This paper highlights the major challenges and considerations for addressing COVID-19 in informal settlements. It discusses what is known about vulnerabilities and how to support local protective action. There is heightened concern about informal urban settlements because of the combination of population density and inadequate access to water and sanitation, which makes standard advice about social distancing and washing hands implausible. There are further challenges to do with the lack of reliable data and the social, political and economic contexts in each setting that will influence vulnerability and possibilities for action. The potential health impacts of COVID-19 are immense in informal settlements, but if control measures are poorly executed these could also have severe negative impacts. Public health interventions must be balanced with social and economic interventions, especially in relation to the informal economy upon which many poor urban residents depend. Local residents, leaders and community-based groups must be engaged and resourced to develop locally appropriate control strategies, in partnership with local governments and authorities. Historically, informal settlements and their residents have been stigmatized, blamed, and subjected to rules and regulations that are unaffordable or unfeasible to adhere to. Responses to COVID-19 should not repeat these mistakes. Priorities for enabling effective control measures include: collaborating with local residents who have unsurpassed knowledge of relevant spatial and social infrastructures, strengthening coordination with local governments, and investing in improved data for monitoring the response in informal settlements.
of Great Britain and Northern IrelandFor many urbanites, infrastructural uncertainty refers to 'predictable shocks' rather than constituting a quotidian experience. By contrast, for the peri-urban poor, the sources of uncertainty underpinning water and sanitation services are endless: uncertainty about cost, about being evicted and indeed about ever becoming connected to networked systems.Drawing on a number of case studies, we argue that across the urban global south, the future is not one of networked systems but rather one of 'infrastructural archipelagos' that need to be thoroughly understood in order to bridge the growing gap between everyday and large infrastructural planning practices.Keywords: urban WASH; peri-urbanisation; urban services governance; service coproduction; decentralised infrastructure; urban global south Introduction For many urban dwellers, infrastructural uncertainty refers to 'predictable shocks' (such as increasing water tariffs or lower pressure during certain days of the week), rather than constituting a quotidian experience. The picture is significantly different when it comes to considering the meaning and experience of water uncertainty by the peri-urban poor in the global south. In such context, the sources of uncertainty underpinning access to services are endless: uncertainty about cost, about being evicted, about ever becoming connected (or networked). Indeed, about 60% of the new urbanites expected to live across the global south over the next 25 years, will be exposed to all these uncertainties on a daily basis, without networked infrastructure to access essential basic services such as water and sanitation. In this context, the future is not one of networked systems but rather one of -paraphrasing Karen Bakker (2003) -'infrastructural archipelagos', shaped by misrecognised practices of everyday planning.Everyday planning practices are those adopted on the ground by ordinary women and men to access water and sanitation, and they range from 'needs-driven practices', which are based on some form of collective action -whether within communities or between communities and the state -and those that are undertaken individually and might rely either on solidarity among
This paper explores how communities in Chinhoyi, Zimbabwe have used community-led mapping and enumerations(1) to build partnerships with local government to support the development and co-production of innovative pro-poor city-wide sanitation strategies as part of the SHARE City-Wide Sanitation Project. This action research project is being conducted in four cities across sub-Saharan Africa: Chinhoyi (Zimbabwe), Kitwe (Zambia), Blantyre (Malawi) and Dar es Salaam (Tanzania). This programme of work responds to the failure of conventional approaches to urban sanitation to meet the needs of low-income urban communities in sub-Saharan Africa. Over three years it has supported Shack/Slum Dwellers International affiliates to develop and test pro-poor sanitation strategies that can be adopted and driven by networks of community organizations and residents’ associations, and supported by public authorities and private providers.
This paper considers the modalities by which utilities in four sub-Saharan African cities have extended water services into low-income settlements and examines their consequences for household access to water. We argue that water utilities and other public agencies supplying water are experimenting, drawing on the approaches of informal suppliers, to find ways to extend their coverage into low-income and/or informal neighbourhoods despite their legal status. While this experimentation appears to be extending access, prices prevent low-income households from being able to purchase sufficient quantities of water from public suppliers. Prices remain high in a context in which cost-recovery is a priority for utilities. Using a critical political economy approach, we argue that water pricing strategies applied in informal settlements present a form of accumulation enacted through the 'market integration' of low-income, primarily informal households that appears to undermine attempts to build the universal access to water services promised by Sustainable Development Goal 6.
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