Posts tagged with 'informal settlements'
Combating the Coronavirus Without Clean Water
Combating the Coronavirus Without Clean Water
As the coronavirus crisis spreads throughout the world, it is increasingly clear that people with the least access to essential services like water will feel the most dramatic effects. Major health organizations advise washing hands more frequently – for at least ...
At World Urban Forum, Renewed Urgency to Safeguard Vulnerable Communities
At World Urban Forum, Renewed Urgency to Safeguard Vulnerable Communities
“Acknowledgement, voice and the right to negotiate” – that’s what’s needed to bring the world’s urban poor back into the system and begin creating cities that work for everyone, said Sheela Patel, chair of Slum/Shack Dwellers International (SDI), at the 10th ...
City Leaders Must Prioritize Climate Resilience of Vulnerable Communities
City Leaders Must Prioritize Climate Resilience of Vulnerable Communities
As thousands of urban leaders gather in Abu Dhabi for the World Urban Forum, the impacts of the climate crisis on cities have become more visible than ever. Severe floods tore through Jakarta last month. Heatwaves scorched cities from India to Europe last year. ...
Act Locally, Learn Globally: Luis Bettencourt on Building from the Community Up
Act Locally, Learn Globally: Luis Bettencourt on Building from the Community Up
“Cities are special,” Luis Bettencourt says in an interview for the Cities Research Seminar Series, but they may only be beginning to tap into their full potential. We need to think about cities more as “collective systems that have their ...
We’re Underestimating How Many People Lack Sanitation – and Ignoring the Best Solution for Many Cities
We’re Underestimating How Many People Lack Sanitation – and Ignoring the Best Solution for Many Cities
In the urban neighborhood known as Kosovo Village in Nairobi, Kenya, 95% of residents defecate in communal or shared facilities where untreated human waste drains directly into a nearby river. During a storm, fetid and polluted waters flood the riverbanks, ...
To Fix City Slums, Don’t Just Knock Them Down: Involve Residents in Upgrading Efforts
To Fix City Slums, Don’t Just Knock Them Down: Involve Residents in Upgrading Efforts
Many cities, particularly in the global South, have large areas of informal settlements ‒ poor neighborhoods that grew organically, but which often lack structurally sound buildings and services like running water, sanitation and waste management. The traditional approach to upgrading ...
Zero Carbon Buildings, Accelerating Adaptation, National Leadership at UN Climate Action Summit
Zero Carbon Buildings, Accelerating Adaptation, National Leadership at UN Climate Action Summit
The UN Climate Action Summit in New York this week saw strengthened national climate commitments from 67 countries, but a disappointing showing from the world’s major economies. As national governments fall short, cities must continue to be climate champions. Indeed, ...
To Fix Housing, We Need to Talk About Land Use: Nora Libertun and Cynthia Goytia
To Fix Housing, We Need to Talk About Land Use: Nora Libertun and Cynthia Goytia
Affordable housing is a crisis that only seems to deepen. Some 1.2 billion people in cities lack access to affordable, secure housing – a number that’s projected to grow to 1.6 billion people by 2025. Cities in the global south, ...
IPCC 1.5 Report: Cities Are the Best Chance to Get Climate Right
IPCC 1.5 Report: Cities Are the Best Chance to Get Climate Right
Amid the barrage of news about climate-related natural disasters and climate change summits, it’s important to recognize real inflection points—when there is truly cause to sit up and take note. The IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5ºC, released ...
Confronting the Urban Housing Gap
Confronting the Urban Housing Gap
More than 1.2 billion city dwellers – one of every three people living in urban areas – lack access to affordable and secure housing. This housing gap is a major drag on the economy and the environment. The impact is ...
https://www.flickr.com/photos/talitaoliveira/3398977656/
Friday Fun: Beyond the Map—Google Explores Rio’s Slums
What do you think of when you hear the word “slum”? For many, the word brings to mind poverty, violence and squalor; slums, or informal settlements, are overwhelmingly associated with the negative. This is particularly true in Rio de Janeiro, ...
What Can We Learn from Thailand’s Inclusive Approach to Upgrading Informal Settlements?
What Can We Learn from Thailand’s Inclusive Approach to Upgrading Informal Settlements?
Currently, an estimated one billion people worldwide live in informal settlements where they lack access to basic services and infrastructure and are often threatened with forced eviction. While the overall proportion of the world’s urban population living in informal settlements ...
From Grassroots Organizing to Affordable Housing: A Conversation with Diana Mitlin
From Grassroots Organizing to Affordable Housing: A Conversation with Diana Mitlin
Diana Mitlin is a Principal Researcher with the International Institute for Environment and Development’s (iied) Human Settlements program, conducting research on urban poverty and community development. Mitlin is also an academic, teaching on Global Urbanism at the University of Manchester. ...
Dhaka Information Settlements
Friday Fun: The daily life of informal settlements in a series of striking new videos
As a filmmaker, writer, and editor, Cassim Shepard is particularly attentive to the many complex ways that rapid global urbanization is affecting people at a very fundamental level—what they see, feel, and do in daily city life. Commissioned by Design ...
Connection between Medellín's Metrocable and Metroplús rapid transit systems
Mobility solutions for marginalized communities: The urban cable car
Latin America’s rate of urbanization peaked in the 1960s and 1970s, during which the region’s cities saw unprecedented rural to urban migration. In the following decades, violence in many of these population-drained rural areas accelerated the flow of rural migrants ...
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