Land for Poor: Towards Sustainable Master Plan for Sensitive Redevelopment of Slums

Slums are considered as illegally occupied houses and creating a nuisance of environmental pollution and degradation of urban living conditions. The presence of slum as a part of urban habitat refers to a condition of defective physical, social and economic environment. During last two decades; migration from villages and small towns to metropolitan areas has increased. This leads to the degradation of urban environmental quality and sustainable development especially in the metropolitan cities. The problems faced by the people living in the urban areas have become major concerns for the government. Slums are considered to be the major issue within many urban areas; particularly problems related to transportation, population, health and safety.The Egyptian government has adopted a range of policies and legislation to slow or halt the growth of informal settlements, but successes in improving or removing informal areas have been limited to specific communities and have done nothing to reduce the overall growth of informal areas.The present study is for two slum areas. One is of Egypt (Ezbet Aljama, Alexandria) and the other in India (Dharavi, Mumbai). Since all the slums are not lying at same level of infrastructural development, it is necessary to know about the basic services and facilities like drinking water, electricity, sanitation, education and health services etc between and within the two slums.Therefore, this study was stresses to compare the living conditions and variation between the two slums. The major finding of the study is that learning from the experiences of other countries to help in “improve the quality of life and public health” in informal areas. And throughout the national and international experiences that took place about the slums, we can determine a number of recommendations to deal with the slums, which will create a balanced and sustainable master plan for sensitive redevelopment.