Colonias are low-income settlements on the US-Mexico border characterized by poor infrastructure, minimum services, and an active housing construction with a high self-help and self-management component. Housing in colonias is very diverse showing house forms that include temporary and permanent structures, campers, trailers or manufactured houses and conventional homes. Most of this housing does not meet construction standards and codes and is considered substandard. Colonias households are also of diverse nature and composition including single households, nuclear and extended families, as well as multiple households sharing lots. This wide variety of house forms and households in colonias fits poorly within the nuclear household, single family detached housing idealized by conventional low-income housing projects, programs and policies. As a result, colonias marginally benefit from the resources available to them and continue to depend mostly on the individual efforts of their inhabitants. This research identifies the housing diversity and the process of housing consolidation in colonias of the US-Mexico border by looking at the patterns of house form and household arrangements in colonias of South Texas. Ten colonias located to the east of the city of Laredo along Highway 359 in Webb County, Texas were selected based on their characteristics, data availability and accessibility. Data collected included periodic aerial images of the colonias spanning a period of 28 years, household information from the 2000 census disaggregated at the block level for these colonias, and information from a field survey and a semi structured interview made to a random sample of 123 households between February and June 2007. The survey collected information about house form and household characteristics. The survey also incorporated descriptive accounts on how households completed their house from the initial structure built or set on the lot until the current house form. Data was compiled and analyzed using simple statistical methods looking for identifiable patterns on house form and household characteristics and changes over time. Findings showed that housing in colonias is built and consolidated following identifiable patterns of successive changes to the house form. Findings also showed that households in colonias share characteristics that change over time in similar ways. These results suggest similarities of colonias with extra-legal settlements in other developing areas. Based on these findings, the study reflects on possible considerations that could improve the impact of projects, programs and policies directed to support colonias and improve colonias housing.

This Master thesis is written in the field of collaborative planning aiming to challenge the collaborative approach on it applicability, especially in the context of the Global South. As a case study it looks on the urban poor community participatory practice, the so called 're-blocking' in Cape Town – an example of insitu informal settlement upgrading. It questions not only to what extent re-blocking displays a successful approach of collaborative planing but also whether it can lead to more inclusive cities in South Africa. The field data was gained through qualitative semi-structured interviews, observations and an analysis of national housing policy documents. The findings evaluate re-blocking as a successful example of collaborative planning in the sense that local communities are truly involved in the process and have a lot of decision making power. Also, re- blocking can be replicable to other cities in South Africa. Yet it faces several risks in community mobilisation and communication and can only be operated on a small scale. Therefore, the thesis concludes that re-blocking itself may not lead to inclusive cities, however as an example of community participation it may change the mindset of the South African society and (local) government towards informal community inclusion.

El presente artículo tiene como objetivo analizar el papel que los medios de comunicación, especialmente la prensa escrita en su papel digitalizado, tienen en el proceso de estigmatización de un barrio pobre y segregado de la Comunidad de Madrid, España. Para ello, hemos utilizado las noticias aparecidas en los periódicos de uno de los mayores asentamientos informales de España, La Cañada Real Galiana a su paso por Madrid. Identificados sus cerca de 15 km de extensión con categorías como sucia, desordenada, caótica, ilegal y marginal, además de ligarla con el tráfico de drogas y otras actividades delictivas en los últimos años, la creación y rápida divulgación de una narrativa que la estigmatiza ha sido posibilitada por su vinculación con los valores opuestos a los implícitos en el nuevo modelo de desarrollo urbano. / This article has as objective to analyze the role that the media, especially the written press in your scanned paper, are in the process of stigmatization of a poor neighborhood and segregated from the Community of Madrid, Spain). To do this, we have used the news which appeared in the newspapers about one of the largest informal settlements of Spain, La Cañada Real Galiana passing through Madrid. Its near 15 km in length have identified with categories such as dirty, disorderly, chaotic, illegal and marginal, in addition with drug trafficking and other criminal activities in recent years, the creation and rapid dissemination of a narrative that stigmatized has been made possible by linking them to the opposite values to those implicit in the new model of urban development.

This dissertation examines the effect of environmental discourse and disaster risk reduction mapping in the favela Santa Marta, an urban informal settlement in the municipality of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. With the world’s largest urban forest within the metro area, Rio de Janeiro is unusual for a metropolis of more than ten million people in the rapidly urbanizing country of Brazil. The government of Rio de Janeiro has attempted to control favela settlements since the early 20th century, but beginning in the 1990s the prefecture began delimiting favela settlements with environmentally protected areas called ecolimits. According to the state’s calculations, in the 2000s favelas began to rapidly expand into the urban forest, which is protected by the ecolimits and national parks. In 2009, the state built a wall around Santa Marta, justified by concerns about expansion into the adjacent forest. The state then labeled Santa Marta the model favela after infrastructure improvements there and the installation of the first Pacification Police Unit, a new form of community policing begun in 2008 for favelas. The focus of my study is the particular ways that the government has framed its resettlement efforts in Santa Marta and how favela residents responded. I employ the concept of biopolitics assemblage to critically investigate the state’s and international institutions’ discursive and material practices of disaster risk management in Santa Marta. I collected data using a mixed methods approach during 15 months of fieldwork. Through archival research, I document the history of favela control tactics and trace the roots of disaster risk management in Rio de Janeiro to a World Bank financed disaster response project initiated in 1988. Using ethnographic methods, I documented residents’ responses to and understandings of the government’s resettlement project for Santa Marta. My results indicate that the state has discursively shifted the problem of favelas from a social question to an environmental one, while residents continue to frame favela conditions as a social justice issue and challenge the state’s assessment of environmental risk.

The study takes its point of departure in the urgent problem of slums that follow on the rapid urbanisation worldwide. Focusing on the small informal settlement of Kambi Moto in Nairobi, Kenya, the study tries to answer the question of how power can be worked out in slum upgrading – a way to change the physical environment of a slum without demolishing and rebuilding the whole settlement. The theoretical tool to answer this question is taken from Edward Soja’s reading of Henry Lefebvre in the concept Thirdspace – an extended and politicised way to look at space, where space is not only seen as a stage for historical and social processes, but as something that is shaping our thoughts and actions; a social space that includes and goes beyond the material Firstspace and the mental Secondspace. From a spatialized reading of history today’s situation – where 60 % of the population of Nairobi live in informal settlements – is traced back to the ideological structuring of space in the colonial cityplans. The informal settlements are established as a Thirdspace: both a negative outcome of the dominating Secondspace of the colonial administration and as a counterspace, where traditional ways of life could live on and where revolutionary movements could grow. The study then focus on how the two scales to view the city, the macro and the micro, are resolved in the Shack/Slum Dwellers International (SDI), a global network of local federations that organizes slum dwellers. The network empowers the individual slum dweller in making him/her an actor in a peer to peer exchange, and also creates a social space for political struggle. This is manifested in Muungano wa Wanavijiji, a citywide movement for a collective struggle for spatial rights, empowering the slum dwellers in taking charge of the social production of human spatiality. In a case study of a slum upgrading effort in Kambi Moto the shifting of power from the government, international organisations and professionals to the lived Thirdspace of the habitants, as well as the internal power relations within the community, are looked at in a concrete situation.

As a mega-city and the most populated city in Africa, Cairo is characterised by a high birth rate, escalating rural-urban migration and where the socio-economic services are centralized and overwhelmed, these generally poor migrants have no choice other than to create and develop their own informal shelter in the outer city areas that lay farthest from the reach of the authorities and from where they then search for better job opportunities. The expansion of these slum areas places an extra burden on the already deteriorated natural and unplanned urban environments. No government or public sector mass production housing units . inherited from the former socialist system . have been able to cope with the magnitude of housing demand nor is the private sector interested in investing in a non-profitable market. At this juncture there is an urgent requirement for new ways of thinking that address the realities of the situation and consider integrated socioeconomic long-term solutions for the informal settlements. Under the Egyptian-German Cooperation, GTZ (Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Technische Zusammenarbeit) proposed the Participatory Urban Upgrading Program as a possible means of addressing the problem which is based on stimulation, promotion and effective participation of local communities in the upgrading process. The Participatory Urban Upgrading Program operates at two levels, (i) the local level: through .Demonstration projects. to be applied to a limited geographical area. Ezbet Bekhit Demonstration Project is the case of the present study and (ii) the national level: the experiences gained through several .Demonstration Projects. will give substance, and thereby prominence to the participatory approach, so that the Program has an increasingly beneficial impact on the national policy. The experiences gained from Ezbet Bekhit Upgrading Project will offer the opportunity to examine the main concept expressed by the Program and increase the prospects of having an impact on the urban upgrading policy at the national level. The current study attempts to develop and assess the overall Participatory Upgrading Programme and Ezbet Bekhit Project within a framework of benchmarks extracted from the program concept. At the Project level, the focus of thesis analysis is based on aspects that explain the Project’s approach to solving basic problems. Attention is placed on the involvement of local inhabitants in the solutions at the planning and implementation levels. A Model of Community Participation is proposed for application in a selected upgrading component. The Model is based on the .Community Action Planning., which has been developed by Hamdi and Goethert as an appropriate planning tool that can stimulate and organize a non-cohesive community type. At the Program level, recommendations are presented in this study, which have been extracted from the main pillars of the Program concept and characterized the driving forces influencing the main objectives and orientating the goals of the upgrading projects. It is contended that an in-depth understanding and analysis of the specific socio-economic conditions and the community profile of the selected informal settlements; together with an explicit governmental policy supporting the Participatory Urban Upgrading Approach will enhance the success of Participatory Projects.

對於已開發國家而言，都市土地的開發往往趨於飽和，因此多藉助舊有土地再開發之策略增加居住或者使用空間，並以此為「公共利益」而證立其正當性。然而，開發行為亦涉及諸多對人權之干預，尤其在強制拆遷的執行上，一方面侵害既有居住者之私人與家庭生活，另方面則因欠缺程序權保障而徒增糾紛。同時，因為臺灣當前對強制拆遷之司法論述，仍聚焦於財產權範疇，而使司法人權保障難以及於非正式住居者。 本文擬以非正式住居之居住權保障為中心，整合人權法治與政治思想，透過國際人權法與當代正義理論的詮釋，以討論公權力主張公共利益執行強制拆遷之界限。本文主張，衡平權利衝突之公共利益，應進一步以差異政治之觀點加以審視。法律做為一種權利保障機制，應避免制度設計對於對社會弱勢形成壓迫、支配。故自承認政治的觀點出發，非正式住居者亦應受正當法律程序保障，才是社會正義實踐之基礎。 / For developed countries, urban region was overdeveloped. Facing with this condition, the government used to resort to the strategy of urban renew, trying to make the most efficient use of the urban land and claim the renew project was based on the public interest. However, the urban renew project execution often violate the human right condition, especially the execution of forced eviction. In Taiwan, the government disobeyed the due process principle, infringed the right to respect for private and family life. The process also resulted the conflict between government and citizens. Such kind of dilemma reveals that the legal protection of housing right was limited primarily to the property rights, and it’s also the reason why informal settlement resident in Taiwan still couldn’t acquire the legal protection. In this article, we will focus on the housing right of the informal settlement and ascertain the boundary of the public interest in which created by urban renew, by the international humanitarian law and contemporary justice theory perspectives. In the end, from the point of the politics of difference, we consider that the informal-settled resident still should have the legal due process protection. The law should protect the social vulnerable from the oppression and domination of the injustice institution.

Bahir Dar is one of the rapidly growing Ethiopian cities characterized by the rise of informal settlements. The expansion of spontaneous neighbourhoods in Bahir Dar is, among other things, conditioned by land management policies and practices. Thus, the intention of this research was to explore the influences of land management on the prevalence of informal settlements in Bahir Dar city, Ethiopia. So as to meet the study targets this research employed mixed method approach, and the data were gathered from various sources by applying different methods. The quantitative data was drawn from 156 random samples through household surveys. It was collected from four FGDs, interview of eight community elders, sub-cities and municipality officials and code enforcement professionals. Furthermore, case studies, published and unpublished documents, photographs, and satellite images were used to enrich the analysis. To analyse quantitative data, SPSS statistical software was used to extract descriptive statistics, to test hypotheses and to draw tables and various types of graphs. Content analysis was employed to analyse qualitative data. It was found that expansion of informal settlements in Bahir Dar was caused, among others, by Poverty of inhabitants, rural-urban migration, limited capacity of the city to deliver basic services, low housing supply and high housing demand, and limitations in land lease laws, as well deficiency of essential amenities like water, sanitation and electricity. The influences of land management policies and practices that resulted to prevalence of informal settlements were found to be the subjective implementation of housing and land leasing policies, harsh government farm expropriation and very low compensation payments, weak governance practices in land administration, frequent demolishing of houses and precarious security of tenure. Even though informal settlements help to address the housing shortage in the city and contribute to environmental management in some areas of the city, it is largely intimidating environmental management, deteriorating the livelihoods and thus brought about the unsustainable city development. In order to address the challenges of informal settlements, it was suggested that legal framework to formalize informal settlements, develop an effective and efficient land administration system, improving good governance in land administration, establish land and housing policies favouring low-income population, and bring about attitude change favourable to urban development are essential. / Environmental Sciences / D. Litt. et Phil. (Environmental Management)

No abstract available. / Thesis (M.T.R.P.)-University of Natal, Durban, 1996.

No description available.