Towards Trajectories of Inclusion: Making infrastructure work for the most marginalised

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The bulk of global population growth until 2050 is projected to occur in cities in Africa and Asia. International agreements, such as UN Habitat's New Urban Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals seek to ensure that this growth in as inclusive as possible, yet cities are notoriously unequal places. Our previous GCRF-funded research ('The Unknown City') highlighted the overwhelming significance of securing housing tenure for the most marginal urban residents. The possibility of eviction hangs heavily over everyday life and wellbeing for the urban poor. This project builds on that work. Security of tenure both shapes and is shaped by state decisions to extend infrastructure to 'off grid' settlements. Extending infrastructure can be part of legalising trajectories towards housing security, but can also reverse such trajectories for some by producing new exclusions. This project seeks to bring greater clarity to this complexity and identify ways in which infrastructure for the most marginalised can initiate 'trajectories of inclusion'. The project is designed as action research in which the ultimate goal is a supported intervention in marginalised urban neighbourhood with the aim of implementing findings around these trajectories of inclusion for poor urban residents. The effects of this intervention will be carefully evaluated during the project and the results will be widely communicated. Research builds on the Unknown City project, working in the same cities with the same partners with whom successful collaborations are now well established. The project will focus on two sites from that project in each city in order to develop longer term data sets but it introduces four new neighbourhoods in each country and develops very different approaches, including the central objective of the intervention. Research will be conducted in three countries: Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Zimbabwe and the independent but unrecognised northern region of Somalia, Somaliland. These four countries have extremely dynamic by highly contrasting urban environments. Most research will be conducted in the capital cities, respectively, Dhaka, Colombo, Harare and Hargeisa. All four cities are expanding rapidly and are the subject of major urban redevelopment programmes. The project involves core partner academic organisations in each city engaged in research and evaluation of these redevelopment programmes. In addition to two neighbourhoods involved in previous research, research will expand to two additional contrasting neighbourhoods in the capital and two further neighbourhoods in a secondary city in order to highlight if the capitals are unusual in their planning approaches. This selection of six neighbourhoods in each of these four countries are the location for the first stage of research. A variety of techniques including focus group discussions, a large survey and in-depth interviews will be employed to map access to five key infrastructure grids - water, sanitation, energy, transport and communications. This will form a detailed picture of patterns of differential access to these services and the wide variation between 'off-grid' and 'on-grid'. The second stage of research will move beyond these neighbourhoods to follow the grids. In each country, two of these infrastructures will be identified and an approach known as 'Systems of Provision' will map the grid, identifying key individuals responsible for delivery of each service. This will explain the differential patterns of access identified in the first stage of research. These two research stages will lead to and inform the final stage of the supported intervention to enhance accesswhich will be carried out in conjunction with grassroots organisations in each city. The project will engage with local government, NGOs and infrastructure companies throughout with the aim of demonstrating the potential of these interventions and communicate the need to focus on trajectories of inclusion.