Impact Makers: Sheela Patel

Building resilient, low-carbon housing solutions for informal settlements By Climate Champions | November 7, 2024

NAME

Sheela Bharat Patel

TITLE

Founder & Director, SPARC

LOCATION

Mumbai, India

ABOUT 

Sheela Bharat Patel is the visionary founder and director of the Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centres (SPARC), an organization that has been working to address the needs of communities living in informal settlements across the Global South. One of her most groundbreaking initiatives, the ROOH Campaign (Roof Over Our Heads), seeks to tackle the housing crisis faced by impoverished households in informal settlements, especially in regions vulnerable to climate change.

In the Global South, approximately 1 billion people live in informal settlements, a number expected to double by 2050, primarily in South Asia and East Africa. These settlements are often overcrowded, lacking basic infrastructure, and particularly vulnerable to climate impacts such as storms, floods, and extreme temperatures. ROOH, under Sheela’s leadership, works to provide low-carbon, resilient, and affordable housing solutions tailored to the specific needs of these communities. The initiative champions a bottom-up, locally led approach where slum dwellers, particularly women, work in collaboration with professionals such as architects, designers, and material suppliers to develop sustainable housing solutions.

MOTIVATIONS 

“My first serious experience of engaging women who had migrated from villages happened from 1974, when I started working at a community centre in Mumbai that provided welfare services to people and families that live informally on the pavement of the streets of Mumbai. Many of them had come into the city with their children with no money; no idea where their husbands were taken; long 2-4 day journeys to seek a better life to feed themselves and their children at least two meals a day.

Listening to the stories and their challenges, I was horrified to see that welfare and charity arrangement treated them like illiterate ignorant individuals who were told what to do and constantly reminded about all the good things they needed to do when in reality, they were remarkable women of amazing determination to transform their children’s lives.

My journey began to assist them in whatever they needed to do to improve the quality of their lives, which began with ensuring their children got meals, vaccinations, and admissions to schools. It ended up with all of us working towards ensuring that their humble tents on the sidewalk of the street were not destroyed by the municipality, which constantly destroyed their homes and sought to evict them.

This led to the establishment of Spark, which created networks for these communities, developed detailed censuses of their situations in the cities, and explored the reasons for their migration. Over 20 years, from 1984 to 2000, these networks built skills to negotiate dialogue, advocate for relocation, and work with the government to develop policies that would enable them to secure legal homes.

My exposure to climate change began in 1988, when David Satterthwaite from IIED highlighted the close relationship between development and climate change. He explained how extreme weather—though we lacked the terminology for it at the time—was driving many people to migrate into cities, often as a result of property loss and environmental pressures.

In 2005, Mary Robinson established a group to incorporate social justice into the UN’s climate change framework and invited me to join. My role was to bring attention to the challenges faced by people living informally in cities worldwide. This marked the start of my journey to consistently link development and climate change in addressing extreme poverty, challenging development strategies that often overlooked the real issues faced by vulnerable people migrating to cities in search of a better life.

Roof Over Our Heads represents the latest effort to deepen and strengthen what women, their families, neighbourhoods, and networks can achieve on their own, using the resources and knowledge they already have to build the resilience of their homes against extreme weather. This initiative aims to highlight to cities, nations, and global platforms that climate and development must work hand-in-hand – and must centrally include and build upon what people are already doing independently.

IMPACTS

While challenges of course persist, before ROOH:

• Informal settlements faced significant challenges, with many residents lacking access to basic facilities like clean water, sanitation, and electricity.
• Communities in these areas were highly vulnerable to climate impacts, frequently exposed to floods, extreme heat, and storms.
• Traditional urban development models, often rooted in colonial norms, failed to accommodate or support the unique challenges faced by these communities.
• Residents, particularly women, had limited involvement in decision-making processes regarding housing and infrastructure development.
• Homes in informal settlements were typically constructed with materials and designs unsuited to withstand climate-related stressors.

After ROOH:

• ROOH has raised awareness of over a billion vulnerable people in the global South, whose migration to cities is often driven by extreme weather and exclusionary legal systems.
• Learning labs have been established locally, enabling communities to assess their homes’ resilience and develop solutions, shared across 100 labs in 20 countries in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and MENA, focusing on low-carbon housing suited for climate resilience.
• In 2023, 25 learning labs in 10 Indian cities piloted community-led resilience assessments, with women’s collectives and young professionals developing alternate solutions.
• In 2024, the learning lab model expanded to Indonesia, the Philippines, Kenya, and six Latin American countries.
• Local partnerships with contractors, material providers, and financing institutions allow households to improve their homes incrementally, with support from sustainable financing systems.
• Academic institutions now participate in learning labs, integrating this knowledge into curricula and expanding it through networks nationally and globally.
• The ROOH campaign has created partnerships between local communities, especially women, and professionals, encouraging community ownership and sustainable housing solutions.
• Community-driven labs have partnered with local stakeholders, including material providers, contractors, and insurers, to bring this collaborative approach into future urban development practices.
• Annual showcases, including at COP, promote ROOH’s model as a solution that centres on vulnerable communities, shifting from top-down approaches to inclusive, locally-led resilience building.

CHALLENGES

While ROOH has made considerable progress, several challenges have arisen:

• Many communities hold deeply rooted attachments to traditional building methods and materials, and the persistence of long-standing values and attitudes within these communities can hinder the adoption of new solutions. Building trust and demonstrating the advantages of alternative materials require ongoing effort.
• Although waste-based or recycled materials have been introduced for housing upgrades, they are often seen as temporary or substandard. Residents frequently prefer more permanent solutions and worry about potential hazards, such as toxins or pests, associated with these materials.
• Residents tend to take cues from their neighbours and are reluctant to be the first to adopt new materials. This collective hesitance has slowed the uptake of innovative solutions, even when they are cost-effective.
• Despite the affordability of some solutions, there is skepticism about their lasting value. Immediate costs, although reasonable, are viewed as a potential risk if long-term savings are not assured.
• Many of the proposed materials have not been widely tested in similar environments, which leads to distrust among residents and makes adoption more difficult.
• The desire for homes that resemble formal urban housing, combined with limited financial capacity and a lack of robust solutions that can withstand extreme weather, compounds these challenges.
• Informal households globally and nationally face constant threats of eviction and demolition. The insecurity around their housing makes these communities especially vulnerable, impacting their overall quality of life.
• Political leadership, as well as academic and research institutions, often fail to acknowledge that returning to rural areas is not an option for these households. Urban planning must anticipate and accommodate the influx of rural migrants, yet this shift in city planning, according to Sheela, is not occurring.

GOALS

ROOH seeks to:

• Equip households, neighbourhoods, and networks with the capacity to document their current reality and identify changes needed to build resilient homes tailored to their local context.
• Campaign at local, national, and global levels to establish partnerships that can provide financing, materials, design innovations, and early warning systems, all supporting the goal of resilient housing.
• Place the challenges of informality at the centre of climate change and development discussions, emphasizing its relevance to global climate and development goals.
• Advocate for the inclusion of informality in global climate agendas, such as annual COP events, where discussions and metrics currently lack a focus on the millions who have lived informally across generations or the increasing numbers expected, given the uncertain 2030 climate outcomes.
• Demonstrate that solutions emerge when both formal and informal institutions collaborate, bringing diverse voices to the table and valuing the role of women in driving the transitions needed for a resilient future.

SHEELA’S ADVICE

“There are no silver bullets, and no quick solutions to centuries-old exclusionary practices that have created vast numbers of impoverished households – numbers that continue to grow in an economic system designed to concentrate wealth for the few. Creating solutions that work for everyone, that produce knowledge, practices, and investments allowing each household to prepare the next generation to coexist with nature, may seem like a distant call – but it is an urgent action needed today.”

HOW YOU CAN HELP

ROOH is transforming informal settlements by empowering communities to create resilient, low-carbon housing. Here’s how support can make a difference:

• ROOH requires $10 million to fund 100 learning labs and achieve sustainable, embedded change in community resilience and development. This investment will drive impactful, lasting transformation within informal settlements.
• Public and private sector leaders, researchers, academics, and social entrepreneurs are encouraged to engage deeply and sustainably in build resilience for all communities. A long-term commitment is essential for building a future that safeguards both people and the planet.
• The bottom 40% of populations globally represent a vital part of the consumer base, contributing to companies’ futures, however modestly. Strategies designed to address their needs are both an investment in community well-being and in long-term business sustainability.
• Traditional top-down, one-size-fits-all approaches have often shown limitations. While the challenges within communities are frequently scrutinized, gaps in larger poverty eradication investments are rarely examined. Supporting approaches that are truly responsive to community needs can pave the way for effective solutions.
• Informal communities provide essential services to formal households and neighborhoods in cities worldwide. Recognizing their contribution and supporting their opportunities is an investment in a future where children grow up with values of care, community connection, and sustainability, paving the way for a more inclusive society.

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