Location and welfare in cities: impacts of policy interventions on the urban poor

Informal settlements are an integral part of the urban landscape in developing countries. These settlements are widely distributed within cities, including central business centers and peripheral areas with environment hazards. In most cases, residents of these settlements do not have access to basic public services and amenities. In this paper, the authors examine the impact of interventions, such as upgrading basic services and resettlement policies, on the welfare of residents of these informal settlements, who are typically the urban poor. To examine these interventions, they estimate models of residential location choice and allow households to be sensitive to commuting costs to work, demand for public services, and preferences for community composition. The authors'empirical analysis is based on recently collected survey data from Pune, India, and shows that poor households prefer to live close to work and in communities that consist of people sharing common socio-demographic characteristics. From the perspective of households living in informal settlements, upgrading settlements in the original place is welfare enhancing. If a household must be relocated, it greatly prefers to be moved to a community that resembles its current community.Municipal Financial Management,Public Health Promotion,Decentralization,Housing&Human Habitats,Urban Services to the Poor,Municipal Financial Management,Housing&Human Habitats,VN-Acb Mis -- IFC-00535908,Urban Housing,City Development Strategies

Waste Management Challenges in Freetown’s Informal Settlements

Waste management has been a challenge in the Freetown municipality of Sierra Leone for a long time, underpinned by the limited capacity of institutions responsible for waste collection and depositing. These challenges come with a huge cost to human health. The situation is even worse for people living in informal settlements within and on the fringes on the city. The lack of a well-planned and regulated waste management system in the informal settlements is a key driver of indiscriminate waste dumping. Waste dumping by communities, mostly in waterways, drainages and under footbridges, are invariably linked to health challenges for informal communities and built-up settlements located alongside those communities

Origins of house mice in ecological niches created by settled hunter-gatherers in the Levant 15,000 y ago

International audienceReductions in hunter-gatherer mobility during the Late Pleistoceneinfluenced settlement ecologies, altered human relations withanimal communities, and played a pivotal role in domestication.The influence of variability in human mobility on selection dynamicsand ecological interactions in human settlements has not beenextensively explored, however. This study of mice in modern Africanvillages and changingmicemolar shapes in a 200,000-y-long sequencefrom the Levant demonstrates competitive advantages for commensalmice in long-term settlements. Mice from African pastoralhouseholds provide a referential model for habitat partitioningamong mice taxa in settlements of varying durations. The datareveal the earliest known commensal niche for house mice in longtermforager settlements 15,000 y ago. Competitive dynamics andthe presence and abundance of mice continued to fluctuate withhuman mobility through the terminal Pleistocene. At the Natufiansite of Ain Mallaha, house mice displaced less commensal wild miceduring periods of heavy occupational pressure but were outcompetedwhen mobility increased. Changing food webs and ecologicaldynamics in long-term settlements allowed house mice to establishdurable commensal populations that expanded with human societies.This study demonstrates the changing magnitude of cultural nicheconstruction with varying human mobility and the extent of environmentalinfluence before the advent of farming

The Small Animals of Maasai Settlements: Ethnoarchaeological Investigations of the Commensalism Model

This research was designed to test Tchernov\u27s model of commensalism and the idea that remains of commensal species that today coexist with humans in settlement environments could be used to detect early sedentism in the archaeological record. The validity of the model has been questioned due to the lack of empirical knowledge on commensalism in a wide range of settlement environments including sedentary and more mobile ones. This study examined the commensalism model by focusing on seasonally occupied settlements of Maasai pastoralists in East Africa. Methods from ecology, ethnography, and archaeology were used to document the impact of Maasai settlements on associated communities of small rodents and shrews: micromammals), to measure the intensity of human occupation in settlements, and to relate settlement intensity to micromammalian communities. Taphonomic approaches were also used to evaluate the potential for accumulation and preservation of evidence on commensalism in the substrate of the settlements. The results of the study showed that, in contrast to what we might expect in highly sedentary settings, Maasai settlements increased rather than decreased the biological diversity of local micromammalian communities. Along a gradient of increasing duration of human occupation, but continued seasonal use of settlements, there was no manifest increase in the population of any single species that would amount to pronounced commensalism. This supports the commensalism/sedentism linkage but also suggests more broadly that it should be possible to demarcate distinct contexts of commensalism and related levels of biological diversity in relation to varying intensities of site occupation. These results call for greater investment in systematic fine-recovery and study of variability of micromammalian assemblages at archaeological excavations

Bird communities across different levels of human settlement: A comparative analysis from two northern Amazonian ecoregions

Urban ecosystems are increasingly dominating landscapes globally, so it is critical to understand the effects of human settlements on biodiversity. Bird communities are effective indicators because they are impacted by the size and expansion of human settlements, exemplified by changes in their habitat use, breeding and foraging behaviours, as well as patterns of richness and abundance. Existing studies on bird community responses to human settlements have mainly focused on single ecoregions and large cities, leaving a gap in comparative research on how differently sized human settlements affect bird communities across various ecoregions. To address this gap, we examine species richness, bird abundances and community composition in human settlements, which exhibit variable sizes, populations, landscape configurations, and overall intensity of settlement in two tropical ecoregions in Guyana, Amazonia: forest and savannah. In each ecoregion we explored how different groupings of urban tolerance in birds responded to human settlements of differing population size and building densities. Overall, we found significant differences in bird communities across the varying levels of human settlement intensity in both ecoregions, with greater differences in bird community composition in the forest ecoregion than the savannah region. In both ecoregions, species richness and abundance were highest at the medium level of settlement of human settlement. Our findings suggest that bird tolerance to human settlements varies based on ecoregion and site-level factors. In the savannah, built features may be benefitting birds from all urban tolerance levels, but they have a negative impact on less urban-tolerant species in the forest ecoregion. Our comparative analysis reveals for the first time that the impact of human settlements on avian communities in northern Amazonia varies among ecoregions, indicating that species evolved to live in a savannah may be more tolerant to human settlements than those more evolved to a forest system

Measuring local depletion of terrestrial game vertebrates by central-place hunters in rural Amazonia

The degree to which terrestrial vertebrate populations are depleted in tropical forests occupied by human communities has been the subject of an intense polarising debate that has important conservation implications. Conservation ecologists and practitioners are divided over the extent to which community-based subsistence offtake is compatible with ecologically functional populations of tropical forest game species. To quantify depletion envelopes of forest vertebrates around human communities, we deployed a total of 383 camera trap stations and 78 quantitative interviews to survey the peri-community areas controlled by 60 semi-subsistence communities over a combined area of over 3.2 million hectares in the Médio Juruá and Uatumã regions of Central-Western Brazilian Amazonia. Our results largely conform with prior evidence that hunting large-bodied vertebrates reduces wildlife populations near settlements, such that they are only found at a distance to settlements where they are hunted less frequently. Camera trap data suggest that a select few harvest-sensitive species, including lowland tapir, are either repelled or depleted by human communities. Nocturnal and cathemeral species were detected relatively more frequently in disturbed areas close to communities, but individual species did not necessarily shift their activity patterns. Group biomass of all species was depressed in the wider neighbourhood of urban areas rather than communities. Interview data suggest that species traits, especially group size and body mass, mediate these relationships. Large-bodied, large-group-living species are detected farther from communities as reported by experienced informants. Long-established communities in our study regions have not “emptied” the surrounding forest. Low human population density and low hunting offtake due to abundant sources of alternative aquatic protein, suggest that these communities represent a best-case scenario for sustainable hunting of wildlife for food, thereby providing a conservative assessment of game depletion. Given this ‘best-case’ camera trap and interview-based evidence for hunting depletion, regions with higher human population densities, external trade in wildlife and limited access to alternative protein will likely exhibit more severe depletion

Typology and Current Structure of the Geosystems in the Southern Part of the Trascău Mountains

The geoecological complexity of the Trascău Mountains is revealed not only by means of its natural components but also by means of its existing interactions and inter-dependences with the anthropic elements identified within the region. The current paper represents an overview and a small scale analysis of the existing types of geosystems identified in the southern part of the Trascău Mountains, mainly along the Ampoi River valley, as well as of the type of the existing interactions between the anthropic elements with the natural environment materialized by means of land utilization carried out in order to sustain the existence and development of agricultural activities, as a basis for the development of the local communities. Throughout the time, the human communities have modified the natural environment in such a manner that they have altered the nature’s ability to restore its initial equilibrium, many of the current types of landforms (especially those located alongside the water courses) being modified as result of the man’s interference. The development of the human communities resulted in an increase of the demand for more resources which materialized in an increase in the cultivated surfaces, development of more settlements, and modification of the land utilization with a more pronounced development of crops to the detriment of the natural vegetation. In regards to the existing human settlements, the spreading of the households along the Ampoi River valley and along its tributaries can be observed, the villages thus possessing a congregate shape

Livelihood gains and ecological costs of NTFP dependence: assessing the roles of dependence, ecological knowledge and market structure in three contrasting human and ecological settings in south India

Non-timber forest products (NTFPs) constitute the single largest determinant of livelihoods for scores of forest fringe communities and poor people in the tropics. In India over 50 million people are believed to be directly dependent upon NTFPs for their subsistence. However, such human dependence on NTFPs for livelihood gains (win) has most frequently been at a certain ecological cost (lose). If livelihoods are to be maintained, the existing ‘win-lose’ settings have to be steered to a ‘win-win’ mode, otherwise, there could be severe erosion of the biological resources and loss of livelihoods (‘lose-lose’). Examining the dependence of forest fringe communities on NTFPs at three sites in south India with contrasting human and ecological settings, three key factors (extent of dependence on NTFPs, indigenous ecological knowledge and market organization) are likely to constrain reaching the win-win situation. How these factors shape the ecological cost of harvesting NTFPs at the three sites is examined. Within the parameter space of these factors, it is possible to predict outcomes and associations that will conform to win-win or win-lose situations. Empirical data derived from the three study sites demonstrate the causality of the observed associations. The key for long-term livelihood gains lies in reducing the ecological cost. Certain interventions and recommendations that could optimize the balance between livelihood gains and ecological cost are proposed

Community-driven sanitation improvement in deprived urban neighbourhoods: meeting the challenges of local collective action, co-production, affordability and a trans-sectoral approach.

There is an international consensus that urban sanitary conditions are in great need of improvement, but sharp disagreement over how this improvement should be pursued. Both market-driven and state-led efforts to improve sanitation in deprived communities tend to be severely compromised, as there is a lack of effective market demand (due to collective action problems) and severe barriers to the centralized provision of low-cost sanitation facilities. In principle, community-driven initiatives have a number of advantages. But community-driven sanitary improvement also faces serious challenges, including: 1) The collective action challenge of getting local residents to coordinate and combine their demands for sanitary improvement; 2) The co-production challenge of getting the state to accept community-driven approaches to sanitary improvement, and where necessary to co-invest and take responsibility for the final waste disposal; 3) The affordability challenge of finding improvements that are affordable and acceptable to both the state and the community – and to other funders if relevant; 4) The trans-sectoral challenge of ensuring that other poverty-related problems, such as insecure tenure, do not undermine efforts to improve sanitation. Each of these challenges is analysed in some detail in the pages that follow. The report then goes on to examine two community-driven approaches to urban sanitation improvement that have been expanding for more than two decades, one in Pakistan and the other in India. It is argued that a large part of their success lies in the manner in which they have met and overcome the aforementioned challenges. Indeed, both overcame the co-production challenge to the point where sanitary improvement became the basis for attempts to radically improve community–government relations – relations unfortunately also very dependent on other political dynamics. They also systematically tackled other, less institutionally-rooted challenges, such as the lack of local technical skills in building and maintaining improved sanitary facilities