Housing Precarity, Politics and Justice: Lessons from Slum Relocation Projects in Kathmandu, Nepal

Over the past four decades, the Global South has experienced rapid urbanisation, a rise in informal settlements, and pressures to eradicate them. In 2020, about one in four urban dwellers lived in slums or informal settlements. This translates into more than 1 billion slum dwellers who must be given the support they need to lift themselves out of poverty and to live free from exclusion and inequality (UN, 2022). The global efforts to resettle slum and squatter dwellers have been fraught with problems. In theory, resettlement benefits households through ownership and integration to ensure a stable and enduring future free from any risk of eviction or displacement. However, evidence shows the process is fiercely contested raising questions about agency, governance and participation models. The question is what innovations can be brought in policy frameworks and institutional approaches which would aid the process. Based on the experience from fieldwork conducted in Kathmandu’s two squatter resettlement projects - Kirtipur housing settlement and Ichangu housing project, we examine the approaches and assumptions underpinning the two projects and the manner they were delivered to conclude the factors that contributed to the success of one and a failure of another. We make a comparison of four key attributes – location, design and infrastructure, finance mechanism and inclusivity and participation. It is also observed that the resettlement process has been increasingly authoritarian owing to the wider political turnover in the nation and marked by legislative and regulatory changes that work towards reducing empowerment and agencies. I argue that resettlement is fundamentally both physically and socially disruptive and the odds of success for the project how nuances of those disruptions are handled, the levels of institutional support provided and how resilient is to the external conditions that are constantly mutating.