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 e 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.
Professor of Social Epidemiology and Director of the Centre of Research Excellence in Healthy Housing at the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, The University of Melbourne