informal settlements essay

When planning falls short: the challenges of informal settlements

PhD Candidate and Research Assistant in Urban Design, The University of Melbourne

PhD Candidate, Australian-German Climate & Energy College, The University of Melbourne

Postdoctoral Research Fellow, The University of Melbourne

PhD Candidate in Urban Planning, The University of Melbourne

Research Fellow, McCaughey VicHealth Community Wellbeing Unit, Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, The University of Melbourne

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Hesam Kamalipour receives IPRS and APA scholarships from the Australian Government. He is also a Doctoral Academy member at the Melbourne Social Equity Institute (MSEI).

Alexei Trundle receives research funding from the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat), and an Australian Postgraduate Award from the Australian Government.

André Stephan receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Hayley Henderson receives an APA scholarship from the Australian Government.

Melanie Lowe receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council and the National Environmental Science Programme.

University of Melbourne provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation AU.

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Informal settlements house around one-quarter of the world’s urban population . This means roughly 1 billion urban dwellers live in settlements that have emerged outside of the state’s control.

The Habitat III conference in Quito in October recognised informal settlements as a critical issue for sustainable urban development. But how did informal settlements come to make up such a large part of the world’s cities?

Resorting to informal housing

Rates of urbanisation can fluctuate rapidly and be hard to predict. This makes planning for urban growth a challenge, especially in developing countries, where more than 90% of urban growth is occurring. When data or government capacity is limited, housing shortages often result.

With formal housing too expensive or unavailable, urban migrants must improvise. Many resort to informal housing.

Informal settlements are generally undocumented or hidden on official maps. This is because the state usually sees them as temporary or illegal.

Over the past 50 years, governments have tried to deal with these areas in a number of ways. Strategies have included denial, tolerance, formalisation, demolition and displacement.

While efforts to improve settlements and anticipate future ones are becoming more common, the desire for eradication persists in many cities. Forced evictions in various parts of the world are putting the rights of informal settlement dwellers at risk .

Over time, however, it has been recognised that poverty and inequality cannot be simply eradicated through demolition or eviction. In the developing world, one-third of the urban population now lives in slums . In Africa, the proportion is 62%.

Many cities are looking for alternatives that formalise these areas through incremental, on-site upgrading. In addition to offering effective protection against forced evictions, it is critical to provide access to basic services, public facilities and inclusive public spaces.

We need to adopt integrated approaches that cut across urban scales and disciplines. These need to involve stakeholders from government, citizens and other organisations. Design thinking is essential in this process to meet the challenges of urbanisation.

The role of the New Urban Agenda

The Habitat III conference adopted a New Urban Agenda for the United Nations. This document presents a road map for sustainable urban development until Habitat IV in 2036.

While the quality of life for some informal settlement dwellers has improved over recent decades, growing inequality pushes more people into informal housing. As a result, the growth rate of informal settlements often outstrips upgrading processes.

The UN Human Settlements Program (UN-Habitat) was one of the key agencies involved in Habitat III. Since Habitat II, UN-Habitat has worked extensively on housing and slum upgrading . The New Urban Agenda incorporates lessons from this process.

An example is the need for innovative small investment models for informal housing and their inhabitants’ transport needs. The agenda also acknowledges the informal settlements located in hazard-prone areas. Their inhabitants often need more help with reducing the risks and building resilience.

The way forward

Dealing with informal settlements is an issue of inequality. This inequality is both social and spatial in nature, across cities worldwide.

It is problematic that spatial thinking does not have a high profile in the New Urban Agenda. While urban design by itself cannot reduce social inequality and urban poverty, much can be learned from cutting-edge practices that integrate design thinking into upgrading informal settlements.

One key lesson is that incremental housing (a step-by-step process of upgrading) can be a critical part of the solution. Incrementalism allows informal housing to be adapted over time. It also means community engagement is central to governments’ handling of informal settlements.

Another learning is that evidence-based, multi-scale and multidisciplinary approaches are essential to tackle the challenges of informal settlements. Such integrated approaches intervene at multiple scales to provide a network of public open space and access to affordable public transport and facilities.

Most informal settlements – but for a few exceptions located in hazardous areas – need to be upgraded incrementally and on the same site.

Are we prepared?

When it comes to the critical role of design thinking in the process of urbanisation, built environment professionals need to be prepared to tackle the challenge of informal settlements.

Incremental and on-site upgrading relies on a sophisticated understanding of informal settlement forms and adaptations.

Universities have a key role in equipping future built environment professionals with the skills and knowledge needed to meet the real challenges of urbanisation. Informal settlements are here to stay.

To better integrate these settlements into cities globally, they need to be recognised – politically, socially and spatially – and made visible through the gaze of mapping and research.

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Informal settlements and climate change in the ‘last mile of urbanization’

Subscribe to planet policy, angela r. pashayan angela r. pashayan political scientist and professor - american university school of international service.

February 29, 2024

This viewpoint is part of  Foresight Africa 2024 .

Rapid urbanization and climate change are impacting informal settlements in sub-Saharan Africa. An informal settlement or slum is generally defined as a highly populated urban area that has no infrastructure for human habitation and is densely packed with dwelling units constructed with weak materials of poor quality. Climate change affects slum communities disproportionately when compared to their formal counterparts. Informal settlements are formed organically by residents who occupy land not planned for residential living. Aside from having no infrastructure, the land is precarious and unwanted, often near industry structures or dumpsites along rivers.  Hidden from sight are the impacts of climate change on food insecurity, malnutrition, and disease in these communities. Policy change is urgent: Residents of informal settlements make up over 60% of the urban population on the continent of Africa. 1

Since late 2016 , drought has plagued the African continent, particularly in East Africa, creating food insecurity and malnutrition. In March 2023, the  World Health Organization  reported 7,800 cholera cases in Kenya due to drought and 122 deaths. While our minds habitually go to areas in northern Kenya—like Turkana—or eastern Kenya—like Tana River, urban Nairobi was also affected. In Nairobi, the  Kenyan Ministry of Health reported 11,181 cholera cases and 196 fatalities in July 2023. A targeted cholera campaign intended to vaccinate 300 Nairobi residents per day was surpassed, reaching 500 residents per day, according to the vaccine organization GAVI. 2 Effective infrastructure can mitigate disease and health issues related to climate change in informal settlements.

In 2022,  600 people were killed  in Nigeria’s worst flood in decades. In the same year, floods in  West and Central Africa  affected 8.2 million people in 20 countries—killing 1,418, injuring 4,398, and displacing 2.9 million people. While formally planned urban areas are zoned in locations safe for habitation, informal settlements are in precarious locations, often beside rivers, making residents more vulnerable to floods. For many slum residents, the river becomes a  dumping ground  for trash and waste. Each year,  homes along Kenya’s Ngong River  float away during rapid flooding due to climate-induced heavy rainfall, after which residents search for their belongings and  missing relatives. Excess water lays dormant near homes and attracts mosquitos which may carry malaria or other blood-borne diseases like yellow fever, dengue fever, or West Nile. 3 Stagnant water breeds more waterborne diseases than running water, including typhoid fever, cholera, giardia, dysentery, e-coli, hepatitis, and salmonella, all of which put residents of informal settlements near excess flood water at risk.

Excessive heat

The realities of increasing urbanization, rising average temperatures, and the population density in informal settlements gained attention during the COVID-19 pandemic. 4 Living in high-density slums increases heat due to a lack of open space. Heat makes you sweat, causing you to lose the water you have in the body. These effects are heightened for residents of informal settlements who cannot afford the recommended fresh water intake. In high-density slums, dwellings are, on average, approximately 10ft x 12ft with one or no windows at all, occupied by up to six people, and built along narrow 2-3ft mud paths. Slum dwellings are typically constructed of cinder-block, mud, and sticks, or corrugated tin. Some of these materials hold heat, leading to increased human suffering as temperatures continue to increase in urban cities. A study from Johns Hopkins University on climate revealed that Nairobi’s slums range from 5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than the central business district. 5

With the 1.4 billion population boom expected by 2063, informal settlements and climate-based issues must be addressed, lest half the population of Africa be lost due to lack of foresight.

Policy recommendations

The reality that over 60% of Africa’s urban population live in informal settlements cannot be denied, nor can it be denied that a country’s population is its best asset. With the 1.4 billion population boom expected by 2063, informal settlements and climate-based issues must be addressed, lest half the population of Africa be lost due to lack of foresight. 6 In light of these facts, my recommendations are: 1. Settle land tenure issues in slums. A working model is community tenancy. 2. Change the development approach: Ditch the high-rise model and upgrade slums with water and sanitation, keeping climate-smart ecology at the forefront of design.  3. Enact eco-measures to prevent rivers from overflowing and to capture excessive water to offset droughts. 4. Empower paid community health workers to manage 50 homes each in informal settlements for basic health issues, and to accurately report data linked to climate change. 5. Use micro-carbon credits to incentivize community-led kitchens that use clean gas to deter the use of wood and charcoal for cooking in slums. Addressing the challenges in informal settlements is key to fostering climate-resilient urban cities. The last mile of urbanization can be reached with climate at the forefront of “Leapfrogging to Settle the Informal Settlement,” that blends African Village Culture with climate-smart urban living as a blueprint for reclaiming the health and resilience of 60% of the continental population.

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• Amegah, A. Kofi. “Slum decay in Sub-Saharan Africa: Context, environmental pollution challenges, and impact on dweller’s health.” Environmental Epidemiology 5.3 (2021).
• Joyce Chimbi. 2023. “Averting a cholera disaster in Nairobi’s informal settlements.” Gavi. https://www.gavi.org/vaccineswork/averting-cholera-disaster-nairobis-informal-settlements#:~:text=%22The%20number%20of%20people%20 vaccinated,City%20County%20department%20of%20health.
• Nabatanzi, Maureen, et al. 2022. “Malaria outbreak facilitated by increased mosquito breeding sites near houses and cessation of indoor residual spraying, Kole district, Uganda, January-June 2019.” BMC Public Health 22.1: 1898.
• Mehrolhassani, Mohammad Hossein, et al. 2022. “Health protection challenges of slums residents during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the social determinants of health framework: A case study of Kerman city in Iran.” Journal of Education and Health Promotion 11.
• Scott, Anna A., et al. 2017. “Temperature and heat in informal settlements in Nairobi.” PloS one 12.11: e0187300.
•  Weny, K., R. Snow, and S. Zhang. 2017. “The demographic dividend atlas for Africa: Tracking the potential for a demographic dividend.” UNFPA.

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Revisiting the “Informal Settlement” Phenomenon

• First Online: 24 April 2018

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This chapter provides a broad theoretical overview of informality by outlining some popular misconceptions on informality: that informal settlements are solely a developing countries’ problem; that those myths are essentially long-gone; and, that the distinction between formality and informality still holds. This chapter briefly touches on each of these myths and offers a fairly broad conceptual framework arguing that as the backbone of any physical upgrading policy, enabling or enablement of informal settlements should reflect the juxtaposition of two simultaneous undercurrents, namely, the “ formalization of the informal” and the “ informalization of the formal.” As part of this debate, the chapter takes a hard look at a series of government policies that have been in vogue in response to slum or informal settlement upgrading including benign neglect, forced relocation or evacuation, self-help, public housing, redevelopment and eventually, enabling since the 1950s and 1960s. Showcasing the legality–illegality discourse as a hotly debated component of informal settlements, this conceptual framework revisits the formal–informal nexus by distinguishing between regularization vs. regularizing aspects of each policy.

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Arefi, M. (2018). Revisiting the “Informal Settlement” Phenomenon. In: Learning from Informal Settlements in Iran. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78408-3_2

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NAIROBI 25 May 2019 – A dynamic discussion between UN-Habitat, civil society, Non Governmental Organizations (NGOs), community organizations and others took place on the sidelines of the first UN-Habitat Assembly.

The Global Stakeholders meeting discussed included equality, slum upgrading, investments, partnerships and inclusivity.

A key issue was how to move away from piecemeal slum upgrading and policies that result in more slums to strategically working with local governments to provide good facilities and services in rural areas to reverse the trend of migration to urban areas. It is estimated that the 1 billion who live in slums and informal settlements will grow to 3 billion by 2050 without more action.

Rose Molokoane, the coordinator of Slum Dwellers International in South Africa brought home her country’s experience in dealing with huge inequality twenty-five years after apartheid was abolished.

Molokaone and her community organization is pushing for inclusion, integration and for those living in informal settlements to be able to own their own homes.

“Our government is talking about integration and everybody moving from the settlements to the city. Can a poor person afford to buy a mansion in the city? We want to create our own informal cities meaning that if we get security of tenure, if we are allowed to build our own houses then we can create our own settlements,“ she said.

UN-Habitat’s Executive Director Maimunah Mohd Sharif said the focus of UN-Habitat’s 2020 – 2025 Strategy Plan is reducing poverty and inequality of services in urban and rural areas, improving the urban environment and building capacity to effectively respond to urban crises.

"We want to do less but with focus, create partnerships. Share successes and challenges. Be better. We need to have the capacity to deal with the migration crisis as well as national disasters and violence. UN-Habitat is not a first responder. We go into countries to give technical advise to revitalise and reconstruct"

The UN-Habitat Assembly will run at the UN compound in Nairobi from 27 – 31 May 2019.

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Within the informal settlements domain, we are focusing on the following cities:

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Learning from Cairo: What Informal Settlements Can (and Should) Teach Us

• Written by Magda Mostafa
• Published on March 14, 2014

The following essay, written by Magda Mostafa , is an excerpt from the book " Learning from Cairo: Global Perspectives and Future Visions ," a collection of reflections from a three-day symposium of the same name. Here, Mostafa focuses on the need to accept informal communities as a reality, not an exception, and argues that conventional architecture practice and education must begin equipping architects to "address the potentials and problems of such parallel modes of existence in our built environment."

It would be a disservice if the debate spurred at the "Learning from Cairo" symposium were to remain confined to the hypothetical. It is our responsibility to extend it to both the professional realm as well as the academic. The purpose of this discussion is just that.

How can architectural academia respond to this shifting climate? A climate where the majority of the built environment is conceived and implemented outside of the construct of conventional practice? Where the majority of the architectural product in our city exists without architects? How can we further propagate a singular top-down mode of practice in our teaching when it’s malfunctioning at best and corrupt or absent at its worst? When this conventional mode is only viable in neatly packaged projects with clear financing, educated clients and formal frameworks? How can we continue to teach our students, the architects of the future generation, to only be equipped to operate within a small portion of the built environment- ignoring the massive built environment and user groups often represented on maps as solid black “informal areas”. 

This phenomena can no longer be blacked-out, and it is time for academia to begin educating its architects-to-be at least to be minimally aware, if not proficiently trained, to address the potentials and problems of such parallel modes of existence in our built environment.

The answer is not an either/or scenario. Conventional practice must be viewed as the scaffolding of standards, codes and best practices; despite the limitations it may present in our current socio-economic environment, it remains the only foundation from which good architecture can emerge. On the other hand informal modes of development can no longer be ignored nor labeled as something to be tolerated until they can be removed. Particularly post-January 25 th , when the ethos of an entire population has shifted from top-down to bottom-up (and taking things into your own hands seems to be the modus operandi of the day), informal practice- for lack of a better word- in Cairo can no longer be ignored. New roles must emerge to mitigate these two poles of practice- in policy making, governance, and education - for the future of the built environment.

The architect should begin to emerge as the mediator of these two seemingly conflicting poles. We need to begin educating our students to prepare for this role. Armed with the technical knowledge of best practice, architectural students should begin engaging in such exchanges and become exposed to this new role of facilitator, perhaps between communities and policy makers, at several scales. Community based learning practice- or CBL- is an excellent pedagogical model for this.

To appropriately navigate this process, however, students must be equally versed in the other pole of the equation- the informal. But to do this we must perhaps first redefine, or at least critically debate the negative connotations associated with this terminology. For the greater half of the past century, since decision-makers historically began cordoning off user groups in distinct urban hinter-lands, informality has been the general term associated with slums, ghettos, squatter settlements and any urban development formed outside of legislative frameworks. With this came a perceived temporality to the existence of such settlements, as areas that would eventually be either destroyed or brought up to standard and legalized. With the proliferation and expansion of such urban areas in many of the world’s developing cities, this temporality has become a permanence, and with the shift in socio-economic trends from top-down to bottom-up, informality needs to be looked at in a very different light.

It is this different light that was the ethos of the “Learning from Cairo” conference, and which must now be shifted to our architectural pedagogy.

On a global scale, the economic platform on which architecture operates has shifted. The current economic crisis has seen the demise of the “star-chitecture” of the 90’s and early 2000’s. Simply put we can no longer afford to build the way we have been building. As Ian Harris, director of “ArchiCulture,” the 2013 documentary that discusses the pedagogy of studio education, notes: “design school(s are) feeding into the top down approach of the omnipotent starchitect”. With the demise of this praxis, education must shift to accommodate the emerging role of the architect as a promoter of his work, rather than a recipient of commissions- perhaps even the guerilla architect that designs for a cause, without a singular client. BIG’s Bjarke Ingels, often labeled a “star-chitect” himself, commented at the 2012 ACSA Conference on Change in Architectural Education that architects must now define a perceived problem, research and develop a design scheme to address it, and then market it to the various stakeholders and clients. As architectural educators we must gradually shift the responsibility towards the student to define, research, develop, and design their own projects. They have to know how to seek out the client and sell them on a project, rather than vice versa.

To these ends, a new lexicon of theory needs to be developed and taught, a lexicon which incorporates approaches such as that presented by Lindsey Sherman in the works of Urban Think Tank’s Syncretic City- an architecture built on, in and with the existing city. This is embodied in such projects as the Metro Cable and Torre David in Caracas Venezuela. Such projects serve to shift the perception of informal settlements from parasitic to symbiotic, from one of negativity to one of potential. In their work Urban Think Tank heeds a call “to see in the informal settlements of the world a potential for innovation and experimentation, with the goal of putting design in the service of a more equitable and sustainable future”. Other theories, such as Revedin’s Radicant City, one of exchange with the city, rather than imposition, are viable shifts that all architectural students of today need to be aware of, and conversant in. Such theories help support the growth of architects as advocates, mediators and facilitators of a built environment that addresses the city comprehensively and objectively, with expertise yet without prejudice.

In a similar paradigm shift, architectural institutions internationally are moving towards expanding their understanding of architectural practice, and consequently education, to be more comprehensively responsible. In a 2013 communiqué, Albert Dubler, current president of the Union Internationales des Architectes urged architects to take a “leadership role… and stop doing things ‘as usual’… (and to) raise awareness of the absolute need for collaboration with all stakeholders of all types of human settlements”. This culminated in the UIA’s current Responsible Architecture Project. Dubler calls for “architecture as a human right” — it falls on the shoulders of educators to train architects that will understand, acknowledge and uphold that human right responsibly and comprehensively.

We need to broaden the roles of our future architects, expanding the field of users whom they will design for and the environments that they must take responsibility for. When the “in”formal (anti-formal) is no longer the exception, is it really still “in”formal? And then how can we call conventional training mainstream? How much more than the majority of our urban areas does the informal have to become before we train our students to understand, address, and ultimately work with it- rather than ignoring or eradicating it.

This is not a call to romanticize informal settlements, with their issues of safety, hygiene, lack of viable infrastructure, etc. However, when a built environment is self-financed, demand-driven, grows incrementally, is compact, has low-energy demands, is walkable, self-sufficient and provides a work-home proximity, how can it be viewed as a failed architecture? If anything, this list of characteristics describing informal settlements in Cairo reads almost like a sustainability index. Again this is not a call for one solution or another, but rather a call to study these environments, to acknowledge their existence- their potentialities and strengths, to work on, in and with them symbiotically, and - perhaps most importantly - to train our students to do the same.

The following essay, written by Magda Mostafa , is an excerpt from the book " Learning from Cairo: Global Perspectives and Future Visions ," by Beth Stryker, Omar Nagati and Magda Mostafa, a collection of essays and reflections on the events surrounding a three-day symposium of the same name, held at the American University in Cairo's Tahrir Square campus in April, 2013. More information about the conference, including full video documentation of all plenaries and working sessions, can be found at http://learningfromcairo.org . Additional information about Cairo's post-revolution urban landscape can be found in the book "Archiving the City in Flux" by the same authors, from CLUSTER Cairo available here .

Dr. Magda Mostafa is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Architectural Engineering at the American University in Cairo and serves as Deputy Vice President for Africa in the UNESCO-International Union of Architects’ Education Commission and Validation Council . She received her Ph.D. from Cairo University, where her doctoral dissertation studied architectural design for children with special needs and sensory dysfunctions, with a focus on autism. She is currently working as a special needs design consultant for government and private sector projects in Egypt , the Gulf and Europe, as an associate at the Cairo based architectural firm Progressive Architects.

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Research Proposal Informal settlements: A case study on the informal settlements of Kabul City, Afghanistan.

Informal or squatter settlements or as referred to slums during the 18th century are still existed in a large number in our society and they are created by low income or poor people or a result of having an adequate planning systems. The origin can be traced back to the “Victorian Slums” in England during mid of 18th century where the word of slum appeared for the first time in the reports (UN HABITAT, 2007). Today this is a major issue in many developing countries, such as Afghanistan, Turkey, Pakistan, India, Latin America and many more. Numerous governments and humanitarian aid organizations such as United Nations, World Bank, UN-HABITAT and USAID have gathered up to fight this problem and how they can find suitable solutions for them. Afghanistan as a developing country which recently has been retrieved from a long war and it is one of those countries that its urbanization is affected widely by the informal living conditions. The main aim of this paper is to find the key factors for the creation of these informal settlements in the Kabul city, the capital of Afghanistan. However these settlements in most cases are not slums which are described by the Oxford dictionary “a squalid and overcrowded urban street or district inhabited by very poor people”. I would argue that there are people in these areas, who are counted as the top income bracket people in the society, therefore in Kabul these places are a mixture of both rich and poor people, and often they are called informal settlements. The study will gather qualitative data from the participants such as local residents, academic and government officials and quantitative data from the current planning system policies and secondary source information from organization involved in the urban planning process.

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Samuel Wapwera

Nattasit Srinurak

To make city sustainable the road system is the most priority to consider in urban planning. Chiang Mai is primary city in the north of Thailand with polycentric development which urban planning encourages decentralization of development into suburban and also had transportation planning that contribute city growth to satellite districts. It designate ring road as linkage between satellite districts. But after urban planning was expired in 2006 and there was no urban planning control in that period for 7 years. This study aims to clarify effects after the road constructed in uncontrolled urban plan period. The study found that housing development have occurred which causes more distance between work space and residential are and suburban area change into automobile oriented development furthermore citizen of Chiang Mai have more personal vehicle dependency leading to higher energy consumption and traffic problem. The urban sprawls along the ring road also scatter in agricultural area and indirectly make flooding and air pollution worse than before. The Chiang Mai's development policy must encourage the sustainable planning by strengthening urban promotion and/or urban control area to resolve vehicle dependency problem through urban planning regulation and public transport strategies.

Southeast Asian Geotechnical Society (SEAGS)

The TOULON highway tunnel is located in a very dense urban environment, and a much complex geology. The excavated section is about 120 m 2 and the depth is in the range 15-35 m. The aim of the paper is to show how a great attention was paid to the settlements control: at the design stage through soils investigations, survey of existing constructions in regards to their sensibility to tunnel induced settlement, definition of settlements thresholds, and choice of ground pre-reinforcement techniques; during the construction, by heavy monitoring of deformations and continuous adaptation of the supports to the actual settlements and buildings behavior. This case history is an illustration of how the settlements induced by tunneling can be managed for any urban tunnel, mainly in old cities.

Latifa Sitadevi

Chief Editor

Code based design of piles with NSF consider the NSF force as a dragload to be imposed on the pile as an unfavourable design action. These codes like Singapore CP4, UK BS 8004 and the recent EC7 would indirectly factor up the value of the dragload while at the same time factor down the positive shaft friction below the neutral plane. Thus the pile design in very deep soft clays typical of Singapore and Asean coastal plains will lead to very conservative pile lengths to meet the code requirements. The Unified pile design method of Fellenius recognized this deficiency and it allows for better pile design with NSF taking into account the need for both force and settlement equilibrium between pile and soil. Fortunately, EC7 also allows for interactive pile/soil analysis using modern FEM tools that can optimise pile design for NSF, particularly when the remaining consolidation settlements around the piles are relatively small. This paper will compare these methods and provide insights into the proper understanding of NSF effects on pile behaviour, and recommend the way forward for rational and economical pile design in settling soils.

Ahmed Hammad

The Social idealism has been associated to utopia, where lots of trials have been taken aiming to reach the ideal state in different fields, such as: philosophy, technology, urban planning, politics, economy and others. The utopic thought have been also merged with architectural thought, that helped in the evolution of architecture and helped to present the futuristic city; as well as developing new technological, social and other typologies. The research examines the notion of idealism, and the relation of utopic thought with both architectural and urban thought. The research also reviews the utopic evolution, specially in architecture of the 20th century, that resulted in affecting both current and futuristic architecture.

Mabel Hoedoafia

In recent times, there has been a surge in small scale mining activities in Ghana which has made significant contributions to the national gold output, foreign exchange earnings, and employment among others. This paper investigated the impact of small scale gold mining on the living conditions of the people of the West Gonja District in the Northern Region of Ghana. The research involved: (a) the determination of gender and generation roles in small scale mining activities; (b) the determination of the effect of mining activities on employment, education, health, agriculture and cost of living of the people in the district and (c) The identification of the areas of interventions that will eradicate the negative effects of small scale gold mining in the district. Data of sampled households in four communities in Damongo was gathered and analyzed. The research methods included; semi structured interviews, validated self-administered questionnaires and observations. Sampling of communities and households was done using a combination of stratified and simple random sampling procedures. The study revealed varied effects with respect to small scale miners and the general community. Small scale mining has contributed positively in improving the lives of the people in the form of employment, revenue generation and meeting health, educational and basic family needs. It also confirmed the associated social, and environmental negative effects of small scale mining. The paper concludes that in the absence of a viable alternative source of economic livelihood, the West Gonja District Assembly should organize small scale miners into groups, assist them to acquire equipment needed for their operations and regularly monitor and control their activities.

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U.S. Presses to Avert Wider War Between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon

A recent flurry of diplomacy aims to head off a conflict that could pit the United States directly against Iran.

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By Michael Crowley ,  Julian E. Barnes and Aaron Boxerman

Michael Crowley and Julian E. Barnes reported from Washington, and Aaron Boxerman reported from Jerusalem.

The United States is in the midst of an intense diplomatic push to prevent full-on war between Israel and Hezbollah forces in Lebanon, as the risks rise that either side could initiate a broader regional fight.

In recent days, U.S. officials have pressed their Israeli counterparts and passed messages to Hezbollah’s leaders with the goal of averting a wider regional conflict that they fear could draw in both Iran and the United States.

Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, met with several Biden administration officials in Washington this week, in large measure to discuss the escalating tensions along Israel’s northern border with Lebanon. That visit followed one last week by Israel’s national security adviser, Tzachi Hanegbi, and its minister of strategic affairs, Ron Dermer.

Also last week, a senior White House official, Amos Hochstein, who has assumed an informal diplomatic role mediating between the two sides, visited Israel and Lebanon. Mr. Hochstein warned Hezbollah, which is supported by Iran, that the United States would not be able to restrain Israel should it commit to an all-out war with the militia group.

Archrivals for decades, Israel and Hezbollah have frequently exchanged fire along Israel’s northern border. After the Hamas-led attacks on Oct. 7 triggered a blistering Israeli assault in Gaza, Hezbollah began firing at Israel, mainly against Israeli military targets in northern Israel to show solidarity with Hamas, which is also backed by Iran.

The fighting has intensified in recent weeks, and Israel’s reduced combat operations in Gaza, where it has greatly weakened Hamas, have freed up more of its forces for a possible offensive in the north.

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