Rights & the City
Why Rights & the City?
Around 55% of the global population resides in cities [1], which are tasked with providing crucial services like public safety, mobility, housing, clean water, efficient waste disposal, and proper sanitation and health utilities. These services are essential for economic mobility, climate resilience, and public health, making equal access to them a fundamental human right. Yet, for residents of informal settlements in Kenya, access is often severely restricted due to inadequate infrastructure, exclusion, and uneven development.The Rights & the City Principle advocates for the rights of all city dwellers to participate in creating just, safe, healthy, accessible, affordable, resilient, and sustainable cities. It emphasizes the necessity of sharing city resources with informal settlements and including them in city development processes.
Unplanned and unserviced neighborhoods frequently become battlegrounds involving residents, authorities, and political entities. Prioritizing integrated and inclusive infrastructure is crucial not only for providing basic human rights but also for facilitating the realization of the "right to the city" for the majority of urban dwellers. Adopting a human rights and justice perspective in city planning could transform infrastructure upgrades into tools of citizenship rather than mechanisms of dispossession.
Planning & Design
The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban esources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city
– David Harvey
In the planning and design stages, it is essential to establish a foundation for equality, anti-discrimination, accountability, inclusion, and participation, while considering the specific needs of diverse users, such as men, women, non-binary individuals, people with disabilities, the elderly, and children. All designs must ensure accessibility and safety, addressing the realities of these groups. To achieve this, disaggregating planning and design data can help identify issues faced by different urban residents, and evidence-based research, focus group discussions, key informant interviews, or household surveys can ensure no user is left behind. Additionally, the approach should recognize the interconnectedness of human rights and the institutional efforts needed to uphold them.
In Kenya, the County Governments Act of 2012 sets out principles for citizen participation, public communication and access to information, public service delivery and principles of county planning.
The Urban Areas and Cities Act of 2019 also establishes the citizen fora as the platform for residents to participate in city development. County and municipal governments can also develop by-laws and regulations to contextualise and improve participation and collaboration.
While the Rights & the City principle encourages proactivity by residents and civil society to advocate or ‘agitate’ for their basic rights, it is ultimately the government that must take an active role in the defence and preservation of those rights. Urbanists can help facilitate a mindset shift among city officials, encouraging them to see informal areas as “unserviced” rather than “informal”.
Past participatory projects show the value of cooperation between residents and governments. In Addis Ababa, community members helped design a highly functional and cost-effective public park. According to city officials, a senior urban planner could not have done a better job [2]. Similarly, the Integrated Development Plan (IDP) for the Mukuru Special Planning Area (SPA) demonstrates how residents can engage with and shape spatial planning effectively [3].
To promote genuine collaboration between city governments and residents of informal settlements, adequate budgetary allocation for participatory processes is required. This prevents superficial engagement in infrastructure development, and will help integrate low-income areas into the wider social and economic fabric of the city.
Governance & Policy
During the implementation and use of infrastructure, the Rights & the City Principle promotes open access to information, feedback mechanisms for continuous community input, and the means for greater uptake of these inputs. Active community participation is crucial for co-creating their settlement and city, with residents involved in infrastructure construction, which fosters ownership and equips them with valuable skills. Project implementers should be trained in the human rights-based approach (HRBA) to ensure the "do no harm" principle is respected, preventing additional risks to communities. Pre- and post-implementation evaluations will help identify any deviations from HRBA and package project learnings for broader review and knowledge development.
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Implementation & Use
[1] World Bank (2022). Urban Development: Overview. URL
[2] ICLEI (2020). UNA Impact Story: Embracing Innovation and Experimentation. URL
[3] Horn, P. (2021). Enabling participatory planning to be scaled in exclusionary urban political environments: lessons from the Mukuru Special Planning Area in Nairobi. URL
