ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the politics of informal settlements by considering how knowledge is produced, used, shared and contested. Open flows of knowledge in general, and the inclusion of community-based knowledge and the knowledge generated by social movements in particular, have been highlighted as important pre-requisites for participatory public interventions in housing for the poor. Jacobs argues that in struggles over scientific legitimacy, communities often form strategic knowledge alliances with experts or civil society organisations (CSOs), such as legal advisors during court cases. Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and human rights organisations sympathetic to slum dwellers disputed the scientific basis for the eviction, by referring to statistics from the central pollution control board to document how the informal settlement dwellers contributed only minimally to the river's pollution. The movement started in Mumbai, where the NGO society for the promotion of area resource centres (SPARC) was established in 1984 as a network of social work professionals working on urban poverty issues.
