Over 900 million people – one in six of all people – now live in urban slums. Millennium Development Goal (MDG) Target 11 calls for significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers by 2020. To achieve this and provide adequate alternatives to new slums forming, local and national governments and the international community need to work with urban poor people on upgrading slums and better urban design and planning.

As more and more people live in cities, the gap between incomes and rent levels is widening. ‘A Home in the City’, a report from the United Nations (UN) Millennium Project’s Task Force 8 brings together lessons from a three-year research project on improving the lives of slum dwellers. Half the world’s population will soon live in cities. In developing countries 43 percent of urban dwellers live in slums – and in least developed countries the figure is 78 percent.

Yet many states are reluctant to accept the extent of (and right to) urbanisation and fail to acknowledge how many of their citizens are denied access to water, sanitation, sufficient living space, habitable dwellings, secure tenure and employment. They are reluctant to legalise informal settlements or provide them with infrastructure and services. Poor urban residents, particularly those most recently arrived from rural areas, are treated as a temporary presence.

The authors show that:

• Statistics systematically under-report urban poverty. Cost-of-living adjustments are not made to income-poverty estimates and no effort is made to disaggregate statistics within urban areas, which would show a similarity in development indicators between rural and urban slum residents.
• Infrastructure variables such as access to water and sanitation and adequate shelter are inadequately defined.
• Forced eviction is never the solution – it does not remove slums and simply forces people to move elsewhere, typically in the same city.
• In many cities, poorly planned major urban infrastructure projects have increased the risks of eviction and made little provision for adequate, affordable and accessible resettlement.
• Benefits from informal activities in urban economies reach far beyond the city and contribute to rural and national development.

The UN estimates that US$ 18 billion of additional funding will be required yearly over the next 16 years, in order to achieve MDG Target 11. Most of this will have to come from domestic sources. Research shows that even very poor communities can contribute to upgrading their own housing. Through communal development funds, communities can also access required support from local and international sources. Cities in turn must offer a regulatory and policy environment that encourages both small and large-scale private sector initiatives.

Key recommendations from the UN Millennium Project task force on slums are:

• Legislate against forced evictions, provide security of tenure and ensure that building codes are enforceable and realistic: the state must ensure the availability of a sufficient amount of land to keep prices down and ensure that private transactions are transparent.
• Recognise that urban poor people are active agents, not passive beneficiaries or bystanders: governments and the private sector must encourage and work with representative local organisations of urban poor people to set MDG targets.
• Improve city governance: those in authority must be transparent, committed to equity and ensure that citizens are fully involved in planning, budget setting and overseeing programme development.
• Remove macroeconomic constraints and restrictions on public expenditure for capital investments aimed at improving the lives of poor people.
• Strengthen experience-sharing networks between local and international actors: there is scope to develop a partnership of ‘Millennium cities’ – formally committed to realising the MDGs through local poverty reduction strategies.

Source(s):
‘A Home in the City’ UN Millennium Project Task Force on Improving the Lives of Slum Dwellers’ by Pietro Garau, Elliot Sclar and Gabriella Carolini, January, 2005 Full document.

Funded by: UN Development Group

id21 Research Highlight: 14 November 2005

Further Information:
Pietro Garau and Elliot Sclar
UN Millennium Project Secretariat
One United Nations Plaza
21st floor Rm. 2160
New York, N.Y. 10017
USA

Tel: +1 (212) 906 5735
Fax: +1 (212) 906 6349
Contact the contributor: tf8info@unmillenniumproject.org

UN Millennium Project Taskforce 8

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