO2 emission through the use of information and communication technologies (ICT). Energy transition pursues systematic changes to the low-carbon society, and it can benefit from technological and institutional advancement in smart cities. The integration of the energy transition to smart city development has not been thoroughly studied yet. The purpose of this study is to find empirical evidence of smart cities’ contributions to energy transition. The hypothesis is that there is a significant difference between smart and non-smart cities in the performance of energy transition. The Smart Energy Transition Index is introduced. Index is useful to summarize the smart city component’s contribution to energy transition and to enable comparison among cities. The cities in South Korea are divided into three groups: (1) first-wave smart cities that focus on smart transportation and security services; (2) second-wave smart cities that provide comprehensive urban services; and (3) non-smart cities. The results showed that second-wave smart cities scored higher than first-wave and non-smart cities, and there is a statistically significant difference among city groups. This confirms the hypothesis of this paper that smart city development can contribute to the energy transition.

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