In many cities and urban areas in Africa, land acquisition for urban redevelopment, land readjustment, and resettlement of affected urban residents are currently framed as innovative approaches to eradicating informal settlements, improving the living environments, and supporting the implementation of newly adopted city Master Plans. Nevertheless, it is not yet known how the responses of institutions and affected people shape these processes. Based on research conducted in Kigali, Rwanda, this article discusses affected residents’ responses to land expropriation and resettlement necessary for urban redevelopments. Our findings show that affected informal settlement dwellers voiced their concerns over the deviations from the Expropriation Law, compensation decision-making made behind closed doors, lack of transparency in property valuation, and compensation packages that they perceive to be unfair. Some of the consequences of these concerns are strong feelings of unfairness, exclusion, and marginalisation; distrust and increased perceptions of impoverishment risks, all of which fuel contestation and resistance attitudes among the affected landowners. The affected landowners agitate to assert their rights and stake their claims through contestations, community mobilisation, and legal recourse. We conclude that such contestations constitute claimed spaces and interactions in which affected landowners are laying claim to fair processes against the ‘’exceptionality’’ and the “decide-defend” decision-making approaches, while local authorities assert legitimacy of their decisions. Critically, informal households affected by urban redevelopments see opportunities for participation in their resettlement decision-making as fundamental to securing their future.
Rapid urbanization and frequent natural disasters have substantially increased the number of urban households-especially poor households-that have to be relocated away from their homes and communities (Satiroglu and Choi, 2015). Urbanization in developing countries is associated with many challenges, among them poverty and viral growth of informal settlements, many of which are often exposed to various natural hazards (Manirakiza, 2014). Resettlement is one option for reducing the risk of natural disasters that is being adopted both before and after the occurrence of a disaster (Correa et al., 2011). Governments and international agencies increasingly consider resettlement of vulnerable urban communities as a risk reduction strategy (Ibrahim et al., 2015
Introduction
Livelihood impacts and impoverishment risks in induced displacement and resettlementDisplacement and resettlement may bring some benefits to resettled informal settlement dwellers, including potential improvements in housing conditions and access to some basic infrastructure (Li & Song, 2009;Vickery, 2017). However, some evidence suggests that induced * This chapter is based on a published paper:
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.