From Local Action to Global Networks: Housing the Urban Poor

Understanding formal and informal relationships in settlement upgrading for planning just and inclusive cities: the case of Phnom Penh, Cambodia

“…This demonstrated that formal and informal relationships in governance spaces are characterized by a negotiability of value of citizenship and legitimacy (AlSayyad & Roy, 2004). Within this negotiability of value, collective action is necessary for overcoming the vulnerabilities that the urban poor face in cities in the global south like Phnom Penh, characterized by inequality, authoritarian governance, and processes of accumulation by dispossession enabled by the commodification of land and housing, and neoliberal and market-oriented policies (Cabbanes, Yafai & Johnson, 2010;Herrle, Ley, Fokdal, 2015). This happens because the negotiation of citizenship and legitimacy is evidently and necessarily a negotiation about power.…”

“…Thus, in Phnom Penh as many other cities of South East Asia the urban poor rely on practising covert planning and insurgent citizenship, inventing spaces of participation or using the limited invited spaces (Miraftab, 2009) opened by donors and civil society organizations to make their claims visible to the state. As the case of Phka shows, within invented and invited spaces of participation (Miraftab, 2009) the urban poor need to develop collective strategies such as building networks and saving groups, building relationships with key organizations and key actors in cities, conducting legal research and producing information through enumerations to gain power and expand this power to influence the structures of government to gain the possibilities to access land, housing, infrastructure and, in some cases, political recognition (Boonyabancha, 2009;Patel, Baptist and D'Cruz, 2012;Herrle, Ley & Fokdal, 2015).…”

“…These collective strategies are then sources of power that the urban poor use to achieve visibility and recognition in cities (Herrle, Ley & Fokdal, 2015). The case of umbrella organizations like Slum Dwellers International and the Asian Coalition for…”

“…Both enumerations and saving groups are practices of citizenship that have resulted in the empowerment of urban poor communities and a change in the donor-beneficiary relationship that characterizes most approaches used in informal settlement upgrading. The political support gained through these processes is stronger when linkages are expanded through networks of urban poor communities operating at the neighbourhood, city, national and international scales (Herrle, Ley & Fokdal, 2015).…”

“…These networks help empower the urban poor by reducing their isolation and catalyzing collective action within poor communities and various actors to penetrate the structures of power in cities and achieve access to land, housing and infrastructure at the city scale (Boonyabancha, 2009;Leonhardt, 2012). Thus, networks are a key strategy when conceptualizing slum upgrading as transformation as I explained in Chapter 3, as by empowering the urban poor, networks help to include a political dimension in upgrading processes transforming marginalization and exclusion (Herrle, Ley, Fokdal, 2015).…”