Improving accountability for equitable health and well-being in urban informal spaces: Moving from dominant to transformative approaches

This article critically reviews the literature on urban informality, inequity, health, well-being and accountability to identify key conceptual, methodological and empirical gaps in academic and policy discourses. We argue that critical attention to power dynamics is often a key missing element in these discourses and make the case for explicit attention to the operation of power throughout conceptualization, design and conduct of research in this space. We argue that: (a) urban informality reflects the exercise of power to confer and withhold advantage; (b) the dominant biomedical model of health poorly links embodied experiences and structural contexts; (c) existing models of accountability are inadequate in unequal, pluralistic governance and provision environments. We trace four conceptual and empirical directions for transformative approaches to power relations in urban health equity research

Catalysing effective social accountability systems through community participation

Worldwide, infrastructure expansion and visions of ‘slum-free cities’ displace people living in informal settlements. Without community participation in these processes and accountability mechanisms in place’ such displacement can adversely impact people’s health and well-being. This piece outlines SPARC’s (Society For Promotion of Area Resource Centres, SPARC is an NGO based in India promoting action of organised communities of urban poor to negotiate with the state on accessing tenure security, housing, sanitation and civic services) experience promoting community participation among residents of a relocation site in Ahmedabad, fostering coalescence, and rebuilding the dismantled community organisation to foster social accountability systems. The experience has reinforced learnings from previous work that poorly planned relocation increases the risk of impoverishment and negatively impacts residents’ social relations, which severely affects their ability to come together to demand social accountability. As such, we had to innovate our engagement strategies to rebuild trust and confidence and strengthen community participation and organisation, which we share here

Incremental housing as a node for intersecting flows of city-making : rethinking the housing shortage in the global South

Incremental housing drives urbanization worldwide, and is recognized as the basis for socially relevant solutions to housing shortages in the global South. However, scholarship on incremental housing continues to focus largely on tenure, building materials and housing conditions at a local level, while incremental housing is embedded in – and dependent on – larger urban and regional systems and flows. We argue that a further reconceptualization of incremental housing is needed that acknowledges the embeddedness of local incremental building practices within broader industries, markets and practices of city-making. Starting from this observation, we suggest an extended framework for understanding the city-wide industries and flows around incremental housing, in relation to five dimensions: 1) land, 2) finance, 3) infrastructure, 4) building materials and 5) labour. Mapping these dynamics is necessary to understand fundamental questions of where, how and why initiatives aimed at improving or developing incremental housing advance or get stuck

Incremental housing as a node for intersecting flows of city-making : rethinking the housing shortage in the global South

Incremental housing drives urbanization worldwide, and is recognized as the basis for socially relevant solutions to housing shortages in the global South. However, scholarship on incremental housing continues to focus largely on tenure, building materials and housing conditions at a local level, while incremental housing is embedded in – and dependent on – larger urban and regional systems and flows. We argue that a further reconceptualization of incremental housing is needed that acknowledges the embeddedness of local incremental building practices within broader industries, markets and practices of city-making. Starting from this observation, we suggest an extended framework for understanding the city-wide industries and flows around incremental housing, in relation to five dimensions: 1) land, 2) finance, 3) infrastructure, 4) building materials and 5) labour. Mapping these dynamics is necessary to understand fundamental questions of where, how and why initiatives aimed at improving or developing incremental housing advance or get stuck