The Implications of Informal Settlement Upgrading Programs for Access to Water, Sanitation, and Public Health

Most cities in low- and middle-income countries have substantial proportions of their population living in informal settlements—sometimes up to 60% or more. These also house much of the city’s low-income workforce; many informal settlements also concentrate informal economic activities. These settlements usually lack good provision for water, sanitation, and other essential services. The conventional government responses were to bulldoze them or ignore them. But from the 1960s, another approach became common—upgrading settlements to provide missing infrastructure (e.g., water pipes, sewers, drains). In the last 20 years, community-driven upgrading has become increasingly common. Upgrading initiatives are very diverse. At their best, they produce high-quality and healthy living conditions and services that would be expected to greatly reduce illness, injury or disablement, and premature death. But at their worst, upgrading schemes provide a limited range of improvements do nothing to reduce the inhabitants’ exclusion from public services. There is surprisingly little research on upgrading’s impact on health. One reason is the very large number of health determinants at play. Another is the lack of data on informal settlement populations. Much of the innovation in upgrading is in partnerships between local governments and organizations formed by informal settlement residents, including slum/shack dweller federations that are active in over 30 nations. Community-driven processes can deal with issues that are more difficult for professionals to resolve—including mapping and enumerations. Meanwhile, local government can provide the connections to all-weather roads, water mains, sewers, and storm drains into which communities can connect.

Determination of the maximum traction force of the screw working body when piercing the soil

Laying of gas distribution pipelines, water mains, sewerage systems, power cables and communication cables is performed both by laying it in an open trench and by trenchless methods.

Experimental determination of the critical depth of cutting of blocked soil cutting by cutters and the length of the ploughshare of chain excavators

The development of civil and industrial construction and the growing trend of construction of underground communications have led to an increase in the volume of work on the laying of gas and oil pipelines, water mains, sewerage systems, power cables and communication cables. Much of the excavation work in the construction of these communications is performed by trench excavators.

Monitoring the health status of water mains using a scorecard modelling approach

There has been considerable research into prediction of water mains failure, however, those models are very complex and fail to convey the message of the health status of an asset to the relevant stakeholders. The study developed a ‘pipe health scorecard’ based on historical failure data which could be used for operation, maintenance, refurbishment, or replacement decisions by a water utility. This scorecard model was developed by using 160,413 pipe-condition datasets from the South Australian Water Corporation over 10 years. Measures such as the Kolmogorov–Smirnov (KS) statistic, Area Under the ROC Curve (AUC), and Population Stability Index (PSI) showed the model is strong enough to predict the health status of water mains. The study found that the factors influencing water mains failure to be in the order of importance: length, material, age, location (road vs verge), diameter, and operating parameters. The development of a simple but reliable model for the assessment of the health status of water mains will have major benefits to the water utility with the ability to identify and potentially replace water pipes prior to failure. Additional benefits of flexible scheduling of the maintenance and replacement programs would contribute to cost savings.

Sinkhole Stability in Elliptical Cavity under Collapse and Blowout Conditions

Road subsidence and sinkhole failures due to shallow cavities formed by defective water main have increased in recent decades and become one of the important research topics in geotechnical engineering. The present paper numerically studies the stability and its associated failure mechanism of ellipse-shaped cavity above defective water mains using the finite element limit analysis technique. For a wide range of geometrical parameters, the pressure ratio method is used to formulate the stability solutions in both blowout and collapse scenarios. Even though there is no published solution for elliptical cavities under blowout failure conditions, the obtained numerical results are compared with available circular solutions. Several conclusions are drawn based on the failure mechanism study of the various ellipse shape transformations in this study, whilst design charts and equations proposed for practical uses.

CT Scans of Asbestos Cement Pipes as a Reference for Condition Assessment of Water Mains

The water distribution network of The Netherlands contains around 30,000 km of asbestos cement (AC) pipes, which constitutes around 25% of the total network. As a pipe material, AC has a relatively poor performance, and therefore is a high priority for renewal. To help decide an effective order of replacement, the water utilities need condition assessment techniques that help them determine which pipes have the highest risk of failure. In the presented work, X-ray computed tomography (CT) was used to measure the degradation of AC pipes taken out of the field. These scans provide a description of the pipe degradation with unmatched detail. The results are compared with strength tests performed on the same pipes, revealing that detailed knowledge of the complete pipe degradation is more important than previously assumed. Moreover, comparison of the CT results to those of a commercial, non-destructive inspection technique was used as a new avenue for validation of this technique, demonstrating its future usefulness for attaining the detailed measurement of pipe degradation required by water utilities.

Investment subsidies as a source of revenues to local budgets

Introduction. Given the limited own resources of local self-government, it is important to ensure the effective functioning of the mechanism for providing investment subventions from the state budget. Such investment subventions include subventions for the formation of infrastructure in the united territorial communities and subventions for the implementation of measures of socio-economic development of separate territories. The purpose of the paper is the analysis of the mechanism of providing and using investment subventions to local budgets in order to identify disadvantages and eliminate them. Results. Providing an “infrastructure” subvention to local budgets has strengthened the capacity of united territorial communities and to some extent improved the quality of services provided to the population. During 2016–2019, UAH 6.5 billion was allocated from the State Budget of Ukraine to local budgets for infrastructure development and 9475 projects were implemented. With the help of these subventions, schools, kindergartens, outpatient clinics, cultural and sports institutions, water mains and roads were built and repaired, and specialized transport was purchased. However, in recent years, the role of this subvention has decreased significantly due to the fact that the number of UTCs that received an infrastructure subvention during 2016–2021 has increased significantly, and its volume has hardly changed. The amount of subventions from the state budget to local budgets for the implementation of measures for socio-economic development of certain territories has also decreased, which negatively affects the capacity of local governments in the field of investment projects. Conclusion. The volume of investment subventions remains insufficient, and their distribution is partly in a “manual mode”, which creates a favorable environment for political corruption and lobbying.