Posts tagged with 'informal settlements'
5 Big Ideas to Address the Climate Crisis and Inequality in Cities
5 Big Ideas to Address the Climate Crisis and Inequality in Cities
EDITOR’S NOTE: Sustainable Food Production for a Resilient Rosario won the 2020-2021 Prize for Cities on June 29, 2021. Learn more here. (June 29, 2021) City life can be deeply unfair. This was true before the COVID-19 pandemic exposed just how ...
Urban Sanitation Is a Climate and Economic Issue Too
Urban Sanitation Is a Climate and Economic Issue Too
Along the Ngong River in Mukuru, one of Nairobi’s slum neighborhoods and home to more than 100,000 people, residents face a dual threat when the rains come. First, the river rises, flooding into streets and houses. Then the water reaches ...
Transport and Inequality: Why Disparities in Access Matter in Cities
Transport and Inequality: Why Disparities in Access Matter in Cities
They marched for human rights, for health care and education, but they came for the metro system, burning and damaging more than 86 stations across the city. Massive protests in Santiago last October forced the government to agree to rewrite ...
Cities, Battered by COVID-19, Remain Key to Recovery. How Can Investments Be Well Spent?
Cities, Battered by COVID-19, Remain Key to Recovery. How Can Investments Be Well Spent?
As the world reels from the COVID-19 pandemic, investment packages are taking shape to provide relief and recovery. Cities from New York to Nairobi are not only on the frontlines of the health and economic impacts, but they provide immense ...
From My Window: A View of the COVID-19 Pandemic in Mumbai
From My Window: A View of the COVID-19 Pandemic in Mumbai
Inequality is shaping how people are experiencing COVID-19 in cities to a startling degree. The vulnerability of the urban poor is striking everywhere, but the divide is more visible in some places than others. This is where I live on ...
Tackling Inequality in Cities Is Essential for Fighting COVID-19
Tackling Inequality in Cities Is Essential for Fighting COVID-19
The COVID-19 pandemic has created a disruptive new normal for everyone through shelter-in-place orders and social distancing guidelines. But for the billions of urban poor, these guidelines aren’t just burdensome; they’re essentially impossible. Social distancing is a critically important response ...
How Will COVID-19 Affect Urban Planning?
How Will COVID-19 Affect Urban Planning?
The impacts of the global COVID-19 pandemic are still being understood, but it does seem clear that this crisis will make a mark on cities, physically and socially, that will echo for generations. How we plan our cities has always ...
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, ...
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