Synopses & Reviews
The past several decades have seen dramatic changes in global poverty—the most important of which has been a shift that has seen nearly three-quarters of the world’s poor living not in the most impoverished areas of the world, but in middle income nations. This relatively rapid transformation has forced a rethinking of anti-poverty strategies, as many of the long-established frameworks for such policies no longer apply to this altered situation.
This book gathers experts in anti-poverty work to answer many of the key questions that now face development policy. With contributions covering Latin America, Africa, and Asia, and analyzing poverty and inequality on global, national, and local scales, the book provides poverty researchers and policy makers with valuable new tools for assessing and addressing poverty as it actually exists in today’s world.
Synopsis
One in seven of the world s population live in poverty in urban areas, and the vast majority of these live in the Global South mostly in overcrowded informal settlements with inadequate water, sanitation, health care and schools provision. This book explains how and why the scale and depth of urban poverty is so frequently under-estimated by governments and international agencies worldwide. The authors also consider whether economic growth does in fact reduce poverty, exploring the paradox of successful economies that show little evidence of decreasing poverty.
Many official figures on urban poverty, including those based on the US $1 per day poverty line, present a very misleading picture of urban poverty s scale. These common errors in definition and measurement by governments and international agencies lead to poor understanding of urban poverty and inadequate policy provision. This is compounded by the lack of voice and influence that low income groups have in these official spheres. This book explores many different aspects of urban poverty including the associated health burden, inadequate food intake, inadequate incomes, assets and livelihood security, poor living and working conditions and the absence of any rule of law.
Urban Poverty in the Global South: Scale and Nature fills the gap for a much needed systematic overview of the historical and contemporary state of urban poverty in the Global South. This comprehensive and detailed book is a unique resource for students and lecturers in development studies, urban development, development geography, social policy, urban planning and design, and poverty reduction.
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About the Author
Einar Braathen is a senior researcher in international studies at the Norwegian Institute for Urban and Regional Research.Julian May is director of the Institute for Social Development and chairperson of the Community Law Centre at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa. Gemma Wright is a senior research fellow at the Oxford Institute of Social Policy in the Department of Social Policy and Intervention at the University of Oxford and the deputy director of the Centre for the Analysis of South African Social Policy.