Award-winning paper in 2017 Free

The Richard Trevithick Prize, presented for the best paper published in Engineering Sustainability, was awarded to Mulligan et al. (2017).

Much of the world’s existing and future population will live in slums, where the twin trajectories of rapid urbanisation and increased flooding driven by climate change collide. Few spatial planning policies currently address this issue in practice. Poorly planned relocation from slum areas has caused conflict and insecurity, while large-scale infrastructural solutions for reducing flood risk are prohibitively expensive. There is a need to consider how local adaptation measures for increasing resilience to flooding can complement other structural and policy measures. This paper describes and evaluates autonomous, market-based and public-policy-driven structural and non-structural adaptation approaches to flooding in Kibera, the largest informal settlement in Nairobi, Kenya. The analysis employs a novel survey data set from 963 households in Kibera and extensive community and institutional stakeholder consultation. Results of the consultation demonstrate how autonomous adaptation at the household level is disincentivised by insecure housing tenure, while public-policy-driven approaches are constrained by the lack of effective community engagement. Combining the lessons from this analysis with 10 years of experience in developing public space and infrastructure projects in Kibera, the paper builds the case for an approach to ‘community-responsive adaptation’ to urban flooding that negotiates these limitations.