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Poverty mapping and its difficulties

Maryam Amiri, Tehran Community Manager

Tehran, 16 March 2015

The "informal settlement upgrading plan" was started in Iran for the first time in 1999 through a mutual cooperation between the World Bank and the Iranian government. Since then, a similar plan has been executed in dozens of Iranian cities.

The initial stage in performing an upgrading plan is to identify the affected regions by defining the geographical boundaries of each informal settlement. To do this, the government's Urban Development and Revitalization Organization and an advisory board of urban planners have developed certain criteria to distinguish informal settlements from other parts of a city. Although the criteria are the same for all Iranian cities, they can include more specific criteria for each city.

Some of the parameters and the criteria are:

• Lack of formal title registries among the residents

• Lower-than-average household income

• Lack of sanitary facilities like baths and toilets

• Invalidity of legal infrastructures like electricity and water

• Prevalence of informal employment

• High population density

• High rates of crime and drug abuse

A wide range of neighborhood survey techniques are used to collect the basic information, including the personal interview, questionnaire, residents' surveys, non-resident surveys, and environmental surveys. Upon completion of this phase, the collected data is analyzed using the ArcGIS software; results of the analysis show informal settlements where the poorest households live. Furthermore, deeper studies assess the most critical problems in these areas in order to properly address them. To this end, city managers get involved and are asked to share their ideas about the settlement's visions.

This upgrading plan has been criticized for a number of different reasons. The government's payments to the private research companies are often inadequate for covering the costs of high-quality analysis, resulting in low-quality results. Some areas with a great majority of poor households are routinely missing among the results. Budgetary limitations are not the only problem: some local governors consider poverty mapping as a security issue and refuse to provide the basic information to the urban planners. This reluctance may be related to several recent revolts in informal settlements and the fear of future revolts.

Often, a similar plan for the "rehabilitation of deteriorated urban textures" is executed by the municipalities, and goes alongside the upgrading plan. The criteria for the latter are almost the same as the former, so one can often find two similar adjacent areas — one of which has been recognized as "informal settlement" and the other as a "deteriorated urban texture," although of course both are dealing with the same problems. Despite the similarities in the issues, the advantages for the residents are not equal: while upgrading projects are normally low-cost and hardly improve living conditions, residents living in rehabilitation zones are able to use low-interest loans and discounted construction permits.

Despite the inadequacies and criticisms mentioned above, visualizing and mapping poverty and living conditions is a significant step towards improving the situation of Tehran's poorest residents. Recognizing the problem is the first step to solving it.

 
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