Series ID: TPW-0145
Some settlements are too dense for the infrastructure they need.
Homes may stand wall to wall. Footpaths can narrow until emergency access becomes impossible. Drainage follows improvised channels. Water pipes and electrical connections arrive through whatever space remains. Fire can jump rapidly from structure to structure. Waste collection becomes difficult. A resident may live only twenty metres from a road and still be almost unreachable by ambulance, fire service or utility crews.
The obvious engineering answer is to clear space.
The dangerous planning answer is to clear people.
Participatory reblocking tries to separate those two ideas. Instead of treating an informal settlement as a blank site for demolition and replacement, residents and planners map existing homes, negotiate a new internal layout, create space for roads, drains, water, sanitation, electricity and public areas, and rebuild or reposition structures in a way that keeps the community substantially in place.
UN-Habitat’s World Cities Report 2026 describes reblocking as a method in which residents collaborate to map existing housing units and floor areas, create a preliminary land register, dismantle structures where necessary, and reconstruct them according to an agreed layout that creates space for basic services, roads and pedestrian movement. The report points to community-led examples in South Africa and links reblocking to wider settlement upgrading, resilience and access.
The reader job: understand how to improve spatial structure without treating residents as an obstacle
This article explains the planning mechanics of reblocking: enumeration, mapping, trust, tenure, temporary relocation, plot adjustment, infrastructure corridors, fire access, drainage, public space, compensation, phasing, governance and the protections required to prevent upgrading from becoming displacement.
Nearby owners already cover adjacent questions. The Parcel Problem owns parcel geometry and land assembly. The Plan Stack owns the relationship between strategy and implementation. The Arrival Town owns rapid population growth and service pressure. The Maintenance Ledger owns the long life of public systems.
The Reblocking Plan owns a different question: when people already live densely on land that lacks a workable internal structure, how can the settlement be reorganized enough to deliver infrastructure without destroying the social and economic networks that make the place function?
The settlement is not empty land
The first planning mistake is to look at irregular fabric and see disorder without seeing systems.
Residents may know which path floods, which house contains a home business, which neighbour watches children, which water point serves several lanes, where older people live, which route is safest at night and which families rely on one another during emergencies.
A conventional site plan can erase those relationships with a clean grid.
Reblocking begins from the opposite premise: the existing social fabric is part of the infrastructure. The spatial pattern can change, but the planning process must understand what should be preserved before it decides what should move.
Enumeration is the first act of design
Before drawing a new layout, the community needs to know what exists.
Enumeration can record households, structures, occupancy, household size, vulnerable residents, home businesses, rental arrangements, sanitation, water access, hazards and social facilities. Physical mapping records paths, drains, slopes, service points, structures and boundaries.
The dataset is not merely technical. It can establish a baseline for rights.
If the settlement is reconfigured without a trusted pre-project record, residents can fear that participation will make them easier to evict or that households omitted from the list will disappear from the final plan.
The enumeration process therefore needs transparent rules: who counts, how renters are recorded, how absent residents are handled, how disputes are corrected and who controls the data.
A map can become a promise
Residents may accept major disruption only if they believe the plan protects their return.
The pre-project map can therefore become part of an occupancy guarantee. Each household should be able to see how its current situation translates into the reblocked settlement: same plot, adjusted plot, reconstructed unit, temporary relocation, permanent relocation with consent, or another documented arrangement.
This reduces the fear that “upgrading” is a softer word for clearance.
The new layout should solve specific failures
Reblocking is not a beautification exercise.
The layout should respond to identifiable problems: no fire access, poor drainage, impossible waste collection, unsafe paths, inaccessible water points, no room for toilets, no public lighting, no addressable frontage, or no corridor for future utilities.
Every metre of clearance should therefore have a planning job.
A three-metre lane may exist because emergency and waste vehicles need it. A drainage corridor may follow natural topography. A widened path may connect children safely to school. A small open space may double as a fire break, meeting place and play area.
Fire access often changes the geometry first
Dense informal settlements can carry severe fire risk where structures are combustible, access is narrow and water supply is limited.
A reblocking plan can create access lanes, turning areas, hydrant or water points, separation zones and clearer address systems. The exact dimensions should reflect local emergency equipment rather than importing a road standard designed for another city.
The planning objective is not to push a suburban street section through a dense settlement. It is to create the minimum safe access that works with actual emergency operations.
Drainage is often the hidden master plan
Water reveals whether the layout works.
If paths, roofs and hard surfaces drain into low-lying homes, the settlement becomes hazardous during storms. Informal drains can become blocked by waste or collapse because nobody has space to maintain them.
Reblocking can reserve continuous drainage corridors, protect outfalls, create maintenance access and integrate green-blue-grey solutions where conditions allow.
The World Bank’s 2026 settlement-upgrading work increasingly links neighbourhood planning with sustainable drainage, climate resilience, roads, sanitation, water and public space. That integration is important: the settlement layout and the infrastructure design should be one plan, not separate consultant packages.
Services need corridors before they need pipes
Water, sewer, electricity and telecommunications become difficult to install when no continuous public or shared route exists.
A service lane or easement can be as important as the pipe itself because it creates a legal and physical space for installation, inspection and repair.
This is one reason reblocking can unlock infrastructure that piecemeal upgrading cannot. The project is not only improving homes. It is creating a spatial skeleton that public systems can use.
Plot adjustment must be fair enough to survive
Some households may lose a portion of footprint so that the settlement can gain a lane, drain or public space.
That sacrifice can become a major source of conflict if the rules are opaque.
The planning process should explain how plot adjustments are calculated, whether all households contribute proportionately, whether vulnerable households receive special protection, and how households with different tenure or rental status are treated.
A household should not lose a large share of space simply because it happens to sit where the easiest road alignment passes.
Tenure security changes whether people invest
Residents are less likely to invest in safer structures, drainage or sanitation if they believe they can be removed at any time.
Reblocking can therefore be paired with tenure recognition, occupancy certificates, community tenure, leases, plot records or other lawful forms appropriate to the jurisdiction.
The goal is not necessarily to impose one model of private freehold ownership. UN-Habitat and other international urban programmes increasingly recognise a continuum of land rights. What matters is that residents know the basis on which they may remain, improve and transfer their homes.
Renters are easy to lose in upgrading
Many informal settlements contain complex rental markets.
If compensation or replacement rights are designed only around structure owners, tenants can be displaced even when the project claims that “all residents” benefited.
The enumeration should therefore record renters, subtenants and informal lodging arrangements. Temporary accommodation plans should include them. Post-upgrade rent increases should be monitored where possible.
Physical improvement can create economic displacement even without formal eviction.
Home-based work must be designed back in
A dwelling may also be a shop, workshop, kitchen, childcare space, repair business or rental asset.
A new layout that reduces commercial frontage or separates residents from passing foot traffic can destroy livelihoods.
The mapping process should identify economic uses and protect appropriate locations for them. Some lanes may need wider frontages. Some corner plots may play community-commercial roles. Some households may need loading access.
The World Cities Report 2026 explicitly argues that housing and infrastructure interventions should support mixed use, home-based work and local livelihoods rather than treating settlements as purely residential containers.
Temporary relocation must have a return mechanism
Some reblocking cannot occur while every household remains in place.
A small number of residents may need temporary accommodation while a lane or drainage corridor is created and structures are reconstructed.
The relocation plan should state where people go, for how long, what costs are covered, how belongings are protected, what happens to children’s schooling and livelihoods, and exactly how the household returns.
Temporary relocation without a documented return path can become permanent displacement.
Phasing should keep the settlement functioning
A settlement is lived in every day during construction.
Phasing should preserve access to water, toilets, shops, schools, work and emergency routes. Construction materials need storage. Temporary drainage must work. Demolition areas need security. Children need safe routes around work zones.
The strongest phasing plans create small, complete increments rather than opening the entire settlement at once.
Community savings can be an implementation tool
Many successful upgrading programmes involve organised community savings, not because residents should finance infrastructure that belongs to the public realm, but because savings groups can create governance capacity, document participation, support household improvements and strengthen collective decision-making.
Community finance can also reveal whether replacement-house designs are affordable to residents rather than merely technically attractive.
The state still has responsibilities
Participation should not become a way for government to transfer public obligations to low-income residents.
Major drainage, trunk sewer, roads, public lighting, fire protection and legal recognition often require municipal or national action. Community labour can contribute knowledge and ownership; it should not be used to excuse chronic underinvestment.
The 2026 World Urban Forum agenda and World Bank urban programmes continue to frame informal-settlement upgrading as a systems problem involving institutions, finance, infrastructure, housing and rights—not merely self-help construction.
Reblocking should not become forced regularity
There is a temptation to make every block rectangular and every path straight.
That can consume unnecessary land and require more displacement than the infrastructure problem justifies.
The objective is functional structure, not geometric purity. A curved lane may work. A variable-width path may work. Plot shapes can remain irregular if access, safety and services are resolved.
Informal settlements do not need to imitate suburban subdivisions to become healthier and safer neighbourhoods.
Public space should be small, useful and defendable
Large parks can require major displacement and may be difficult to maintain.
Reblocking can instead create a network of practical spaces: widened intersections, play pockets, market areas, washing points, shade, meeting spaces and fire breaks.
Each space should have a clear user group, maintenance arrangement and relationship to nearby homes. Leftover space is rarely successful public space.
Addressing is a quiet but powerful outcome
A readable internal network can make homes addressable.
That can improve emergency response, deliveries, utility billing, voter registration, financial access and public administration. It can also make the settlement visible to systems that previously treated it as an unmapped gap.
Addressing should be implemented with privacy protections. Visibility to services should not become surveillance or eviction risk.
The new layout needs a maintenance owner
A drain works only while it remains clear. A water point works only while it is repaired. Lighting works only while electricity and fixtures are maintained.
Before construction finishes, every asset should have an owner: municipality, utility, community organisation, cooperative or another defined institution.
The reblocking plan should therefore include an asset handover schedule, not end at practical completion.
Climate risk can change which blocks should stay
Some land cannot be made safe through internal rearrangement alone.
Homes in severe floodways, unstable slopes, erosion zones or other high-risk locations may require relocation. The difficult planning task is to distinguish unavoidable risk reduction from convenient clearance.
Risk evidence should be transparent, technically credible and applied consistently. Where relocation is necessary, households should be offered options that preserve access to livelihoods, schools and social networks as much as possible.
Upgrading can produce gentrification pressure
New roads, services, tenure security and improved public space can increase land value.
That is partly the point: residents should benefit from better living conditions and stronger assets. But rising value can also attract speculation and push renters or poorer households out.
Anti-displacement tools may include occupancy protections, community tenure, restrictions on early resale, support for renters, property-tax relief, incremental tenure conversion or community land mechanisms, depending on local law.
The existing Displacement Risk Map explains how neighbourhood improvement can create affordability pressure after public investment.
Data should return to the community
Participatory mapping often generates valuable datasets.
Residents should not become unpaid data collectors for a system that then locks the information in a consultant database.
Maps, household lists, infrastructure plans and monitoring results should be accessible in useful formats, subject to privacy safeguards. Community organisations should be able to use the information to hold agencies accountable and manage future changes.
A worked example: a drainage lane through forty homes
Imagine a settlement of 1,200 households on sloping ground. During heavy rain, water runs through several narrow footpaths and floods the lowest homes. Engineers identify a continuous drainage alignment that requires a four-metre service corridor.
A demolition-led approach clears every structure in the corridor and relocates forty households elsewhere.
A reblocking approach first maps structures and household relationships. It discovers that twenty-two affected structures can shift within existing plots, ten can be reconstructed on small nearby spaces created through collective plot adjustment, six need temporary relocation during works, and only two sit in locations where permanent local replacement is impossible.
The drainage corridor becomes a lit pedestrian route with buried water and electrical services. Small widened areas become play and gathering spaces. Households receive documented return arrangements. The project still changes the settlement substantially, but the intervention is designed around continuity rather than removal.
A practical reblocking audit
- Enumeration: Is every household, renter, structure and home-based activity recorded?
- Data rights: Who owns the household data and how can errors be corrected?
- Risk: Which hazards require spatial change and which can be mitigated in place?
- Access: What minimum routes are needed for emergency, waste and maintenance vehicles?
- Drainage: Does the layout follow real topography and provide maintainable corridors?
- Utilities: Is there continuous space for water, sewer, electricity and communications?
- Plot adjustment: How are land losses and gains distributed fairly?
- Tenure: What form of occupancy security will residents receive after upgrading?
- Renters: Are tenants protected during and after the project?
- Livelihoods: Are shops, workshops and home businesses designed back into the layout?
- Temporary relocation: Is there a documented return route, budget and timeline?
- Permanent relocation: Is it limited to cases where in-place safety is genuinely impossible?
- Public space: Are new spaces useful, accessible and maintainable?
- Phasing: Can the settlement keep functioning during construction?
- Community governance: Who represents residents and how are decisions challenged?
- Maintenance: Who owns each new asset after completion?
- Affordability: Could upgrading costs or rising land values displace poorer households?
- Monitoring: Are outcomes tracked after residents return?
Reblocking is planning at human scale
The planning challenge is not to make an informal settlement look formal from the air.
It is to make daily life safer and more serviceable while preserving the community’s ability to remain.
That requires an unusual combination of precision and humility. Precision about drains, paths, plots, infrastructure and risk. Humility about the fact that residents already understand the settlement in ways an outside planner does not.
Reblocking works best when the community is not consulted after the plan is drawn but participates in making the plan itself.
The measure of success is not how much irregularity disappears. It is whether the settlement gains infrastructure, safety and dignity without losing the people and relationships that made it a neighbourhood in the first place.
Sources and further reading
- UN-Habitat — World Cities Report 2026, including participatory reblocking and settlement upgrading
- World Bank Group at World Urban Forum 13 — 2026 urban upgrading and informal-settlement programme priorities
- UN-Habitat — Participatory Slum Upgrading Programme
- World Bank — 2026 resilient settlement upgrading programme documentation
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