A new report by the United Nations organisation UN-Habitat had some good news - that in the past deccade 228 million people ( mostly in India and China ) no longer lived in slums yet the bad news is that the number of people living in shantytowns and ghettoes increased by 55 million to 827.6 million as population growth and migration from the countryside outstripped the effect of upward mobility . “The progress made on the slum target has not been enough to counter the growth of informal settlements in the developing world,” UN-HABITAT says.
Anna Tibaijuka, the executive director of the U.N. Habitat program played down the achievement of beating the Millennium goal of pulling 100 million people out of poverty, calling it "totally inadequate."
Barring drastic action, the number of slum dwellers in the world's cities is expected to grow by 6 million a year over the next decade to hit 889 million by 2020, the report said.
The world's urban population now exceeds the world's rural population.Potentially, cities can make countries rich because the high concentration of people enables industry to produce goods more cheaply. Urbanization appears to be a must for industrialization, sustained economic growth and social development. Urban-based enterprises are able to mass produce goods.Seoul accounts for almost half of South Korea’s GDP; Budapest (Hungary) and Brussels (Belgium) each for roughly 45%. Tokyo alone accounts for almost 2% of the world’s GDP , similar to Spain's or Canada's. London's GDP is higher than that of Sweden or Switzerland.
Yet in "First World wealthy" America for many people moving up from the lowest economic ranks to the middle class, and from the middle class to the top income echelons, is becoming increasingly difficult. The richest 1 per cent of households now earns more than 72 times the average income of the poorest fifth of the population, and 23 times that of the middle fifth. In just one year, between 2005 and 2006, the richest 1 per cent of the U.S. population increased their earnings by US $95,700, while the bottom fifth took home only US $600 more than the previous year, and the middle fifth stagnated, earning only US $300, or 0.6 per cent, more than they had in 2005. In “the other America”, poor black families and the chronically unemployed are clustered in ghettos, lacking access to quality education, secure tenure, lucrative employment and political power. Higher inequality often corresponds with greater segregation, especially for black residents. The most unequal city, Atlanta, Georgia, has the third-highest degree of black segregation. In Chicago, discriminatory mortgage lending and public housing development from the 1960s onward conspired to isolate many low-income black families in the central city. Lack of affordable housing outside the city centre, coupled with high unemployment and poor education, has further undermined social mobility and economic advancement. In Washington, D.C., the vast majority of black residents live on the eastern side of the metropolitan area, far from the economic prosperity, wealth, job growth, and quality schools now concentrated in the west.
Political leaders, public servants and the rich in three of the world’s regions benefit most from urbanization, effectively denying millions of fellow citizens their full rights to the city, UN-HABITAT said .The urban poor in general get only minimal access to the benefits of urbanization.Generally, planning and policies appear to favour the empowered, mainly the local and regional economic elite. In the developing world, this pattern is more often than not linked to historical and cultural hegemony.In addition to gentrification, a number of other large projects and events have created cityscapes that hardly benefit the poor. These have included large infrastructure projects (water, sanitation and roads), “city beautification”, riverfront development, and facilities for major global sports and cultural events.
In the Mexican city of Guadalajara, recent research confirmed the findings of the UN-HABITAT survey. Because of relentless expansion of developments on the outskirts of the city, some 30% of this new housing stock remains unoccupied, even as in the inner city a similar percentage goes underused. This situation highlights the speculative patterns of investment at work, which are largely influenced by powerful interests.It also has to do with rent-seeking groups that lobby for their vested interests to the loss of other residents.
Data collected between 1990 and 2007 shows that serious malnutrition has been widespread in urban slums of Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean. Children in the poorest income brackets are malnourished at twice the rate of their counterparts in the richest ones . Even in many countries with serious malnutrition, children from rich families are much less affected than those from lower-income households.Poor sanitation and hygiene, as well as unsafe water supply kill many slum dwellers each year. Many succumb to malaria, diarrhoeal and respiratory diseases.
Social and cultural barriers continue to deny many slum dwellers the chance to enroll in school and complete primary education and youth living in the same communities plainly have slimmer prospects to attend secondary school than non-slum residents.Humankind today is younger than it has ever been with half of the global population under the age of 25.Poorer young people have unequal access to basic services, housing, education and employment, contributing to the growing problem of “idle youths” who do not work or study.Those who live in low income areas have no choice but to attend poorly taught and badly equipped schools.
To solve the above problems in socialism will require a massive expansion of every part of production connected with housing. Given the integrated nature of modern world production, this again will have to be co-ordinated on a world scale.Cities are dirty and noisy places where all is rush, rush, rush. There is no real sense of community. Apathy is rife. People don't think that anything can be done to change things or even that it's worth trying to. We are all of us on our own, competing individually to try to do the best for ourselves and our families. Everybody feels that this is not a satisfactory way to live but can't put their finger on what precisely is wrong.What is wrong is that we are living in a society where to survive you must have money . We need money because we can only access the things we need if we can afford to pay for them.
Fortunately, there's a way out. Nobody can do it for us – no leader, no politician. We've got to do it ourselves. That means understanding what causes the problem – the profit system – and then getting together to do something about it. Not just complaining about how the system treats us and asking for a few improvements here and there. Not founding the Labour Party again. Not some amorphous “anti-capitalist” movement which is against everything but for nothing. But organising to get rid of the whole profit system and replacing it by a new and different system. A new and different system geared to meeting people's needs. We'd be co-operating to produce what we needed and then we'd have free access – without money – to what we produced.
Tinkering with the present system has always failed, and always will. What is needed is not reform but a revolution in the basis of society to make all the natural and industrial resources of the Earth the common heritage of all humanity. World socialism is the only way to restore the balances with the rest of nature that the profit system has upset.
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