Paper short abstract:

In much research on poor urban settlements there is little attention to how the knowledge produced is useful to the inhabitants. The paper argues that knowledge production on informal settlements often leaves them effectively without history or without influence on the production of their history.

Paper long abstract:

In much academic and practitioner research on poor urban settlements there is little attention to how the knowledge produced is useful to the people inhabiting the places subject to research.

Informal locations are often characterized by an absence of comprehensive, formal knowledge accessible to the settlements' inhabitants, which compromises their possibilities for making rights claims, preventive intervention, and participation. Still, academic and practitioner research tends to reproduce a lacking focus on the history of informal urban places and its impact on current analyses and interventions.

Practitioners often produce knowledge for the purposes of acquiring donor funding, for the purposes of reporting back to donors and documenting impact. Such studies often depart from a baseline study or survey that describes the current situation of the given area, unintentionally ignoring the history of the place. Similarly, academic research often emphasizes social processes and institutional dynamics of informal settlements in the context of larger urban and political developments with only little attention to the detailed histories of the locality.

The paper argues that the existing knowledge production on informal urban settlements in many instances leaves them effectively without history or without influence on the production of their own history. The power of knowledge production becomes removed from the informal localities and remains with the academics and practitioners. These tendencies in knowledge production leave the informal urban settlements lacking history, thereby missing an opportunity to establishing a more comprehensive body of knowledge useful for inhabitants in their claims for rights.