COMMUNITY-LED PLANNING: THE KEY TO SUCCESSFUL SLUM UPGRADING?

As a result of the urbanization crisis taking place in the developing world, nearly a quarter of the Earth's urban population lives in slums (WUP, 2014), amounting to a total of 881 million people in the developing countries in 2014 (UN-HABITAT, 2016). Without effective intervention, these figures are expected to increase in the future, since the urban population of the developing countries will have risen by almost 1 billion people by 2030 (WUP, 2018). Slum upgrading is therefore an area of paramount importance that is realized in practice by taking one of two approaches: one of the most common procedures is external or expert planning, when identifying the problem and developing and implementing a solution is done by experts. In the case of the other approach, these steps are realized by members of the given community with a facilitator - this is called community planning. This paper compares these two planning approaches using two slum upgrading programs in Kenya as examples, and it aims to use the experiences gained from them to support the hypothesis that the key to efficient slum upgrading is the active involvement of the affected community in the planning process; that is, community planning.