The jugaad urbanism-sustainable circular cities nexus: Insights from sub-Saharan Africa's informal settlements
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Informal settlements have long been viewed derogatorily as terrains of despair. Some scholars even summarily dismiss them as offering little to no value to the functioning of cities. Underpinned by the Foucauldian idea of ‘milieus,’ this article challenges the apocalyptic depiction of informal communities, emphasizing their profound roles in sustainable and inclusive cities. Recently, the concept of ‘jugaad urbanism’ has been used to typify this paradigm shift. Emanating from the Hindi term jugadu , jugaad urbanism highlights the ingenuity and resourcefulness of marginalized communities to make do and improvise to solve their everyday problems. With a lacuna in the concept's application to Africa, the aims of this article were twofold: (i) To underscore exemplary communal jugaad urbanism practices in sub-Saharan Africa and (ii) To critically discuss how they contribute to building sustainable, circular, and inclusive cities. After a rigorous review of conventional literature (i.e., scholarly and grey literature), 21 case studies of jugaad urbanism were assessed via six themes: i) re-making of public spaces, ii) innovative reuse of plastic waste, iii) resourceful provisioning of water and sanitation infrastructure, iv) empowerment through games, v) resilience to climate-related risks, and vi) communal safety and security measures. The communal jugaad initiatives analyzed contribute to social, economic, and environmental sustainability while advancing the circular economy principles of waste reuse and recycling. The article recommends that city officials and policymakers learn from marginal populations by first taking stock of jugaad practices and then providing sustained technical and financial support.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".