Geography

Document Type

Article

Abstract

Unfettered growth of slums is a daunting transition challenge and many upgrading programs fail to sustainably improve the livelihoods of slum residents. This paper elaborates a transitions perspective on structural tensions that may lead to success or failure of slum upgrading programs. We conceptualize slums as urban subsystems, governed by sociotechnical (infrastructure) and socioeconomic livelihood regimes (related to production and social reproduction). The framework permits examination of the tensions due to mis/alignments of rules associated with newly introduced infrastructures, and those that regulate existing production and social reproduction practices of slum residents. This approach extends transition studies by accounting for the multi-system interactions between different infrastructure regimes (e.g., transportation, sanitation) and livelihoods within a local sociotechnical system. We apply this framework to an in-depth analysis of a slum upgrading project in Naivasha, Kenya, which was part of a national urban upgrading program covering a total of 80 slums. © 2023 The Author(s)

Publication Title

Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions

Publication Date

9-2023

Volume

48

ISSN

2210-4224

DOI

10.1016/j.eist.2023.100747

Keywords

informal settlements upgrading, livelihoods, multi-regimes, production, structural tensions

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Download

Included in

Geography Commons

Share

COinS
 
 

To view the content in your browser, please download Adobe Reader or, alternately,
you may Download the file to your hard drive.

NOTE: The latest versions of Adobe Reader do not support viewing PDF files within Firefox on Mac OS and if you are using a modern (Intel) Mac, there is no official plugin for viewing PDF files within the browser window.