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Experience with urban social protection programmes is relatively limited in the Global South. Extensions or duplicates of rural social assistance programmes do not reflect the distinct vulnerabilities of the urban poor, who face higher living costs and more precarious employment, and are not reached by social insurance schemes that are designed for formally employed workers. Neither the Sustainable Development Goals nor the New Urban Agenda reflect a specific focus on urban social protection. COVID-19 has exposed this major gap in coverage, given the disproportionate impact of lockdowns on the livelihoods of the urban poor. To ‘build back better’ post COVID-19, we propose rights-based national social protection systems with two components: categorical social assistance for non-working vulnerable groups (children, older persons, persons with disability) and universal social insurance for all working adults (formal, informal or self-employed), financed out of general revenues rather than mandatory contributions by employees and employers. These ideas are explored in the case of South Africa, which has comprehensive social assistance but inadequate social insurance for urban informal workers.

Throughout the early months of 2020, COVID-19 rapidly changed how the world functioned, with the closure of borders, schools and workplaces, national lockdowns, and the rapid normalization of “self-isolation” and “social distancing”. However, while public health recommendations were broadly universal, human capacity to accordingly transform everyday life has differed significantly. We use the example of South Africa to highlight the privileged nature of the ability to transform one’s life in response to COVID-19, arguing that the virus both highlights and exacerbates existing inequalities in access to infrastructure. For those living in urban poverty in South Africa, where access to basic infrastructure is limited, and where overcrowding and high density are the norm, it is frequently impossible to transform daily life in the required ways. The failure of global public health recommendations to recognize these inequalities, and to adapt advice to national and local contexts, reveals significant limitations that extend beyond this specific global pandemic.

Informal rental housing remains a hidden – yet central – pillar of low-cost shelter markets across the global South. The large informal settlement of Mathare Valley illustrates Nairobi’s rapidly changing informal rental housing markets, with the ongoing rise of tenements alongside metal shacks. Informal single-room rental units (shacks and tenements) already house most Nairobi residents in low-quality but highly profitable shelter. This case study describes how multiple exclusions can shape access to rental housing and examines the politics of shelter delivery. We underscore the importance of private rental markets and offer recommendations for inclusive, multi-pronged interventions combining support for rental housing, land governance and infrastructure delivery. Through a better understanding of the myriad actors and dynamics of informal rental housing, it may be possible to develop strategies that serve low-income tenants for whom renting is often the only viable option.

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.

‘Homelessness’ is the worst form of urban poverty, and in the wake of neoliberalism it has become more pervasive in cities across the world. Taking the case of Delhi, the study focuses on the making of homelessness, the connotation of being homeless, and the nature of responses from a governing institution to homelessness in the neoliberal city. The study reveals that large scale slum demolition in the last three decades has rendered thousands of people homeless. They are denied of basic human rights and human necessities. They are not even allowed to reside in the open spaces of the city. Governing actors have bypassed their duties by setting up only a ‘few’ night-shelters in the city, most of which remained unoccupied because of several adversities. The study also reveals that homelessness is the outcome of governance failure and the failure of the welfare state. But the structural problem of homelessness is completely overlooked both in policy and by ‘other’ sections of society.

There is an increasing need to study urban food security in the global South. This is because of the monetization of food in urban areas and compounding vulnerability from other deprivations such as lack of access to infrastructure. We assess these claims in this paper, based on a city-wide household survey in Bengaluru (Bangalore) carried out in 2016 that used experiential measures of food security like the Household Food Insecurity Access Scale. We find that income and consumption do not have a clear relationship with food insecurity. However, socioeconomic dimensions like education level and wage type of the household head, and infrastructural dimensions like housing typology, and water connection are strongly related to food security. Through this work, we attempt to establish the baseline evidence on the current status of food security in Bengaluru, to lay the foundation for a future research agenda on urban food security in India.

This paper examines the capacity of community-based planning to address two aspects of urban poverty in Southeast Asia: first, the local, material manifestations of household poverty, including inadequate housing and lack of access to infrastructure and services; and second, the structures and forces that create and sustain poverty, including the state’s land management systems and the actions of powerful political and economic elites. Building on literature about collective action and social movements, the article presents case studies of informal settlements in Chiang Mai, Thailand; Phnom Penh, Cambodia; and Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Each case study considers the organizational setting, the nature of the community’s housing and built environment, and community-level collective action. The article finds that, under optimal conditions, communities use collective action to address their material poverty, but not the broader social, political and economic forces that create and sustain poverty.

‘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.

Over the last three decades, Windhoek, Namibia has grown substantially. In line with the general urban growth, Windhoek’s informal settlements have expanded, making it ever more pressing to secure basic services and suitable housing for residents of these settlements. This paper, drawing from the author’s PhD completed at the University of Manchester in 2013, documents how one social movement, the Shack Dwellers Federation of Namibia (SDFN), has challenged and collaborated with the City of Windhoek to improve living conditions. The analysis draws on varied data sources – including extensive interviews with government and federation representatives, the SDFN’s own data, and maps showing the spatial transformation of the city – to trace the recent history of co-production in Windhoek. The continuing marginalization of the city’s informal settlement dwellers points to a need for reimagining Windhoek’s residential development and integrating this into planning, as well as working with social movements like the SDFN to ensure that reforms are grounded in local realities and reflect the aspirations of those on the city’s northwest fringe.

Drawing on interviews and ethnographic observation, this article examines how poor African American mothers in Houston, Texas, experience seeking help from the safety net, focusing on mothers’ perceptions and interpretation of the application process. Compared to welfare, seeking help from nonprofits and churches involved little formal surveillance and there was no punitive mechanism involved if mothers did not adhere to the minimal conditions required for participation. Mothers framed this as a preferable option to welfare, which they characterized as intrusive and punitive. However, the absence of formal surveillance practices in nonprofits did not mitigate the need to discern between the deserving and undeserving poor, nor did it ameliorate women’s sense of stigma around seeking help. Mothers were thus ambivalent about utilizing these resources. Further, it was mothers, not welfare caseworkers, who sometimes took on a surveilling role in these settings, scrutinizing themselves and other women and distancing themselves from those they deemed as undeserving. By taking up the same cultural logics of deservingness produced through welfare surveillance and applying them elsewhere, mothers were able to shore up their own sense of personhood and moral worthiness in an environment that threatened both. Yet, the strategies mothers used to distance themselves from others they cast as undeserving may unintentionally reproduce the notion that poor people must be scrutinized when seeking assistance. This logic reinforces the rationale for the surveillance mothers lament and resist in the welfare system.

This paper examines U.S. anthropologist Oscar Lewis’s research in Mexico City in the 1950s to reflect on how urban poverty has been construed in the United States and Latin America in the twentieth...

In India, a new approach to finance has been transforming shelter options for low-income households and supporting community-led development over recent decades. This paper examines the financial architecture developed to support hundreds of community-driven efforts by grassroots groups working in alliance with the Mumbai-based NGO SPARC. Much has been written about this Alliance’s work, but its financial architecture has had little attention. This paper seeks to explain how grants given for grassroots community development in urban areas can produce new forms of entrepreneurial behaviour among the urban poor, showing how they can design and execute large projects with the expertise gained from more modest efforts. It also shows how this Alliance has managed, invested and revolved these grants and other sources of funding, including its own savings, to leverage resources and opportunities for inclusive city development.

Urban poverty in most of the developing world is considered a spillover of rural poverty. With increasing pace of development in these countries, urban settlements are assimilating migrants searching for better livelihood opportunities and who could be vulnerable and poor in the urban settlements. This article empirically assesses the levels of urban poverty in India at the disaggregated level and examines how recent growth episode has impacted poverty reduction. This article finds that growth in general has been reducing poverty, but its effect in reducing poverty over different geographical domain has not been uniform. We find that rising inequality is playing a significant role in differential reduction of urban poverty in India and in its states.

Drawing on over two years of ethnographic fieldwork, this article demonstrates how violence shapes relations between black and Latino youth in the poorest neighborhoods of South Los Angeles. Most academic work views interracial relations as a cause of conflict and violence. My work reverses the causal arrow and looks at violence as a central force in creating and shaping interracial relations. My findings build on Roger Gould’s theory of group solidarity by demonstrating how violence is a central precondition in shaping group identity. I revisit the concept of interracial avoidance between blacks and Latinos, and its connections to violence, group identity, and interracial relations and explain its role within what I call alternative governance, which consists of avoidance, protection, and negotiation.

If we want to build authentic evidence-based policy, we need a strong descriptive foundation of evidence on the everyday experience of poverty. The National Poverty Study (NPS), which is currently in development, provides this foundation with a new “qualitative census” of the everyday conditions of poverty in rural, suburban, and urban sites. The NPS will allow us to build new evidence-based theories of poverty, evaluate and improve existing place-based antipoverty policies, validate official poverty measures, and assist local communities in improving the safety net for vulnerable populations.

Poverty has a strong relationship to geography in the United States. Previous research has found that rural areas have higher average poverty rates than urban areas, but the new supplemental poverty measure (SPM) has shown in recent years that urban areas have higher average poverty. In this article, we analyze poverty trends from 1967 to 2014 in rural and urban America, using the improved SPM metrics. We find a dramatic decline in poverty in rural areas, and also show that the geographic adjustment of the poverty threshold in the SPM (which lowers poverty thresholds in less expensive areas and raises them in more expensive areas) is an important explanatory factor. We also find that changes in the demographic and economic characteristics of rural and urban residents help to explain the decline. Last, we investigate whether migration of the poor between rural and urban areas helps to account for differential poverty trends, but we find little evidence in support of that hypothesis.

Hygiene plays a key role in tipping the balance towards reduction of diarrhoeal and other infectious diseases. Yet it has often been overlooked, positioned as a “supporting rider” of water supply and sanitation services, or narrowly understood as handwashing. By focusing on handwashing infrastructure as proposed for the monitoring of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6, development actors might miss the opportunity of capturing hygiene practices that are socially embedded and can act as a catalyst for change and risk reduction. We develop this argument by presenting an in-depth examination of hygiene practices in a low-income neighbourhood of Lilongwe, Malawi. Despite the high poverty levels and the constant water shortages in the area, a number of water-intensive hygiene practices are consistently carried out, proving that hygiene is central to residents’ everyday lives. Development projects should start by identifying these practices and by reflecting on the extent that these already work or can be made to work for reducing health-related risks.

This article explores the issue of urban management in the face of ‘informal’ or illegal commercial practices in Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe. It captures the deep-rooted presence of touts who have, for years now, been controlling public spaces of terminals in Harare’s Central Business District. The article is based on narratives from newspapers, radio and comments by stakeholders and aided by theoretical explanations derived from literature review. The western theory of travelling does not differ much from that of Africa only in so much increasing ‘informality’ has distorted it greatly. It has been noted that the major problem is an institutional one yet, the mismanagement of space has overarching challenges for different stakeholders of the city, including passengers and commuter omnibus operators. The article concludes by saying that without the necessary back-up systems, it is a waste of time and resources to embark on aggressive clean-up campaigns of the city. In this case, Harare has no option but to fully ‘capitalise’ its management and develop control mechanisms if the unruliness and distortions posed by touts is to be curbed substantially.

While poor families experience high residential instability, they also stay put for extended periods of time before moving. When they do move, they are likely to move laterally to a similarly disadvantaged place. These two processes—staying in place and churning—amount to “horizontal immobility.” Why do people get stuck in disadvantaged environments? Prevailing understandings focus on constraints to residential choice, but even under limitations, families make active residential decisions. Drawing on fieldwork with 50 renters in a low-income, high-crime Baltimore neighborhood, this article proposes that neighborhoods themselves shape narratives governing residential decision-making. In high-crime neighborhoods, renters stay put as long as they can craft a story that justifies remaining. But when the narrative is ruptured by violent events, residents are pushed to action, often a move. The logic behind these moves is motivated by a desire to restore a sense of safety. The concept of “narrative rupture” sheds light on when a family decides to move, representing a mechanism for how residential decisions are shaped by neighborhood forces to reproduce poverty. This concept also contributes to theories of how culture shapes action: we are most likely to act when the narratives supporting our current course of action break down.

This article further develops understandings of urban riot as a social and political symptom to consider the riot as a situated and situating biographical moment, a personal experience which is both signifying and significant. It argues for a paired understanding of riots as a set of physical incarnated (re)actions and as ‘total social fact’ – involving ‘society as a whole’ and putting its institutions at work ‘all together and at once’ (Mauss, 1950). It switches from ‘urban riots’ as a descriptive notion to total rioting as an analytical tool. Total rioting consists of intertwined social upheavals and exchanges, writ through the metaphysical, sociological, poetical and political. It assembles people of a particular kind forever, hence manufacturing social solidarities and subjectivities. As a particular response to specific problems, it reveals how a contemporary state of metaphysical, social and political insecurity generates new forms of empowering projections and intimate policies; and why what is destroyed is precisely what matters. As an attempt to make and unmake society at the same time, it has become the pinnacle of a paradoxical political socialization process. Being less a language for a broader political communication than an insider trading activity, its long-term outcomes reshape the politics of recognition and claims for visibility.

Over the last four decades, the United States’ criminal justice system has undergone a historic expansion, which has disproportionately impacted poor urban neighborhoods. The meteoric rise in the percentage of the urban poor either on their way to, in, or recently released from jail or prison has led a number of scholars to theorize a “fusion of ghetto and prison culture” (Wacquant 2001). The exact sources and contours of this fusion, however, remain unspecified. How, concretely, are the cultural contexts of prisons transmitted to poor urban neighborhoods? This article proposes that intergenerational socialization is a key mechanism in this process. We contend that the dramatic expansion of the criminal justice system over the last four decades has given rise to an unexpected and peculiar form of socialization, provided by a new social actor—what we term the “prisonized old head.” We define the prisonized old head as an individual who exhibits three particular characteristics. They are (1) older individuals with extensive experiences in, and wisdom about, the criminal justice system; who (2) informally socialize neighborhood residents to embrace the cultural schemas and routines learned inside penal spaces; to (3) navigate the daily exigencies routinely faced in the neighborhood context. Stated simply, prisonized old heads leverage ways of life developed “on the inside” as strategies for living life “on the outside.” We articulate the emergence, mechanisms, and implications of this form of socialization drawing on fieldwork data in Los Angeless’ Skid Row neighborhood—one of the premier reentry communities in the United States. We show that although this socialization may contribute to desistance and self-transformation, it can simultaneously constrain upward mobility and limit reintegration.

Slum rehabilitation programs in economically developing countries are designed to improve housing and enhance residents’ health and well-being. Yet no empirical research has directly investigated these objectives. Housing quality was assessed by trained raters on a walk-through among women in public housing as well as those currently in slums on wait-lists to relocate to public housing. Standardized, self-report measures of mental and physical health, quality of life, along with social ties in the neighborhood were assessed. Women who moved from slum housing to public housing manifest better physical and mental health but diminished social ties in comparison with women remaining in slum areas. Furthermore, housing quality, assessed by trained raters, largely explained the differences in health between the two groups. These quasi-experimental findings suggest that housing quality can enhance health and well-being of women, but that care must be taken to promote the maintenance of social capital following resettlement.

For over two decades, Adolph Reed has offered a compelling, contrarian view of urban poverty through his writings on the “underclass.” This article shows the distinctiveness of Reed’s account: his emphasis on the “underclass” as a political classification rather than as an economic or political condition, his focus on relationships among groups rather than on the deficiencies of one group, and his attention to how seemingly anti-poverty constituencies, in fact, reinforce the “underclass” idea.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted during recess and lunch in a primary school sited in a deprived Palermitan neighbourhood, this paper sheds light on the (dis)functioning of food pedagogies in a school on the fringes of society. During recess, teachers use food rules to highlight transgressions, but not to improve food literacy. Likewise, their efforts during lunchtime are devoted solely to keeping children under control, while trying to get to the end of lunch as soon as possible. Ultimately, both eating occasions are seldom opportunities for food education, as teachers’ primary focus is on preventing or halting children’s restlessness and skirmishes. I conclude by outlining some limitations and strengths of the ethnography while reflecting on the findings vis-à-vis previous fieldwork I conducted in less challenging contexts.

Urban poverty and social exclusion is rarely the outcome of a single phenomenon. It results from a diversity of factors, including socio-economic patterns, discrimination, access to housing, the built form, transportation and social networks, often in connection with institutional breakdowns. To understand this challenge, with a particular emphasis on the role of public institutions in resolving or exacerbating these issues, this article, based on an ESPON Territorial Indicators of Poverty and Social Exclusion case study, focuses on the municipality of Botkyrka, located in the Stockholm Region. It had the lowest median income in 2010 and among the highest municipal concentrations of persons with a foreign background in the region, but has also seen dramatic improvements over the past decade. Through an review of relevant municipal and regional documents, in-depth interviews and on-site investigation, this article analyses poverty and social exclusion challenges through the lens of social exclusion and just city theory. In doing so, a focus on the role of institutions in mitigating these issues is offered. The paper concludes with a discussion of positive measures undertaken locally, with recognition of multiple levels of governance, and their transferability within Europe and beyond.

The language that global justice theorists use to characterize global poverty, the terms of duty and charity, are detached discourses that fail to capture the reality of poverty as most people currently experience it, as slum dwellers living on the outskirts of the world’s megacities. In contrast, the language of alienation better captures the experience of global, urban poverty. This article’s aim is to draw from Hannah Arendt to form a new idea of alienation that responds to the specific conditions of urban, global poverty. Arendt posits alienation in terms of the ‘loss of the world’: the deprivation of durable material structures and lasting institutions that are the preconditions for political speech and action. The language of alienation evidences how the problem of poverty is one of a lack of meaningful work, the kind of work that creates a livable world.

This article presents findings from an ethnographic study of prisoner reentry programming in a large Midwestern city to better understand the strategies reentry organizations employ to ‘rehabilitate’ prisoners and the ways in which those strategies articulate with larger social policy processes. Prisoner reentry is a hybrid welfare state–criminal justice institution. As the rehabilitative strategy of choice in the current age, the ascendance and proliferation of reentry services throughout low income communities of color represents the long standing collusion between social welfare and criminal justice actors to manage marginalized populations and a formal reconfiguration of the state, altering its scope, reach and consequence in the lives of the urban poor. I detail the experiences of former prisoners participating in reentry services and discuss the implications of the ascendance of prisoner reentry for race relations, punishment, and social welfare policy in the United States.

An empirical analysis of the lived experiences of more than 2,000 households in different Bangalore slums shows how migration patterns, living conditions, livelihood strategies and prospects for the future vary widely across distinct types of slums that were initially identified from satellite images and studied over a 10-year period. Shocks and responses vary in nature and intensity, and coping and accumulative strategies diverge across slum types. More fine-grained policy analyses that recognize this diversity of slum types will help people deal with shocks and increase resilience more effectively.

Although tenant evictions are routine in impoverished urban communities throughout the USA, scholars of housing and urban poverty have consistently overlooked this social problem. Drawing predominantly upon participant observation on eviction crews in Baltimore, this study examines the social drama of eviction, focusing upon the orchestration and execution of the court-ordered physical removal of tenants and their property. I find that property managers delegate the ‘dirty work’ of dispossession to a dispossessed population and that laborers on eviction crews tend to differentiate and distance themselves from the people they are evicting, adopting the dominant belief that eviction is rooted in the individual, moral deficiencies of the tenant. These findings reveal that those who are excluded from the American ‘paradigm of propertied citizenship’ – the homeless – are used to enforce, and serve to legitimate, that very paradigm. I argue that evictions entail a circle of dispossession, reproduced both materially and ideologically.

This paper reviews and assesses how urban poverty in Zambia is defined and measured by the government, using data from the Jesuit Centre for Theological Reflection (JCTR). It shows the often dramatic differences in the scale and nature of urban poverty, depending on what poverty measurements are chosen and applied. Applying the government poverty line, which takes no account of differences in costs between rural and urban areas, shows the incidence of urban poverty falling from 49 per cent in 1991 to 27.5 per cent in 2010; but a food basket based on what urban households eat is twice the cost of the food basket used in the official poverty line. In addition, as the paper describes, what urban poor households pay for food is often particularly high as they cannot buy in bulk. The official poverty line’s allowance for housing costs is based on what low-income groups spend on housing, not on the costs of the cheapest reasonable quality accommodation. The JCTR estimate for the cost of essential non-food needs is twice that in the official poverty line, and the JCTR review of house prices shows that the cost of “adequate” housing in cities is far higher than the allowance for housing in poverty lines. The paper also discusses other reasons why official poverty lines understate urban poverty, including neglecting the costs low-income groups face for transport, health care and keeping their children in school.

This project examines violent victimisation and offending in poor urban neighbourhoods in Nairobi, Kenya. Using data from the 2000 Nairobi Cross-sectional Slum Survey (NCSS), the study assesses neighbourhood characteristics utilising the foundation from US-based neighbourhood effect research. Results from multilevel models demonstrate that social disorganisation theory and neighbourhood effect research can work as a framework for studying neighbourhood-level processes and public safety in the rapidly urbanising region of sub-Saharan Africa. However, important exceptions exist. A robust and positive relationship between residential stability and violent victimisation by strangers was found. This relationship between residential stability and personal victimisation, in addition to a positive association between household-level residential stability and family violence, shows support for the negative effects associated with poverty traps in urban Africa. Neighbourhood characteristics matter for public safety in Nairobi, but frameworks for examining neighbourhood effects must consider the context of chronically poor neighbourhoods in urban Africa.

We use unique data from the Boston Non–Profit Organizations Study, an innovative survey containing rich information on organizational participation across seven social domains in two Boston neighborhoods, to examine the relationship between ethnic diversity and participation in local organizations. In particular, we identify neighborhood–based social ties as a key mechanism mediating the initial negative association between diversity and participation. In contrast to previous work, we measure participation using both the domain–based and group–based approach, with the former approach uncovering a wider range of organizational connections that are often missed in the latter approach. We also investigate the relationship between interpersonal ties and organizational ties, documenting how primary involvement with an organization facilitates the development of further interpersonal ties and secondary forms of organizational involvement. We then discuss implications of our findings for urban poverty research.

This paper calculates select urban inequality and poverty indices and finds their policy linkages. In addition, the determinants of urban poverty and inequality are estimated by using data of 52 large cities in India. The main results show that higher city economic growth and large city population agglomeration are associated with reduction in city poverty and increase in inequality between cities.

This paper describes the Asian Coalition for Community Action (ACCA) programme that was initiated by the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights (ACHR) in 2009. ACCA seeks to catalyze and support community initiatives, citywide upgrading and partnerships between community organizations and local governments. By January 2012, it had helped fund initiatives in 708 settlements in 153 cities in 19 different Asian nations. In each city, small grants support community-led initiatives that encourage citywide networks to form, where members share skills with each other and learn to negotiate with their local governments. Further support was available as local governments engaged and then came to support this process, including the formation of jointly managed community development funds. The paper also describes how the design of ACCA drew on earlier work, and ends with a reflection on what has been learnt with regard to more effective ways of reducing urban poverty. This explores the two underlying dimensions: first, the creation of institutions based on relations of reciprocity; and second, the strengthening of relations between low-income community organizations such that they can create a synergy with the state. One key lesson is the need for financial systems that allow the urban poor to be the key agents in addressing their problems and in bringing in city governments to work with them. This collaboration can lead to the urban poor being recognized as legitimate and highly productive residents and citizens of the city.

This paper describes five examples of mapping and enumerating poor informal Roma settlements in Serbia, implemented in the last decade by non-governmental organizations and Roma associations as a prelude to different upgrading projects. Their contexts, processes and outcomes are discussed and their common patterns and approaches are summarized. The characteristics and types of Roma settlements are described within the framework of the Roma’s poverty and social exclusion and the lack of adequate responses by national and local authorities to the difficult housing situation in Roma settlements. This paper considers ways of overcoming the gap between the need for reliable mapping and enumeration data and the actual situation, where informal Roma settlements are neither put on official maps in Serbia nor included in formal records, unlike other city areas.

This study draws upon ethnographic data from a group of homeless persons residing in a 24-hour donut shop that doubles nightly as an ersatz shelter. This article examines the role of ‘urban hybrid spaces’ – spaces that serve dual roles as legitimate business establishment and homeless habitation or hangout – in facilitating the construction and enactment of more dignified identities for the unhoused. Ethnographic data depict the strategies by which unhoused individuals utilize an urban hybrid space to verbally, symbolically, and performatively assert and maintain a ‘patron identity’ – understood as someone who is housed, employed, autonomous, occupies the donut shop legitimately, and associates with other such people. I argue that this identity is uniquely facilitated by the social and physical context provided by the donut shop qua private business.

This paper is influenced by Sue Hendler’s concerns about the interlinked issues of feminism, ethics and social justice in planning. It uses a feminist-inspired ‘everyday life’ framework to explore the implication of recent settlement planning on the lives of urban poor people in Delhi. The work argues that, at the very least, planners need to understand the everyday lives of the urban poor if they are to execute socially just decision making in the planning of new settlements for them. Moreover, it suggests that using feminist approaches to planning may provide a more ethical starting point in a context of what Watson (2003) identifies as the ‘conflicting rationales’ between different groups in the urban arena.

In recent years, some advocates for social equity have sought to develop new solutions to urban poverty and build new forms of political power at a metropolitan or regional scale. The evolution of American urban areas into sprawling megaregions raises a concern that these “regional equity” advocates today may be facing the same dilemma as urban reformers in the 1960s: They are arriving to a new policy table just as the scale of the economy is shifting up and out. In trying to assess how the potential emergence of megaregions affects opportunities for addressing equity, the authors examine the Northern and Southern California megaregions and argue that “thinking megaregionally” may help to identify some new issues for equity organizing, but there are important challenges: (1) the issues most likely to gain traction at a megaregional scale seem to be primarily related to infrastructure and the environment and may not have the immediacy usually associated with successful mobilization of constituencies and (2) even if the issues are megaregional, the policy levers are likely to be local, state, and federal, rendering the megaregional scale less immediate in a policy sense as well. The authors nonetheless suggest that there may be growing opportunities in the years to come, and analysts concerned with equity and social movement may want to conduct further research in this area.

This paper explores the strategic use of sexual relationships in bolstering the economic well-being of young low-income women and men in The Gambia, West Africa. While other studies of sexuality in sub-Saharan Africa and beyond have demonstrated the importance of intimate (and often cross-generational) relationships for young women as a means of accessing resources, less is known in this regard about their male counterparts. This study points to the increasingly prominent place of cross-generational relationships, related to international tourism, in the livelihood strategies of young men struggling for employment in a constrained labour market. For poor young Gambian women and men, resource scarcity seems to be associated with a prioritization of the instrumental and material over the affective or recreational value of sexual partnerships, often resulting in multiple, concurrent relations. However, manifold considerations come into play in the relationship decisions of young women and men, indicating the importance of close attention to social and cultural as well as economic factors.

This paper analyzes at the level of space the invention and management of homelessness in postsocialist cities. Based on more than a year of ethnographic fieldwork in a nongovernmental organization (NGO) that provides shelter space in Bucharest, Romania, this paper foregrounds the political significance of placing homeless populations to better understand neoliberal governance as a set of spatially minded practices, arguing (ultimately) that space is a key domain through which homeless populations become managed. This paper, in the end, focuses on ‘the place’ of homelessness to bring the dynamics of postsocialist liberalization into clearer relief.

What constitutes a ‘slum’ is much debated in the urban poverty and affordable housing literature. We argue that a focus on living conditions can help clarify this and present a framework, the living conditions diamond, for detailing living conditions and determining how the settlements we deem ‘slums’ compare with each other and with nonslum settlements. The diamond distils living conditions into four dimensions: (i) tenure, (ii) infrastructure, (iii) unit quality, and (iv) neighbourhood and location. This framework depicts conditions in graphic terms enabling comparison of conditions within and across cities. The diamond moves us beyond the notion that slums are homogeneously poor in quality, and facilitates analyses that can reveal why they differ. Settlements in Nairobi, Kenya and Dakar, Senegal are compared.

Poverty is a multidimensional concept and cannot be defined unidimensionally. Poverty means non-fulfilment of the human right to a range of basic capabilities, e.g. nourishment, shelter, education, security, justice, earning a livelihood One of the important components of the right to live with dignity and also a significant constituent of the right to equality is the right to adequate housing. Homeless population with unique problems is the best representative of poverty. The present study has identified the poor in relation to the houseless population, as they have been denied their basic right to shelter due to the absence of housing and lack and complete denial of civic amenities to them, which enhances deprivation and poverty in urban areas. It was this basic idea that a need to conduct a snapshot survey of the homeless population in Ludhiana was considered vital. CRRID team carried out the study in all twelve areas of high concentration of the homeless population in Ludhiana.

This paper investigates the extent of political participation of the urban poor in Dhaka, identifying the actors with whom the urban poor interact for problem solving and gaining access to services. Through a comparison of the different experiences of "active" and "non-active" poor residents across two wards, the research identifies barriers to effective political participation; it then considers how opportunities for participation can be advanced. The experience of the Coalition for the Urban Poor's (CUP) Basti Basheer Odhikar Surakha Committee (BOSC) illustrates how collective mobilization of the poor has been successful in incorporating the urban poor into municipal governance. However, alongside its successes, the research investigates constraints to such initiatives in terms of securing national commitment to urban poverty reduction. © 2008 International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED).