Segregated Neighbourhoods and Their Integration Attempts: Participatory Slum-Upgrading in the Making

Abstract

As the proliferation of informal settlements has gained pace around the world, often coupled with spatial and social segregation, the global community has made efforts to provide a set of norms to tackle the issue. From the UN Sustainable Development Goals, a clear message takes shape for urban experts and decision makers: the focus is from now on social inclusion and community building; a priority before infrastructural intervention. The offered tool, named Participatory Slum-upgrading Program (PSUP) draws up a guide suitable not only for the Global-South but for urban rehabilitation projects of segregated areas in the developed world, too. The challenge is not only to implement global recommendations to local context but to measure the projects’ effectiveness in order that we can learn from each other: to be able to decide at a glance whether a project supports social integration and strengthens communities. To answer this need, a tentative index is tested on two case-studies. One that had begun as an urban experiment but at the end turned out to be a model of social urban rehabilitation in Pécs (HU), and the second one in Siklós (HU) implementing the former model, is a live project, still running. The background and process of the two cases are analyzed according to the index to demonstrate their comformation to the PSUP principles. On the side, the importance of process-design will also be examined.