Urban Slum Upgrading: A Model for Expeditious Estimation of the Cost of Interventions

More than a billion people around theworld live in slums in undignified and precarious living conditions. These are places of high poverty characterized by overcrowding, poor housing facilities and inadequate access to basic services such as clean water, electricity and sanitation. Slums today testify to the two main challenges to human settlement development in this millennium: rapid urbanization and the urbanization of poverty. Slums, in fact, are the increasingly common solution of providing housing for low income-to people. Therefore, the phenomenon of slums is an important contemporary challenge that requires well-structured intervention programs aimed at poverty reduction and urban transformation. In light of the above and in line with the goals mentioned in both the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the New Urban Agenda (NUA), urban slum redevelopment interventions would make it possible to improve the quality of existing settlements, and reverse their decline, by transforming and making the spaces better, safer and more sustainable places where everyone can live and work. In this sense, the purpose of the work is to define possible intervention scenarios and characterize a model for the expeditious estimation of related construction costs. The model, which is based on a synthetic-comparative procedure, makes it possible to provide an economic reference that is useful in determining the amount of resources to be allocated for the urban upgrading of slums, a symbol of profound social inequality.