Cities Without Slums (ABPL90279)

This subject explores ways to achieve global housing equity in informal settlements. Urbanisation and densification are the two most powerful processes that impact the quality of life in cities. While cities offer better opportunities through education, healthcare, employment and transport, poorly planned urbanization reinforce the already present challenges of poverty, informality, affordable housing, climate change, and inequity. As one billion urban residents lack access to affordable and secure housing and basic services, urban informality continues to challenge current approaches to urban development. 

The Cities Without Slums subject will provide students with intellectual and creative tools to explore and explain the process of urbanization, the importance of housing, policies that give rise to slum formation and the persistence of slums. Specifically, this subject will: 

•    equip students with a critical mindset to analyse emerging ‘best-practice’ over the years and the roles of institutions in influencing and/or formulating national urbanization, housing and slum upgrading policies. 
•    engage students in making use of practice-oriented research, to employ case studies from around the globe and explore government-led, community-led, and community/local government partnership approaches to slum upgrading and the delivery of land and provision of basic services in the context of urban governance. 
•    help prepare students to effectively examine cross-cutting topics that underwrite inclusive and sustainable, well-managed cities, including regulatory frameworks, security of tenure, housing finance, land use and transport interaction and linkages, and affordable house designs.

The widening participation and collaboration that is happening between and across the public and private sectors as well as with civil society and the urban poor communities is an acknowledgment of the diverse roles actors and agencies can play, both in the Global South and the Global North, in shaping better cities for all.