Course description

Urban Upgrading for Inclusion, Sustainability and Resilience in a time of Global Pandemics

Unprecedented circumstances created by the COVID-19 pandemic have presented huge challenges to a third of the global urban population living in slums around the world. The e-learning course Urban Upgrading for Inclusion, Sustainability and Resilience in a time of Global Pandemics aims at supporting policy makers and urban practitioners to better respond to the challenge of slums, especially in a time of global pandemics. The course focuses on the conceptual and operational aspects of designing, implementing and sustaining a slum upgrading intervention, while underscoring the main policy and programmatic approaches at city level for scaling up upgrading and better planning for future growth.

Upcoming start dates

1 start date available

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Self-Paced Online
Online
English

Suitability - Who should attend?

Prerequisites:

None

Outcome / Qualification etc.

What you'll learn

Specifically, at the end of the course, participants will be able to:

Understand urban slums, their underlying social, economic, and spatial characteristic, how they emerge and consolidate, and their impacts to local communities and the city as a whole
Analyze evolution of policy approaches to addressing urban slums under different contexts, what worked, what did not work, and why
Review and apply key operational principles and instruments for designing an upgrading intervention, including planning, finance, infrastructure, land tenure, housing, social inclusion, and sustainability.

Training Course Content

The Case for Upgrading

How to articulate urban policies, institutional reforms, and spatially targeted interventions to better address existing and future slums.

Planning Informal Settlement Upgrading

How to plan upgrading interventions from a neighborhood project level to a city-wide scale. __

Financing Informal Settlement Upgrading

How to finance upgrading interventions, leveraging public, private and community resources and the role social enterprises play in servicing the poor.

Improving Land Tenure

How to increase tenure security in informal settlements incrementally, from protecting local communities from forced eviction towards formal land tenure rights.

Upgrading Infrastructure

How to design infrastructure improvement intervention in informal areas to improve accessibility, water and sanitation, drainage and erosion control, electrification and street lighting, as well as community facilities.

Incremental Housing and Resettlement

How to address shelter needs in informal areas, from managing voluntary resettlement in upgrading interventions to providing technical and financial support for housing improvements.

Social Inclusion in Upgrading

How to involve local communities during the design, implementation and post-occupation of upgrading projects, how to promote social development such as income generation, and how to integrate urban informal workers and their livelihoods in urban upgrading.

Sustainability and Scaling Up

How to ensure that investments are well-maintained during post-occupation phase and that upgrading is scaled up continuously.

Managing Health Outbreaks in Slums

How to apply a framework for action in urban upgrading to respond to the needs of the urban poor in the short, medium and long terms during and after a health outbreak.