IN_SITU - An investigation of functions and future strategies for Leprosy Colony

Abstract: The world is urbanizing and many cities in developing countriesare unable to accommodate the masses of new city residents.Slums are an immediate response to this process, and in Indiaover 50% of the urban population lives in slums. Different ideasand methods of slum reduction have been present in Indiaduring the 20th century, which started off with a focus on slumclearance. As pure slum clearance eventually turned out to beunsuccessful in practise as slum dwellers remained unable tointegrate in the formal housing market, but simply rebuilt theirhuts illegally, clearance in combination with resettling on a newlocation instead became the prevailing idea. This method isstill in practice in India, and pre-fabricated residential buildings(often in form of multi-storey slab blocks) are built by thegovernment all over the country. Through the work of manyNGO’s, new ways of handling urban slums are however coming.Slum upgrading where the existing structures are upgraded insituin collaboration with the slum community is an increasinglyused method, although still in very small scale. SPARC, a majoractor on the Indian NGO scene, has for example tried to usethese methods in a slum upgrading project in Pune where onlyselected houses of poor quality were demolished and rebuilt,and the rest was upgraded. The problem is that these alternativeideas of slum rehabilitation are still rare, and the dominatingmethods of pre-fabricated, multi-storey projects are generallyunsuccessful. On the wide-ranging level, one could say that theyare unsustainable; socially (because they alter the slum dwellers’social networks), economically (because they are not adaptedto slum dwellers’ economic situation and income-generatingstrategies) and environmentally (because they don’t take existingstructures and materials in consideration).