3. Case Study: Kalaburagi

Case studies are in-depth investigations of an event or a community. Case studies explore complicated issues in their natural environment. They also help in experimenting with new policy ideas and government schemes. The output helps us understand the loopholes or lacunas and assists in refining the policy and fine-tuning the existing schemes. They offer insight into a phenomenon or a process that cannot be attained by any other approach. Hence, to understand the characteristics of slums, problems of slum dwellers, issues of planners, we need to study at least the slums of one city in detail. This will also elucidate the success and failures of the efforts taken by the central, state, and local governments in uplifting the slum dwellers. This, in turn, will help us plan sustainable cities. With this background, it was decided to study the slums of a non-metropolitan city. Under the HUDCO (Housing and Urban Development Corporation) project, the city of Kalaburagi had been chosen as a case study. Mapping of slums experimented with new combinatory methods like slum ontology and spatial decision support systems combined with a participatory GIS. This chapter creates a base for building slum ontology, participatory slum mapping, and spatial decision support system (SDSS) for slums in the present work. The field photographs give a visual tour of the slums of Kalaburagi. The detailed study on slums helps in understanding the role of multi-stakeholders in the sustainable management of slums.