Date of Award

Spring 5-10-2022

Document Type

Undergraduate Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors of Arts and Sciences in International Studies

Organizational Unit

Josef Korbel School of International Studies, International Studies

First Advisor

Singumbe Muyeba

Keywords

Slum upgrading, KENSUP, Kenya Slum Upgrading Program, Kenya slum upgrading, Sustainable urbanization, Sustainable slum upgrading

Abstract

Global urbanization is occurring at an unprecedented rate. The brunt of this urban growth is occurring in the developing world, where cities pose a substantial threat to sustainability. Sustainable urbanization has emerged as an approach to this challenge which balances environmental, social, and economic concerns throughout the urbanization process. Slums pose a threat to sustainable urbanization in the developing world as they result in stalled economic growth, environmental degradation, and increased social inequality. Given the increasing popularity of slum-upgrading interventions, it is critical that such programs be aligned with the core tenets of sustainable urbanization. Unfortunately, there is a lack of existing holistic and replicable tools to evaluate slum-upgrading programs for sustainable urbanization. The ASPIRE Toolkit is a holistic assessment tool designed to evaluate the sustainability of infrastructure projects in developing contexts. The present study employs the ASPIRE Toolkit to evaluate the Kenya Slum Upgrading Program (KENSUP) for urban sustainability. The ASPIRE evaluation conducted in this thesis revealed that KENSUP performs strongly with regards to essential services, social infrastructure, and environmental management; however, the program performs below the standard for inadequate community participation, inequitable distribution of benefits, insufficient government capacities, and economic disturbances. Overall, the ASPIRE toolkit was found to be an effective tool for the assessment of slum upgrading programs and it is recommended that the tool be employed in future research.

Copyright Statement / License for Reuse

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

Publication Statement

Copyright is held by the author. User is responsible for all copyright compliance.

Available for download on Monday, November 04, 2030



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