Indonesia | Download Book Chapter
In Informal Services in Asian Cities: Lessons for Urban Planning and Management from the COVID-19 Pandemic. With the Asian Development Bank. Co-authored by Joris van Etten of the Asian Development Bank.
Approximately one-third of the world’s urban residents live in informal settlements (King et al. 2017) characterized by lack of secure land or dwelling tenure, lack of access to adequate basic infrastructure services, and noncompliance with spatial plans or building regulations. Although national definitions may vary, slums are the most excluded form of informal settlements, with high levels of poverty and large expanses of unsafe housing located in hazardous areas (UN-Habitat 2015).
This chapter explores the overlap and distinction between urban informality and urban poverty through a focus on slum upgrading in Indonesian cities. Because poverty is multidimensional, slum upgrading programs cannot focus on physical infrastructure alone if they are targeted at the urban poor. For an integrated approach to
slum upgrading, program development must prioritize the use of multidimensional approaches to address technical, institutional, and financial challenges of program implementation. Case studies from the Asian Development Bank’s urban sector work in Indonesia illustrate the lessons learned from attempts to transform practice and
reflect on the discrepancies between theory and practice.
Tiffany was the primary author of this chapter.