Cities without slums.

Faeces fill up the deep ditches that pockmark the unpaved streets of numerous slum cities in the industrializing world. Some 900 million slum dwellers the world over inhale the foul air and walk through the narrow lanes whose surface is splattered with fetid fluids and littered with plastic bags. Matchbox tenements line the winding lanes, where inhabitants daily battle buzzing flies and disease-injecting mosquitoes, and muddle through ever-migrating rural populations that live under these festering conditions.

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"The Challenge of Slums: Global Report on Human Settlements 2003"--the largest study ever done by the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-HABITAT)--found that urban slums were growing faster than expected. With the locus of global poverty shifting rapidly from rural areas to cities, almost one sixth of the world's population is already living in unhealthy areas, more often than not without water, sanitation or security. The report warns that if no concerted action is taken, the number of slum dwellers worldwide will rise to 2 billion over the next thirty years.

Despite all this the number of people moving to cities, especially in Africa. Latin America, Asia and in many parts of the Middle East, remains high. The huge increase in the world's urban and urban slum populations is a crisis of unprecedented magnitude.

"All of these people will need to be provided with shelter, employment and with urban services". Naison Mutizwa-Mangiza. Chief of the Policy Analysis. Synthesis and Dialogue Branch at the UN-HABITAT Monitoring and Research Division, told the UN Chronicle. Many cities are caught in a deep morass of haphazard growth and unplanned development of infrastructure, which analysts say is making some cities unable to cope with the increasing burden of population. "The stretched capacity of most urban economies in developing countries is unable to meet more than a fraction of these needs", Mr. Mutizwa-Mangiza said.

Although at this stage there are no specific global estimates of urban poverty, the report points out that the absolute numbers of poor and undernourished in urban areas are increasing, as is the share of urban areas in general poverty and malnutrition. Overall, half of the world's population--nearly 3 billion people--lives on less than $2 a day.

Similarly, globalization is another phenomenon, the report notes, bearing down on the expanding slums. As the forces of globalization eddy around the developing world, the opening up of economies may have offered opportunities for a few businesses and cities to grow. However, the report says, the new insecurities that globalization has created surpass its benefits, especially for the poor, who in the last decade have lost jobs, seen their land seized, paid more for basic services and suffer from an absence of a basic social infrastructure.

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Despite growing globalization, little if any of the wealth amassed by the rich has reached the poor, and this has only contributed to the increasing gap between the haves and the have-nots. The task for now is to unbind cities from slums. In its commitment to do so, world leaders in the United Nations Millennium Declaration made a pledge to improve the lives of 100 million slum dwellers by the year 2020. The solution lies in improving slums, as opposed to resettling slum dwellers. Relocating slums are known to have created problems in the past, with people returning to the same area in anticipation of better prospects for getting work. Upgrading of existing slums should be combined with policies that look at urban planning and management, as well as at low-income housing development, according to the report.

"This should include supply of sufficient and affordable serviced land for the gradual development of economically appropriate low-income housing by the poor themselves, thus preventing the emergence of more slums". Mr. Mutizwa-Mangiza said. At a broader national scale, decentralized urbanization strategies should be pursued, where possible, to ensure that rural-to-urban migration is spread more evenly, thus preventing the congestion in cities that account, in part, for the mushrooming of slums, he explained, adding that decentralized urbanization can only work if pursued within the framework of suitable national economic development policies, inclusive of poverty reduction.

A major key to reducing slums lies in providing water, sanitation, storm drainage, basic access to roads, and electricity at a satisfactory level. Although developing countries lack resources to build new infrastructure facilities. Mr. Mutizwa-Mangiza said that this should not be a problem, as upgrading does not involve home construction since the residents can do this themselves. They also offer optional loans for home improvements.

"With respect to the problem of limited resources, it has long been recognized that the poor play a key role in the improvement of their own living conditions and that their participation in decision-making is not only a right, and thus an end in itself, but is also instrumental in achieving greater effectiveness in the implementation of public policies", Mr. Mutizwa-Mangiza explained. He also noted that the removal of environmental hazards, providing incentives for community management and maintenance, as well as the construction of clinics and schools, would be of great benefit to impoverished families. It costs ten times less to upgrade a slum for clearance and relocation, which makes it an affordable alternative, the report says. The poor are often willing and able to invest their own labour and finance resources in their housing. This has been demonstrated in many slum upgrading and site and service projects for the poor, according to the report.

The Orangi Pilot Project in Karachi, Pakistan, is one such example. Residents in Orangi constructed sewers to 72,000 dwellings over twelve years, from 1980 to 1992, contributing more than $2 million from their own resources. The Project includes basic health, family planning, and education and empowerment components. The integrated programmes of social inclusion in Santo Andre municipality, Sao Paulo, Brazil, have improved the living conditions of 16,000 favela inhabitants through partnerships with the poor, who are normally excluded from formal processes.

Slum upgrading in some countries also entails giving formal title deeds or land ownership to poor dwellers. However, according to Mr. Mutizwa-Mangiza, "combining tenure legalization and land titling programmes with programmes to provide serviced land, upgrading and improvements at settlement level has had limited success". When large-scale allocation of property titles to households living in informal settlements has been made possible, it has often resulted in increased housing prices within the settlements, or an increase in the cost of services. This often means that poor households benefiting from such slum upgrading programmes sell their houses to higher income households, thereby returning to their original status of shoddy housing.

The challenge for now is to ensure that the poor's contribution to slum upgrading is made meaningful by investing in citywide infrastructure. The going seems tough for developing countries, and the coming years will be a test for nations seeking slum development. "Experience has shown the need for significant investment in citywide trunk infrastructure by the public sector if housing in upgraded slums is to be affordable to the urban poor and if efforts to support the informal enterprises run by poor slum dwellers are to be successful". Mr. Mutizwa-Mangiza said.

By Namrita Talwar, for the Chronicle