The Pune Slum Census: creating a socio-economic and spatial information base on a GIS for integrated and inclusive city development

Abstract Urban planning systems rarely include the poor. Cities are growing and so is the urban population. Pune is a large city in Western Maharashtra. According to the National Census, 2001, the population of the Pune urban agglomeration is 3.5 million and it is (in some estimates) to reach nearly 6 million by 2021. 1 Out of this, the city of Pune has a 2.5 million people living in it. Forty percent and above of the population live in slums. One of the biggest shortfalls of Pune's urban planning is that it still fails to include the poor in mainstream policies. The reason is that the poor are hardly known about, in fact, even government authorities are unaware about how many poor people there are in Pune. This attitude, and the fact that Shelter Associates (SA) work is closely connected with the poor regarding basic services and housing, started the development of a slum database by SA. Finally, the Pune Municipal Corporation asked us to make a complete census of the slum dwellers in the year 2000. That gave rise to a detailed survey of Pune's slum dwellers, to become, amongst other things, the first ever spatial and socio-economic census processed and analysed on a geographical information system (GIS). The Pune Slum Census has built upon this experience and expanded the communities’ information base, and has created a methodology which the city can use to work on detailed urban planning using a GIS and with the slum database as the base. This article focuses on the Pune Slum Census in progress.