Bargaining in an informal city – who owns, who counts in?

Challenges for participatory development in informal urban settlements

Today’s world is characterized by unprecedented urban growth. According to general estimation, the urban and rural population worldwide has become equal and an expected scenario predicts to almost double the urban population within one generation. The surplus urban inhabitants may present a considerable volume of urban poor facing diverse deprivations and insecurity of housing and income. As vulnerability of the urban poor is highly connected to their inaccessibility to legal status, absence of security of tenure remains the core obstacle for urban poverty alleviation.

Secure land tenure presents a pre-condition to start upgrading without worries of losing human or financial investment in people’s assets. Once a settlement is recognized, a chance to mobilized human energy to build, to improve, to invest, to organize and to entrepreneur takes a place. However, securing land tenure does not ultimately mean decreasing one’s vulnerability. Firstly, outcomes of different approaches to assure slum dwellers’ housing stability should not be blindly romanticized. The widespread full titling approach or regularization may stimulate unauthorised constructions and informal settlements grow rather than disappear. Gentrification, exploitation of the poorest and jeopardy of their assets often present the immediate outcomes. Searching for a more flexible alternative to secure tenure should be in the focus.

Secondly, informal settlements have to be understood as highly heterogeneous communities with divergent interests, bargaining power and livelihood strategies. Not all slum dwellers are poor or vulnerable and not all urban poor live in slums, but dwell on pavements not having even hut. Understanding the complexity of people’s lives in deep is determining for an intended intervention to avoid repetition of failures in urban poverty alleviation programmes such as promotion of patronage or exclusion of marginalized groups. Thus, it is necessary to reconsider a role of politics and participation in the process.

The research is based on the hypothesis that land tenure plays an important role in power bargaining in slums and should be investigated with special focus on increasing/decreasing vulnerability of the urban poorest. It aims to study social interactions and power relations in informal urban settlements in India while assessing challenges for participatory development with emphasize on the land tenure, slum politics and gender.