Community-Led Urban Development

Case Study of Shelter Associates (SA) COMMUNITY-LED URBAN DEVELOPMENT: CASE STUDIES FROM INDIA One Home Toilet (OHOT) - Providing Access to Household Sanitation for the Urban Poor 1 2 COMMUNITY-LED URBAN DEVELOPMENT: CASE STUDIES FROM INDIA FOREWORD This publication has been produced against the background of the ongoing Coronavirus pandemic. While it would be extremely premature to try and anticipate the long-term outcomes of this health crisis, we are certainly able to see very clear evidence how, once again, it is the poorest and most vulnerable members of our societies that carry the heavi- est burdens. India’s towns and cities bear the hallmarks of decades of structural and sys- temic social exclusion, evidenced through severe overcrowding, the lack of basic services and, most fundamentally, a failure to recognise the urban poor as citizens. INCLUDe is a network and platform of civil society organisations and professionals working closely with the urban poor. The Network builds upon the range of different member organisations that have had a strong presence for several decades in different states across India. With support from Cities Alliance, the platform’s main purpose is to promote community-led urban development as a key component to sustainable and inclusive cities. This publication presents eight case-studies to documents significant and successful -ex amples of community-led urban development in different parts of India. The publication highlights the complexity of working in multi-stakeholder environments with urban poor communities, and the challenge of improving their living conditions and livelihoods while ensuring their active participation. The case studies portray projects in informal settlements in cities such as Mumbai, Ahmedabad and Delhi. They highlight INCLUDe members’ diverse experience in achieving scale, influencing policy, improving living conditions and strengthening livelihoods of urban poor communities. The projects presented in the compendium were implemented by Shelter Associates, SPARC, Mahila Housing Trust, Centre for Urban and Reginal Excellence, Youth for Unity and Voluntary Action, Habitat for Humanity India and Aga Khan Trust for Culture, in themes including tenure security, housing, sanitation and access to other basic services. This report aims to advance our efforts to recognize communities from the informal settlements and workers from the informal economy as citizens with the same rights as all other residents of the city. New approaches to urban planning and budgeting are essential to achieve truly inclusive and more sustainable cities – for the whole city, and for all citizens. William Cobbett Sheela Patel Director Chair Cities Alliance INCLUDe PREFACE There is strength in numbers. While everyone has heard this idiom often enough, we de- cided to bring it into operation. Thus a network of organizations came together to form INCLUDe (Indian NGOs for Community Led Urban Development) with the vision to aggregate its members’ diverse strategies and work with different communities. All these organizations were already working with urban poor in India in different states and cities which we believe will facilitate collective engagements with other stakeholders working in cities across India. INCLUDe is an acknowledgment that, in an urbanizing India, the challenges of informality of habitat and livelihood need greater attention, a stronger and deeper acceptance and strategies to produce inclusive approaches. These collectively would ensure that all those who live in cities lead a safe and secure life and produce safe and supportive neigh- borhoods. INCLUDe’s small membership is indicative that only a few organizations are presently working on urban informality. INCLUDe’s initial focus has been to come together and learn from each other. Together with its members, the organization has be- gun to co-create shared experience which in turn has helped each member organization widen and deepen its area of work inspired by what other members are doing. Our vision is to both encourage others to join and, for such organizations, to engage with the rapid urbanization and increasing informalization that is producing exclusion and deeper poverty burdens in city populations in an effort to achieve Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and Climate Justice. The commitment to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the climate change protocols for the decarbonization of the planet have significant elements of social justice and inclusion of the weak and vulnerable. INCLUDE believes that this is a modest contribution that addresses these issues at a granular level (not to say they have the last word on the subject) while demonstrating the value of engaging with the urban poor, especially women, in developing workable solutions so that their own resources and that of the state are used in the best possible way and investments are not wasted or eroded through eviction or demolished houses or wasted on toilets where there is no water. The lack of amenities often traps the lives of generations due to ill health, increased morbidity and mortality. The work of INCLUDe’s members with urban poor communities and their experiences, challenges and localization of programs has produced very good impact results and outcomes for the city and the poor but unfortunately these are not being adopted as widely as these are needed to address similar challenges. There is a need to collaborate to seek support of government institutions of the city, the state and the national government, and also to help governments embrace the ideas and solutions for creating inclusive cities. INCLUDe acknowledges that while many members have published articles in journals and written reports about their projects, most have not explored the option of producing learning material that could be useful for cities, States and other stakeholders, thus COMMUNITY-LED URBAN DEVELOPMENT: Case Studies from India BY INCLUDe helping them to address challenges of inclusive and sustainable urban development. In almost all the documentation there are clearly some unique and significant common themes such as partnerships, community groups, networks and representation, data and evidence-based engagement with city and state officials that have produced practices and sustained engagement. As NGOS working on the ground, INCLUDe members quite often miss the chance to document the processes and critical inputs that go into the making of a successful initiative. The INCLUDe network helps facilitate such documentation and production of learning material derived from ground experiences in all formats and for diverse stakeholders – governments, civil society groups, service provider institutions, consulting agencies, etc. It also provides an opportunity to see the impact such material produces on the city. INCLUDe believes that the role of NGOs in India is to produce, in collaboration with communities and with technical support, valuable evidence for designing and localizing solutions that respond to a community’s needs. INCLUDe also considers it crucial that these are shared with the local bodies for producing scale. The responsibility of scaling up good ideas, processes, technical solutions or elements thereof is that of the city or State. If not multiplied, refined or adapted the value of that innovation vanishes over time. However, it is mostly the case that innovative pilots are never mainstreamed. There is also frequent leadership churn at the State or city level – when champions move on, their successors may or may not pursue the ideas. The challenge for INCLUDe has been to promote the strategies crafted and implemented by members and use the curated learning material to maintain continuity of knowledge. INCLUDe believes that such documentation can be used, adapted, copied and replicated by city governments to solve problems of poor people. These can nudge cities into engaging with the people and co-create participatory solutions. Taking this idea forward, INCLUDe is also producing a set of policy briefs about five critical aspects or pro poor urban development and also adding a section on analyzing budgets and data viz. each one of the partner organizations. The rationale for these has been to produce short summaries of the practices that produced policy or policies that were imaginatively translated in practice ensuring the participation of the urban poor and cities. The policy briefs in particular are for city and state officials to help decision makers working on urban issues to read up quickly and, hopefully, get inspired to look at the longer documents. The five policy briefs are on Land and Tenure Security, Housing and Habitat Design, Access to Finance, Urban Livelihoods and Participatory Gover- nance. It was through a grant support from CITIES ALLIANCE, an organization tcommitted to tackle urban poverty, not through evictions and removal of slums but through trans- formation of informality by a process of investment and inclusion, that encouraged us to come together and gave us the resources to begin our conversations, share experiences, support each other and document our learnings in pursuance of our shared goals of re- ducing urban poverty, building collective agency and promoting integrated development. The case studies in this compendium emerged through an evidence-based documentation of a special project of each organization. A team of external professionals laid down the process of selection, review and documentation.

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