Relieving Poverty and Providing Welfare for Informal Settlements with Empowerment Approach

long as the government in the concept of urban management plays the role of “direct provider” instead of “facilitator” to improve the life’s welfare level and provide a situation for poor societies and particularly informal settlements, its sole result is the increase in the number of open mouths that their dependence on government enlarges per day. Therefore the investigation of different grounds and the way of implementation of “empowerment” approach in local association are very important. In present research, documentary and library methods, as well as square methods (quantitative and qualitative) including questionnaire and focus group meetings are used to gather necessary information. The framework and conceptual model of this research is a combination of informal settlement model, the welfare measurement indexes and the theoretical framework of empowerment model. From the time point of view this research had been done during the years of 1386, 1387, and 1388. A series of questions has been asked in two different periods from fixed samples (family guardians) to compare the temporal changes between winter 1386 and spring 1388. Mian Abad (nearly 40000 inhabitants and 8ooo family guardians) has been chosen considering the population of the sample society, first the pilot sample has been chosen according to the statistic quality of willingness and unwillingness to cooperate with urban management. Considering the proportion of 67 percent willingness to 33 percent unwillingness (20 from 30 and 10 from 30), with the confidence level above 95 percent (0.954) and t equals 2, with the use of sample estimate method in binomial distributions, the number of the family guardians in the present research has got 396, that finally has considered 400. The findings have shown that welfare priorities and the necessities of families living in informal settlements (suburban areas) are to some extent different from those living in common settlements and poor urban areas, though they enjoy those in similar aspects. On the other hand those inhabitants themselves have a high social asset; even if their confidence in urban management institute is low. The research results have shown that the only solution to boost welfare and theenvironment for living in informal settlements to move in the direction of empowerment approach; besides, in this direction the grant of ownership right, establishment of stable employment, and the improvement of public services and infrastructure facilities are necessary elements to improve the social asset and the empowerment of inhabitants.