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In Sao Paulo, squatting movements provide an alternative route to housing for members. At the same time, they highlight the city’s housing deficit and high rates of property vacancy. This article a...

This paper explored the reading perceptions, needs, and practices of parents from an urban poor community in Manila, Philippines. 274 parents of K-1 pupils were surveyed to determine their reading ...

This paper examines how high levels of eviction and displacement of the urban poor have arisen due to the financialization of land in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Focusing on the Meradia neighborhood of Dhak...

In Jakarta’s poor kampungs, out-of-home purchase of ready-to-eat products from street vendors, the lack of home cooking and public eating produce a foodscape where the boundaries between the home a...

This study assesses the spatial dimensions of social exclusion in the traditional core areas of Ilorin with specific emphases on the urban poor in Ilorin. For methodology, data collection instrumen...

Much of the research on food security in Ethiopia focuses on the rural poor, paying very little attention to the urban poor. The urban poor, marginalized from employment opportunities and other ser...

This article explores how the asset-based community development approach has improved the living conditions of the urban slum communities and have also addressed the house level poverty through dir...

Global estimates show that millions of urban poor in many Global South cities embrace informal livelihoods to earn a living. Street vending is one of such informal employment. The literature has ex...

Urbanization in most African countries has overstretched the available sanitation services, leading to unsafe disposal of faecal sludge especially among the urban poor. Recycling of faecal sludge i...

Due to a lack of available job opportunities in the formal sector and financial resources, in most parts of the developing world the urban poor rely on access to urban public space for earning thei...

In Kenya, informal urban water markets serve the poor in areas where public utilities have failed to deliver. They often charge high prices, sell low-quality water and perform water transactions in...

The aim of this research is to examine the extent to which mobile money has improved the financial inclusion of Nairobi’s urban poor. Nairobi is Kenya’s largest and most developed city, but it is a...

As cases of COVID-19 were rising in India and the country’s political leadership instituted a nationwide lockdown, one of the authors of this article received a timely invitation from a friend – a ...

Women living in low-income areas and informal settlements in the cities regularly have to undergo hardships to access water from overstressed shared water sources in the absence of individual utili...

Scholars have demonstrated that citizenship is tied to water provision in megacities of the Global South where water crises are extensive and the urban poor often do not have access to public water...

This paper addresses the persistent challenges in housing the urban poor in Bangladesh. In particular, it explores the empirical evidence on informal networks of the urban poor as they relate to se...

This article focuses on conditions of prolonged uncertainty for people residing in a squatter settlement, a sukumbasi basti, in Kathmandu and the role assigned to the state in this. Inspired by theoretical debates on urban governmentality and based on longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork, the article shows how the threat of eviction has resulted in a permanent state of uncertainty, but also a pragmatic acceptance of the state of affairs which, over the years, has contributed to fostering a strong sense of belonging to the area.

Drawing on an ethnographic fieldwork in an urban poor area in Delhi, this paper examines how Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHAs) experience and critique sexual violence and harassment in the city. Inherent in these women’s critiques is blaming of urban poor men who belong to their social class, resonating with middle-class discourses emerging in urban India. Simultaneously, in their accounts of sexual violence in domestic spaces, women invoked notions of romantic love and familial success. I argue that this discursive tension around urban poor men is linked to women’s attempts to assert and claim higher social status and respectability in the context of highly divided and gendered city. ASHAs made claims and asserted themselves in the multiple arenas of urban life, as their work on women’s health required cultivation of knowledge and engagement with public spaces, intimate spheres, and cultivation of familial roles. Through a reading of de Certeau’s concept of tactics as limited trajectories of claims to urban environments developed among the powerless, I show how access to urban spaces can be revisited as a negotiation and a claim, rather than being shaped only by existing social status. And, I show how responding with readiness to multiple conditions of urban poverty involves negotiation of those claims pertaining both public and private spaces and spheres.

Across most urban centres, adequate supply of water becomes essential for the urban poor. Attempts at ensuring water availability has been formulated using standard water models. This study develop...

This study is a case study on community center planning in Gondrapa Village of Mymensingh City, Bangladesh, where the urban poor are densely populated. The goals of the plan are to build the capaci...

This article investigates the association between financial autonomy and three other measures of autonomy – sexual autonomy, perceived reproductive autonomy and actual reproductive autonomy...

Recent clearing of squatter housing along rivers in Jakarta demonstrates a government focused on eliminating the uncertainty and risk of flooding, characterised by Zeiderman, Austin [(2015). Spaces...

This article analyzes ways in which urban informal settlements most in need of Community Driven Development (CDD) programs might be overlooked in favor of better functioning poor communities. In a study of two informal settlements in Rajshahi, Bangladesh, one site benefitted from the support of a community based urban poverty reduction intervention from an international donor. The other, poorer, and with greater social challenges, would not qualify. The article highlights the problems the poorest of the urban poor face in developing sufficient community capacity to attract the dominant CDD paradigm of poverty alleviation.

The purpose of this article is to explore consumption-related decisions of urban poor families. Using a combination of in-depth interviews and visual narrative exercise, stories of six urban poor f...

The literature on urban development generally posits that informal settlements offer low cost housing to the urban poor in developing countries. Using data from four informal settlements in Kumasi, Ghana, this paper analyses the costs and quality of water and sanitation infrastructure delivery in relation to the socio-economic conditions of residents. It finds a paradox where residents of deprived informal settlements pay higher fees for the use of low-quality privately-owned outdoor commercial water and sanitation facilities. The study therefore calls for a re-examination of urban upgrading programmes to focus on approaches that consider the financial implications of projects on beneficiaries.

While academics have addressed the interaction between mobilisation and citizenship in a myriad of ways, none of them have used citizenship to explain the sustainability of collective actio...

Thriving cities are characterized by vigorous growth and associated with concepts and the existence of flourishing, healthy communities. However, such concepts are not immediately connected with th...

In the late 1970s, a photo-documentation project titled ‘People of Calcutta’ aimed at bringing about positive social change through imaging the everyday lives of ordinary Calcuttans. These photogra...

The majority of the population living in the informal settlements of Windhoek, Namibia, have limited access to public municipal services. This paper integrates results from a sample of 97 randomly ...

This article explores the way Delhi was being converted into a “world-class” city in order to host the Commonwealth Games in 2010. The negative consequences of the “beautification” project were borne by the urban poor living in informal settlements in the centre of Delhi. The Cybermohalla project created by Sarai (at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi) in collaboration with the non-governmental organization (NGO) Ankur, set up media labs in many of these settlements. These labs became a platform for young practitioners to transmit the challenges of living in Delhi and building their own public sphere. The blogs and details of life in these settlements were put on the Cybermohalla website. Some of these works were included in the 2007 anthology, Bahurupiya Shaha, published in translation in 2010 as Trickster City: Stories from the Belly of the Metropolis translated by Shveta Sarda, who worked closely with these authors since the inception of the Project. The blogs published as ...

In many low- and middle-income countries, conventional welfare state institutions provide social protection only for the formally employed. In contrast, the rural and urban poor are often protected...

There has been widespread recognition in the Global South of the role of participatory governance approaches to urban development in responding to citizens’ immediate concerns. However, critiques n...

The demand for the collective involvement of residents in managing and maintaining their urban residential areas is increasing all over the world, particularly in the developing countries. Such col...

The need for early prevention approaches to improve young people's sexual and reproductive health is gaining attention, yet little is known about the sexual experiences of early adolescents aged 10-14 years. Drawing on cross-sectional survey data collected from 365 early adolescents in a Nairobi slum, we used latent class analysis to identify subgroups based on self-reported awareness about sex and involvement in romantic and sexual activities. Multivariate regression models were fitted to examine the characteristics of each subgroup. Results revealed three subgroups: Involved (12%, high probability of being aware of sex and to have engaged in romantic/sexual activities); Observant (48%, high awareness but little own experience); and Naïve (40%, little awareness or personal experience). Being in the Involved group was associated with older age, having commenced puberty/orphanhood, and living in the least poor households. Findings suggest that while most early adolescents in this setting have not initiated romantic and sexual activities, there are distinct subgroups of who would not be captured by looking only at the prevalence of sexual intercourse. Understanding the characteristics and needs of specific subgroups may help to strengthen efforts to improve young people's sexual and reproductive health in urban poor environments.

In this dense exploration of lower class life and culture at the end of the tsarist empire, Ilya Gerasimov investigates ‘plebeian society’, a realm of ordinary, impoverished people in urban setting...

In a perspective shifting approach, Payne showed that tenure security exists on a continuum from weak to strong tenure rights, rather than as de facto versus de jure categories. This article examin...

My article draws on cultural production from South Africa, Brazil and India to test theorisations that read subjects and objects as ontologically comparable. Using the oceanic circulation of human waste products to link the above locales, I show how the use of junk by the urban poor shows evidence of a relationship with discarded objects that contests their national and transnational marginalisation. Concomitantly, I explore the ways in which aesthetic strategies by Ivan Vladislavic, Mark Lewis and Tanya Zack, Vik Muniz, and Katherine Boo affirm the disruptive potential of objects while also suggesting the ways in which struggles against poverty continue to centre on humanist understandings of the subject.

Set in the broader context of increasing urban precarity and displacement of the urban poor and working classes, this paper examines the social and collective significance of housing precarity and ...

The project of privatisation of water has been floated in Bangalore since 1999, and though it has been kept in abeyance by social activists and non-government organisations working with the urban poor, water is being commoditised. In this article, I examine the impact of this process on the struggles of poor women to access water for themselves and their dependants, in a slum rehabilitation area in Bangalore. Women are resisting the monetisation of water, which they consider to be a human right. While the advantages of the technologies that accompany this process are emphasised by the authorities – piped water is seen as saving time and increasing mobility, as well as delivering a higher-quality resource – women retort that the requirement to pay for water outweighs any benefits, and other material realities of life still bind them to their homes.

This deeply researched, original, and well-written book exposes the plight of the urban poor in colonial Indochina. Cherry reveals the myriad odd-jobs and precarious occupations that poor people pr...

This timely publication explores research at the forefront of empirical approaches, linking knowledge construction with activism and with social and political transformation. The editors are schola...

Among the many important events of the tumultuous year of 1968 were three that addressed the issues of racial discrimination in housing and the need for adequate housing for the urban poor, especia...

In the late 2000s, South Korean (hereafter Korean) independent films underwent intensified commercialization. This change was first heralded by the release of the independent film Old Partner (Dir....

The numbers of urban poor are increasing in the cities of Bangladesh. Formal urban planning approaches derived from experience in the global North have largely failed to tackle the consequent poverty challenges in the global South. This study provides new policy directions for pro-poor planning in Bangladesh through a case study of Khulna city. The study analyses secondary data on urban poverty in the city and interviews representatives of the urban poor, politicians, city administrators, academics, and planning professionals to gain a deeper and more nuanced understanding about the pro-poorness of current planning policies. The Khulna case reveals a continued poverty crisis in Bangladeshi cities, manifested by the limited access to income opportunities for the poor, lack of access to decent housing and urban services for the poor and spatial exclusion of the poverty-stricken areas in cities. Existing planning policies in the city fail to tackle poverty issues. Thus, to be pro-poor, planning policies should limit the over-emphasis on economic growth, and explicitly focus upon addressing the needs of the poor rather\ud than over-concentrating on citywide demands. At the same time, planning practice should emphasize the needs of the poor and recognize the contribution of the informal economic and housing sectors.

The book under review is a collection of thirteen articles that analyze the institutional and political economic dimensions of India's neoliberal reforms undertaken in 1991. Several articles focus on the theme of urbanization and the consequences of neoliberalism for the urban poor. Overall, the volume is an excellent addition to the critical literature on neoliberalism in India and will be of service to both researchers and teachers of development and political economy.

Uncontrolled urbanization in developing countries has led to widespread urban poverty and increased susceptibility to environmental exposures owing to the hazardous occupational activities of the urban poor. Street vending and waste picking are the dominant works undertaken by the urban poor, and besides the physical hazards, it also exposes them to several pathogens and high levels of air pollutants present in the outdoor environment. The situation has severe consequences for the health of the workers. Eliminating these occupational activities from the urban landscape of developing countries should therefore receive urgent attention from the global health community and governments. In this article, we provide evidence to support this policy recommendation by documenting exposure experiences of the workers, the associated adverse health effects, whilst also outlining measures for addressing the problem sustainably. We conclude that with the adoption of the sustainable development goals (SDG), governments now have a commitment to address poverty and the associated occupational health hazards experienced by the poor through their choices to help achieve the health-related SDG target (3.9) of substantially reducing the number of deaths and illnesses from hazardous chemicals and air, water, and soil pollution and contamination by 2030.

In post-reform India, urban spaces have been redefined and reoriented towards the consumer public and are becoming increasingly segregated along class lines. While most of the scholarly attention has focused on the marginalization and segregation generated by anti-poor development in cities like Delhi, which aim to be ‘world-class’, less attention has been paid to the ways in which the poor experience the city and its middle-class consumer-oriented localities. In this article, I explore the ways in which urban poor young men who live in a squatter settlement on the fringes of the city aspire to social mobility as they wander in Delhi’s middle-class consumer-oriented spaces. Wandering (ghūmnā) is evaluated differently by young men and their parents, pointing to generational and gendered distinctions. For young men, such wandering is a means to participate in the consumer culture, while their families evaluate it as a waste of time and useless (bekār) behaviour. By placing aspirations in a temporal perspect...

Urban poor are dominated by migrants and are poorer than the rural poor in Ghana. The underlying reasons have not been researched. Therefore, this research analyzed the severity of poverty and social cohesion among the urban migrants who were poor in Ghana. The level, depth, and severity of poverty among the urban poor alongside social cohesion indicators was utilized in the analysis. Lack of social cohesion among the urban migrants is a contributory factor to severity of poverty among the urban poor. Purposive projects targeting migrant poor are a panacea to reducing severity of poverty among the urban poor in Ghana.

Images of mass protests that arose from Egypt in early 2011 enraptured global audiences with unexpected scenes of street politics and unprecedented possibilities for political change. While the presence of thousands of cellphone cameras, perhaps hundreds of thousands, provided the technology for a multitude of witnessing, the hyper-visibility of the street in times of protest made image-making practices both threatening and powerful. The recursive rehabilitation of counter-revolutionary images happened on many fronts. Western journalists have long characterized the “Arab Street” as a “barbarous urban mob” and, despite enchantment with the “Arab Spring,” still perpetuated a simplistic analysis of street politics in the region. Meanwhile local television, advertising, and music videos endlessly recycled revolutionary images in superficial modes of patriotic sentimentality; while the urban poor, unable to realize the aims of “bread, freedom, and social justice,” have suspiciously remained the unclaimed image of the Egyptian revolution. But by attending to the social life of revolutionary street media, this article reviews the potential for emerging image practice to cultivate new kinds of political subjectivity and collectivity.

After last year’s adoption of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the year 2016 promises to be a landmark year for international housing pol...