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This article reassesses agrarian questions by using the ongoing explosion in urban and urbanization theories to explain Jakarta’s urban poor (the Kaum Miskin Kota) as an extended agrarian question. It shows how the two capitalist development trajectories identified by Lenin as the Russian and American paths, or the transformation of feudal large-scale and small landholders into capitalists, respectively, do not apply in Indonesia. In the latter, a “concessionary capitalism” of large-scale land claims and allocations by the state is observed. This specific process produces specific agrarian questions of soil/land and labor through which the urban poor germinated. It closes with a political project, that is, to open more alliance-building possibilities between urban and rural social movements.

In Chennai, Development-Induced Displacement and Resettlement (DIDR) pushes the urban poor to resettlement sites in the outskirts of the city. One of those sites is Kannagi Nagar, located 15 km from the city centre, in which women suffer from more significant livelihood deprivation. As there is evidence of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) being useful in development, this study aims to explain the role of ICT in the livelihood restoration and enhancement of the social and financial capital for women in Kannagi Nagar. Through a case study with a blend of quantitative and qualitative techniques, the research incorporated a closed-ended questionnaire survey and interviews. Among the women, ICT use is prevalent, however, they have not fully optimized the potentials of ICT for livelihood restoration. The use is still limited to the purpose of maintaining the contacts they already have. However, some women have been able to use ICT, especially through their phones, for the restoration and enhancement of their social and financial capital. Nonetheless, to harness the full potential of ICT and strengthen women’s agency, access to ICT should be improved.

In Dhaka, three urban poor networks play a central role in advocating for the rights and entitlements of low-income settlement residents. Despite their numerous achievements, this article outlines how attempts to scale participation via these networks are limited by three overlapping state–civil society processes: (1) the politicization and increased monitoring of non-governmental organizations (NGOs); (2) shifting donor preferences towards service delivery and the creation of new community-based organizations (CBOs); and (3) the ongoing dominance and paternalism of NGOs towards low-income settlement residents. By situating these findings within existing understandings of in/formal governance and political participation, it can be argued that attempts to scale may struggle to evade or transform deep structures of dependency, patronage and intermediation. Recognizing that scaling can and does occur under these conditions, the article outlines opportunities to support the city-wide networks and alternative forms of organizing, to address pressing needs and priorities.

Education is fundamental to learning and is a pre-requisite for development. It is also imperative for sustained growth and development of a nation. There is still a long way to go for India in achieving Goal 4 and 5 of the UN Sustainable Development Goals quality education and gender equality by 2030. Despite several government initiatives and literacy programmes, a gender gap in literacy of 17% still persists. A collective effort is required to address these gaps , as women constitute two-thirds of the illiterate population in India. The present study has been conducted to assess the outcome of an adult literacy programme ‘Each One Enable One’ by undergraduate students at a college of the University of Delhi, targeted at women from poor socio-economic backgrounds residing in the neighbourhood of students. The study was conducted across 11 districts of Delhi, the Capital city of India, using a sample of 150 women. The results have revealed that literacy programme led to statistically significant gains in the overall literacy scores of women in Reading, Writing and Arithmetic and enhanced self-confidence of women. The study has highlighted the positive outcome of the Each One Enable One Program and has provided evidence for the need to upscale such initiatives.

Cities present important challenges for the extension of quality childcare services to informal workers, who make up most of the urban poor across the global South. For women, who are disproportionately responsible for childcare in their own households, access to quality childcare services allows for more time to earn an income and seek new employment. This is particularly important as women informal workers struggle to recover their earnings following the economic recession brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. For children, quality childcare services can contribute to lifelong health, educational and social development benefits. This article explores the key barriers to childcare provision for women informal workers and their children in cities, and assesses the role municipalities can play in the provision of childcare services. Access to quality childcare services in urban areas can help break the cycle of gendered and intergenerational poverty as cities recover from the pandemic.

This study is part of a broader phenomenological study on the experiences of family caregivers and their care recipients. There is a general paucity of research on the experiences of primary and secondary caregivers, and the negative impact of elderly care on caregivers in the urban poor settings in Ghana. This study explored primary and secondary caregivers’ challenges and coping strategies in the urban poor context in Accra, Ghana. This study was conducted in Ga Mashie. Thirty-one caregivers were interviewed. A phenomenological analysis was conducted using NVivo 10. Primary and secondary caregivers experienced economic, physical, social, and psychological burdens. Also, caregivers used spirituality and perseverance to cope with their challenges. The findings demonstrate that caregivers’ challenges varied by type of caregiver. Researchers and policymakers should consider the type of caregiver when designing interventions to mitigate the negative impacts of family caregiving on caregivers.

This article traces the labours of hope embedded in the everyday social reproductive practices of urban poor homeowner association members in Metro Cebu, the Philippines. It explores how aspirations for housing and land tenure security and the (failed) promises of opportunity bound in the urban materialise in the narratives and activities of women and men living in informal settlements. I argue that the sociality of hope, which propels and sustains homeowner associations, produces gendered labours of resilience amidst everyday circumstances of poverty, uncertainty, risk and displacement. As I reveal, these care-based practices constitute expressions of hope that are driven by moral codes associated with the family, industriousness and service to others. These findings reinforce the utility of hope as an analytical lens in geographical studies; one which broadens conceptualisations of labour beyond economic production to include, in this case, the emotional embodiments and reproductive activities that underpin people’s everyday resilience.

Objects have social lives like humans and are invested with the properties of social relations. We restore performativity to the journeying objects of the Maseit street magicians by drawing on our ethnography with this wayfaring community from Kathputli Colony, Delhi. The shifting social incarnations of the magicians’ objects threaten law’s desire for semantic closure. Their truncated movements indicate how law traps the fluid history of street magic in a rigid definitional register by criminalising it as begging. By mapping these journeys, we illuminate the ways in which the Maseit make sense of their lives within the legal framework.

It is a widely accepted fact that sustainable development cannot be achieved without sustainable human settlements. Cities cannot be made sustainable without ensuring access to adequate and affordable housing to all and improving informal settlements. According to the Census of India (2011), 13.75 million urban households, that is, 65–70 million people live in informal settlements and about 1.77 million people were homeless in India. The goal of sustainable cities cannot be fulfilled with such a large number of populations still being deprived of their basic right to adequate housing. Chandigarh is one of the first planned cities of modern India and has the second highest percentage (89.8%) of urban population to its total population among all the states and union territories in India. This article endeavours to analyse the adequacy and affordability of public housing for urban poor in the Union Territory of Chandigarh.

In Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh with a population of 18 million, nearly one-third are living under the threat of eviction without resettlement due to lack of tenure security. This occurs despite the Bangladesh government’s ratification of multiple international conventions as well as provisions within the national Constitution with regard to people’s rights. Within this context, drawing on Lefebvre’s theorization of space and using the right to the city (RTC) framework, this article explores the urban poor’s right to housing in the context of Dhaka, Bangladesh. Findings suggest that the local and central government officials categorize slum dwellers as encroachers and criminals, who pose a direct threat to an orderly, clean and green city. Hence, they cannot be allowed to exist in the city. Additionally, the state has shifted the development of land and housing markets to real estate developers, following a neoliberal economic model. Consequently, a few powerful developers control Dhaka’s land and housing markets, only supplying housing for the growing middle class. Access to these houses is far beyond poor people’s reach. Thus, the urban poor’s housing rights are denied both by the state and by the market in Dhaka.

While the current scholarship on open defecation overwhelmingly focuses on increasing access to sanitation facilities as the solution, millions of people around the world still practise open defecation despite having latrines. This is especially problematic in urban slums where people are more vulnerable to sanitation-related diseases compared with rural areas because of their high population density. We explore why latrines are not being used even when they are available to slum dwellers by identifying social interactions that serve as information channels that promote public latrine use. Using an original survey in New Delhi, we find that slum dwellers who frequently interact with slum leaders, more so than other community leaders, are more likely to use nearby public latrines regularly. A survey of slum leaders finds that their role in fixing and maintaining public latrines and informing others of these acts as well as educating people on hygiene encourage public latrine use.

While government housing can raise living standards for the urban poor, it has environmental impacts and contributes to urban resource consumption. In Gauteng Province, South Africa, government housing aims to improve quality of life, reduce poverty and inequality, and transform unsustainable urban forms. This paper draws on survey and interview data to explore the social justice and environmental sustainability outcomes of Gauteng’s government housing programmes. The data reveal improved access to basic services and amenities. However, the developments tend to be poorly located with regard to economic opportunities, and residents are forced to explore other income generation opportunities. This paper highlights the complex interplay between justice and sustainability, where the outcomes are aligned in some instances and conflictual in others. It points to the need to move beyond linear, reductionist relationships between justice and sustainability to further the conceptual understanding of their interlinkages.

The article aims to identify how varied factors (e.g., physical and socioeconomical) behind vulnerability of the urban poor in Dhaka’s low-income settlements interact with each other to constitute their overall vulnerability. It addresses the complexity of the issues involved which cannot be understood by having partial look at their vulnerability. Hence, it suggests a ‘whole systems’ view to understand the underlying phenomenon. Data collected through mixed methods were analysed using a grounded theory-systems analysis approach. It identifies the reinforcing loops developed within the systems that strongly promote poverty traps and also identifies ways in which these vicious circles can be broken.

Since Independence, Muslim politics in India has mainly been framed through the idiom of identity. While political engagements calling for democratization and increased participation in public life have occasionally occurred, scholarly interest in the ongoing shifts in Muslim political demands is recent and new. Simultaneously, the emerging literature on the politics of patronage and post-patronage networks in democracies of the Global South present anthropologists with new tools for studying the changing contours of the political mobilization of the urban poor. Using ethnographic narratives collected during fieldwork in Park Circus—one of Kolkata’s many Muslim-dominated neighbourhoods—which remains stigmatized and socially and spatially set apart, this article highlights the emerging modes of political engagement among poor and lower middle-class Muslims. I carefully document their efforts to negotiate a perceived ‘better’ life within a fast-changing neoliberal urban landscape that is prejudiced against them. For many ordinary Muslims, this has involved a movement away from the traditional elite-led politics of identity towards more plebeian forms of assertion and activism aimed at eking out a respectable living by working through extant structures of the local administration and networks of power in the neighbourhood.

The informal provision of benefits to the poor in exchange for political support, known as clientelism, often provides access to land and services for the urban poor in informal settlements in developing democracies. This review of multidisciplinary literature finds that while clientelism provides the urban poor with some access to the state, its benefits are often inadequate and inequitable. This kind of informal provision also disincentivizes or interferes with the implementation of formal plans. The literature provides some examples of transitions away from clientelism, but lessons for planners in facilitating such transitions are elusive.

Despite the magnitude of urban housing problem the attention given to this issue is very neglectful. Rapid urbanization stimulates dynamics in urban centers that escalate urban housing dynamics. Several personal and structural constraints become hurdles for urban poor or low income group to access affordable and adequate housing. Thus, to secure their livelihood and to meet housing need different coping mechanisms are being operated. So, prior to see housing empirical scenario it is better to identify systematized knowledge of housing or epistemology of housing.

While slum clearance projects in the Global South have displaced a large number of urban poor from the inner city to peripheral areas, peripheral mass housing estates have been developed as a spatial fix to improve the livelihood of the urban poor through slum development projects. Shifting the focus of displacement and poverty studies on changing assets and social experiences of displacement, this study makes an empirical contribution to the literature with a case study from Turkey. It demonstrates that mass housing projects that increase the importance of market-based processes and financial assets at the expense of intangible assets (household relations and social capital) make the urban poor more vulnerable to displacement pressure and external shocks. Using the example of a mass housing project in Turkey designed for the relocation of a highly concentrated Kurdish migrant squatter settlement, this research demonstrates that slum development projects can cause different types of displacement, divesting residents of opportunities to accumulate assets and reconstruct a sense of place. The research demonstrates that the dissolution of intangible assets and the exclusion of social spaces that are important to relocated residents in the mass housing estate bring about community displacement in the case of Kurdish residents. Also, relocated squatters feel pressured by the ongoing and daily experiences of displacement—notably everyday, symbolic and temporal displacement—as the spatial design of the mass housing unfamiliar with the livelihood of squatter dwellers constrains their opportunities to appropriate neighbourhood space in everyday life and enact a sense of place.

The impacts of climate change tend to be unevenly distributed, affecting mostly urban poor communities. This research analyses the case of El Colli, a community with high levels of marginalization ...

Climate resilience varies significantly based on gender and on location in different physical and social spaces. A qualitative study exploring conditions of the urban poor in Khulna, Bangladesh dem...

‘Neighbourhood cooperation’ can be viewed as a key element for livelihood improvement, particularly within areas of urban poverty in Least Developed Countries (LDCs). Such cooperation might be useful for mobilising resources and sharing risks of investing in infrastructures/services and maintaining common goods. This article explores the structural relationships between individual level cooperation and overall social capital, in relation to household and neighbourhood characteristics. These relationships are complex as various factors are interlinked, which influence cooperation at both individual and group levels. Literature on social capital has relied mainly on Western countries; from this starting point, this article analyses the relationships among aspects of social capital. Analytical models are based on Durlauf’s approach of measuring ‘social capital’ and Manski’s perspective on social interaction, which are tested on 1800 households’ data across three locations in Bangladesh. The estimates reveal that individual level cooperation can be influenced directly by households’ socio economic circumstances and indirectly through neighbourhood mediation, while questioning some theoretical generalisations about neighbourhood cooperation. The findings contribute to the literature on neighbourhood effects by revealing that: (a) the relationship between one’s socio economic status and one’s social capital is less clear than expected; and (b) extreme poverty and proximity of living in a neighbourhood can promote norms of trust and cooperation.

The urban poor living a life of uncertainty and insecurity throughout the year, are compelled to adopt various survival strategies to meet the challenges of their daily existence. In our study, micro-level data gathered through field surveys conducted in Kolkata’s slums was used to develop an understanding of the multi-dimensional nature of poverty and the diversification of these livelihood strategies. It was observed that a major chunk of workers earn their livelihood through physical labour, although income levels differ across and within occupational categories. As households move up the economic ladder, the contribution to the total household income from domestic work and scavenging declines, while that from self-employment rises. The transport sector workers, however, defy such trends. Using probit regression, we examined the determinants of the choice of modes of employment by poor urban workers, and note that more educated workers heading large households and having their fathers engaged in self-employment made them more likely to be involved in forms of self-employment activities.

In the mid-1990s, the grassroots movement Muungano wa Wanavijiji emerged from Nairobi’s many slums aiming to resist forced evictions by the Kenyan government. Muungano confronted a nexus of politicians, government administrators and elites all seeking to acquire city land occupied by informal settlements – and in doing so challenged antipathetic attitudes to informality. Joining global advocacy, Muungano has pushed locally for recognition of slums as human settlements, later designing models for upgrading living conditions. Throughout this evolution, the Kenyan state has been the single most prominent precipitant for the strategies Muungano has employed. This paper describes the correlations between a social movement and the state, set within broader changes in state–civil society relations in Kenya. In doing so it seeks to bring out the complexity of a relationship that has varied from conflict to contestation, partnership to collaboration, and separate but parallel efforts to address common issues.

Waiting for low–income housing is an increasingly common experience of the urban poor in both the global North and South, although little attention has been paid to its effects. Engaging a growing literature on time in systems of social provision, this article presents an ethnographic case study of waiting among poor housing–seekers in a peripheral district of Santiago, Chile. While illustrating how waiting is produced by state policies and practices that position homeless city–dwellers as passive clients, it challenges existing studies that argue that waiting produces durable submission to dominant state projects. In contrast, it shows that housing–seekers in Santiago actively negotiated a denigrating temporality of state provision through multiple practices, including collective contestation of arbitrary delays. By dissecting the conditions that enabled contentious responses to waiting for housing in Chile, this article aims to elucidate how such temporal contestation may emerge (or be precluded) in other contexts.

Various policies and programmes have been launched in India to enhance the adaptive capacities of vulnerable groups to climate change. However, an assessment of the adaptive abilities of urban poor women living in the National Capital Region of Delhi, India, to climate change shows that marginalized groups have been excluded from access to required information. It recommends the urgent need to provide knowledge on how to adapt to the effects of climate change to the most vulnerable sections of society.

The network of slum dweller federations known as SDI has innovated a form of local financing derived from the collective savings of urban poor groups. This addresses three shortcomings of conventional microfinance: its inability to reach very low-income people, its limited role in community mobilization for longer-term social change, and its constraints in terms of leveraging subsidies from the state and the market. SDI’s national and international urban poor funds have been used, among other purposes, for providing basic services and upgrading homes in informal settlements. Further, SDI’s model of federating urban poor communities and their funds at city, national and international levels has enabled mature federations, capable of financially sustainable projects, to cross-subsidize learning and precedent-setting projects in which full cost recovery is not feasible. This produces an outcome whereby the combined portfolios of all the national funds are able to match financial outflows with inflows. At the same time, the federations that co-manage these funds and the projects that they finance are able to escalate the production of social capital amongst the urban poor and to generate impact through changed relationships with government.

More than one billion people worldwide are mired in extreme and inescapable poverty, while millions of others are on the brink of poverty. They face risks which are further exacerbated by natural hazards and ill-health. However, those who are poor today may not necessarily be poor tomorrow. Again, many of those who are non-poor today face a high chance of becoming poor after experiencing an adverse shock. Thus, a better understanding of the vulnerability concept is pressing, particularly in the context of the Third World cities like Kolkata. This article attempts an analysis of the vulnerability, and its impact on the livelihoods of the people living in slums in Kolkata. A simple bifurcation of the sampled households in terms of poor and non-poor is examined in terms of a constructed vulnerability index. As many of our surveyed slum households are found to be “vulnerable” (although they may not necessarily be “poor”), the government should assess the levels of vulnerability of households and use that as a yardstick (instead of income alone) at the time of distribution of various benefits so as to avoid “targeting error.”

Informal settlements have been crucial sites of spatial dispossession and neoliberal urbanization with the displacement of the urban poor from profitable urban areas. This study examines the gendered implications of dispossession and changing dimensions of women’s poverty as a result of slum/squatter redevelopment projects. Based on the research of the Kadifekale Urban Transformation Project in Turkey that resettled residents of a highly concentrated Kurdish migrant squatter settlement into a new mass housing estate, the study highlights the impacts of profit-driven urban development projects on women's access to affordable housing, support networks, care work, and employment opportunities. Kurdish women's experiences of displacement and resettlement illustrate in particular the intersectional aspects of gendered dispossession and asset erosion with their exclusion from affordable housing options, dispersal of their communities, and separation from their ethnic employment niches. Drawing upon dispossession and feminist development literature, the study sheds light upon the gendered experiences of displacement, changing livelihood opportunities, gendered access and control over resources, and strategies of resistance that result from slum redevelopment projects.

A critical analysis of two conflicts associated with the displacement resulting from gentrification in Santiago, Chile, reveals that this displacement affects both the urban poor and the middle classes and that the common adversary is the real estate sector. The subjective experience of the groups involved can be understood in terms of the concept of territorial disqualification, a threat both to their positions in the social structure and to the recognition of the identities, personal and collective, that have been constructed about particular neighborhoods. The subject defended in struggles against territorial disqualification is the community. While class positions, specific demands, and territorial claims differ significantly, the structural framework in which neoliberal urbanism develops makes possible a confluence of class organizations that are susceptible to generating interclass strategies of opposition. El análisis crítico de dos conflictos asociados con el desplazamiento provocado por la gentrificación en Santiago de Chile, revela que el desplazamiento afecta tanto a la población urbana pobre como a las clases medias y que el adversario común es el sector de bienes raíces. La experiencia subjetiva de los grupos involucrados se puede entender si usamos el concepto de descalificación territorial, una amenaza tanto a sus posiciones en la estructura social como al reconocimiento de sus identidades, personales y colectivas, que han sido construidas con relación a ciertos vecindarios. La comunidad es el sujeto que se defiende en las luchas en contra de la descalificación territorial. Aunque las posiciones de clase, las demandas específicas y los reclamos territoriales difieren considerablemente, el marco estructural en el que se desarrolla el urbanismo neoliberal facilita la confluencia de organizaciones de clase que son susceptibles de generar estrategias de oposición interclasistas.

Since the International Olympic Committee (IOC) selected Rio de Janeiro to host the 2016 Olympic Games, large-scale transportation infrastructures have been transforming the city. We examine the transportation planning process and consequences of implementation in the run-up to the 2016 Olympic Games by triangulating qualitative and quantitative methods. We argue that because of the low cost, speed of implementation, best-practice knowledge, existing political coalitions, ease of land acquisition, and flexibility in planning, BRTs emerged as the dominant Olympic transport solution. We find that the transport planning process has undermined the public interest and placed the burdens of implementation disproportionally on the urban poor.

In the wake of the neoliberal turn in India, the focus on urban areas has gained importance in the planning process at various geographical scales. Urban space making and restructuring processes are evident in the form of various physical infrastructural undertakings and developmental projects such as bridges, flyovers and other lines of transportation, also upscale shopping malls, plush residential buildings devoted to residential and recreational uses. The (re)making of urban spaces is subject to intense conflicts both from above and below, since it is a contradictory socio-economic process based on conflicting class interests. However, in the current literature inspired primarily by post-structuralism that examines urban space, the emphasis is unduly on the politics of urban subalterns. This literature prioritizes a plethora of everyday practices on the part of the disenfranchised population in response to the top-down developmental politics. Such an approach is undialectical: it ignores the fact that the (re)creation of urban space is a combined result of the struggles from above reflecting the interests of the ruling classes and its state in accumulation, and the struggles from below represented by the subordinate classes, reflecting their interests in their own reproduction. Urban space (re)making must be studied in its totality. Through an analysis of empirical materials based on a study of the poorer (low-income) segments of the urban working class in India, I assert that a Marxist approach provides a better analytical framework to understand the politics of the urban subordinate class, in which the emphasis is on class struggle that complexly intertwines with other socio-spatial schisms in the society.

Three fundamental tenets of this article are: ‘whether all the sections of urban poor have been sufficiently considered’, ‘participation of urban poor vis-à-vis urban health’ and ‘communication for mobilizing community participation’. Urban poverty in India has a global significance as about 39.8 per cent of the world’s urban poor live in India (The World Bank, 2008). Their number in India is not only matched by the number of urban poor in a single country but even by the number of urban poor in any other subcontinent. Participation of the urban poor in improving and maintaining urban health becomes very crucial as they are the most health-vulnerable and suffer from highly impoverished quality of life characterized by deprivation from basic services related to health and hygiene. However, the application of participatory principles in urban health has been hitherto neglected unlike the emphasis on participation since long in the arena of rural health. Any schemes and programmes of urban health will hardly succeed unless they incorporate the component of community participation. The article analyzes the extent to which the various sections of the urban poor, and especially women, are considered while considering the issues of urban health. For example, though ‘slum dwellers’ are many times regarded as a homogenous category, the most neglected among them are those residing in non-notified slums and are hitherto highly neglected. Health concerns and deprivations are more severe among non-notified slums than in notified slums as it is not mandatory for urban local bodies in many states to provide basic services to dwellers from non-notified slums. Another neglected entity among urban heath discussions is that of small and medium towns. Data shows that the access parameters to basic services, especially for urban underprivileged worsen as one moves down the urban population size. However, a major attention of the urban health debate carries a large city bias. Though there have been efforts to change this situation, their effectiveness needs to be amplified multifold through ‘effective communication’. Communication becomes an extremely crucial aspect for mobilizing community participation in urban areas. Though the extent and quality of community engagement in rural areas can invite diverse perspectives, there is at least a legacy of efforts on community participation for rural health for a good number of decades. Relatively in the urban context, community participation in general and for urban health in particular are at the infant stages and needs more focus and innovation. The article strongly puts forth the need for developing context-specific customized communication tools for mobilizing participation of the urban poor community in improving urban health. A special consideration should be wide bandwidth in education status among the urban poor. Of special significance will be the tools which enable ‘community self-assessment and planning (SAP)’. The above aspects are explained with illustrations from diverse health domains as the author has been involved as the principal investigator or initiator for slums redevelopment, proper adolescent health and the role of men in improving women’s health (enabling men to be more responsible for women’s health).

With rapid pace of urbanization, urban health has emerged as one of the most significant health themes of the decade in India. The increasing proportion of urban poor and vulnerable, with health indicators worse than their rural counterparts, face various social and financial barriers to accessing healthcare. While urban health has been emphasized over the years by various committees and five-year plans (described in detail in the article), there has been little concerted effort at the national level for providing comprehensive healthcare to the urban population, up until the launch of the National Urban Health Mission (NUHM) in 2013. As urban health infrastructure, developed under various schemes and projects in different states, is quite inconsistent across the country, covering the entire urban population with standardized services is a challenge for NUHM. Other challenges include crowding out of the urban poor from available urban facilities, multiple burden of diseases and vulnerability in urban areas and fostering coordination and convergence between various urban stakeholders including the private sector. This article describes the past and current policies on urban health, the current challenges for implementing urban health programmes in India and the way forward.

Background: There is a significant disparity in hypertensive treatment rates between those with and without health insurance. If left untreated, hypertension leads to significant morbidity and mortality. The uninsured face numerous barriers to access chronic disease care. We developed the Community-based Chronic Disease Management (CCDM) clinics specifically for the uninsured with hypertension utilizing nurse-led teams, community-based locations, and evidence-based clinical protocols. All services, including laboratory and medications, are provided on-site and free of charge. Methods: In order to ascertain if the CCDM model of care was as effective as traditional models of care in achieving blood pressure goals, we compared CCDM clinics’ hypertensive care outcomes with 2 traditional fee-for-service physician-led clinics. All the clinics are located near one another in poor urban neighborhoods of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Results: Patients seen at the CCDM clinics and at 1 of the 2 traditional clinics showed a statistically significant improvement in reaching blood pressure goal at 6 months ( P < .001 and P < .05, respectively). Logistic regression analysis found no difference in attaining blood pressure goal at 6 months for either of the 2 fee-for-service clinics when compared with the CCDM clinics. Conclusion: The CCDM model of care is at least as effective in controlling hypertension as more traditional fee-for-service models caring for the same population. The CCDM model of care to treat hypertension may offer another approach for engaging the urban poor in chronic disease care.

In the last 60 years since independence, India had achieved considerable improvements in the health of its population as reflected in their life expectancies which have doubled within this period. This article aims at explaining pertinent health-care issues and challenges based on some health indicators in India by using the literature review method that involved collection of material from the online sources, which included government documents, articles and publications related to healthcare, healthcare indicators, poverty, financial burden and coping strategies. To avoid premature deaths among adults, children and maternal mortalities, greater attention should be given to prevention and treatment of non-communicable diseases, and women and other social determinants of health. More attention should also be given to the reduction of births among teenage girls in order to avoid premature morbidity and mortality. To protect the vulnerable and poor, the government should provide more resources since financial burden of curative care is higher among lower income groups. However, in poorer states, the government tends to have relatively low ability to raise their own resources and the people in these states have a lower ability to pay for private insurance. Therefore, it is worthwhile and pertinent that the government initiates social insurance.

This piece is an attempt to synthesize our learnings about poverty and action research using the financial diaries methodology among the urban poor at Ramanagaram, a town 60 km away from Bangalore, India. We introduced a participatory component in the financial diaries methodology by asking our respondents (all women) to be the diary writers. This helped narrowing the gap between the researchers and researched towards understanding data on the lives of the poor. It spurred an on-going relationship with our diary writers and enabled us to take a critical look at several mainstream conclusions about poverty. For example, eating out and expenditure on snacks by women, especially in women-headed households is not to be considered a temptation good but an expense arising from the informal nature of her employment, allowing her little time towards household chores. Similarly, buying a TV (sometimes by borrowing money) was often prompted by the drudgery of onerous job–work done from home, rather than from the need to emulate the Joneses. A small self-help livelihoods venture grew out of the interaction, which we helped setup. This study reinforces the need to have more action research with the poor, if meaningful solutions need be sought to their problems.

Government of India has introduced various schemes for the uplift of the deprived section of the urban poor. As a result, the proportion of India’s poor with respect to total population has dropped in both urban and rural areas, but then again, the absolute number of the urban poor is growing. Therefore, this article tries to analyse the utilization pattern of credit availed through various credit expansion avenues by the urban poor households, thereafter examining its impact on poverty alleviation at different levels. Snowball sampling method was used to collect data from 598 respondents living in the most populous cities of Punjab and the union territory (UT) of Chandigarh using the references of registered deprived urban poor, who are continuously being recorded and monitored by top non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and banks. Apart from descriptive statistics, exploratory factor analysis was used to categorize the utilization pattern and poverty alleviation dimensions into the valid factors. Finally, structural equation modelling (SEM) was employed to test the proposed hypothesis. The study found that the productive utilization of credit availed by the Economic Weaker Section (EWS) of the urban poor through various government credit schemes is highly associated with poverty alleviation at individual level (β = 0.55 and p = 0.000) followed by that at regional (β = 0.29 and p = 0.009) and community levels (β = 0.18, and p = 0.001). Social structure of the families is found to be an important deciding factor in how productively a household channelizes its loan amount or grants to move out of poverty and to become self-reliant. The article is limited to only government-backed credit expansion schemes for the EWS of the urban poor residing in the most populous areas of Punjab and Chandigarh. The development of the evaluation model is expected to lead towards better implementation of government credit schemes for the EWS of the urban poor, which would be practically helpful in policymaking. Also, the development of suggestive measures is expected to complement effective, efficient and more cohesive implementation of government schemes for the urban poor, which would be socially more sustainable. With policy emphasis in recent times for the urban poor, the topic is of utmost importance for research.

In 2013, the National Urban Health Mission (NUHM) was rolled out to effectively address health concerns of the urban poor population. In the last decade, there has been a spate of publicly funded insurance schemes, prominent amongst them being the Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana (RSBY). In 2012, the Government of Chhattisgarh expanded the RSBY into a new avatar, the Mukhyamantri Swasthya Bima Yojana (MSBY), thereby universalising health insurance coverage. This study was conducted in the slums of Raipur, the capital and largest city of Chhattisgarh, with the objective of assessing issues of coverage and utilisation in these areas. The specific focus was on issues of women’s medical conditions and the experiences of women beneficiaries during enrolment in these schemes.

In Chennai alone, over 21,000 families have already been removed from their primary livelihood area and ghettoised in the peripheral areas of the city like Kannagi Nagar, Semmencherry and Perumbakkam, which are 25 to 30 kilometres from their original habitation. Another 31,912 families are in the process of being removed to these resettlement colonies. The R&R processes adopted by the government for the urban communities have unleashed gross human rights violations including right to adequate housing, food, water, education, health, work/livelihood and security of the person and home. There are no prescribed standards or policy in place for urban resettlement, yet government is constructing more houses in these sites. This article intends to document the human rights violation faced by the resettled communities in Kannagi Nagar, Chennai, and calls for an urgent attention to bring in necessary changes in the R&R policy for urban resettlement.

This article analyses how we might understand corruption as anchored in ordinary, everyday practices. Avoiding the double trap of condemnation and relativism, it shows how the urban poor see the aspiration for a purified polity as creating the conditions of possibility in which the political space of action closes down for those within what one might call a corruption complex. Moving between ethnography and literature, the article pays close attention to forms of talk as well as forms of action and demonstrates that the poor display much more nuanced understanding of the state as compared to the way it is represented in the work of public intellectuals and activists.

This paper describes how urban poor community leaders in six nations (Cambodia, Nepal, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Vietnam) worked together to define poverty, assess its causes, and suggest how best to measure it and address it. Their work drew on over a thousand detailed household expenditure surveys from different settlements in a range of cities in the six nations. Five distinct groups could be distinguished among these urban poor households, and the work suggested that two poverty lines were needed. The community leaders also reviewed national and international poverty lines and found these to be incompatible with reality, especially the US$ 1.25/person/day poverty line. The paper draws some conclusions and describes plans for the country teams to further this work, including engaging with their national governments over the definition and measurement of urban poverty.

Public pay-per-use toilets are the only alternative to open defecation for a significant number of people in many low-income, urban neighbourhoods where insecure tenure, space constraints, and/or cost make private sanitation facilities unfeasible. This study explores public toilet use, characteristics of public toilet customers and possible improvements to public toilet facilities in four neighbourhoods in Accra, Ghana, the country with the highest reliance on shared sanitation facilities globally. Reliance on public toilets ranged considerably depending on neighbourhood affluence, but even some people living in compounds with a private toilet used a public toilet. The vast majority of users were adults. Few public toilet customers could foresee owning a household toilet in the coming year, mostly because of lack of space, and they voiced desires for more and cleaner public toilets with better provision of handwashing facilities. Improved accessibility and management of public toilets, along with facilities more suitable for children, could reduce open defecation.

Many of the people who are most vulnerable to the effects of climate change live in low-income and informal settlements in and around urban centres in Africa, Asia and Latin America. While there is a growing recognition of the importance of urban resilience, there is little documented evidence of how collective actions undertaken by residents of these communities can contribute to this. This paper describes the processes adopted by the National Slum Dwellers Federation of Uganda for responding to a variety of challenges – and explains how these not only address the immediate needs of these communities but also contribute to building resilience at the scale of the individual, household, community and city. It links the experiences of manufacturing matoke briquettes, developing new construction materials for low-income housing, and improving drainage and freshwater supplies to some of the key features of an urban resilience agenda, and makes the case for broader international support and funding to these local responses to climate change.