Data Collection Techniques for Informal Settlement Upgrades in Cape Town, South Africa

Abstract

Abstract: Informal settlements pose a major challenge for managers and planners of developing world cities. Failure to intervene in a manner that improves residents' quality of life may lead to social and political unrest. Due to continually changing internal social and political environments in these settlements and to frequent changes in the arrangements of shacks, spatial and social data need to be collected more frequently than for conventional development tasks. What are needed are simple, low-cost techniques that preferably involve community members in collecting the data. Palmtop computers, group workshops, and voice recordings incorporated into digital records, digital still and video imagery, and semi-automated feature extraction techniques are methods that have been developed and tested in a number of settlements in Cape Town, South Africa, along with one in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania, and that can be used to address these needs. Introduction The burgeoning informal settlements that accompany rapid urbanisation in Africa, Latin America, and Asia constitute a major challenge for land managers, because informal settlements may house 30 to 80 percent of a developing world city's population (UNCHS 1996). Improving the conditions of the urban poor is critical to social and political stability, and there is the potential for urban violence and social unrest as social disparities become more acute (Farvacque-Vitovic' and Godwin 1998). Managing informal settlements involves, amongst other things, planning and controlling where they are located and how and where they grow; improving the social, economic, and basic health conditions in them; and ensuring that residents in these settlements and neighbouring communities enjoy social justice. Addressing all these objectives requires current, accurate, social, and spatial information, and informal settlements hold certain unique challenges in this respect due to their complexity and frequently changing social conditions. Land tenure security is important in many improvement strategies because it provides the much needed stability for these strategies to succeed. Thus, much of the data collection and information management effort should be directed toward security and equity in the land tenure system. In this paper we describe a number of techniques to collect social and spatial information. These techniques were developed during projects to upgrade informal settlements in a number of ongoing case studies in Cape Town that started in 1995. The techniques were developed primarily in studies of the Marconi Beam and Imizamo Yethu (through collective struggle--Xhosa) settlements in Cape Town. Some of the ideas and techniques were also developed and applied in several other informal settlement upgrade cases in and around Cape Town (e.g., Brown's Farm, Wallacedene, parts of Khayelitsha), and the Manzene informal settlement in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania. Two of the techniques were first tested in a rural land reform case in the village of Algeria, some 230 kilmoeters northwest of Cape Town, which is not an informal settlement, because the social and local political environment in the village was far more stable than in the informal settlements. The Algeria village proved to be ideal for first testing ideas in a situation where some of the factors that may exist in informal settlements (e.g. high levels of conflict, continual change) and that may have impeded the experimental processes, were absent. We begin by describing the historical context of the large number of informal settlements in Cape Town, followed by brief histories of the Marconi Beam and Imizamo Yethu settlements. We then describe a number of general social and political characteristics of informal settlements in southern Africa. These sections demonstrate why social and spatial data need to be collected frequently, especially when major change is occurring in the wider society. …

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