Informal settlements are on the frontline in the battle against climate change. Home to one billion people, their infrastructure deprivations pose challenges for the health and resilience of communities and ecosystems. Upgrading of informal settlements can improve urban services and infrastructure, strengthen tenure security, and empower local communities. This chapter examines the conceptual and practice relationships between climate resilience and in-situ upgrading. It critiques prevailing approaches, which centre upon threshold, coping, recovery, and adaptive capacities. Transformative capacity offers greater scope for addressing climate change impacts at a level commensurate with the size of the challenge, and for redressing the entrenched structural inequalities and deep socio-spatial injustices shaping cities in the Global South that perpetuate vulnerability and socio-spatial exclusion. Five elements are identified to advance transformative informal settlement upgrading: socio-technical innovation; a climate justice framing; greater attention to intersectional dimensions; inclusive governance and community empowerment; and fit for purpose finance.
Mobility is an important part of the discourses around climate change. Many argue that mobility in connection to climate change, natural hazards, or similar is about bringing people to safety, supporting them in their own efforts to reach safe grounds, or as McAdam (2015) puts it: taking people away from "danger zones". This chapter investigates mobility of people living in informal settlements in Suva, the capital of Fiji, which are exposed to hazards. This chapter, hence concentrates on people moving to highly exposed areas. How can we explain when people move to 'danger zones' like is happening in many informal settlements in the Pacific Islands (and surely elsewhere)? Are people not aware that the locations are dangerous, do they not bother to find out, or do they consciously choose such 'danger zones'? For our study, we undertook interviews and observations in two informal settlements in Suva. Our research suggests that the two locations where people established informal settlements were chosen at least in part because of their unfavourable environmental conditions. Whether this occurred consciously or more in a reflexive learning process that directed people to locations where they did not face evictions needs to be established in future research. It is becoming evident, however, that in Suva space is becoming scarce. Locations that nobody was interested in several decades ago are now in high demand. This also puts people who live in informal settlements at risk of being evicted by governments' plans of relocation and/or by market forces, which can be seen as a special form of gentrification.
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.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.