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THE URBANISATION
OF POVERTY
source:
www.unchs.org/mediacentre/
documents/backgrounder6.doc
John Sunil Soren, “Urbanization: Meeting the Challenge”
[ www.nhb.org.in/Publications/
hNews_jun2003_Articles.htm]
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The current scale of urbanisation is unprecedented in history. Rapid urbanisation in developing countries could be rephrased ‘the urbanisation of poverty’... (1) - many developing countries experienced economic crises during the 1980s and 1990s. Consequently, poverty has spread as wages have fallen and the prices of goods and services have risen;
- the World Bank estimates that, worldwide, 30% of poor people live in urban areas. The proportion is projected to reach 40% by 2020 and 50% by 2035. The indicators used to define poverty (US$1-2/day), however, pay little attention to differences in the expenditure patterns of different groups of the poor (in particular, between rural and urban areas); (2)
- national studies in many of the poorest African, Asian and Latin American countries suggest that more than 50% of the urban population are below the poverty line. According to UH-Habitat figures, 40% of African urban households and 25% of Latin American urban households are living below the locally defined poverty lines;
- Sub-Saharan Africa has some of the world's highest levels of urban poverty, reaching over 50% of the urban populations in Chad, Niger and Sierra Leone;
- in Asia the highest percentages of urban poverty are in India at 30% and Mongolia at 38%;
- poorer people are regularly treated as 2nd class citizens, or as ‘illegals’, as if somehow they have no right to live in cities. Most of those - born into cities or moving from the countryside in search of a better life face incredible hardship. For hundreds of millions of poor urban dwellers, cities represent long hours of work for little pay, living in cramped and overcrowded slums or squats, vulnerable to disasters, disease and violence;
- most urban poverty, in fact, results not from unemployment but instead from the lack of well-paying steady jobs. The unemployment rate itself is relatively low in urban areas of most developing countries. For example, in 155 surveyed cities in developing countries 3/4 had unemployment rates at or below 15%;
- in 30 of 40 developing countries surveyed by the International Labor Organization (ILO) in 1999, employment in the urban informal sector constituted over 1/3 of total urban employment;
- 1/4 of all urban housing units in developing countries are temporary structures and more than 1/3 do not conform to building regulations. An estimated 20 million to 40 million urban families are homeless;
- estimates from various countries show that it would take low-income households 15 to 30 years of saving 30% to 50% of their income to afford a house meeting regulatory norms and minimum standards;
- 2/3 of all urban dwellers in Africa are thought to live in slum and squatter settlements;
- people in slums often pay more for services that other urban residents and they receive services of lower quality. In Istanbul, for example, water from private vendors costs 10 times the public rate while in Mumbai vendors charge 20 times more. Poor households often spend 5% to 10% of their incomes to buy water;
- perversely, most poor city dwellers survive in spite of the formal systems that are supposed to help them. When policy makers and officials misunderstand the positive contribution poorer people make to cities, the poorest suffer the most, through forced evictions, denial of land, services and rights, of protection from crime, and political manipulation. The effects can be widespread. Badly run cities, i.e. those that do not embrace the positive contributions all its citizens make, have implications for entire nations. They hinder investments, waste resources, destroy environments and engulf rural societies through unplanned expansion; (1)
- today, there is a growing awareness of the emerging significance of urban poverty. Many analysts believe that the locus of poverty and under-nutrition is gradually shifting from rural to urban areas. However, according to Diana Mitlin’s survey on the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) of 23 countries – see a data sample hereafter - urban poverty seems to have been relatively ignored by development specialists for long time. (3)
(1) David Sanderson, “The urbanisation of poverty”, CARE International UK, September 2002 [ www.careinternational.org.uk/resource_
centre/urban/urbanisation_of_poverty.doc]
(2) The 1999/2000 World Development Report (World Bank, 1999) suggested that there were 495 million ‘urban poor’ by the year 2000, which means that three-quarters of the urban population are ‘not poor’. The World Bank’s world poverty counts use an international poverty lines of approximately US$1and US$2 -a-day at 1995 international purchasing power parity (PPP) prices. These figures do not fit with the many national and city studies which show that one- third to one-half of a nation’s urban population or a city’s population have incomes too low to allow them to meet their needs.
(3) Diana Mitlin, “Understanding Urban Poverty. What the Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers tell us”, IIED, Human Settlements Programme, Series Working Papers 13, 2004. [ www.iied.org/urban/pubs/urbn_pov.html]
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