What Is A Slum? Un-Habitat Definitions And Global Standards

Slums are a spatial phenomenon as well as a policy issue that pervades the cities of the world, the largest megacities and the smaller towns. Not just the places of poverty, but multi-faceted urban systems that arise due to migration and land market, the quality of governments and social networks. The language and policy structures surrounding slums have changed through the decades and the most used global definition and measurement strategy is that offered by UN-Habitat. This method allows comparability between national-levels and at the same time recognizes that local manifestations favela, barrio, bustee, kampung, shantytown, informal settlement are manifestations of varied histories and morphologies.

Knowing what a slum is is important as definitions lead information, and information leads to investments, rights, and results. A household being or not being living in a slum influences those receiving an upgrade in water and sanitation, those receiving security of tenure and areas of focus in participatory planning. It also affects the development of the Sustainable Development Goals, in particular, SDG 11.1 that requires nations to provide all people with sufficient, safe, and affordable housing and basic services and to upgrade slums. However, definitions need to be used with caution. Slums are not monombathic; even within the same settlement, one street might be regularized in land and pipe water, and the next will be at risk of eviction and open sewerage. Furthermore, the word slum is a stigma when used irresponsibly: most of the practitioners will use the term informal settlements or underserved neighborhoods to focus on their rights, dignity, and inclusion.

The meaning of Slum in Global Policy.

In world policies, slum cannot be defined by appearance but by quantifiable deprivations that impact on the right of a household to a decent housing. A functional indicator-based definition was popularized by UN-Habitat to enable a standardization of counting across countries and time. Notably, the term slum is generally used on a household scale (a slum household) as opposed to being used solely in the neighborhood scale as even in the same locality the conditions differ. The definition is associated with the human right to decent housing- adequacy which involves habitable, sufficient, services, affordability, accessibility, location and security of tenure. This grounds slum assessment on general rights as opposed to subjective aesthetics.

The discourse of policy draws a line between the slums and informal settlements. Informal settlements focus on land and planning status unplanned, unserved or without formal tenure, whereas slum focuses on live-condition deprivations. The two categories are not the same but overlap with each other: there are informal settlements that can be service-sufficient; there are formally planned regions that contain slum-like deprivations as a result of service failure or excessive population. These ideas are combined in global frameworks like the New Urban Agenda and SDG 11 which asserts that states should upgrade settlements instead of clearing them, and to ensure no new slums are formed by comprehensive planning, providing serviced land, affordable housing, and secure tenure. Finally, the goal of the policy is not semantic but material: to eradicate deprivations, and safeguard the rights of the residents to stay and prosper.

UN-Habitat Operational Definition and Its Five Deprivations.

UN-Habitat defines a slum household as a household that does not have one or all the essential components of a proper housing. The conventional operational set includes five deprivations:

1) Sustainable housing: This is a housing construction on a non-hazard site with construction materials and construction capable of withstanding the local weather and hazards. Temporary, or extremely weak, or unsafe constructions do not meet this requirement.

2) Adequate living space: If overcrowding exists then it is past accepted standards which are usually no more than three people in a room used to sleep in. Crowding is an indication of inadequate housing availability and affordability.

3) Availability of better water: Safe, adequate supply of water of high quality without a lot of time and cost commitment. This has implications on health, time consumption and household expenditures.

4) Availability of better sanitation: Privateness or collective amenities to excreta that safely divide it out of human touch, with proper waste disposal and control.

5) Security of tenure: Documented or common law security against forced dispossession, such as any statutory or customary right.

A family that meets none of the criteria is registered as slum household. Such a dichotomous method facilitates comparability at the expense of gradations of severity. Others differentiate between slum, vulnerable non-slum and extreme slum by enumerating the number of deprivations. Security of tenure is most difficult to measure continuously which leads to proxies. Nevertheless, these five anchors direct diagnostics, budgeting and upgrading priorities.

Slum Measuring: Data Sources, Indicators and Limitations.

Measurement is a combination of household survey, census and spatial analysis. National statistical agencies tend to use UN-Habitat indicators through Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS), Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS), and population census to determine the percentage of urban residents within slum households. Spatial methods, including high-resolution images, extraction of building footprints, and night-time light, introduce settlement level delineation, whereas the information at the community level is found in community mapping, and enumerations, which are very much precise and up to date. Integrating techniques enhances precision: surveys encompass services and tenure, imagery encompasses density and growth, community data encompass actual lives.

However, challenges persist. The issue of tenure security is complicated: formal titles are uncommon, recognition can be customary, community-based or time-based. Thresholds of overcrowding are crude tools that lack cultural standards and family structure. Water and sanitation categories can be improved to describe water safety improvements when continuity, affordability, or fecal sludge control is poor. Administrative areas usually omit peri-urban belts where the growth is most rapid. Longitudinal tracking is complicated by season change, migration and informality. Stigma can discourage truth telling. Triangulation is the most desirable practice: official statistics should be complemented by participatory maps and service audits, and settlement typologies are to be used to explain trends. In spite of this, a stable set of indicators enables nations to compare their development, focus investments, and report against SDG 11.1 with increasing accuracy.

Slum Typologies and Morphologies Across Regions.

Slums come in various shapes and purposes. The inner-city tenements and chawls stuff families into sub-divided rooms that share toilets and have very little light; they are centrally situated yet so overcrowded. Informal settlements on the periphery of urban areas are expanding, where land is cheaper but of inferior quality; it may be self-built over time, producing a patchy quality of constructions. Riverbank, hillside, railway and floodplain encroachments present entry and source of livelihood with exposure to acute hazards. Improved neighborhoods have paved streets, measured connections, standard addresses and neighborhood amenities, which are also frequently the product of incremental regularization.

Regional patterns vary. Several favelas and barrios in Latin America have been consolidated over decades, masonry, and have a well-developed social network, but they struggle with tenure regularization and violence. South Asia is characterized by extremely high densities, rental submarkets, and complicated relations between landlords and tenants. The settlements in Sub-Saharan Africa tend to be horizontally developing with lack of trunk infrastructure and large service shortages, yet the success of upgrading is noteworthy. In the Middle East and North African regions, the war-ridden areas and host neighborhoods of the refugees make the classification complex. In slums, workshops, retail, logistics are important to the livelihoods across regions. Typology recognition will aid in the design of interventions: hillside stabilization and drainage, densification with services, rental housing reform, or multi-hazard risk reduction, and not blueprints.

Scale and Geography: Where the Slums Are Growing and Why.

The urbanization process is now centred in Africa and Asia with that the urban centres are increasing populations of millions without a corresponding growth in serviced and affordable land and structures. It has been estimated that there are about a billion slum dwellers or informal settlement dwellers, and that that number of people has been increasing in absolute terms even in areas in which ratio is decreasing. New clusters emerge in peri-urban belts of cities and transport corridors, which are regulated poorly and whose land markets are highly speculative. The secondary cities which are sometimes considered neglected are increasing rapidly and may either deter or induce new slums according to their plans and investments in the serviced land.

Why growth? The supply of housing fails to meet the rate or even the price of demand. Middle- and upper-income classes tend to receive formal development, while low-income households are hampered: entry costs are excessively high, approvals tend to be complicated, finance is often scarce, and standards are too inflexible to allow them to be considered legal. Provision of public land and infrastructure has not been keeping up with this and rental markets are being informally organised. Migration, youth bulges, conflict displacement and climate shocks also increase urban demand. In the meantime, the breakdown of governance disperses responsibility of trunk investment. With a proactive policy, in which there are planned expansions, serviced plots, transit-based affordable housing and incremental regularization, expansion of the slum can be retarded and conditions can be ameliorated. In the areas where it is reactive, evictions with no alternatives, deprivation only gets deeper and relocations usually reproduce slums in different places.

Drivers: Economics, Governance, Land, and Demography.

A number of drivers interrelate to create slum conditions. Naturally, demographically, the natural population growth and rural-urban migration overflow the demand around jobs and services. Informality overtakes the economic status of livelihoods of most low-income urban dwellers; unpredictable earnings make formal housing finance unaffordable, promoting incremental self-construction or congested rentals. Markets in land are crucial: in the case of scarce serviced land supply or rigid standards, low income families are forced to occupy marginal or unsafe locations with lax enforcement measures. Speculation and lack of coordinated planning is aggravated by the administrative fragmentation and opaque land records.

The quality of governance determines the results. A lack of investment in trunk infrastructure (water mains, sewers, drainage, and power) implies the necessity to use costly and unsafe alternatives. Complex, slow permitting locks out the poor; exclusionary zoning drives up the price and pushes the poor away. The lack of proper tenant control exposes tenants to exploitation and eviction. On the other hand, policies that make land redistribution, gradual land standards and community involvement opportunities can affordably open up suitable and well-placed opportunities. Climate vulnerabilities such as floods, heat, landslides are overlapping with poverty as they force people into the impacted region and demolish their property again and again. Conflict and calamities translate into the scope of urban fringe populations that approach the humanitarian and development apparatuses in an unseemly manner. Finally, the slums are the effects of failure of the system in land and infrastructure, housing finance, and government, and to remedy it, the system needs to be relieved.

Slum living conditions, health, gender and risk.

The health and safety are determined by slum conditions. Crowding promotes spread of respiratory and infectious diseases, poor ventilation and indoor air quality increases long-term risks. Poor sanitation, limited and sporadic water supply negatively affect the environment by causing diarrheal disease, breeding of vectors and environmental pollution. Unsafe tenure discourages investment in home renovation and connection to infrastructures, and the fear of eviction leads to stress and lack of social solidarity. Exposure to hazards, flash floods, landslides, fires, excessive heat etc., is increased in areas where settlements are located in dangerous land and have no drainage or fire breaks.

Gender and age matter. Females and girls have to suffer increased loads of carrying water, nursing sick people in the family, and unsafe sanitation opportunities at night; the risks of gender-based violence increase in poorly-lit places and overcrowded living. Repeated illness and absence of safe play space stunt and cause loss of learning in children. The disabled people are faced with withering mobility obstacles where they can only use narrow paths and services that are inaccessible. However, in slums, they also contain high concentrations of mutual aid, savings organizations and microenterprises, which enhance resilience. Specific improvements in the upgrading to reliable water, household toilets or well managed shared facilities, drainage, and waste collection and primary care provide rapid gains in terms of public health. Incorporating safety (lights, community policing), heat reduction (shade, cool roofs), and risk-informed planning helps to decrease both the risks of everyday and disaster and enhance dignity, productivity, and well-being.

Regularization and Upgrading: Principles, Standards and Tools.

Global standards are unanimous on the matter: in-situ upgrading should have a priority over the mass eviction and relocation. Upgrading consists of the development of services, housing, quality of the public space and tenure security without the displacement of residents, based on participation planning and incremental standards. Its main principles are: do-no-harm to tenure and livelihoods; minimize displacement; make affordable through subsidies and preferred finance; and make slums a part of the city; in terms of connectivity, schools, clinics, and markets in addition to pipes and pavements. Regularization acknowledges or legalizes occupancy, including occupancy certificates or entire titles, sometimes in phases, and subject to risk reduction.

Tools are diverse. Co-design and community enumeration streamlines investments against needs. Context-sensitive standards (e.g. the width of lanes, plot sizes) combine safety with practicality. Professionally managed shared sanitation blocks can be in transition to household toilets. Cost is reduced by condominium sewerage, simplified design of water network and decentralised treatment. Some of the instruments of tenure are land readjustment, land pooling and cooperative ownership. Funding is an amalgamation of municipal funds, national, donor and community savings, micro-mortgages and rental reforms can be used to do housing upgrades. Inherent is the reduction of risk, drainage, slope stabilization, fire safety. Efficient programs do not only invest in capital works, but also in maintenance and municipal capacity. Assessment measures reliability of services, affordability and satisfaction by residents, to guarantee that improvements are sustainable based on fair gains.

Conclusion

Slums are not urban exceptions; they are the logical results of the ways cities use land, infrastructure, and housing in correlation with the incomes and rights of people who can live in them. UN-Habitat has provided a clear and comparable diagnostic and accountability lens to its policymakers through its operational definition of five deprivations including durability, space, water, sanitation, and tenure. But definitions are not ends, but means. The actual measure is whether measurement results in material changes without displacement or stigma. That needs governments to combine consistent indicators with participative planning, flexible standards, and sustained financing of trunk infrastructure and neighborhood improvements, which will support increased water and sanitation, may reduce disease, and improve safety; in-situ upgrading facilitates household investment; and combined strategies linking transport, employment and services may mitigate new slum growth.

 Prevention is as essential as treatment: controlled urban sprawls, serviced plots, and cheap rentals need to increase faster than demand. Mapping and monitoring can be spurred by technology, but it has to be ethical and co-produced with communities in order to prevent harm and maximize impact. After all, eradication of deprivations of slums is a human right requirement, as well as an instrument of development: healthier and safer areas with better services increase productivity, inclusion, and climate resilience. With cities sending the message that every neighborhood matters, and reinforcing that message with money, requirements, and responsibility, slums no longer become dead ends, but become bridges to respectable, fair urban lives.