Taking Urban Upgrading to Scale: Where Are the Bottlenecks?

This paper discusses the challenges to expanding successful, small-scale urban upgrading initiatives in developing countries, where “scaling up” comprises inclusion (upgrading efforts reach the vast majority of the target population with improved services within a reasonable time frame), and institutionalization (a system of actors and institutions—public, private, and/or civic—is in place that has the necessary capacity and resources to carry out upgrading indefinitely). Despite frequent identification of scaling up as a central challenge to effective upgrading efforts in the literature, no systematic assessment of obstacles to scaling up was identified. This paper presents a taxonomy of scaling-up bottlenecks and applies it to the case of the Slum Networking Project (SNP) in Ahmedabad, India. Despite demonstrated success in 27 slum communities, the SNP has had difficulty expanding its activities to a substantial proportion of the city’s 2,431 low-income neighborhoods. The analysis presented in this paper suggests that insufficient resources and a lack of “political will,” which are often cited as explanations for the failure to scale up, are relatively insignificant in the Ahmedabad case. Instead, a disconnect between the bundle of infrastructure services offered by the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation and the priorities of slum households, along with the remuneration policies for the Slum Networking Project’s NGO partners, are among the principal explanations for the SNP’s slow rate of expansion.