Building flood resilience of low-income urban communities through formal public housing: lessons from Ahmadabad and Surat, India
- Urban India
- 39(2), Jul-Dec, 2019: p.80-98
Urban floods are one of the many risks and threats that climate change has brought in the last few years. Flooding and water-logging can put large areas of a city in entirely uninhabitable conditions, or damage infrastructure. In places where people lack adequate shelter and basic infrastructure, flooding could directly affect their health through injuries, transmission of infectious diseases, displacements or indirectly affect their living conditions through impact on properties, social infrastructure and livelihoods. Such negative impacts could exacerbate existing vulnerabilities, especially of the urban poor and the disadvantaged sections of the society who live in precarious housing conditions in low-lying areas or areas unsuitable for building habitation. This research thus looks if floods affect slum dwellers more than those living in formal housing in the two cities of the state of Gujarat – Ahmedabad and Surat. By comparing two different housing typologies - (i) formal settlements i.e. public housing schemes (in particular Basic Services to the Urban Poor (BSUP) and Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY)); and (ii) informal settlements i.e. slum settlements; the study looks at different impacts residents of these housing typologies bear, such as water-logging depths, loss in housing structures, loss in assets, etc. in case of floods and subsequent water-logging in the study areas.- Reproduced
Climate change, Gujarat, Public housing, Resilience, Urban flooding