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Call for Papers - Conference on Housing, Urban Poverty and Environment - CLOSED

*NOTE TO APPLICANTS: A very high number of excellent abstracts was received. Successful authors have been notified of abstract acceptance. We thank all applicants for their interest.*

This is a call for researchers, practitioners, and policy-makers working on housing, urban poverty and environment issues to participate in an upcoming IDRC-sponsored expert meeting to be held in Kampala, Uganda, on December 2-4, 2008.

Deadline for submission of abstracts: 4 April 2008

Background

According to the UN^[1], humanity will reach a major demographic milestone in 2008, when the world’s population becomes predominantly urban for the first time in history. As the urbanization trend continues, in developing countries —in Sub-Saharan Africa in particular— it is likely to be characterized by increasing urban poverty and expanding slums. At present, one billion people are slum dwellers, many who live in inadequate housing and with limited services, under health- and life-threatening circumstances that perpetuate cycles of poverty^[2].

UNFP’s 2007 State of World Population report emphasizes the tremendous influence that improving housing in urban areas can have on poverty reduction and the environment. More than just providing shelter and safety, housing is also necessary for maintaining a minimum level of health and well being, and it can have profound effects on social and human development. Housing can be considered a productive asset, as many of the productive and income-generating activities carried out by the urban poor take place within and around the home. Housing is often the most valuable asset that poor urban dwellers acquire in their lifetimes.

The urban poor often exhibit tremendous creativity in changing the meaning and function of discarded objects, turning them into building materials, assembled in ways that sometimes challenge traditional building principles. The results can sometimes be risky, however, due to structural instability, flammability, or contamination, compounded by hazards related to human activities (e.g. cooking, heating, or productive activities) happening in or around the house. Other challenges that can affect the well being of poor urban households include space constraints and lack of light and ventilation.

Poor urban communities are often established on marginal lands such as floodplains or steep hillsides—often the only land available. These sites are often characterized by lack of environmental services, including poor drainage, lack of wastewater collection and treatment, inadequate access to safe water, and lack of garbage collection^[3]. Furthermore, these sites are particularly susceptible to hazards of natural or human cause, both of which are very likely to increase in frequency and severity with climate change.

IDRC’s Urban Poverty and Environment (UPE) Program seeks to ease the environmental burdens that exacerbate poverty in urban areas of developing countries by strengthening the capacity of the urban poor to access environmental services, reduce environmental degradation and vulnerability to natural disasters, and enhance use of natural resources for food, water and income security. UPE has taken an integrated approach to environment and natural resources, working with four priority themes —urban agriculture; urban water and sanitation; waste management; and vulnerability to natural disasters— with land tenure as a crosscutting issue.

UPE funds interdisciplinary research projects that address several of its priority themes in concert, with efforts made to integrate social and gender analysis in order to expand knowledge on inequity and on strategies for enhancing inclusion. UPE is currently exploring the potential of housing as an entry point for research.

Objective of the meeting

The goal of the workshop is to bring together a range of stakeholders, including researchers, practitioners and policy-makers, to explore the potential of improving housing to alleviate poverty and environmental degradation in urban areas of developing regions.

Specific Objectives:

To better understand how good housing can alleviate poverty and how poor housing can worsen it in urban areas;
To identify best practices for increasing access to adequate housing in poor urban areas;
To identify the linkages between housing and UPE’s themes of urban agriculture, water supply and sanitation, vulnerability to natural disasters, and solid waste management, to facilitate a more integrated approach to research on these themes;
To formulate a set of key practical, applied, policy-focused research questions that would enable UPE to further support research on housing and urban poverty;

Call for papers

For this conference, UPE seeks papers that integrate housing with our priority themes (urban agriculture; urban water and sanitation; waste management; and vulnerability to natural disasters; with land tenure as a crosscutting issue), identifying new directions for future research in housing, urban poverty and environment in developing areas. Papers may include case studies, and should take a transdisciplinary approach. The final selection of papers will reflect a wide range of approaches to the issue.

Potential themes for papers include, but are not limited to, the following:

How to build, maintain, or improve affordable housing for the poor in urban areas?
How can the housing supply for the urban poor be increased?
Should the criteria for regularization of poor, informal urban settlements differ from those applied in the formal city?
How to turn informal settlements into more supportive neighbourhoods?
How to design adequate and affordable housing that integrates/accommodates income generating activities in poor communities?
What are appropriate energy supplies for low income housing?
How can housing be designed or modified so that it better suits the needs of women?
What are appropriate forms of environmental services (e.g. water, sanitation, drainage, solid waste management) in slums, and what are the implications for housing?
How can housing, settlements and landscapes be (re)designed to reduce impacts of extreme events expected to increase with climate change?
Is resettlement an option, and if so, can it be done in a participatory and equitable manner?

Guidelines for Abstract, and Submission Deadlines

English or French abstracts of a maximum of 1000 words are to be submitted via email for review no later than Friday April 4, 2008. E-mail should be addressed to UPE at upe@idrc.ca. The email body serves as the cover page and must include the title of the proposed paper, the full name, affiliation, mailing address, telephone, facsimile, and e-mail address of the principal author (all correspondence will be sent to principal author only), and names and affiliations of all other authors. Accepted formats are Microsoft Word and PDF only.

Each abstract should have a concise and meaningful title, and a maximum of 5 key words should be listed. In their abstracts, authors should clearly state the purpose of the intended paper, the problem or knowledge gap being addressed, the research question being explored, the methods to be utilized, and the results and conclusions, including policy implications.

After review of the abstracts, selected authors will be asked to submit a full paper, which they will be invited to present at the conference in Kampala in December 2008.

Draft full papers will be reviewed by an advisory committee, who will provide comments to authors before final submission of the papers for the conference.

Publication

After the conference, approximately 10 selected papers will be assembled in a book that will be published by IDRC.

Location, Transport, & Accomodation

The workshop will be held in collaboration with Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda.

Transportation, accommodation, and other costs related to the authors’ participation in the conference will be sponsored by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC).

The exact location for accommodation during the conference is to be announced.

Workshop Format

The workshop will take place in English, and will be in the form of plenary sessions organised by themes, in which papers will be presented and discussed.

Keynote speeches
20-minute paper presentations, followed by a 15-minute question/comment period
60-minute facilitated general discussion at the end of each theme presentation

Key Dates

Call for Abstracts	25 January 2008
Abstract submission deadline	4 April 2008
Notification of abstract acceptance; invitation to write full papers for the conference	2 May 2008 EXTENDED
Confirmation of interest in writing a full paper and participating in the conference	16 May 2008 EXTENDED
Submission deadline for draft full papers	25 July 2008
Comments on full draft papers to authors from advisory committee	15 September 2008
Final paper submission deadline	14 November 2008
Deadline for submission of Power Point presentations	21 November 2008
Conference in Kampala, Uganda	2^nd-4^th December 2008

For further information, please contact:

Urban Poverty and Environment (UPE)

International Development Research Centre (IDRC)

Email: upe@idrc.ca

Web site: www.idrc.ca/upe

[1] United Nations Population Fund (UNFP) (2007). State of the World Population 2007.

[2] UNFPA 2007.

[3] Bartone, C. (2001). Urban Environmental Management and the Poor.