Slum Upgrading and Participation; Lessons from Latin America

THIS VOLUME IS an outcome of a study carried out and funded by the Private Sector Advisory Services Department of the World Bank and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, with additional support from the Japanese government. The book presents a collection of five geographically and institutionally diverse case studies from Latin America, each telling a successful story about slum upgrading with community participation, providing detailed information about their weaknesses, constraints and, most importantly, their achievements. With the continuous growth of the urban population, the provision of adequate shelter and services increasingly represents a challenge. This book provides examples of alternatives to traditional housing policies for local officials, policy makers and practitioners concerned with the sustainability of service provision projects for low-income people. When adapted to other local contexts, the lessons from this book can also be of assistance in places other than Latin America. The authors can be seen as channels for the “voices from the field”, including the urban poor themselves, emphasizing the importance of upgrading existing settlements with the active involvement of community members, even for projects on a large scale. This book tries to emphasize the fact that slum upgrading is not a purely technical process but rather an “…integrated and comprehensive intervention aimed at improving the physical characteristics of a neighbourhood and its inhabitants’ quality of life.” The book provides the reader with a set of social, institutional, financial and procedural tools to set up and facilitate successful participatory upgrading projects. Participation is understood here to be an integral component of a continuous process that goes beyond the completion of a project.

Part I, “Lessons from the Field”, draws lessons from the experience with participatory urban upgrading and shelter programmes in Latin America. The authors focus on the participatory component and how this is connected to other parts of a programme or project.
Part II, “Voices from the Field”, presents case studies from Bolivia, Brazil, Costa Rica, Mexico and Peru. This section provides the reader with an understanding of how participatory methods in the context of existing stakeholder relationships and institutional settings have influenced the implementation and outcome of the project.