Abstract
This chapter gleans some lessons from the World Bank’s enablement initiative that took place in Iran from 2004 to 2009. An $80 million loan from the World Bank targeted these settlements in Bandar Abbas, Zahedan, Kermanshah, Sanandaj, and Tabriz. Adaptation, formalization, and integration emerged as the three components of this upgrading process based on data collection and analysis from mainly secondary sources of information on this initiative. The chapter then delves deeper into these themes and distinguishes them from the mainstream planning process that starts from the conception of an idea, followed by the planning phase, and finally implementation. Service delivery, governance, and leadership constitute the three key components of adaptation which captures people’s coping mechanisms and endurance. Title deeds, regularization, and physical upgrading represent the three attributes of formalization representing compliance with formal regulations, and finally, trust building, capacity building, and asset building epitomize integration when an informal settlement victoriously formalizes. Regardless of whether or not the targeted settlements experienced all of these three types of transformations fully or partially, these efforts were compared and ranked for the target cities.
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Notes
- 1.
See Dovey, Kim. 2012. Informal Urbanism and Complex Adaptive Assemblage. International Development Planning Review 34 (4): 349–367.
- 2.
Bandar Abbas (capital of Hormozgan province); Tabriz (capital of Azarbaijan Province); Kermanshah (capital of Kermanshah province); Zahedan (capital of Sistan and Baluchestan Province); Sanandaj (the capital of Kurdestan province).
- 3.
This low-tech recycling process engaged a wide network of people and businesses, from shop owners who rented out carts to truck drivers distributing them among end users who collected garbage throughout the city, to people that separated and packaged garbage by type. For more information see Khatam (2002).
- 4.
For example, in Pinar, Istanbul, people have reused discarded mattress wire mesh to separate public from private spaces and to demarcate their house boundaries.
- 5.
Eskandari (2008) explains how 22 local women served as neighborhood mayors and oversaw the implementation of repairing an open sewer project that ran through a neighborhood in Bandar Abbas. This project demonstrated successful trust building and cooperation between people and city officials in 2006.
- 6.
While ‘formalizing the informal’ presents a common urban management goal, Dowlatabad experienced a reverse trend. This originally large swath of land belonged to a wealthy local landlord who decided to subdivide and sell it all (Irandoust personal interview 2016). To avoid poor planning, a professional planner prepared a gridiron plan with plots of roughly 200 m². Knowing that large lot sizes were not affordable and would not easily sell in the future, they were further broken up into four smaller 50 m² lots. Having found these small lots affordable and more compatible with their needs, lower-income people purchased them. Unlike the organic, meandering, and seemingly unorganized spatial structure of most informal settlements, Dowlatabad looks much like a typical formal planned neighborhood. This experience demonstrates that if there is an economic or political will, informal settlements do not have to look chaotic, and can benefit from the clarity of gridiron plans.
- 7.
For more information about Kermanshah’s typologies of informal neighborhoods see Alaedini and Tavangar (2012).
- 8.
Building the Ill Goli metro station in the upscale part of Tabriz as opposed to Ahmadabad with its potentially higher ridership illustrates the public perception about enforcing redlining toward the poor.
- 9.
While, according to Piran (2002), 25–30% of Shirabad’s population might engage in drug-related activities, its public image is much worse.
- 10.
This is what Roy calls the “rural/urban interface.” See Roy (2005).
- 11.
See Razzaz (1998).
- 12.
See Glickman and Servon (1998).
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Arefi, M., Mohsenian-Rad, N. (2019). Endurance, Compliance, Victory: Learning from Informal Settlements in Five Iranian Cities. In: Arefi, M., Kickert, C. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Bottom-Up Urbanism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90131-2_14
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