The British Academy awarded this three year (2015-2018) grant under its International Partnership and Mobility Scheme (IPM 2014). It builds on a key finding of the ClimUrb project: informal private involvement in low-income shelter provisioning is increasingly prominent in South Asian megacities. Problematically, however, very few studies appreciate that small-scale individual private developers provide shelter for millions, perhaps tens of millions of poor urban people.

The aim of the IMP project is to shed new lights on the struggles between people’s rights to, and pubic powers to manage, urban land. We shall examine the levels of non-negotiable risks in private settlements as an outcome of this struggle, and test the hypothesis that informal developers’ access to social enterprises and use of knowledge are key to promote scalable practices.