Slums, Space, and State of Health—A Link between Settlement Morphology and Health Data

Abstract

Approximately 1 billion slum dwellers worldwide are exposed to increased health risks due to their spatial environment. Recent studies have therefore called for the spatial environment to be introduced as a separate dimension in medical studies. Hence, this study investigates how and on which spatial scale relationships between the settlement morphology and the health status of the inhabitants can be identified. To this end, we summarize the current literature on the identification of slums from a geographical perspective and review the current literature on slums and health of the last five years (376 studies) focusing on the considered scales in the studies. We show that the majority of medical studies are restricted to certain geographical regions. It is desirable that the number of studies be adapted to the number of the respective population. On the basis of these studies, we develop a framework to investigate the relationship between space and health. Finally, we apply our methodology to investigate the relationship between the prevalence of slums and different health metrics using data of the global burden of diseases for different prefectures in Brazil on a subnational level.

Need for an Integrated Deprived Area “Slum” Mapping System (IDEAMAPS) in Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs)

“…Deprived areas are defined by social, environmental, and ecological risks to health and well-being such as lack of legal access to land, social amenities such as access to schools and health centers, or basic infrastructure such as roads and sewer lines (Table 1). Living in a deprived area can increase the incidence of disease via exposure to animal vectors and crowding of buildings, injuries such as fire, vulnerability to extreme weather events, higher incidence of crime, and physical and social barriers to services (Ezeh et al 2017;Friesen et al 2020). The "slum household" definition reflects household-level poverty, which poses unique risks such as crowding within the home and economic barriers to services.…”

COVID-19 and Slums: A Pandemic Highlights Gaps in Knowledge About Urban Poverty

“…Recent, largescale reviews showed that our knowledge of the health of slum inhabitants is very limited [ 16 , 19 ]. What we know is mostly limited to individual regions, such as Nairobi and Kenya [ 20 ]. These findings are confirmed when researching current measures to determine the extent to which countries are taking measures to protect their vulnerable populations.…”

“…Detailed comparative research on slum dwellers’ state of health. It is necessary to investigate what commonalities and differences in the health status of slum dwellers exist [ 20 ]. This refers both to the differences within a city between groups living in formal and informal settlements [ 24 ], which was done for HIV in South Africa [ 25 ], and to the differences across slums in different global regions.…”

Investigation of Clustering in Turing Patterns to Describe the Spatial Relations of Slums

“…The size of most slums is between 10 −3 km 2 and 10 −1 km 2 and thus shows no dependence on the total number of morphological slums within the city. This information can be used as typical scale in other scientific domains such as infrastructural planning [8] or epidemiological analyses [9,10].…”