Conference on housing, urban poverty and environment
The urban poor often exhibit tremendous creativity in changing the meaning and function of discarded objects, turning them into building materials, assembled in ways that sometimes challenge traditional building principles. The results can sometimes be risky, however, due to structural instability, flammability, or contamination, compounded by hazards related to human activities (e.g. cooking, heating, or productive activities) happening in or around the house. Other challenges that can affect the well being of poor urban households include space constraints and lack of light and ventilation.
Poor urban communities are often established on marginal lands such as floodplains or steep hillsides-often the only land available. These sites are often characterized by lack of environmental services, including poor drainage, lack of wastewater collection and treatment, inadequate access to safe water, and lack of garbage collection[3]. Furthermore, these sites are particularly susceptible to hazards of natural or human cause, both of which are very likely to increase in frequency and severity with climate change.
IDRC’s Urban Poverty and Environment (UPE) Program seeks to ease the environmental burdens that exacerbate poverty in urban areas of developing countries by strengthening the capacity of the urban poor to access environmental services, reduce environmental degradation and vulnerability to natural disasters, and enhance use of natural resources for food, water and income security. UPE has taken an integrated approach to environment and natural resources, working with four priority themes -urban agriculture; urban water and sanitation; waste management; and vulnerability to natural disasters- with land tenure as a crosscutting issue.
UPE funds interdisciplinary research projects that address several of its priority themes in concert, with efforts made to integrate social and gender analysis in order to expand knowledge on inequity and on strategies for enhancing inclusion. UPE is currently exploring the potential of housing as an entry point for research.
Objective of the meeting
The goal of the workshop is to bring together a range of stakeholders, including researchers, practitioners and policy-makers, to explore the potential of improving housing to alleviate poverty and environmental degradation in urban areas of developing regions.
Specific Objectives:
- To better understand how good housing can alleviate poverty and how poor housing can worsen it in urban areas;
- To identify best practices for increasing access to adequate housing in poor urban areas;
- To identify the linkages between housing and UPE’s themes of urban agriculture, water supply and sanitation, vulnerability to natural disasters, and solid waste management, to facilitate a more integrated approach to research on these themes;
- To formulate a set of key practical, applied, policy-focused research questions that would enable UPE to further support research on housing and urban poverty;