Today I Learnt (TIL): What long-run evidence on settlement upgrading can teach CoRE Stack
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Amit Kumar
Mar 17, 2026, 3:06:18 PMMar 17
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Hello everyone,
Source: https://www.nber.org/papers/w34560
Today I learnt about an NBER working paper, "Impacts of Slum Upgrading: Evidence from a Site and Services Program in Ethiopia." The study evaluates a relocation program in Addis Ababa that moved slum residents to sites with land titles and improved basic services. About 13 years later, households had better housing quality, stronger utility access, more formal borrowing, higher subjective well-being, and lower crime exposure. At the same time, the gains did not clearly translate into higher wealth, labor income, or consumption.
That result matters for CoRE Stack. It suggests that upgrading land, housing, and infrastructure should not be tracked only as physical delivery. We also need place-based ways to observe whether dignity, safety, access, and livelihoods improve together over time. Even though this study is urban, the evaluation logic is highly relevant to India, where villages, hamlets, and peri-urban settlements often experience uneven service access without enough spatially grounded evidence.
A strong CoRE Stack entry point on `origin/main` is `get_village_data()` in `dpr/gen_mws_report.py`, which pulls village-linked data and checks for `nrega_assets_village` and `social_economic_indicator` sheets:
https://github.com/core-stack-org/core-stack-backend/blob/main/dpr/gen_mws_report.py#L2317-L2385
This is the kind of workflow we can build on to ask a better public-good question: when infrastructure changes, do people’s lived conditions change too?
Source: https://www.nber.org/papers/w34560
Today I learnt about an NBER working paper, "Impacts of Slum Upgrading: Evidence from a Site and Services Program in Ethiopia." The study evaluates a relocation program in Addis Ababa that moved slum residents to sites with land titles and improved basic services. About 13 years later, households had better housing quality, stronger utility access, more formal borrowing, higher subjective well-being, and lower crime exposure. At the same time, the gains did not clearly translate into higher wealth, labor income, or consumption.
That result matters for CoRE Stack. It suggests that upgrading land, housing, and infrastructure should not be tracked only as physical delivery. We also need place-based ways to observe whether dignity, safety, access, and livelihoods improve together over time. Even though this study is urban, the evaluation logic is highly relevant to India, where villages, hamlets, and peri-urban settlements often experience uneven service access without enough spatially grounded evidence.
A strong CoRE Stack entry point on `origin/main` is `get_village_data()` in `dpr/gen_mws_report.py`, which pulls village-linked data and checks for `nrega_assets_village` and `social_economic_indicator` sheets:
https://github.com/core-stack-org/core-stack-backend/blob/main/dpr/gen_mws_report.py#L2317-L2385
This is the kind of workflow we can build on to ask a better public-good question: when infrastructure changes, do people’s lived conditions change too?
If this sparks an idea, contribute to CoRE Stack and help build open geospatial tools that connect infrastructure, settlement realities, and human well-being.
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- Amit
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