Slum Upgrading and Housing Alternatives for the Poor

Appraisal of Slum Upgrading In Cameroonian Cities: A Twin-Track City Management Framework for Adequate and Decent Affordable Housing

“…The result is the widespread proliferation of slums in the urban landscape. In their studies, [5] and [2] equally confirmed that the lack of political will by governments is one of the factors combining to result to the development of slums in cities and towns in Africa, with Cameroon included.…”

“…[3] further estimated that this could increase to 3 billion by 2050. In 2012 alone for instance, an estimated 863 million urban residents worldwide lived in slum conditions, compared with 760 million in 2000 and 650 million in 1990 [5]. In 2014, the UN-Habitat placed the global estimate of slum populations at 881 million, just under a third of all urban-dwellers in the developing world [6].…”

“…Source: Pieterse (2013) Slum upgrading, which is the principal component of the UN-Habitat Global Housing Strategy addressing housing conditions in cities, is widely recognized as the most proactive and effective way of improving the housing conditions and lives of the millions of low-income and BOP (bottom-of-thepyramid) households living in slums in African cities and towns, and thereby contributing to the achievement of Sustainable Development Goal 11: ensuring access for all urban households to adequate, safe, and affordable housing and basic services, as well as upgrading slums, by 2030 [5]. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), specifically Goal 11, aims to "make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable", with its first target seeking to "ensure access for all to adequate, safe and affordable housing and basic services, and upgrade slums" [12].…”

“…As such, the intended beneficiaries (slum dwellers) are not targeted by upgraded housing projects in cities and towns. As [5] equally found out, heavily subsidized housing (social housing in Cameroon) is unaffordable for the originally targeted slum dwellers and ends up being occupied by middle-income households. As a result, slum areas will not cease to emerge in our cities as the urban poor will utilise every opportunity to "improvise" their own housing to shelter themselves and their families especially for the short term.…”

Combatting Slums, Suistaining Poverty: Dynamic Urban Governance in Makassar, Indonesia

“…The basic concept in physical improvement in slums according to Michiani and Asano (2019) consists of three elements: (1) regulating road networks as the basic system that composes settlements, (2) building a public utility system that is important for livelihoods, and (3) providing public spaces and facilities as "external organs" that form identities and reveal the physical beauty of the location. While (Bah, et. al., 2018) looked at several factors that underlie the success of slums handling strategies carried out by many countries through pro-growth urbanization policies and economic reforms, namely: (1) Increasing the productivity of urban poor by developing skills and providing access to microcredit; (2) improving the living conditions of the poor through basic service provision and the development of slums, (3) providing guarantees of ownership for poor families living in illegal settlements and increasing their access to low-cost housing and subsidized housing, (4 ) empowering the urban poor through community development and encouraging their participation in decision making.…”