Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
URBAN SLUMS
Background
As noted in the section on “Megacities,” a massive immigration of rural farmers
to urban cities has been underway for several decades, which is “unstoppable,”
and the existing cities being enlarged have been able to furnish the infrastruc-
ture and housing sufficient to accommodate only part of the immigrants, leading
to formation of large slum areas with very inadequate housing and community
facilities including environmental infrastructure/facilities (water supply, excreta
management, solid waste management, drainage, roads/access lanes). This section
on Urban Slums describes the experience and findings of two major slum man-
agement studies/projects, one in Indonesia and the other in Malaysia.
Indonesia Kampung Improvement Projects (KIPs)
New Approach to Slum Management
In the 1990s, the governor of Jakarta
“invented” a new approach to handling the urban slum problem in which aban-
doned than the conventional approach of tearing down slum housing and moving
the families to new housing outside the city, which hardly solved the problem
because of lack of employment in the new housing areas, requiring the workers
to travel back to the city to be employed, through wasting both time and travel
costs. In the new approach the city furnished these facilities to the slum areas
with the expectation (which did happen) that the families would then upgrade
their homes to match their new environmental situation. An evaluation of this
in 1976 for a WHO sponsored project for planning a metropolitan sewerage
system for Jakarta, showed that the governor's project, to be really effective,
needed improvements, and these were subsequently planned and implemented
with World Bank support
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. The success of this effort led to expansion of the
“KIP” (kampung improvement program) approach to many other cities through-
out Indonesia.
The sanitation facilities furnished in this program
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included provisions for
(1) piped water supply including delivery to homes that could afford individual
house connection changes, with public taps (operated by a paid tap manager) for
other users, (2) use of pour-flush toilets with excreta disposal using dual leaching
pits, (3) periodic pickup of refuse, (4) pathways for enabling access to homes
above flood levels, (5) adequate drainage (with the KIP dwellers themselves
furnishing the labor to keep the drains clean and functioning), and (6) public
centers with toilets, washing facilities, and bathing facilities, including payment
by users at low charge levels.
The dual pit leaching system for disposal recognized the need for (1) two pits
so that one would be in use while the other was being desludged, (2) a special
desludging unit of the municipal government for desludging service to the homes
designed to work effectively in narrow access
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.
A very important aspect of the KIP program was recognition that, while many
if not most of the slum residents were squatters who had come to the cities
