170.
39 Population rank from Thomas Brinkhoff (www.citypopulation.de); GDP rank from Denise Pumain, “Scaling Laws and Urban Systems,”Santa Fe Institute Working Paper 04-02-002, Santa Fe 2002, p. 4.
40 Josef Gugler, “Introduction – II. Rural–Urban Migration,” in Gugler (ed.), Cities in the Developing World: Issues, Theory and Policy, Oxford 1997, p. 43.
41 Sally Findley emphasizes that everyone in the 1980s underestimated levels of continuing rural–urban migration and resulting rates of urbanization. (“The Third World City,” in John Kasarda and Allen Parnell (eds), Third World Cities: Problems, Policies and Prospects, Newbury Park 1993, p. 14.)
42 Nigel Harris, “Urbanization, Economic Development and Policy in Developing Countries,”Habitat International 14:4 (1990), pp. 21–22.
43 David Simon, “Urbanization, globalization and economic crisis in Africa,” in Rakodi, Urban Challenge, p. 95. For growth rates of English industrial cities 1800–50, see Edna Weber, The Growth of Cities in the Nineteenth Century, New York 1899, pp. 44, 52–53.
44 A. Oberai, Population Growth, Employment and Poverty in Third World Mega-Cities (ILO Studies), London 1993, p. 165.
45 UNEP, African Environment Outlook: Past, Present and Future Perspectives, quoted in Al Ahram Weekly, 2–8 October 2003 (Africa); Alain Jacquemin, Urban Development and New Towns in the Third World, Aldershot 1999, p. 28 (nineteenth-century Europe).
46 Deborah Bryceson, “Disappearing Peasantries? Rural Labour Redundancy in the Neo-Liberal Era and Beyond,” in Bryceson, Kay and Mooij, pp. 304–05.
47 Sébastien de Dianous, “Les Damnés de la terre du Cambodge,”Le Monde Diplomatique, September 2004, p. 20.
48 See Josef Gugler, “Overurbanization reconsidered,” in Gugler, Cities in the Developing World, pp. 114–23.
49 Foreword to Jacinta Prunty, Dublin Slums, 1800–1925: A Study in Urban Geography, Dublin 1998, p. ix. Larkin, of course, forgets Dublin’s Mediterranean counterpart: Naples.
50 Oberai, p. 13.
51 UNCHS, An Urbanising World: Global Report on Human Settlements, Oxford 1996,p. 239.
52 Priscilla Connolly, “Mexico City: our common future?”Environment and Urbanization 11:1 (April 1999), p. 56.
53 Ivo Imparato and Jeff Ruster, Slum Upgrading and Participation: Lessons from Latin America, World Bank, Washington D.C. 2003, p. 333.
54 John Browder and Brian Godfrey, Rainforest Cities: Urbanization, Development and Globalization of the Brazilian Amazon, New York 1997, p. 130.
55 Yang Wenzhong and Wang Gongfan, “Peasant Movement: A Police Perspective,” in Michael Dutton (ed.), Streetlife China, Cambridge 1998, p. 89.
56 Dileni Gunewardena, Urban Poverty in South Asia, working paper, Conference on Poverty Reduction and Social Progress, Rajendrapur, Bangladesh, April 1999, p. 1.
57 Arif Hasan, “Introduction” to Akhtar Khan, Orangi Pilot Project: Reminiscences and Reflections, Karachi 1996, p. xxxiv.
58 Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, New York 2004, p. 117.
59 Gautam Chatterjee, “Consensus versus Confrontation,”Habitat Debate 8:2 (June 2002), p. 11. Statistic for Delhi from Rakesh Simha, “New Delhi: The World’s Shanty Capital in the Making,”OneWorld South Asia, 26 August 2003.
60 Harvey Herr and Guenter Karl, Estimating Global Slum Dwellers, UN-Habitat working paper, Nairobi 2003, p. 19.
61 Gordon Brown quoted in the Los Angeles Times, 4 October 2004.
62 UN statistics quoted in John Vidal, “Cities are now the frontline of poverty,” The Guardian, 2 February 2005.
Two
The Prevalence of Slums
He let his mind drift as he stared at the city, half slum, half paradise. How could a place be so ugly and violent, yet beautiful at the same time?
Chris Abani 1
The astonishing prevalence of slums is the chief theme of The Challenge of Slums, a historic and somber report published in October 2003 by the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat). This first truly global audit of urban poverty, which follows in the famous footsteps of Friedrich Engels, Henry Mayhew, Charles Booth, and Jacob Riis, culminates two centuries of the scientific reconnaisance of slum life which began with James Whitelaw’s 1805 Survey of Poverty in Dublin. It is also the long-awaited empirical counterpart to the World Bank’s warnings in the 1990s that urban poverty would become the “most significant, and politically explosive, problem of the next century.”2
The Challenge of Slums, a collaboration of more than one hundred researchers, integrates three novel sources of analysis and data. First, it is based on synoptic case-studies of poverty, slum conditions, and housing policy in 34 metropolises from Abidjan to Sydney; this project was coordinated for UN-Habitat by the Development Planning Unit at University College London.3 Secondly, it utilizes a unique comparative database for 237 cities worldwide created by the UN-Habitat Urban Indicators Programme for the 2001 Istanbul Urban Summit.4 And thirdly, it incorporates global household survey data that breaks new ground by including China and the ex-Soviet bloc. The UN authors acknowledge a particular debt to Branko Milanovic, the World Bank economist who pioneered these surveys as a powerful microscope for studying global inequality. (In one of his papers, Milanovic explains: “For the first time in human history, researchers have reasonably accurate data on the distribution of income or welfare [expenditures or consumption] amongst more than 90 percent of the world population.”5) If the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change represent an unprecedented scientific consensus on the dangers of global warming, then The Challenge of Slums sounds an equally authoritative warning about the worldwide catastrophe of urban poverty.
