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Sample Papers and Popular Downloads


 

Cover Image Baan Mankong; going to scale with slum and squatter upgrading in Thailand
Somsook Boonyabancha

Environment&Urbanization
Vol 17, No 1, April 2005


This describes the ambitious national slum and squatter upgrading programme launched by the Thai government in 2003 and implemented through the Community Organizations Development Institute. The programme centres on providing infrastructure subsidies and housing loans to low-income communities to support upgrading in situ wherever possible and, if not, to develop new homes close by. Support is provided not only to community organizations formed by the urban poor for projects but also to their networks, to allow them to work with city authorities and other local actors and with national agencies on city-wide upgrading programmes.


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(426Kb)



 

Cover Image

Community-designed, built
and managed toilet blocks
in Indian cities
Sundar Burra, Sheela Patel and
Thomas Kerr

Environment&Urbanization
Vol 15, No 2, October 2003

This paper describes the ten-year programme of community designed, built and managed toilet blocks undertaken by urban poor federations and women’s cooperatives, with support from the Indian NGO SPARC. This programme as reached hundreds of thousands of poor urban dwellers with much improved sanitation and facilities for washing; it has also demonstrated how such provision is affordable and manageable for all Indian cities. But this programme has also demonstrated to city authorities the capacity and competence of urban poor organizations, and helped change the relationship between the residents of slums and local government agencies. The paper begins by explaining why sanitation has been neglected, and describes the inadequacies in government sanitation programmes. It then describes the first experiments with community sanitation and the difficult negotiations in many cities, including Mumbai, Kanpur and Bangalore. Then it discusses the major community toilet programmes that developed in Pune and Mumbai. It highlights the innovations that allowed these to work better than previous public toilet blocks, the reasons why the urban poor organizations took on these projects, the lessons learnt and the ways in which community toilet blocks helped address other problems faced by the urban poor.


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Cover Image Are the debates on water
privatization missing the point?
Experiences from Africa, Asia
and Latin America

Jessica Budds and Gordon McGranahan

Environment&Urbanization
Vol 15 No 2 October 2003

This paper has two principal aims: first, to unravel some of the arguments mobilized in the controversial privatization debate, and second, to review the scale and nature of private sector provision of water and sanitation in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Despite being vigorously promoted in the policy arena and having been implemented in several countries in the South in the 1990s, privatization has achieved neither the scale nor benefits anticipated. In particular, the paper is pessimistic about the role that privatization can play in achieving the Millennium Development Goals of halving the number of people without access to water and sanitation by 2015. This is not because of some inherent contradiction between private profits and the public good, but because neither publicly nor privately operated utilities are well suited to serving the majority of low-income households with inadequate water and sanitation, and because many of the barriers to service provision in poor settlements can persist whether water and sanitation utilities are publicly or privately operated. This is not to say that well-governed localities should not choose to involve private companies in water and sanitation provision, but it does imply that there is no justification for international agencies and agreements to actively promote greater private sector participation on the grounds that it can significantly reduce deficiencies in water and sanitation services in the South.


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(397Kb)



Cover Image Participatory democracy and sustainable development: integrated urban environmental management in Porto Alegre, Brazil
Rualdo Menegat

Environment&Urbanization
Vol 14, No 2, October 2002


Porto Alegre is well known for its innovative social policies but less so for the environmental policies that are this paper’s focus. The paper begins by describing the city's participatory budgeting system and the multiple interconnections it has with a wide-ranging environmental policy. Porto Alegre has the highest standard of living and the highest life expectancy of any Brazilian metropolitan centre. Virtually all its people have water piped to their homes and most have good quality sanitation and drainage. The garbage collection system reaches virtually all households and has included a separate collection of recyclables since 1990; other programmes enforce industrial pollution control (including special provision in garages and petrol stations), keep down polluting motor vehicle emissions and ensure the re-utilization of organic wastes from parks and restaurants. The city has 14 square metres of green space per person space and a million trees along its streets. This paper also describes the education and environmental information programme that underpins these policies, including changes to school curricula and the Environmental Atlas of Porto Alegre that provides the base information for environmental policy, environmental discussion and environmental education. The paper ends by discussing how sustainable development is impossible without good urban environmental management and how this, in turn, has to be built on democracy and participation.


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Cover Image Participatory budgeting: a significant contribution to participatory democracy
Yves Cabannes

Environment&Urbanization
Vol 16, No 1, April 2004


This describes participatory budgeting in Brazil and elsewhere as a significant area of innovation in democracy and local development. It draws on the experience of 25 municipalities in Latin America and Europe, selected based on the diversity of their participatory budgeting experience and their degree of innovation. The paper provides a systematic analysis of the range of experience that can be included in participatory budgeting and considers the questions that are raised by this diverse set of possibilities.


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Cover Image Community federations and city upgrading: the work of Pamoja Trust and Muungano in Kenya

Jane Weru
Vol 16, No 1, April 2004

This describes the work of the Kenyan NGO, Pamoja Trust, and the urban poor federation (Muungano wa Wanvijiji) in the informal settlements where a high proportion of Kenya’s urban population live. This work centres on developing a consensus among the inhabitants of informal settlements around issues of land and structure entitlements, and building community capacity to address these, before negotiating with government for land and infrastructure. Community-based savings schemes, “slum” enumerations, house-modelling and community-to-community exchange programmes are some of the approaches used. This paper describes how an international network of community federations seeds and supports such processes.

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Popular Downloads

Below are links to papers that are among the most popular downloads from Environment and Urbanization; the full text of all of these can be freely accessed through the on-line edition at http://eandu.sagepub.com/. The links listed below take you to the contents page of the issue in which the paper listed; from there you can access the abstract or a .pdf of the full text. The papers that were published prior to 1995 take longer to download, because these have .pdfs based on scans of the originals.

Historic papers on urban environmental and development issues
(These are also among the most cited and most downloaded papers)

Ecological footprints and appropriated carrying capacity: what urban economics leaves out
William E. Rees
http://eau.sagepub.com/content/vol4/issue2/

Curitiba: towards sustainable urban development
Jonas Rabinovitch
http://eau.sagepub.com/content/vol4/issue2/

The river of our life
Gabriel García Márquez
http://eau.sagepub.com/content/vol5/issue1/

Conceptualizing urban poverty
Ellen Wratten
http://eau.sagepub.com/content/vol7/issue1/

Poverty and livelihoods: whose reality counts?
Robert Chambers
http://eau.sagepub.com/content/vol7/issue1/

The informal housing sector in the metropolis of Abidjan, Ivory Coast
Alphonse Yapi-Diahou
http://eau.sagepub.com/content/vol7/issue2/

NGO Profile: Orangi Pilot Project
http://eau.sagepub.com/content/vol7/issue2/
NB An expanded and much updated profile of the Orangi Pilot Project written by Arif Hasan was published in Environment and Urbanization, Vol 18, No 2, pages 451-480

Agenda 21; a form of joint environmental management in Manizales, Colombia
Luz Stella Velásquez B
http://eau.sagepub.com/content/vol10/issue2/

Deep democracy: urban governmentality and the horizon of politics
Arjun Appadurai
http://eau.sagepub.com/content/vol13/issue2/

Papers with among the most citations
(from journals that, like Environment and Urbanization, are housed on the Highwire site)

What determines vulnerability to floods; a case study in Georgetown, Guyana
Mark Pelling
http://eau.sagepub.com/content/vol9/issue1/

The politics of urban-rural relations: land use conversion in the Philippines
Philip F. Kelly
http://eau.sagepub.com/content/vol10/issue1/

Rhetoric, reality and resilience: overcoming obstacles to young people’s participation in development
David Driskell, Kanchan Bannerjee, Louise Chawla
http://eau.sagepub.com/content/vol13/issue1/

Papers with among the most recorded downloads

u Tshani Buyakhuluma (The grass speaks): People's Dialogue and the South African Homeless People's Federation (1994-6)
Joel Bolnick
http://eau.sagepub.com/content/vol8/issue2/

Healthy cities or unhealthy islands? The health and social implications of urban inequality
Carolyn Stephens
http://eau.sagepub.com/content/vol8/issue2/

Governance, economic settings and poverty in Bangalore
Solomon Benjamin
http://eau.sagepub.com/content/vol12/issue1/

From global intercity competition to cooperation for livable cities and economic resilience in Pacific Asia
Mike Douglass
http://eau.sagepub.com/content/vol14/issue1/

Are the debates on water privatization missing the point? Experiences from Africa, Asia and Latin America
Jessica Budds and Gordon McGranahan
http://eau.sagepub.com/content/vol15/issue2/

Participatory budgeting: a significant contribution to participatory democracy
Yves Cabannes
http://eau.sagepub.com/content/vol16/issue1/

Community federations and city upgrading: the work of Pamoja Trust and Muungano in Kenya
Jane Weru
http://eau.sagepub.com/content/vol16/issue1/

Baan Mankong: going to scale with "slum" and squatter upgrading in Thailand
Somsook Boonyabancha
http://eau.sagepub.com/content/vol17/issue1/

 

 


 

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