The place names of Nairobi’s informal settlements offer a glimpse into the realities of people who live there.
Jamestown, Accra. The city’s authorities have done nothing to develop green spaces in the city’s slums.
Photo by In Pictures Ltd./Corbis via Getty Images
In cross-sector collaboration, communities and citizens articulate their needs and then partner with governments and NGOs to address these self-identified problems.
Makoko neighbourhood in Lagos, initially founded as a fishing village.
Frédéric Soltan/Corbis via Getty Images
Despite high prices, poor quality and inconvenience, Kenya’s urban poor continued to buy water from private vendors because it’s still their best option.
African urban dwellers pay 55% more in rentals than their counterparts in other cities in the world.
The demon is not density but rather that African countries have not planned and made the investments necessary to manage the downsides of the type of density found in informal settlements.
One of the entry points to San Roque, with a makeshift guard shelter on the left.
Kim Dovey
Besides battling the coronavirus pandemic, San Roque residents have long been locked in a bigger struggle for their very survival as a community in the face of home demolitions and relocations.
Long before the Indian government responded to the threat of COVID-19 with a lockdown, residents of Shivaji Nagar, with the support of a local NGO, were protecting and helping one another.
Many are speculating about the pandemic changing how we plan and use our cities. What they overlook is how many people live in unplanned settlements where it’s more likely to be business as usual.
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?
Professor of Social Epidemiology, Principal Research Fellow in Social Epidemiology and Director of the Centre for Research Excellence in Healthy Housing in Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, The University of Melbourne