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COVID-19 pandemic has brought significant adverse impacts, in all ramifications, to the Nigerian society, especially in worsening the hunger situation resulting from the distortion of the urban foo...

The Government of India has been taking various steps towards identification of the poor (and vulnerable through the Socio Economic Caste Census) and measurement of poverty with the help of various Expert Groups right from the Task Force that was set up in 1962 to the Task Force on Poverty Elimination of the NITI Aayog. There have been many researchers as well who have been suggesting the ways in which the poor and vulnerable can be identified and poverty can be measured besides the suggestions given by the Expert Groups. However, it may be considered as a ‘national shame’ if we are unable to identify the needy even after 75 years of independence. Through the review of around 100 books, research papers and articles, an attempt has been to understand the strengths and shortcomings of suggested ways to identify the poor and vulnerable and suggest a comprehensive methodology to identify the needy. Unless we are able to identify the poor and vulnerable sections of society correctly, planning and implementing poverty alleviation programmes for “ending poverty in all its forms everywhere”1 would be a futile exercise!

Gender-based structural inequalities in Southern African cities continue to drive poverty and food insecurity in spite of decades of development efforts to raise the social, economic, and political...

Informality within the urban planning practice in developing countries is no longer synonymous to the prevalence of urban poverty but rather also associated with various forms of power and wealth a...

Urbanisation has created a disparity between the standard of living in urban and rural areas. Subsequently, more and more people are migrating from the rural areas to the urban areas due to the lure of wider economic opportunities and greater access to infrastructure and facilities. Unfortunately, massive urban migration gradually limited economic opportunities for migrants, and this has led to wide-spread urban poverty. This article will explain the phenomenon of urban poverty and discuss urban poverty eradication from an Islamic perspective. This study employs the qualitative approach by applying the inductive, deductive and comparative content analysis method where the primary data are derived from library research, as well as from previous studies. The study found that the authority and community both play an important role in addressing urban poverty. This can be addressed through several measures of poverty eradication implemented in Islam, which include correcting belief about the economy, ensuring a balance wealth distribution from the rich to the poor, and changing attitudes and motivation at the ground level. In this regard, the authority should focus on creating a balanced distribution of wealth, facilitating a strategic economic management plan, adopting priority-based economies, effective implementation of poverty eradication policies, adoption of growth strategies, improving basic facilities and focusing on institutional roles.

This essay focuses on three recent books that examine contemporary trends and policy responses to poverty and urban regeneration: Places in Need: The Changing Geography of Poverty, by Scott...

The proliferation of small arms and light weapons (SALW), their illegal use and its threat is felt by the populace, particularly those in the urban centres. The causes of the proliferation and its implications are centred on the urban centres. And though the literature on the subject of SALW is rich, very few, focus on urban centres. The chapter therefore focuses on the process of urbanisation in Africa, its nature and dynamics and and also examines its connection to and for, the proliferation of SALW. The political economy of urbanisation in Africa is characterised by socio-economic problems, leading to urban poverty, unemployment infrastructural problems, rising urban crime, violent urban conflicts, insecurity, ethnic and religious crisis and civil wars.

‘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.

This paper uses the city of Shanghai as a case study to analyze the changing institutional mechanisms for the new urban poverty stratum in China. Specifically, this paper examines urban poverty in relation to economic restructuring and the transformation of the welfare provision system in three stages of market reforms. In each stage, this paper will first examine the overall economic growth strategies at the national level, and then examine local government policy outcomes at the city level. This paper will further identify the impacts of institutional changes on urban poverty and social inequality. Finally, this paper will assess the current poverty reduction policies and propose a “social inclusion” framework to alleviate urban poverty in China. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

The survival strategies of migrant women living in urban poverty are embedded in urban food landscapes (‘foodscapes’) characterized by dynamic social relationships and mobility. Relying on interviews with 31 migrant women in Washington, DC, this paper traces the socio-spatial conditions of their urban foodscapes to show that urban environments inhabited by low-income migrants are dynamic, stretching across multiple neighborhoods as they move throughout the city with social networks to obtain affordable, quality, and culturally appropriate food. Investigating these foodscapes demonstrates the relational nature of food provisioning strategies thus providing a critique of simplistic explanations of hunger that treat food insecure residents as static, ignorant, and individual economic actors. These explanations risk producing equally simplistic and inefficient approaches to addressing food insecurity such as increasing mainstream consumption opportunities in so-called food deserts or focusing on nutrition education and individual choice without considering residents’ dynamic urban experiences. As a result, this paper argues that programmatic responses to insecure urban foodscapes should be developed that foster social and physical connectivity while better addressing structural causes of hunger.

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.

This paper shows that despite progress in reducing extreme poverty, little progress has been made in reducing the number of people living on between $1.25 and $2 a day and it provides updated estimates of rural and urban poverty for regions throughout the developing world. It then shows the dramatic growth in recent decades in government expenditures on social protection, defined broadly. Next it shows that social assistance coverage is lowest and amounts transferred the smallest in parts of the world where poverty is most widespread. It shows that few households receive both social assistance and agricultural input subsidies. It concludes by summarizing levels and trends in poverty and social protection and identifying data gaps.

In a perspective shifting approach, Payne showed that tenure security exists on a continuum from weak to strong tenure rights, rather than as de facto versus de jure categories. This article examin...

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.

Rapid urbanisation has been an emerging issue in recent decades, particularly for developing countries such as Bangladesh. As one of world’s largest international NGOs, BRAC, based in Bangladesh, is transiting towards a more integrated approach for alleviating urban poverty. This article presents BRAC’s current journey for eradicating urban poverty and outlines the characteristics of urban poverty, key issues faced by the urban poor, and learning that BRAC has accumulated through its urban interventions. Introducing the concept of “coproduction”, the article identifies BRAC’s priorities to eradicate urban poverty within the context of an overall urban strategy.

In my investigation, two basic concepts of urban poverty will be utilized to examine public housing and ghettoization. It shall demonstrate how especially families of color were affected.

Urbanization and urban poverty have close linkage as the former creates the latter. The hasty urbanization in Bangladesh over the last 20 years has accelerated the growth of urban poverty in major cities. Therefore, this chapter presents a discussion on the intensity and extent of urbanization in Bangladesh from a historical perspective. While analyzing the situation of urbanization, different issues, including urban situation, urban growth, the proportion of urban population and share of GDP have been given special prominence. Moreover, the issue of urban poverty has been discussed, highlighting the growth and impact of urban poverty on the economy of the country.

Although the devastation from Haiti’s 2010 earthquake was concentrated in Port-au-Prince, it had deep agrarian roots. This paper situates Haiti’s urban poverty in the chronic exploitation of the co...

Este artículo aborda el tema de la pobreza urbana en su expresión territorial. Su objetivo es brindar ele- mentos conceptuales para la revisión de enfoques y estrategias de abordaje de la pobreza persistente y de su reversión por medio de políticas sociales de carácter universal. Para esto el trabajo toma aspec- tos de orden conceptual que revisan el abordaje y convenciones sobre la pobreza como categoría de análisis e intervención. En este sentido se aporta una suerte de caracterización de los enfoques do- minantes y principales debates sobre la orientación de los programas sociales en las dos últimas décadas. En un segundo momento el texto desarrolla orien- taciones sobre el enfoque situacional del abordaje de la pobreza urbana, identifcando atributos de las políticas para actuar en los territorios complejos como son las villas y asentamientos más pobres. Finalmente se hace un avance sobre la problemá- tica de accesibilidad, como un eslabón clave en el proceso de implementación de las políticas sociales que se proponen llegar a los hogares que padecen pobreza persistente y que tienen como particulari- dad una alta dependencia del Estado para atender sus necesidades más básicas.

The urban concentration of deprived masses is the basic mechanism for the reproduction of social disadvantage: “space matters” indeed. Although large areas of chronic rural poverty exist, especially in the less developed countries, it’s the urban character that has mostly attracted the academic as well as political attention to poverty in industrialized countries. Moreover, it was in the urban context that the concept of absolute and relative poverty had been set as a universal standard to estimate the extension of the phenomena. Furthermore, the social and economic transformation of the last few decades has led to the reemergence of severe forms of impoverishment in practically all cities in the industrialized world helping to maintain this focus

Urban population growth in Nigeria—in both absolute and relative terms—has been supplemented by opportunities and challenges for urban dwellers. Nigerian cities have functioned as the engines of economic growth. However, frequently unplanned and unprecedented physical growth, combined with tenure insecurity and the proliferation of urban poverty, have given rise to complex linkages between spatial expansion and urban risk and crime. This chapter makes the link between urbanisation and Nigeria’s crime challenge. It provides a review of historical and contemporary process of urbanisation in Nigeria and expands on the debates about the underlying causes. It also discusses the characteristics of the transformative role of urbanisation and its accompanying challenges. The chapter concludes by explaining the nexus between trend and pace of urbanisation and Nigeria’s crime challenge.

This paper revisits an important analysis of enterprise zones (EZs) by Ham et al. (2011), who report substantial poverty reductions from state and federal EZs, as well as improvements in other labor market outcomes. In our re-analysis, we find that a data error accounts for a large share of the estimated impact of state EZs in reducing poverty. More generally, we find that both state and federal EZs appear to be endogenously selected based on prior changes in poverty and other labor market outcomes. Once we account for this selection, much of the evidence that state and federal EZs reduce poverty largely evaporates, as does most of the evidence for other beneficial effects of enterprise zones, with the main exception of some limited evidence for federal Empowerment Zones. Thus, we confirm the more widely-prevailing view that EZs – and especially state EZs – have for the most part been ineffective at reducing urban poverty or improving labor market outcomes in the United States.

Between 1820 and 1924, nearly thirty-six million immigrants entered the United States. Prior to the Civil War, the vast majority of immigrants were northern and western Europeans, though the West Coast received Chinese immigration from the late 1840s onward. In mid-century, the United States received an unprecedented influx of Irish and German immigrants, who included a large number of Catholics and the poor. At the turn of the 20th century, the major senders of immigrants shifted to southern and eastern Europe, and Asians and Mexicans made up a growing portion of newcomers. Throughout the long 19th century, urban settlement remained a popular option for immigrants, and they contributed to the social, cultural, political, economic, and physical growth of the cities they resided in. Foreign-born workers also provided much-needed labor for America’s industrial development. At the same time, intense nativism emerged in cities in opposition to the presence of foreigners, who appeared to be unfit for American society, threats to Americans’ jobs, or sources of urban problems such as poverty. Anti-immigrant sentiment resulted in the introduction of state and federal laws for preventing the immigration of undesirable foreigners, such as the poor, southern and eastern Europeans, and Asians. Cities constituted an integral part of the 19th-century American immigration experience.

The increasingly serious problem of urban poverty is becoming an important social problem affecting stable economic and social development. To solve this problem, since the beginning of the 1990s, the Chinese government has formulated and promulgated a series of urban pro-poor policies and initially established an urban anti-poverty action system. Many of the programs are, of course, still in the early stage of development, and need to be improved in many aspects such as the coverage, sources of funding, the level of institutionalization, coordination between projects and organizational management. The establishment of this system, however, has showed that the anti-poverty action in Chinese cities in recent years has gradually grown into an institutionalized anti-poverty policy system from temporary measures.

Historically poverty as a concept was considered to be a key factor to design social policy. The social development normally is concerned with socio-economic empowerment of the poor of the concerned society. It is always been a key issue for developing as well as developed countries, however the nature and treatment of issue varies. The treatment of poverty is different from society to society. In advanced countries, an individual who is unable to actively participate in society or has weak social network, environment, health and education etc. is considered to be poor. Financial empowerment is also considered to be important in these countries but it takes into account with other dimensions of poverty [Lyberak and Tinios (2005)]. However, in developing countries, policy focus is still on uni-dimensional definition of poverty where a single dimension either consumption or income is a strong factor that affects the standard of living of an individual [Wagle (2005)]. Though the multidimensional poverty concept is also getting attractiveness in these countries with a perception that an individual’ status in one dimension cannot represent his status in another dimension but still there remains dearth of policy-making. Another important transformation in the literature on poverty is seen in terms of identification of nexus of marginality, social exclusion and poverty [Ruth, et al. (2007); Zoran, et al. (2006); Whelan and Bartrand (2005)]

General consensus exists concerning the relevance of networks and space in poverty situations, despite a considerable dispute on the prominence of each element. While social-support and poverty debates highlight the joint importance of space and networks, the research agenda on contemporary communities suggests that networks have recently started replacing space in social integration. These debates mainly consider networks and ties normatively and are restricted to the global North, hampering the formulation of comparative interpretations and more theoretical conclusions. This article discusses the relationship between space, sociability and poverty, based on research results on networks of poor individuals in two major Brazilian metropolises -Salvador and Sao Paulo. Research indicates the existence of great heterogeneity in the networks of poor individuals, although with substantial differences, on average, to middle-class individuals. Certain types of networks and sociability are systematically associated with better living conditions, employment and income. Additionally, network mobilization by individuals presents important regularities associated with social mechanisms, understood as regular patterns that trigger or cause certain results. These mechanisms explain to a great extent the heterogeneity of networks, and mediate the individual's access to opportunities and everyday assistance. They therefore contribute decisively to the production (and reproduction) of urban poverty.

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.

This paper analyzes the effect of mass forced displacement on urban poverty in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The process of displacement in Bosnia and Herzegovina involved “forced evictions”, implying no choice in displacement decision, meaning that this type of rural-urban migration was not a rational decision driven by economic motives. Consequently, this can possibly lead to a larger incidence of poverty among displaced people. The paper starts with a discussion of the specific features of the process of forced displacement and their possibly different effect on urban poverty compared to voluntary migration, based on qualitative evidence collected through interviews with people who experienced forced displacement during the conflict in the 1990s. Then, the probit model of determinants of poverty, based on the Living Standards Measurement Survey data, was estimated in order to provide empirical evidence of the effect of mass forced displacement on urban poverty, as well as the difference in the poverty incidence among displaced people compared to voluntary migrants. The results suggest that consumption is significantly lower among displaced households, while incidence of poverty is not affected by displacement status. The evidence also contributes to the migration literature by providing specific results about the relationship between mass forced displacement and urban poverty.

Diana Mitlin and David Satterthwaite have been at the heart of debates in urban development for decades, and are widely regarded as vital sources of rigorous and thoughtful insight into the nature ...