Night in the Informal City: How Limited Public Infrastructure Shapes Life After Dark in Informal Settlements
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Author
Date
2022Type
- Doctoral Thesis
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Abstract
Informal settlements, and the share of urban residents living in them, are growing alongside rapid urbanization such that roughly one in seven people worldwide live in one of these neighborhoods. These numbers imply that a large share of urban dwellers live without the foundational elements of urban life that are necessary for health and prosperity. In studying informal settlement upgrading interventions, development economists have focused primarily on housing, water, and sanitation, yet this body of research has ignored an important aspect of life in informal settlements: nighttime. Compounded by little or no public lighting, the density, environmental vulnerability, shared water and sanitation infrastructure, not to mention high crime, make life at night in informal settlements difficult and dangerous.
To address this research gap and in order to better understand how access to public space and shared infrastructure in informal settlements is altered by darkness, this thesis focuses on two research questions in the context of one informal settlement in Cape Town, South Africa. The first two articles in this thesis address the question: What is the experience of pedestrian life at night in informal settlements and how applicable is the existing literature, given that it is mainly based on pedestrian activity in formal, high-income contexts? In both articles, I approach this research question from a quantitative perspective, by measuring nighttime pedestrian activity in the informal route network using proximity-infrared pedestrian motion sensors.
In the first article (co-authored), we test whether two urban planning theories intended to predict the most frequently used routes based on the configuration of the route network — route optimization and space syntax — correlate with the sensor data. First, we show that sensor-measured activity patterns in the early morning and evening in the informal settlement are quite different from each other, which may have to do with the different types of activities taking place at these times of day. Second, we find that the shortest path heuristic from route optimization theory is correlated with average pedestrian activity during the evening (6:00 – 9:00 pm), as well as on weekdays and weekends, but not during early morning hours (5:00 – 8:00 am). On the other hand, we find that the space syntax measure of choice does not perform well. The performance of both theoretical predictions varies by time of day, opening up questions about how pedestrian activity in informal settlements over the course of day differs from activity in formal areas.
In the second article (co-authored), we study how the lockdown of public life in South Africa in response to the COVID-19 pandemic affected mobility in the informal settlement in the evenings, early mornings, and at night from February to June 2020. We find that mobility was already decreasing in March prior to the first lockdown. We observe the biggest changes on weekends, key leisure times, and during typical commute hours (6:00 – 9:00 pm and 6:00 – 8:00 am), even though these time periods continue to have the highest activity, indicating that some people continued to commute. The mobility reduction we document is large, but generally smaller than reductions observed in high-income countries. Despite concerns that residents of informal settlements would not be able to comply with lockdown measures due to the constraints of life in these neighborhoods, we show that residents do comply to the best of their ability. We also show that awareness of COVID-19, prior to the lockdown, led to mobility declines. This article demonstrates the usefulness of pedestrian motion sensors to both the development economics and public health literatures.
The second two articles explore the experience of life at night through the lens of public lighting, asking how public lighting impacts the experience of nighttime life in informal settlements. In the third article, I assess the existing public lighting —high-mast lights — in the Cape Town informal settlement I study and show that the two high-mast lights installed on the periphery of the neighborhood produce low light levels that are not uniformly distributed. Combining the light measurements with household survey data, I then analyze how this poor lighting situation influences perceptions of safety, perceived crime risk, and willingness to engage in public space at night. I find that there is only a relationship between light levels and perception of safety on the brightest paths (10 lux or greater), but find no relationship between light levels and perceived crime risk or nighttime activities. Furthermore, I find that using distance from the nearest high-mast light as a proxy for the light measurements leads to mostly similar results, indicating that distance from the nearest high-mast light could be a proxy when studying large number of informal settlements. I show that high-mast lighting for informal settlements may not be sufficient to actually provide effective lighting at night, particularly since residents need light to access shared sanitation infrastructure.
The fourth article (co-authored) evaluates the results of a cluster-randomized controlled trial testing the efficacy and impact of an alternative type of public lighting — wall-mounted solar public lights. We show that the lights lead to a six- to eight-fold increase in light brightness and that residents living on treated paths report feeling safer, especially at night. On the other hand, we show this increased safety does not lead to widespread behavior change at night. We find that residents in both experimental groups are more likely to report using shared sanitation compared to baseline, an indication of spillover, but find no effect or a decrease for other activities, indicating spillover is not widespread. We find no effects on experience of crime. To my knowledge, this study is the first to test the impact of public lighting in an informal settlement and only the second randomized controlled trial studying the impact of public lighting. This dissertation demonstrates that focusing on life at night in informal settlements has important implications for how academics across multiple disciplines as well as policymakers think about access to critical public infrastructure in these neighborhoods, not to mention basic quality of life and human dignity. Furthermore, this research explores the advantages and disadvantages of transdisciplinarity in randomized controlled trials and demonstrates how such an approach can lead to evidence-based recommendations informed directly by residents who intimately understand the experience of life at night in an informal settlement. Show more
Permanent link
https://doi.org/10.3929/ethz-b-000531758Publication status
publishedExternal links
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Contributors
Examiner: Günther, Isabel
Examiner: Wenger, Andreas
Examiner: Jack, B. Kelsey
Examiner: Carolini, Gabriella
Publisher
ETH ZurichSubject
URBAN DEVELOPMENT (URBAN PLANNING); Informal settlements; INFRASTRUCTURE (ECONOMICS); Pedestrian Movement; Public Lighting; URBAN PLANNING (BUILT ENVIRONMENT); URBANIZATION (URBAN STUDIES)Organisational unit
03808 - Günther, Isabel / Günther, Isabel
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