Epsilon Archive for Student Projects

Abstract

The world is urbanizing and many cities in developing countries
are unable to accommodate the masses of new city residents.
Slums are an immediate response to this process, and in India
over 50% of the urban population lives in slums. Different ideas
and methods of slum reduction have been present in India
during the 20th century, which started off with a focus on slum
clearance. As pure slum clearance eventually turned out to be
unsuccessful in practise as slum dwellers remained unable to
integrate in the formal housing market, but simply rebuilt their
huts illegally, clearance in combination with resettling on a new
location instead became the prevailing idea. This method is
still in practice in India, and pre-fabricated residential buildings
(often in form of multi-storey slab blocks) are built by the
government all over the country. Through the work of many
NGO’s, new ways of handling urban slums are however coming.
Slum upgrading where the existing structures are upgraded insitu
in collaboration with the slum community is an increasingly
used method, although still in very small scale. SPARC, a major
actor on the Indian NGO scene, has for example tried to use
these methods in a slum upgrading project in Pune where only
selected houses of poor quality were demolished and rebuilt,
and the rest was upgraded. The problem is that these alternative
ideas of slum rehabilitation are still rare, and the dominating
methods of pre-fabricated, multi-storey projects are generally
unsuccessful. On the wide-ranging level, one could say that they
are unsustainable; socially (because they alter the slum dwellers’
social networks), economically (because they are not adapted
to slum dwellers’ economic situation and income-generating
strategies) and environmentally (because they don’t take existing
structures and materials in consideration).

In Bangalore in Karnataka, southern India, the number of slum
dweller is lower than the national average, but still high enough to involve around two million people. Bangalore is a segregated
city with remains of separation from colonial times. Gated
communities and secure shopping malls arise next to small
slum pockets. As the “high-tech” capital of India, it is rapidly
expanding, and a new metro line is under construction. 1,200 of
Bangalore’s slum dwellers live in Leprosy Colony, an old leprosy
slum close to the central railway station. The settlement is old
and overcrowded and lacks sanitary facilities and clean water.
However, the slum also displays some fine qualities in terms of
variation, flexibility, human scale, street life and social capital,
as well as 40% stable, permanent buildings which could be
upgraded rather than demolished.

The aim of the thesis is to gain a greater understanding of the
use, functions and potential improvements of slum settlements,
with the focus on Leprosy Colony. It intends to look at slum
rehabilitation issues from a planner’s perspective, of public
space and of the role and layout of a ‘non-planned’ settlement.
The project have been carried out through a differentiated
methodological approach of literature analysis; observation;
documentation; interviews and proposal work, where the
literature analysis and proposal work were performed mainly in
Sweden, and observation, documentation and interviews were
carried out mainly in India. The proposal work resulted in a slum
upgrading proposal for Leprosy Colony, IN_SITU, built up by six
conceptual strategies;
Improved connectivity; rail and road bridging structures;
reinforced network of public realm; a flexible anti-flood system;
incremental housing; framework for neighborhood expansion.
These form a proposal of a flexible character, which takes its
departure in the existing conditions and possibilities of the slum.