The Science and Practice of Urban Planning in Slums*

Luís Bettencourt1, Joe Hand1, José Lobo2

1 Santa Fe Institute, USA2 School of Sustainability, Arizona State University, USA jose.lobo@asu.edu

*: Reflections informed by our collaboration with Shack/Slum Dwellers International (SDI) as part of a project funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Views expressed here are our own.

The Challenge and Opportunity of Urbanization

Issues of poverty alleviation, sustainable development and inclusive growth are and will be urban problems.

How to capitalize on the processes of spontaneous urbanization – including the formation of informal urban settlements – has become the central challenge to urban planning theory and practice.

%of a country’s population which is urban (2012)

Becoming “a planet of cities”

The historical experience of the now developed economies is that urbanization accompanied and fostered economic growth.

But the process of urbanization now unfolding in the developing world seems much more mixed in outcomes.

Bloom et al. (2008)

Central to the differentiated experience of urbanization in developing nations is the differentiated experience of slums.

It seems unlikely that most slums will be transformed on their own. Policy will need to play an important role in addressing the challenges and opportunities which slums present.

Marx et al. (2013)

The Challenge and Opportunity of Planning

Global trends: access to mobile telecommunications and to the internet/web, social media, “big data”, “open data”… this incipient new connectivity could play a crucial role in fostering faster human development and is a new ingredient to urban planning and policy-making everywhere.

But how exactly is urban planning to benefit from more socially connected urban environments, from greater access to ICTs and from greater access to data?

An Information and Knowledge Crisis

Many of the phenomena and processes that characterize urbanization continue to be poorly documented.

Very few (developing) nations collect good data on neighborhoods.

Slums are often zones of silence in terms of public knowledge, opinion and discussion about urban poverty.

Most cities in the developing world are suffering from an information crisis, which is seriously undermining their capacity to develop and analyze effective urban policy.

Our Perspective (as scientists) on Cities

We consider cities as complex adaptive systems (and as instances of “organized complexity”): many components—social, economic, infrastructural—whose subtle and nonlinear interactions generate structures and hierarchies which are difficult to foretell simply by knowing the properties of the individual components.

This perspective is not new in the planning literature (as it was pioneered by Jane Jacobs (1961)) but its significance as a set of theoretical principles and its implications for policy and practice has remained, in our opinion, largely unexplored.

Problems, problems

Planner’s Problem: addressing socioeconomic issues in cities requires information that is hard to obtain—because it exists at the personal and neighborhood level, especially in poor informal settings.

Community’s Problem: while organized communities, in participatory civic environments, can achieve a lot but their needs cannot be met (and rights exercised), effectively and sustainable, only with interventions at the local level.

Our Perspective on Planning

Planning as neither the detailed design of socioeconomic solutions for development implemented “from above” nor as simply a bottom up processes of community organization.

Urban planning as a social coordination problem.

Planning as an instance of a “wicked problem”: a problem with circular causality, many interconnected facets, varied stake holders, and conflicting constraints (Rittel and Webber, 1973).

Coordinating Information and Action

THE information problem: acquiring, articulating and sharing information from the bottom up and across many different levels of agency: from neighborhoods to communities, from local service providers to land owners, NGOs and governments.

This is the fundamental development problem of human societies (Hayek, 1945; Arrow, 1974; Acemoğlu, 2008).

Urban planning: coordinating individuals and institutions with different perspectives and capabilities so that they collaborate: shared, trusted, verifiable information is crucial.

Assessment & Review is information dependent

Enable many uses of slum data: empower many users of slum data

Community

Local authorities, land owners, utilities

National Governments

International Agencies

Research Community

Verifiable information

Evidence-driven

policy design

Knowledgeaccumulation and

a scientific approachto human

development

+

+

=Comprehensiv

e Solution

Without a common framework to organize findings, isolated knowledge does not cumulate.

Elinor Ostrom

Science 2009

Data Platform Shared KnowledgeA data platform is essential not just to house the data but also to embody a process for how to standardize data collection, serving the local goals while benefiting the global community. •Wikipedia Linux•OpenStreetMaps Android•GenBank

Essential to all of these open and crowd-sourcing solutions is the underlying social organization as well as the technology and communications platform. This is the “system” that allow data to be preserved and cumulate.

Data enables the community to talk to itself and with others the slum dwellers gain clear and loud voice.

With out a common framework to organize findings, isolated knowledge does not cumulate. will

References

Acemoğlu, D. (2008). Introduction to Modern Economic Growth. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Arrow, K. (1974). The Limits of Organization. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

Bloom, D.E., Canning, D., Fink, G. (2008) Urbanization and the wealth of nations. Science, 319: 772-775.

Hayek, F. (1945). The Use of Knowledge in Society. American Economic Review, 35: 519-530.

Jacobs, J. (1961) The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Random House.

Marx, B., Stoker, T., Suri, T. (2013). The economics of slums in the developing world. Journal of Economic

Perspectives, 27: 187-210.

Rittel, H., Webber. M. (1973). Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning. Policy Sciences, 4: 155-169.