Planning slums? A new tool for improved access to basic services.
Today, approximately one billion people live in slums and informal settlements. With massive demographic growth happening in central cities of developing countries, most local governments don’t have the means to provide for these unplanned parcels hosting more and more incoming urban dwellers each day. The way these shacks are built, with various materials found by slum dwellers in their immediate environment, usually in very tightly knit patterns, don’t necessarily leave space for basic service access. Sanitation, water, waste disposal, electricity…all these services are expected to be integrated in formal buildings. In slums however, the built habitat can often be located in quite some distance from access to these basic services. When municipalities do intervene to provide for a certain level of access, these are often located at the periphery of the dense habitats. Once shacks have been built so close next to one another, it is indeed hard to introduce service facilities across the settlement.
This is where Open Reblock comes into play. This application has been created to answer this specific need: how to create better access to basic sanitation, where slum dwellings are stacked onto one another over large stretches of land?
To try answer this question, Reblock uses an algorithm that aims to help rearrange slums, with the smallest amount of disruption possible, in order to give all blocks of a settlement access to streets and basic services.
Why is this a smart city tool? Because although smart cities refer in our common imaginaries to flying cars, robot cashiers and all sorts of high tech devices, a large part of human beings have yet to access these potentialities, and remain stuck in growing unplanned and insecure housing. Basic technology can thus make significant changes with minimum investment and disruption for these communities.
Here is an example of a neighborhood map of Harare in Zimbabwe, using reblock to improve street access.
The first step is to collect parcel data, in collaboration with local residents, to try mapping out the broad design of the settlement.
The black lines show streets and paths. Black doted lines show which parcels have direct access to streets and various services served by these streets. Orange lines outline parcels with no direct access to streets.
Reblock looks for the simplest modification of these paths in order to provide street and service access to every parcel within the settlement. Here, the result is found in adding four small pathways that allow inner shacks to access streets more easily. No orange line is left, meaning that the settlement does not have enclosed parcels anymore.
If we could draw a parallel -at a bigger scale, enclosed countries with no access to the sea often find themselves penalised in the global economy. Here, enclosed parcels could also be penalised regarding the most basic needs that they have more difficulty to fulfil, with potential repercussions on other productive activities.
This reflection is of course theoretical, and every settlement reblocking involves unique dynamics, understood and maintained only through strong partnerships with local communities.
Intelligent cities should absolutely be thought in relation to the human beings they are supposed to serve, not just as autonomous systems pursuing the highest technology possible, just for the sake of science. The latter should be put at the service of the people, and even more at the service of those for whom even basic technologies could imply significant improvements on a daily basis.
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