Slum-dwellers as experts: A problem structuring approach to understand housing challenges in slum communities of India

ABSTRACT

Housing programs in India have rarely engaged with slum communities to understand slum-dwellers’ housing needs and preferences as the tools to systematically understand them are lacking. Consequently, the programs are often designed and implemented without the slum community’s participation. This paper demonstrates the usefulness of inviting slum residents to understand housing problems from their perspective by using in-depth interviews and focus group discussions in two slums of Odisha, India. We compare their priorities with the provisions of slum policies such as the Odisha Land Rights to Slum Dwellers Act 2017 to highlight that housing needs and challenges in slums are diverse, and preferences are often incremental that the current program has failed to recognize. We use problem structuring methods from decision sciences as our analytical framework that treats the slum residents as experts. Such an approach can potentially transform how we design housing programs and policies in the developing world.

KEYWORDS:

• Tenure security
• land rights
• housing
• slums
• value focused thinking
• cognitive maps

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Slum is a widely accepted term in the international development literature and does not refer to the slums as understood in the developed world, particularly in the U.S. where its usage is widely criticized for being pejorative.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Namesh Killemsetty

Namesh Killemsetty is an Assistant Professor in the Jindal School of Government and Public Policy at O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat, India. As a transdisciplinary researcher working in urban governance and poverty, Namesh’s work particularly focuses on integrating theories and methods from Urban Studies, Policy Analysis, Operations Research, and Decision Sciences. His research is supported by his previous training in Infrastructure Management and Civil Engineering. Namesh is the recipient of the 2021 Urban Affairs Association Alma H. Young Emerging Scholar Award, USA and has been a global winner in a Research competition on Urban Development by Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, USAID, and the World Bank Group.

Amit Patel

Amit Patel is Associate Professor of Public Policy and Public Affairs at University of Massachusetts Boston. His research, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Bank Group, and International Development Research Centre, focuses on slums in global South to understand multiple housing deprivations and how they perpetuate over time, processes that lead to formation and expansion of slums, ways to identify slums from space for urban planning purposes, health consequences of living in slums, and gendered impacts of housing conditions, to draw policy implications towards improving lives of urban poor in developing countries.