Constructing Empirical Public Decision-Making: The Application of Situated Data to Development in Consolidated Informal Settlements

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The Directorate of Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences offers postdoctoral research fellowships to provide opportunities for recent doctoral graduates to obtain additional training, to gain research experience under the sponsorship of established scientists, and to broaden their scientific horizons beyond their undergraduate and graduate training. Postdoctoral fellowships are further designed to assist new scientists to direct their research efforts across traditional disciplinary lines and to avail themselves of unique research resources, sites, and facilities, including at foreign locations. This postdoctoral fellowship award supports interdisciplinary research that draws on statistical and mixed method approaches in collaboration with community groups in two large consolidated settlements. The fellowship will significantly advance the professional training of the postdoctoral fellow, due to the mentorship provided by two exceptional scholars at the University of Texas at Austin whose pioneering work has been instrumental to urban planning, development, and sustainability studies in Texas and the urban Global South.The study will (1) identify the factors that informal settlement residents, planners, architects, and policy makers believe contribute to successful development; (2) apply criteria to a participatory post-occupancy evaluation of the processes and outcomes of four development typologies shared by the two settlements; and (3) input data findings to a parametric framework through which to test possible community development outcomes. The combined use of assessment criteria, evaluation, and the parametric tool offer significant potential to: (1) synthesize the efforts undertaken by diverse actors and institutions involved in development; (2) increase citizen participation and project equity; (3) visualize the fusion of policy goals and diverse user needs; and (4), better align the goals and actual achievements of policies that guide urban development. The study advances current research by (1) contributing to urban planning's emerging interest in the relational analysis of social and spatial data; (2) producing a modifiable, participatory framework for evaluating development impacts and applying data to concrete outcomes; and (3) exploring how to practically transform the development of informal settlements from a housing-centric, expert-driven enterprise to an evidence-based platform that increases citizen participation and addresses the multiple risks that afflict cities in the developing world. The broader impacts of this research include the empowerment of community groups with data development and its application to graphic formats that can visualize, and thus help to catalyze, long-term change. Furthermore, the parametric framework facilitates a common, data driven language through which community groups, planners, architects, and policy makers can test and discuss possible future development scenarios.