Dissertation Brief: Understanding Informality and Planning for Safe and Inclusive Urban Spaces - A Case Study of Slums in Patna, India
By Ziming Li, Ph.D.
Approximately one in three urban dwellers is living in slums worldwide [1]. Rapid and unplanned urbanization in the global South proposes a question about the relations between the challenges of safety and security and the worries about ever-increasing informal settlements. Do informal settlements generate neighborhood insecurity and affect the safety of slum dwellers? Because of the general public’s perception that informal settlements and poverty affect urban safety, concerns about the safety of slum dwellers remain inadequate. It is also a complex question due to the diversity of informal settlements, local governance, and cultures. However, to answer this question from the perspective of the slum dwellers will be beneficial for understanding sustainable urban redevelopment.
The central questions are why slum dwellers suffer from insecurity and how to implement urban planning strategies and inclusive local governance. My study attempts to draw attention to the problems of insecurity in slums and the difficulty of employing effective crime prevention strategies in the cities of the global South such as Patna in India. Patna is the capital city of Bihar. Bihar is one of the under-developed states with high crime rates in the last decades except for the recent three years in India [2]. Patna was selected as a pilot city of the Smart Cities Mission in 2016. Through this national initiative, pilot cities were required to provide citizens with “core infrastructure,” including basic public facilities, affordable housing, good governance, and public security. Despite its high economic growth rate and local governments’ efforts to build up safe and livable neighborhood influenced, the vacancy about the extent to which slum dwellers deal with neighborhood insecurity, including conflicts, violence, gender-based crimes, and their fear of crime and insecurity shows the needs for more empirical analyses from the perspective of slum dwellers.
Location of the Study Area | Source: Patna Municipal Corporation
I attempt to answer the core questions in three interlinked papers based on mixed methods. I utilized the household survey of 225 households from 16 slums of Patna through multi-stage stratified random sampling in 2016 and participatory observations in 15 slums along with 35 individual semi-structured interviews and 24 focus group discussions conducted in 2017.
Structure of the Author’s Dissertation
To begin with, I examine the origins of neighborhood conflict and violence by rethinking the relationships between slums, informality, and social structure within a slum. I identify the physical, social, economic, and institutional determinants of diversified neighborhood conflicts and violent resolution to these conflicts. I use housing and land tenure as a proxy for informality and further calculate a compound index of informality incorporating housing conditions and housing-land tenure, employment, and the pattern of infrastructure usage. The quantitative analysis suggests that the perceived insufficiency of hard infrastructure including water system, sanitation, and energy rather than compound informality including housing and land tenure, employment, and facilities provision and utilization induced to neighborhood conflicts and disputes. These findings imply that formalizing slums through the small-scale provision or improvement and continuous maintenance of hard infrastructure to fulfill household pressing needs for infrastructure could directly minimize neighborhood conflicts and violence, especially water usage-relevant ones. I also find that in self-organized slums, slum dwellers are more likely to engage in efforts to improve the built environment such as trying to secure loans and services from local governments for infrastructure building and maintenance, which reduces the neighborhood conflicts and violent resolution from their origins. Therefore, empowering slums through civic education and engagement is a sustainable strategy for neighborhood security in the long run [3].
Household Survey and Fieldwork Observation | Source: By courtesy of Ziming, 2016-2017
Slum dwellers’ perceptions of neighborhood insecurity are meaningful and informative for us to understand how to construct safe neighborhoods for all. My second paper evaluates the extent to which men and women perceive neighborhood insecurity in terms of water usage, sanitation and defecation, and gender-based crimes in public spaces. I identify that the perceived insufficiency of toilets at both neighborhood and household levels led to more perceived acts of violence during open defecation and perceived women’s insecurity during defecation. Improved drainage and toilets rather than building new toilets can effectively reduce the harassment of girls. Informality in terms of house and land tenure and slum dwellers’ perceived hard infrastructure insufficiency both significantly strengthened men’s perception of females’ insecurity. In contrast, the perceived soft infrastructure insufficiency in terms of education and health facilities influenced women’s perception of females’ security. Furthermore, in the self-organized slums, the slum dwellers perceived more neighborhood security in general and security for women in particular. Based on comparative case studies, I further propose that empowering women in community design is pivotal for maintaining neighborhood security for all.
The rest of my research centers on the knowledge gap about whether institutional linkages are partly responsible for both the formation of neighborhood insecurity in slums Due to the incomplete institutional design of city redevelopment at the national level, the local goals and execution of urban governance have generated uncertainties in policing and community governance at the neighborhood level. I find that government actions toward slums—including eviction threats, relocation attempts, and regularizations—are associated with the exclusion or biases originated from“ the identity of living in slums with shame” and land and housing informality. These two factors affect police patrolling and gave rise to police harassment in the slums. This transmission mechanism from top to bottom through policing is the primary reason for slum dwellers’ violent resolutions toward neighborhood conflicts and their perception of insecurity at the neighborhood level. Slum dwellers’ belief in successful slum upgrading and their perceptions of their roles in urban planning and community design are essential in the circle of trust. Therefore, to mitigate distrust between the local government and slum dwellers and maintain neighborhood security should be a significant component of inclusive slum upgrading and effective redevelopment.
My research highlights that informality is embedded in the heterogeneity of communities in terms of dwellers’ perception of infrastructure insufficiency and social structure as well as the connections between local governance, slum dwellers’ perceptions, and family or collective preferences, all of which are significant factors for approaching inclusive slum upgrading in the global South. In my on-going research after graduation, I am applying the household survey data in four big cities in Bihar, including Patna, Gaya, Bhagalpur, and Muzzafarpur, to investigate the connections between social psychology such as individualism, familism and collectivism, safety and security, and slum dwellers’ opinions about housing policies.
Dr. Li received her PhD in 2019 from the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Florida.
You can find more about Ziming’s research here. You can also find her on Twitter @Ziming_Li_
[1] According to the 2014 data of the World Bank, 29.762% of urban population living in slums worldwide. Available at https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.POP.SLUM.UR.ZS
[2] National Crime Records Bureau: Crime in India, 1973-2015, Available at http://ncrb.gov.in/StatPublications/CII/PrevPublications.htm
[3] Special thanks go to Mr. B.K.N. Signh at the Institute for Human Development for his assistance in my fieldwork research in Bihar.
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