Methodology

Participant observation Transect walk Participatory needs assessment

Semi-structured interview

ACTION PROPOSAL

Participatory mapping IDENTIFICATION OF NEEDS

Scoring matrix Survey

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Seven participatory methods were mainly applied in our fieldwork to facilitate our process of understanding the situation, identifying the needs to find the focus, and developing proposals based on feedbacks from the residents.

Our study starts from getting familiar with the general situation of the research area, Vishwakarma Nagar. The ongoing redevelopment project gave us the assumption about tenure issue in this area. Instead of narrowing down our topic from a broader identification of needs and issues, our study direction deviated from the regular route as we directly went to the focus on tenure security before needs assessment, which was later proved to be hasty.

Although abundant information about land tenure and housing constantly came from residents through conversations, inadequate foundation for our assumption weakened our confidence and eventually guided us to a participatory needs assessment for supporting evidence. The needs identification stimulated us to look further into the topic of tenure security. We intended to find out to what extent residents’ needs are overlooked in a relocation project, and how people’s needs could be taken into consideration in the future project of Vishwakarma Nagar.

However, an interview with Bansal Group revealed that both the residents and our group have misconception about the land owner, the future plan of this area as well as the power and interest level of different stakeholders.

It urged us to reflect where our misconception came from, which led to our focus on deficient information exchange. We thus seek to find out how such information inaccuracy and inadequacy happened, what information is usually missed, what are the consequences, and how we could contribute to addressing the issue with small interventions that could bring about changes in short term and longer.

Research Design

This study aims to identify needs of residents in Vishwakarma Nagar through community participation, so as to explore how the prioritized issues could be addressed. Research questions of this study include: (1) What are residents’ main needs in Vishwakarma Nagar? (2) To what extent the information residents have matches the information from the official sources? (3) What are reasons of deficient information

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exchange? (4) What are consequences of deficient information exchange? (5) How the deficient information exchange could be improved?

In order to answer abovementioned questions of this study, a qualitative research is carried out, as a qualitative research to describe and understand the situation (Streubert and Carpenter, 1995). Specifically, as our study places emphasis on needs of the marginalized groups and their informalities which are not fully taken into consideration in the formal planning, we attempt to conduct a participatory action research to involve community participants. Participatory action research is concerned with empowering the poor and marginalized members of society (Freire, 1970), and emphasizes that local people have rights to decide their development and to participate in the process of developing their solutions which they are able to control (Attwood, 1997).

This study is designed to obtain the inductive result, to understand the dynamics of our area and seek to develop strategic interventions to meet the needs of now, while working toward the aspirations of soon and later (Hamdi, 2010, p. 65).

Sampling

Purposive sampling. Purposeful sampling is a technique widely used in qualitative research for the identification and selection of information-rich cases for the most effective use of limited resources (Patton, 2002). In order to select of cases with maximum variation to serve our purpose of identifying important common needs that cut across variations among different age, gender and community groups, we thus adopted the heterogeneous purposive sampling in our stage of needs identification.

Convenience sampling. Convenience sampling involves getting participants wherever you can find them and typically wherever is convenient (Dudovskiy, 2016). During our Co-workshop with local residents, convenience sampling was used due to the availability of participants.

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Data collection methods

To serve the purpose of this study, participant observation, participatory mapping, transect walks, participatory needs assessment, semistructured interviews, surveys, documentary analysis are used to collect the data in our process.

Participant observation Participant observation is a fieldwork technique used by anthropologists and sociologists to collect qualitative and quantitative data that leads to an in-depth understanding of peoples’ practices, motivations, and attitudes (World Bank, 1996). Originated from ethnographic research as a data collection method, participant observation enables the researcher to cultivate personal interaction with local residents, and allows the researcher to learn about the cultures and social customs of local communities with the direct involvement into their daily life.

During our fieldwork, we moved from the campus to the city and stayed 15 minutes away from the area on foot. Every day we spent several hours in the settlement and communicated with local residents, giving us a better understanding of how local residents live and shaped the society that they possess now. During the local Ganesh Festival, we were invited to participate in the celebration events in Bengali community, where we had interaction with local women, who usually lack the opportunities to choose their career. Some stay unemployed at home for religious, cultural or domestic reasons. On the other hand, for days we were also involved in the daily game playing of children in Bihari community.

Transect walks Transect walk is a type of mapping activity, but it involves actually walking across an area with a community member or a group, observing, asking questions and listening as you go (Thomas, 2004). Walking around in the communities with local residents deepens our understanding on the community from diverse dimensions.

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On account of the invisible boundary between communities, we fortunately had 5 different groups of local children from different communities to show us around in transect walks. During transect walks, kids made decisions about where we went and the sequence of visiting different areas and paths. Transect walks gave us an overview of the estimated household numbers, the residence density, the detailed boundary and the complex physical structures deep inside the settlements.

High density of wells which supply water in addition to several water tanks is one of the elements making this area special. It is also one of many ways in which informality takes place here. In addition, the transect walks also highlighted the issues of toilets and drainage. We also accessed marginalized households that we neglected before because of the complexity of path network in this area.

Participatory needs assessment Before we conducted the needs assessment, our group was unconfident about the focus of our study, as numerous issues were identified based on previous observation and interviews. The needs assessment thus also served to help our group narrow down to a topic that could bring residents something they demand for. The goal of a needs assessment is to identify the assets of a community and determine potential concerns that it faces. A straightforward way to estimate the needs of the community is to simply ask residents their opinions about the development of services within the community, their satisfaction with services, and what particular services they need (Sharma, Lanum, and Suarez-Balcazar, 2000). Rating activities offer opportunities for local residents to weigh up issues either related to each other or according to criteria, while the short interviews enable us to understand what these people value and why.

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Accordingly, in order to allow residents to prioritize their concerns based on our preliminary study, we designed a card sort and rating game. Brief interviews followed to allow each respondent to give their explanation and opinions about their choices.

The participatory mapping and transect walks we conducted earlier facilitated our selection of 8 respondents that range in age, gender and origin of the community. In our two-day needs assessment activity, we collected responses of 3 residents from Bihari community and 5 residents from Bengali community. Among them 3 are males, and 5 are females. The age ranges from 15 to 60. 25 cards with different topics originated from our previous findings were provided for selection and some blank cards for adding topics that we didn’t cover. Respondents were asked to pick 5-10 cards of specific topics they regard as the most urgent, and to rate according to their satisfaction degree on these topics.

According to the needs assessment, housing and toilets are the two most frequently expressed concerns for respondents, which corresponds to our earlier findings. A girl mentioned that the public toilets are deficit not only in number but also in its accessibility in night, as the one run by the municipality is usually closed by 9 P.M., while the drunken men gathering around make her feel unsafe about going to movable toilets in the night.

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– Female, Bengali, 15

“Toilet in the front closes at nine. But if we in the night have to go to the toilet in the back, it is unsafe, because boys smoke and drink around that area.” –Female, Bengali, 16

Respondents also ranked houses as their high priority of concern. Some expressed the concern of being evicted, to which our group has been paying attention to considering the ongoing Habibganj railway station project.

“In theory everyone owns the house, but in reality the government owns the house. And we never know when they are going to tell us to leave. We don't have a document for the house.”

–Female, Bengali, 16

“House is the utmost important thing that everyone should own. I have been staying here for 20 years, in the same place, I have no property elsewhere in the city.” –Male, Bihari, 40

The often mentioned coming eviction triggered our curiosity about the future plan of

the authority and the current situation of residents, leading us to the decision of digging into it.

Besides, the needs assessment also highlighted water supply as another issue, hidden behind the harmonious scene of abundant wells.

“Getting water is a big issue here. We get water from the hand pumps which are far away. The hand pumps and wells are divided according to the communities.” –Female, Bihari, 24

“Getting water is troublesome because ten people have to queue to get water. I have to go five times to get water.”

– Male, Bihari, 40

Semi-structured interviews It’s very important to know the objective of your conversation. However, in an informal setup the conversation needs enough space to move into all possible directions. Semistructured interviews, or conversational interviews, are flexibly structured with certain number of predetermined questions, ensuring the focus of the interview on specific issues while allowing participant to develop related new topics (World Bank, 1996). One merit of semi-structured interviews to collect data is the possibilities of collecting detailed information with open-ended questions. Therefore, four sessions of interviews, which are filming interviews with local residents regarding tenure security and housing, interviews following needs assessment, interviews with Bansal Group, BHEL and government officers to find out the formal planning information, and finally interviews after co-workshop with NGOs and government officers to facilitate the proposal. We spoke to the residents about their day-today life around the area, the potential loopholes in their present neighborhood and how they would possibly try to solve them.

Interviews about tenure security and housing. We adopted heterogeneous purposive sampling to select 6 participants from different communities and of age and gender, to conduct 6 interviews on this topic, so as to get the common concern and maximum information. Questionnaires from UNHabitat helped us keep the conversation on track and proved essential in not skipping any important details. We had conversations with participants to find out how local residents perceive their tenure security, how they obtain information about their area, and how they react to the potential resettlement, while taking videos of our conversation that recorded their body language and feelings on their face. Videos deepen our understanding on what people are trying to express with the

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supplement of gestures, facial expressions and eye contacts.

However, during our interviews with residents, we were unable to make sure the interviews take place in a perfect environment due to lack of time and resources. It is suggested that in conducting an interview the interviewer should attempt to create a friendly, nonthreatening atmosphere (Dudovskiy, 2016). Our interviews were carried out inside participant’s house, on the street, and sometimes with the presence of family members or strangers, which could undermine the validity of participants’ responses.

Interviews with the private sector and the government. To gather the information about the land use plan and future redevelopment scheme, our group interviewed the construction manager from Bansal Group, which is the developer of Habibganj Railway Station, the Officer of Publicity & Public Relation at BHEL, which is the land owner of our area, and the city engineer as well as the department head at Housing for All.

Interviews with the NGOs about community empowerment. Aarambh Bhopal is an organization with focuses on urban sanitation, women empowerment and community development. With the realization that residents in our slum lack access to receive and convey information regarding their future and demands, we sought to get contact with non-governmental organizations working in this field. In literature we found NSDF, whose main aim is to mobilize the urban poor come together, articulate their concerns and find solutions to the problems they face. Although NSDF doesn’t have a branch in Bhopal, we visited its partner organization Samarthan here in this city, through which we accessed Aarambh. We seek to learn experience on providing capacity building trainings in the communities. And we were told that it is possible to go through the procedure to get funding for our suggested projects in the future.

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Surveys Survey is a sequence of focused, predetermined questions in a fixed order, often with predetermined, limited options for responses (World Bank, 1996). Surveys can be used to identify development problems or objectives, narrow the focus or clarify the objectives of a project. In our study 12 surveys regarding demographic information were carried out in the early stage of our study to help us grasp the basic situation about the household characteristics and employment in our area. 10 surveys in the form of quiz were finished by community residents during the workshop, demonstrating their lack of correct information related to their area including the knowledge about the real land owner of their slum. A lot of residents have the misconception that the Habibganj Railway Station Co. Ltd. owns the land.

Scoring Matrix Matrix Scoring and Ranking is a way to structure the perceptions and opinions of informants so that individual or group qualities can be ranked in order of importance and the reasons for this ranking discussed (Chatty, Baas, and Fleig, 2003). In our study we conducted the activity both for the needs assessment and the co-design workshop. In the co-design workshop, two scoring activities were carried out to find out how residents get information about their own rights and how they convey their demands. Participants were asked to score the different ways of getting and delivering information that they use the most often, that they think the most effective, and that they think need improvement. High percentage of respondents indicated that friends is the most common source for them to gather information about their own rights, and media/internet is the most effective way, while government officers such as ward councilors are anticipated to communicate more with them.

Participatory Mapping Maps are important means to illustrate resources, socio-economic features, movements and outside contacts of local groups or communities (Chatty, Baas, and Fleig, 2003). Throughout our fieldwork

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mapping activities are frequently conducted to help us collect visual data demonstrating the physical setting, the demographic characteristics as well as the strengths and weaknesses of our area. Through involving local residents in our mapping, we also learned from their discussion about their concerns about employment, water supply, sanitation and housing.

At the earlier stage of our fieldwork, we conducted several visits to the Vishwakarma Nagar, during one of which we commenced mapping in cooperation with students from SPA Delhi and KRVIA Mumbai. Albeit new in the village, we fortunately attracted a number of residents ranging from children to elderly to engage in our mapping activities, which gave us the idea about Vishwakarma Nagar and the surrounding area from the perspective of local residents.

Due to the weak signal in our site, we were not able to map precise location of all the objects such as indoor wells or small drainage along building with the GIS collector on our smartphone. Luckily with printed google satellite maps from different years and the help of residents, we mapped important ones. In addition, we also mapped temples, stores, schools, toilets, hospitals, public space, etc. Based on residents’ feedbacks, in our codesign workshop we carried out a more elaborate community mapping activity for participants to identify challenges that they face and resources they can utilize. Residents came to realize that the invisible boundary between communities might be an issue. But it also strengthened their understanding about the public services they can access and the community strengths brought by members with a variety of skills in this area.

Data analysis method

Content analysis was mainly used to analyze the data collected through semi-structured interviews. It enables researchers to structure the qualitative data collected in a way that satisfies the accomplishment of research objectives (Langkos, 2014). However, human error that might be involved in content analysis will also lead to misinterpretation of data, increasing the risk of unreliable conclusions (Krippendorff and Bock, 2008), which is a limitation.

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