“This is my home, and I am not ashamed to live here”: a comparative study of sense of belonging in Harare and Accra’s informal settlements
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines sense of belonging among residents of informal settlements in Harare and Accra-—specifically, Hopley and Hatcliffe Extension in Harare, and Nima and Old Fadama in Accra. It contributes to and advances literature on sense of belonging in informal settlements by adopting a comparative approach. Our findings reveal both similarities and context specific dynamics on sense of belonging. Compared to Old Fadama, most participants from Nima, Hopley and Hatcliffe Extension generally expressed positive sentiments about their places of residence. They attributed their sense of home to the defacto legitimacy they enjoy and the incremental infrastructure improvements in their settlement – factors that residents of Old Fadama lack entirely. Conversely, Old Fadama residents endure spatial brutality, chronic flooding and entrenched place stigma, which disrupt their sense of belonging. Interestingly, across the four communities, participants fostered a strong sense of community resilience and collective solidarity, deeply rooted in shared struggles and social networks. Therefore, the heterogeneity of informal settlements in terms of legitimacy, exclusion, place stigma and levels of infrastructural development is critical in explaining variations in residents’ perspectives of their sense of belonging. The study highlights the need for informal settlement upgrading as a multifaceted intervention that reduces the burden of spatial deprivation.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".