Involuntary Resettlement: From a Landslide-Affected Slum to a New Neighbourhood. Case Study of Mina Resettlement Project, Ahvaz, Iran

Abstract

In 2014, it was estimated that about one billion people of the world’s population lived in urban slums; of which about 90% resided in the cities of Global South [1], [2]. This figure is about 43% of Iranian and 30% of Asian cities, respectively [3], [4], [5]. In the 1960s, the Iranian government began to cope with the slum problem mainly through slum clearance and eviction; Irandoost, K. (2009), meanwhile, the resettlement approach was trivial [6]. Since 2003 and with the ratification of the National Document on Enabling and Regularizing slums, a new era, which diminished the coercive approaches, began [7]. Accordingly, slums as one category of settlement in Iran are defined as “hastily constructed housing often built by their eventual occupants, mostly without the permit to construct such buildings. They are often outside existing formal planning; and inhabited by lower income groups. Slums are characterised by functional linkages to the main city, low quality of life and desperately low urban services as well as high population density” [7]. Khuzestan with an area of 64 km2 and a population of 4.6 million people [8], is one of Iran’s oilrich provinces with notable slums springing forth mainly from the rural-urban migrations since half a century ago. This is due to several factors which include but not limited to the 1960s land reform, economic restructuring to the benefit of modern industries and Centre for Research on Settlements and Urbanism