Improving the conditions of slum communities by providing home addresses
Over the past century, urbanization has continued to increase. This increasing growth has also brought about increasing inequalities (“World’s population”, 2014). This is especially the case in developing countries whose populations consist mainly of citizens who cannot afford the costs associated with a typical urban lifestyle. In such cases, many citizens resort to the outskirts of the city. This allows citizens to reap some of the benefits of the city, such as having a job, while still being able to afford to live. In more extreme cases, these areas on the outskirts take the shape of informal settlements often referred to as “slums”. These slums are defined by the United Nations Human Settlement Programme as “a group of individuals living under the same roof lacking one or more of the following conditions: 1) access to improved water, 2) access to improved sanitation, 3) sufficient living-area, 4) durability of housing, and 5) security of tenure” (“Millennium Development Goals”, n.d.). If over 50% of the population has a lack of these conditions, then the UN defines the area as a slum. Clearly, choosing to live in the slums for many is less of a choice and serves more as their only option for survival and there is no doubt that with the rate of urban expansion in developing countries, the slum populations will increase. For this reason, policy makers need to step in and help to upgrade these slums to be more livable for their inhabitants.
One of the biggest hurdles in improving the conditions within slums is the lack of helpful locational data. In the context of upgrading slums, the data which currently exists is not helpful for two groups: 1) the humanitarian organizations making an effort to help to improve the slums and 2) the citizens living within the slums.
Humanitarian Organizations
Organizations such as the United Nation’s (UN) have made continuous effort to improve slum conditions for many years. The UN has most recently made slum improvement a target for their seventh Millennium Development Goal to “Ensure environmental sustainability”. The target aims to achieve by the year 2020 that “a significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers” (“Millennium Development Goals”, n.d.). One of the largest challenges organizations face is the lack of data to accurately locate those living within slums. Often slums do not have any particular identification name, and as an extension, the slum households do not have addresses. This makes it almost impossible for organizations to properly evaluate progress in slum upgrading. In response to this, the International Bureau Universal Postal Union in partnership with the UN had launched an initiative in 2008, “Addressing the World — An Address for Everyone”, in order to tackle this problem. Former Executive Director of the United Nations Human Settlements Programme, Anna Tibaijuka, stated that “rapid urbanization means that people need addresses” (“Addressing the World”, 2012).
The barrier to improving slum conditions for the UN rests in their poor ability to define a slum. As defined in the “introduction”, a slum is a community with at least 50% of their citizens lacking one or more of the five conditions. This is a crude definition given that there is hardly any slum data to collect in the first place, and so to monitor whether these five conditions within a community is impossible. This problem was addressed in 2008 by a group of 21 international experts on remote sensing and slum monitoring, mentioning that the definition is a “fairly crude approach to spatially defining slums” (“Report of the Expert Group Meeting”, 2008).
Slum communities
In well addressed countries, conventional address structures are embedded within their psyches. In such countries, “most children learn their address as the first piece of structured information that they are exposed to after their surname and forenames” (Barr, 2015). In contrast, citizens living within the slums face many everyday challenges without having any helpful locational data, such as a home address. One of the main reasons why it is challenging for slums to obtain addresses is due to poor government administration. The lack of helpful locational data affects slum citizens at both an individual and also business level. At an individual level, the lack of helpful locational data threatens a slum citizen’s legal identity. According to the United Nations Development Programme’s Commission on the Legal Empowerment of the Poor, 4 billion people are excluded from the rule of law because they do not have a legal identity (“Addressing the World”, 2012). This lack of identity is often a barrier to the enjoyment of their rights as citizens such as being not being able to vote or potentially participate in national and international markets. At a business level, citizens living within the slums who want to carry out business have not been able to accurately locate target customers. For this reason, the prosperity of these slums is little to none.
Direct vs. Indirect locational data
The kind of helpful locational data, such as home addresses, described in both the previous sections is referred to as “indirect” locational data. Indirect locational data (ILD) is defined as data which is used to describe a location with the use of the alphabet. In the context of human settlement, this form of data has been more popular than direct locational data (DLD). An example of DLD is the literal and numeric latitude and longitude coordinates. The reason why ILD is preferred over DLD is because humans are literary creatures, and can remember words more easily than numbers. For this reason, it would not make sense to force slums to use DLD even though it does not require registration and so can be used by anyone at any time (Barr, 2015). If the challenges with obtaining an ILD continue to persist, policy makers need to find an easier alternative that requires less administration.
Alternatives and Solutions
For the reasons explained above, addresses should be seen as a basic human right. Address infrastructure can be seen as the glue in any effective community. Without the existence of such addresses, communities cannot prosper. If governments can not properly administer something that is so fundamental to a citizen’s ability to participate in the urban environment, then we need to find an easier alternative. While there have been alternatives to ILD and DLD, none have shown any massive success in their implementation. One alternative which shows potential is What3words (W3W), which is a company that provides a universal addressing system. The technology provided by W3W “divides an entire surface of the earth into grid squares each very close to 3mx3m in size” (Barr, 2015). Each square is then assigned a three-word address. One of the problems that W3W solves is the issue of having to register an address with a government because the three-word address is automatically generated for the entire planet. This is because the technology uses longitude and latitude coordinates and converts these coordinate, once created into a 3 by 3 meter square, into a three-word address. For example, the coordinates (43.741256, -79.402075) would translate to “alien.complains.vocally”. It is comforting to know that with this technology, slum citizens would have an address. What policy makers have to do is make the citizens aware that this technology exists, and also find a way for them to actually use it. Given that slum conditions vary, some may not have the proper technology to utilize the application. Policy makers need to take this into account. To provide for the communities who do not have the proper technology, printed maps could be provided which would show the three word addresses for a given region.
Since the release of the application in 2013, the company has made several partnerships with humanitarian organizations. A more recent effort was their partnership with the UN, providing What3words with the chance to integrate their application within UN-ASIGN — an application which locates an area of impact during natural and humanitarian disasters. So far, UN-ASIGN has successfully been used in Haiti, Pakistan, Nigeria and Thailand (Giles, 2015).
Another alternative, proposed by UN-Habitat, is the use of very high resolution (VHR) satellite imagery. This technology has been used in order to identify slums and then evaluate slum data, such as slum growth. Even though this technology does not directly solve the issue of the lack of helpful locational data, it has provided the UN with novel insights about these areas. One of these insights was in the fact that the diversity of slum conditions is such that there are many different manifestations of slums, even within a single city (Report — Expert Group Meeting, 2008). The lack of helpful data in the form of ILD is clearly a challenge in the use of VHR technology.
To compare W3W with VHR, W3W certainly has greater impact potential because it directly solves the issue of the lack of a home and business address. As explained previously, the lack of an address places a hold on many improvements in the slum communities. A specific example of how a universal addressing system, like W3W, would help slum communities is in the the enhancing of their security. By having an address, governments will be able to “properly locate and access marginalized areas in order to incorporate them into the nation” (“Addressing the World”, 2012). By giving the governments a push in the right direction with this technology, this may encourage governments to see the value in further monitoring in order to improve the conditions within the slums.
Given the varied strengths of both W3W and VHR, policy makers should make an attempt to use both to address slums. For example, a technology like W3W can be implemented within the slums and then evaluated when combined with the aid of VHR technology.
Conclusion
The lack of addressing in slum communities is a serious issue that needs to be addressed soon before conditions becomes too unsustainable. There is a reason why the United Nations has declared the improvement of slums as one of their targets regarding the goal of ensuring societal sustainability. The fact that these slums are densely populated, have no governance, and are increasing in size, should raise much concern for humanity. If policy makers could implement addressing within the slum communities, this would be a major step towards solving many of the issues that these slum communities currently face.
References
“Addressing the world — an address for everyone”. (2012). International Bureau of the Universal Postal Union.
Barr, Robert. “What 3 Words — Technical Appraisal”. (2015) Manchester Geomatics.
“Expert Group Meeting on Slum Identification and Mapping”. (2008) Expert Group Meeting on Slum
Identification and Mapping.
“Millennium Development Goals Indicators”. (n.d.). http://mdgs.un.org/unsd/mdg/Metadata.aspx?IndicatorId=32 Accessed 9 Oct. 2016.
“Urban Povery”. (2013). http://www.sustainablecitiescollective.com/global-site-plans-grid/164156/looking-planet-slums-mike-davis
“World’s population increasingly urban with more than half living in urban areas”. (2014). United Nations, http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/news/population/world-urbanization-prospects-2014.html Accessed 9 Oct. 2016.
