Slums have many challenges that can be looked at for improvement. This book is to "address the issue of livelihoods of slum dwellers and urban poverty in general, thus going beyond traditional approaches that have tended to concentrate on improvement of housing, infrastructure and physical environmental conditions." Basically it talks about an alternative approach to "fixing" the slums. It focuses on problems underlying urban poverty "by enabling urban informal sector activities to flourish, linking low-income housing development to income generation, and ensuring easy access to jobs through pro-poor transport and low-income settlement location policies." In the prologue on page xxxi it talks about accommodating growth - which touches on shelter. Slum dwellers do not have enough income to provide them with permanent housing so they build their own dwellings. "Slums are distinguished by the poor quality of housing, the poverty of the inhabitants, the lack of public and private services and the poor integration of the inhabitants into the broader community and its opportunities." It talks about the things slums are lacking such as water supply (what we are focusing on), sanitation, storm water drainage, solid waste disposal and many essential services. This book is quite lengthy, but there is a lot of valuable information in it. If you want to read further, here is a link to google books where parts of the book are posted.
Jack Lipson
November 9th, 2010
United Nations Human Settlements Programme, The Challenge of Slums: Global Report on Human Settlement, 2003 (UK: Earthscan, 2003)
