The Face of Urban Poverty: Explaining the Prevalence of Slums in Developing Countries

Abstract

One of the most visible and enduring manifestations of urban poverty in developing countries is the formation and proliferation of slums. While attention has focused on the rapid pace of urbanization as the sole or major factor explaining the proliferation of slums and squatter settlements in developing countries, there are other factors whose impacts are not known with much degree of certainty. It is also not clear how the effects of these factors vary across regions of the developing world. This paper accounts for differences in the prevalence of slums among developing countries using data drawn from the recent global assessment of slums undertaken by the United Nations Human Settlements Programme. The empirical analysis identifies substantial inter-country variations in the incidence of slums both within and across the regions of Africa, Asia as well as, Latin America and the Caribbean. Further analysis indicates that higher GDP…/

Do the most vulnerable people live in the worst slums? A spatial analysis of Accra, Ghana

“…This definition of slum provides a starting point for identifying slums, and the focus on the physical characteristics of slums, namely poor housing and inadequate infrastructure (“unsafe housing” as UN-Habitat calls it), has been emphasized in recent literature concerning slums (Neekhra 2008, Beall and Fox 2009, Gulyani and Bassett 2010, Arimah 2011). There are, however, two important caveats: (1) the definition permits considerable variability in how unsafe a household may be, as UN-Habitat (2006) itself acknowledges; and (2) it is a household-based definition, not a place-based measure.…”

Urban Violence Patterns Across African States

“…The continent has a low “urban” population at 35%, compared to other world regions, but contrary to other sites of rapid demographic change (for example, South Asia), urbanization in Africa has occurred without concurrent development or an increase in wealth on the national or per capita level (Ravallion, Chen, and Sangraula ). Urban Africans are now less well off than their rural counterparts (Mabogunje ; Arimah ), yet African urbanization will be the most significant rural to urban shift in the contemporary world.…”

Defining Slums Using Multidimensional and Relational Properties: A Dynamic Framework for Intervention

“…This perception has in the past steered most approaches to the management of slums towards their elimination or containment (Hamdi, 2010). Prevailing attitudes since the 1950s, and still common today, include policies of benign neglect by government bodies, who believed slums would disappear with steady economic growth (Arimah, 2010;Njoh, 2003); of forced evictions and demolitions of entire settlements during the 1970s and 1980s which destroyed communities in multiple ways (UN-Habitat, 2003;Arimah, 2010); and the resettling or re-housing of entire slum populations into standardised, planned and over dense inner city estates, or structures outside the city (Abubakar, 2013;Davis, 2006). These have often been shown to rapidly degenerate into slums or to become gentrified, with the consequent expulsion of the population they were created for (see Hamdi, 2010;Cronin, 2013).…”

“…Some of these strategies include initiatives on tenure, poverty alleviation, sanitation and education (Arimah, 2010;Jaitman & Brakarz, 2013). However, a target 9% drop in the proportion of slum to urban populations between 2000 to 2014, favoured by slum upgrades and the Participatory Slum Upgrading Program of the UNHabitat, remains dwarfed by the continued rise in absolute slum populations (UN-Habitat, 2011a, 2011b, 2013a, 2013b.…”