Urban Upgrading and Community Driven Development

The rate of urbanization throughout the world is steadily increasing, and according to UNDP estimates, by 2015 more than 49% of the population in developing countries is expected to live in urban areas. Rapid urban growth has been accompanied by increasing poverty and proliferation of slums. Slums are unplanned and under-served neighborhoods typically settled by squatters without legal recognition or rights. These neglected urban areas are the result of poor or absent urban policies and dysfunctional land and housing markets. They are often located in high-risk and barely habitable sites, such as hill-sides, garbage dumps and river banks. Very often, slum residents are deprived of even the most basic municipal services, such as water supply, sanitation and solid waste collection, and they frequently lack access to social services such as primary health care and education.

What is Urban Upgrading?
Urban upgrading is broadly understood as physical, social, economic, organizational, and environmental improvements undertaken cooperatively among citizens, community groups, businesses, and local authorities to ensure sustained improvements in the quality of live for individuals, especially slum dwellers. The primary goals of upgrading projects are to provide secure land tenure in informal and often illegal areas, and to improve basic infrastructure and service delivery.

Urban Upgrading and CDD
Over the last three decades, the Word Bank has been involved in a number of urban upgrading projects, which have demonstrated that quality of life in slums can be improved through realistic policies, investments and implementation processes. Experience suggests that CDD approaches complement the process of urban upgrading, which provides opportunities to all stakeholders –local and higher level governments, private sector and most importantly communities themselves – to contribute with their comparative advantage . Key issues in designing CDD programs in the context of urban upgrading are:

• CDD approached strengthen representation and ensure responsiveness to community needs and priorities.
• CDD approaches enhance post project sustainability of projects – shared decision-making and control of resources creates community ownership, and ultimately leads to improved operation and maintenance over time.
• CDD in urban upgrading is a gradual process wherein communities and other stakeholders should be given the time to learn to collaborate in development projects. 
• Strengthening institutional frameworks and developing partnerships among stakeholders is a key element of CDD in the urban context. Scaling up and replication of urban upgrading interventions are likely to be effective only when an enabling institutional environment is in place – this often includes strengthening governance structures.

 

Related documents/links:

Urban Services to the Poor thematic group website