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The Pune Slum Census: Creating a Socio-Economic and Spatial
Information base on a GIS for integrated and inclusive city
development
Srinanda Sen and Jane Hobson
Shelter Associates, Pune India
Shelter Associates (SA ) is a small Pune-based NGO, headed by Pratima Joshi and Srinanda Sen who are
architects and planners. Shelter Associates works in partnership with Baandhani, an organisation of
collectives of women and men slum dwellers, to facilitate and support community housing and
infrastructure projects. It works on the philosophy that poor people are the best people to find solutions
to their housing problems, therefore Shelter Associates and Baandhani work together to empower poor
communities to seek solutions for themselves. As part of this process, communities have worked on
collecting information about their settlements and other slum settlements in Pune, and this information
has been one of their strongest negotiating tools.
This article is co-authored by Srinanda Sen and Jane Hobson . Sen is an architect-planner, co-founder
and co-director of SA) and Hobson is a geographer-planner who worked previously for SA and now
volunteers alongside teaching)
Valuable inputs have been made by Pratima Joshi ( architect ,co-founder and co-director of Shelter
Associates.)
We are also grateful to David Sattherthwaite (Director, Human Settlements) and Dr, Nirmala Pandit
(Managing Trustee , Centre for Empowerment, Pune) for their useful feeback on our earlier draft.
Abstract:
Urban Planning Systems rarely include the poor. Cities are growing and so is the urban population. Pune
is a large city in Western Maharashtra. According to the National Census, 2001, the population of the
Pune Urban Agglomeration is 3.5 million and it is (in some estimates) to reach nearly 6 million by
2021 i Out of this the city of Pune has a 2.5 people living in it. Forty percent and above of the population
live in slums. One of the biggest shortfalls of Pune’s urban planning is that it still fails to include the poor
in mainstream policies. The reason is that the poor are hardly known about, in fact, even government
authorities are unaware about how many poor people there are in Pune. This attitude, and the fact that
Shelter Associates work is closely connected with the poor regarding basic services and housing, started
the development of a slum database by SA. Finally, the Pune Municipal Corporation asked us to make a
complete census of the slum dwellers in the year 2000. That gave rise to a detailed survey of Pune’s slum
dwellers, to become, amongst other things, the first ever spatial and socio-economic census processed and
analyzed on a GIS.. The Pune Slum Census has built upon this experience and expanded the
communities’ information base, and has created a methodology which the city can use to work on detailed
urban planning using a GIS and with the slum database as the base. This article focuses on the Pune Slum
Census in progress.
1. Introduction
Urban planning and development in Pune fails to consider the city as a whole. It is rare that the city's slum
settlements are considered in major proposals, and the Municipal Corporation plans for slum settlements
through haphazard, piecemeal projects. There is no integrated and inclusive approach to planning for the
whole city. A large part of the problem is inadequate information about the poor. Reliable and
comprehensive information about slums, their locations and about their populations is needed as a basis
for ensuring that planning works for all citizens, not just those people who live outside slums.
In an attempt to redress the absence of information, NGO Shelter Associates is working on a project to
survey all slum settlements in Pune, for the Municipal Corporation. The project comprises a socio-economic household census, settlement level surveys, and mapping of each settlement. The data is
connected, analysed and presented using GIS software.
This paper considers firstly, how information about slum settlements can be used to promote integrated
and inclusive planning in the city. Information is necessary to raise awareness, to enable different actors
to plan effectively, and to increase accountability of decision-making about the allocation of urban
resources. Next, the Pune Slum Census project is outlined and explained. The final section focuses on the
difficulties in persuading the Municipal Corporation to use the project database as a tool for planning, and
in generating an interest among lower-level municipal officers in the project.
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