VIRTUAL Manchester Livable Cities

Abstract

Women’s voices in urban policymaking, particularly within the context of slum redevelopment, remain critically underexamined. This study applies a gendered lens to understand how built-environment transformations reshape women’s everyday lives as their residential environments undergo in-situ redevelopment. Under this policy model in India, informal settlements are replaced with apartment-style housing constructed on the original site. Drawing on in-depth interviews and social network surveys with women living in both informal and redeveloped settlements, the paper analyzes shifts in daily practices and socio-cultural life using grounded theory and social network analysis. The findings illustrate that the auto-constructed nature of informal settlements fosters spatial configurations that are closely attuned to residents’ socio-cultural values, routines, and support systems. These environments exhibit a mix of vulnerabilities and embedded resilience mechanisms that are particularly significant for women. In contrast, top-down redevelopment often overlooks these critical spatial and social attributes, leading to weakened social networks, reduced social support, and diminished community life. As a result, women are compelled to negotiate between the advantages of upward mobility afforded by formal housing and the heightened social vulnerabilities produced by the erosion of community-based safety nets, an especially precarious trade-off for those lacking formal protections. The paper argues that redevelopment policies must be assessed through a gendered lens to fully grasp their societal implications and to ensure that built-environment interventions enhance, rather than diminish, women’s social well-being.