Vegetation in Bangalore’s Slums: Boosting Livelihoods, Well-Being and Social Capital

Abstract

Abstract:Urban greenery provides ecosystem services that play an important role in the challenging context of urban deprivation and poverty. This study assesses the social importance of vegetation through empirical assessment of 44 urban slums in the rapidly developing southern city of Bangalore, India. Vegetation played a major role in supporting nutrition by its role in food consumption, and in promoting health through the planting of species with medicinal use. Trees in slums also formed nodes for social activities including conversing and playing, domestic activities such as cooking and washing dishes, and livelihood activities such as the manufacture of broomsticks and tyre repair. Innovative methods of gardening were widely adopted, with kitchen gardens found planted in plastic bags, paint cans, old kitchen utensils and buckets, indicating the importance given to planting in environments with limited finances. Short and narrow trunked trees with medium-sized canopies and high economic value, such as Pongamia, were preferred. A greater focus on greening in slums is needed, and can provide an invaluable, inexpensive and sustainable approach to improve lives in these congested, deprived environments. OPEN ACCESSSustainability 2014, 6 2460

Understanding the Role of Rural Poor’s Endogenous Impetus in Poverty Reduction: Evidence from China

“…From the perspective of individual socio-economic characteristics, the accumulation of livelihood capital stock is a key factor for improving the livelihood status of the poor and achieving poverty reduction goals [4,11]. Among them, factors such as the age, gender, education, health protection, labor capacity, and the household size of the farmer represent human capital [23][24][25][26][27]; household assets, productive assets, and infrastructure construction such as transportation, housing, drinking water, energy, and land quality together constitute the physical capital of the farmers [4,23,28]; and social attributes such as social relations, social trust, formal or informal social networks, collective appeals, and opportunities to participate in decision-making are proxies of social capital [10,[29][30][31][32]. In addition to these established variables, several authors have emphasized the subjective variables for the main body of poverty reduction, such as mental health, cognitive ability, and risk preference [19,[33][34][35], thereby effectively turning the focus to "people" factors (namely endogenous impetus) in addition to external "material" factors (namely livelihood capital) [33,36].…”

Green Infrastructure in Relation to Informal Urban Settlements

“…In Bangalore, Gopal (2011) observes that most dwellings in informal settlements have plants grown in different kinds of containers. The plants and trees contribute to decrease in local air temperature (by 3 to 5 °C in summer) and air quality improvement through reduction of pollutants in the neighbourhood (Gopal 2011;Gopal, Nagendra 2014). As a result of their shade, trees in the settlements create cool space for domestic activities (e.g.…”

Waste, weeds, and wild food

“…Investigating urban collecting opens further multidisciplinary research avenues on the genealogy of rights to glean, commoning processes through urban food collecting, and "diplomatic relationships with living beings" (Morizot, 2016). Most importantly it paves the way for a relational approach to urban food collecting within both the urban Global South and North, as foraging is practiced in Bangalore or Delhi (Gopal and Nagendra, 2014); in Uganda, Senegal (NDao and MBaye, 2017) and South Africa; and as scavenging is well documented in Calcutta or Faisalabad (Batool and Anjum, 2016). Ironically, "dumpster diving" has been considered a voluntary alternative practice within cities of the Global North whereas "scavenging" has been more often associated with people in need within cities of the Global South.…”