Slums

Some highlights from the UN report on slums

• Some 923,986,000 people, or 31.6 per cent of the world’s total urban population, live in slums; some 43 per cent of the urban population of all developing regions combined live in slums; some 78.2 per cent of the urban population in the least developed countries live in slums; some six per cent of the urban population in developed regions live in slum-like conditions.
• The total number of slum-dwellers in the world increased by about 36 per cent during the 1990s and in the next 30 years, the global number of slum-dwellers will increase to about two billion if no concerted action to address the challenge of slums is taken.
• More than 41 per cent of Kolkata’s (Calcutta) slum households have lived in slums for more than 30 years.
• In most African cities between 40 per cent and 70 per cent of the population lives in slums or squatter settlements. Many African cities will be doubling their population within two decades. In a city like Nairobi, 60 per cent of the population lives in slums which occupy about five per cent of the land.
• While most slum-dwellers depend on the informal sector for their livelihoods, slum populations in many parts of the world (for example in Pune, India and Ibadan, Nigeria) quite often include university lecturers, university students, government civil servants and formal private sector employees.
• About one out of every four countries in the developing world has laws that contain clauses that impede women owning land and taking mortgages in their own names.
• All slum households in Bangkok have a colour television.
• Slums are also places in which the vibrant mixing of different cultures has frequently resulted in new forms of artistic expression, including some of the major musical and dance movements of the 20th Century, such as jazz, blues, rock and roll, reggae, funk, hiphop, soukuss, breakdance, fado and flamenco.
http://www.citymayors.com/report/slums.html#Anchor-Some-47857