Chilean police clash with anti-government demonstrators during a protest in Santiago, Chile, Nov. 12, 2019. Santiago is one of a dozen cities worldwide to see mass unrest in recent months.
AP Photo/Esteban Felix
From Santiago and La Paz to Beirut and Jakarta, many of the cities now gripped by protest share a common problem: They've grown too much, too fast.
The Bangladesh government wants Karail, an established community of 200,000 people in the capital Dhaka, to make way for development.
Laura Elizabeth Pohl/Bread for the World/flickr
A community of 200,000 in Dhaka faces eviction to make room for "development". Is it time to rethink the concept, especially with a billion people now living in informal settlements worldwide?
Scorpions used to be a rural problem in Brazil. Now, residents of São Paulo and other urban areas are dealing with an infestation of these venomous creatures.
AP Photo/Alexandre Meneghini
Brazil's scorpion infestation, which is terrorizing residents of São Paulo and other major cities, is a classic 'wicked problem.' That means officials must think outside-the-box to fix it.
Residents of slums like Kamla Nehru Nagar, a kilometre away from Patna Junction, have yet to share in the promised benefits of smart cities.
Sujeet Kumar
Indians were promised they would be included in planning 100 smart cities and that everyone would benefit. But many of the millions of slum residents have had no say in their homes being destroyed.
Tiny Paley Park, surrounded by skyscrapers in New York City, introduced the concept of a ‘pocket park’ in dense urban centers.
Aleksandr Zykov/Flickr
Research shows that access to urban green space makes people and neighborhoods healthier. But parks can't work their magic if their design ignores the needs of nearby communities.
King argued for a national guaranteed income that would keep people out of poverty. Fifty years later, the Poor People's Campaign still resonates.
Homeless residents of El Bronx embrace after a May 2016 raid that displaced thousands, sending some to shelters and others to streets elsewhere in the city.
Fernando Vergara/AP
Bogota's mayor wants to make the city 'better for all,' but repeated police crackdowns have displaced thousands of homeless Colombians. Are clean streets really more important than human rights?
Just another day in Nairobi’s Kibera slums. Slums are characterised by densely packed settlements with inadequate provision of services.
Reuters/Noor Khamis
Alex Ezeh, African Population and Health Research Center; Blessing Mberu, African Population and Health Research Center, and Tilahun Haregu, African Population and Health Research Center
Despite increased global awareness about poor conditions in slums, the health of their inhabitants is a little studied phenomenon.
Brazil’s favelas are famous, but so are its ambitious efforts to bring roads, water, electricity, and land rights to its informal urban settlements.
eflon/flickr
For decades, Brazil has worked to improve conditions in its poorest neighbourhoods: building roads, drainage, lighting, and safer housing. Will budget cuts end its ambitious slum-upgrading efforts?
The rear of 30-32 Oxford Street, an area of Sydney affected by an outbreak of bubonic plague in 1900.
Wikimedia/NSW State Archives
New research finds almost a million Australians are living in poor or very poor-quality housing, with more than 100,000 in dwellings regarded as very poor or derelict.
A colorized 1937 photograph of a shantytown on the outskirts of Seattle.
photoretrofit/Reddit
Like Brazil's favela dwellers, America's working poor felt a sense of pride and community in their shantytowns – and desperately resisted the powerful interests that sought to demolish them.
Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, is one of the fastest-growing cities in the world despite its ranking as one of the ‘least liveable’.
mariusz kluzniak/flickr
Bringing significant benefits to an emergent middle class, Dhaka's cultural, economic, environmental and political landscapes are being rapidly but unevenly transformed.
As machinery demolishes houses behind them, Jakarta police evict residents from the settlement of Luar Batang in April.
Reuters/Beawiharta Beawiharta
The world's informal settlements are growing at an unprecedented rate, with about one in four urban dwellers living in slums. We need to rethink how we view and deal with these people and places.
Flaking lead paint in a home in Muncie, Indiana.
Shelly/Flickr
How did lead poisoning become a persistent threat in U.S. cities? Lead paint and slumlords played key roles, but so did postwar housing policies that trapped minorities in crumbling inner cities.
Residents in Nairobi's urban slums are opting for fast food rather than the healthy alternatives, which is increasing their risk of developing diabetes.