Community-led resettlement/rehabilitation: slum dwellers, city managers transform cities together
By 2025, half the world's population will be living in cities, and one billion people will be living in slums. In Mumbai alone, 6 million people live in slums.
In 1984, when SPARC was formed, it began working with the pavement dwellers, the most vulnerable and invisible of Mumbai's urban poor, reasoning that solutions that worked for the city’s poorest and most marginalized could be scaled up to work for urban poor across India and internationally. SPARC has been working in partnership with the NSDF and MM since 1986; today, the Alliance works in about 70 cities in the country and has networks in about 20 countries internationally.
NSDF, founded in the mid 1970s, is a national organisation of community groups and leaders who live in slums/informal settlements across India and works with about half a million households. NSDF’s aim is to mobilise the urban poor to come together, articulate their concerns and find solutions to the problems they face.
Mahila Milan - "Women Together" in Hindi - is a decentralised network of poor women's collectives that manage credit and savings activities in their communities. Initiated in 1986 when 500 women who lived on Mumbai's pavements organised themselves to successfully prevent the demolitions of their homes, MM has since given out tens of thousands of loans to poor women all across the country and collected savings worth several crores of rupees.
Video posted on YouTube by SPARC on April 17, 2008.
Within the Alliance, NSDF organises and mobilises the urban poor and negotiates with resource providing institutions; MM supports and trains women's collectives to administer and manage their community's resources and participate in NSDF activities; SPARC provides the administrative, financial, policy, documentation and other support necessary for these processes to be successful on the ground.
The Alliance of SPARC, NSDF and Mahila Milan has assisted over 20,000 families that used to live in slums and on pavements to access secure and permanent housing. Since 2004, it has scaled up its work to another 150,000 families. Their strategy involves:
Setting up community centers called Area Resource Centers.
Encouraging communities to join a Savings and Credit program that builds trust within a settlement while strengthening financial assets of participating families.
Supporting communities to collect detailed information about themselves, called Enumerations, Mappings and Surveys, so that they can negotiate with local authorities from an informed position.
Facilitating communities to visit each other, share ideas and learn from each other's experiences and lessons through Peer Exchanges.
Organising Housing and Toilet Exhibitions which showcase affordable housing and sanitation solutions to government authorities as well as local populations.
Demonstrating through Pilot or Precedent Setting Projects the kinds of housing and infrastructure models that work for the poor as well as the city and can be scaled up substantially.
And finally, based on its grassroots mobilisation work and experience, advocating for pro-poor Policy Changes.
NSDF is part of Shack/Slum Dwellers International (SDI), based in Cape Town, South Africa, which organized the first such conference for slum dwellers in Cape Town in May 2006, and then took part in the World Urban Forum held in Vancouver Canada in June 2006. SDI contact: P.O. Box 14038, Mowbray 7705, Cape Town, South Africa. Email.
In the 1990s, the Suburban Railways of Mumbai, which are the city's life line, were falling apart. However, because slums encroached as close as 5 feet from the track, the authorities were unable to maintain or expand the lines. To undertake such a project meant that some 20,000 households would have to be relocated.
Slum dwellers on pavements, railway, airport and other lands have been members of the National Slum Dwellers federation for over two decades. In the late 1980s they had designed a strategy for community driven relocation. When the railways began talking of expanding the lines, the federations, through an alliance with SPARC, the NGO that works with them, presented their idea to the state government and railways. But nobody believed this was possible.
In 1998, about 800 families from the Railway Federation who were living along a stretch of the Central tracks decided to pioneer this process. Along with the state and railways they worked out a solution -- the government provided the land, the railways provided the infrastructure, and the communities demolished their own homes, built transit houses themselves and organised their shifting. No police force was used.
And for the first time in the city's history, based on the federation's community-led strategy, another 12,000 households moved.
This model of community-led resettlement is now being adopted across the city, country and world.
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