A significant number of India's urban population living in slums face large-scale challenges to access adequate housing and essential services. However, the solutions implemented by government agencies have been inadequate as they fail to understand the diversity of challenges and preferences of slum residents. While the traditional prescriptive approaches to study slum communities do not capture the uncertainties that riddle slums, we explore this domain of inquiry alternatively through theories of Community Operational Research (COR) and Community Based Operations Research (CBOR) that develop an understanding of housing problems from slum resident perspectives. In this paper, we study slum communities’ housing priorities by learning how they structure their concerns and identify specific solutions that could enable access to improved housing facilities. This is one of the first studies to apply Strategic Options Development & Analysis (SODA) and Value Focused Thinking (VFT) to engage with slum residents and generate in-depth insights into the lives of slum communities. Our findings from a slum in the Indian state of Odisha highlight the diverse challenges and needs of the community with regard to housing and basic infrastructure facilities from the slum-dwellers’ perspective, a voice often missing in slum policymaking. We believe that our findings could inform policymakers about most valued preferences of slum residents among many possible slum upgrading interventions. The study contributes to the extension of Operations Research tools and methodologies for meaningful engagement of vulnerable communities to develop interventions for improving social welfare.

大量生活在贫民窟的印度城市人口面临着获得充足住房和基本服务的大规模挑战。然而，政府机构实施的解决方案并不充分，因为他们未能了解贫民窟居民面临的挑战和偏好的多样性。虽然研究贫民窟社区的传统规范方法没有捕捉到贫民窟的不确定性，但我们通过社区运筹学 (COR) 和基于社区的运筹学 (CBOR) 的理论探索了这一研究领域，这些理论从以下方面发展了对住房问题的理解贫民窟居民的观点。在本文中，我们通过了解贫民窟社区如何构建他们的关注点并确定可以改善住房设施的具体解决方案来研究贫民窟社区的住房优先事项。这是首批应用战略选择发展与分析 (SODA) 和价值聚焦思维 (VFT) 与贫民窟居民互动并深入了解贫民窟社区生活的研究之一。我们对印度奥里萨邦贫民窟的调查结果突出了从贫民窟居民的角度来看，社区在住房和基本基础设施方面面临的各种挑战和需求，而贫民窟决策中经常缺少这种声音。我们相信，我们的研究结果可以让决策者了解在许多可能的贫民窟改造干预措施中贫民窟居民的最重要的偏好。