How many people are living in slums today?
Two years ago, the head of U.N. HABITAT [the United Nations Human Settlement Program] estimated that 1 billion people were living in slums, classically conceived as having inadequate, substandard housing and missing some essential services. A much larger number, perhaps 2 billion people, live in cities and are poor. More than a billion people, again overlapping with slum dwellers, really exist outside the formal economy and formal employment. These developments are gigantic, and in some ways unexpected. No social theory predicted that urbanization would take this course at the end of the 20th century or on such a vast scale. How do the slums today in the Global South differ from the 19th century slums? The slums in St. Giles in London and in Old Town Manchester that Friedrich Engels explored in his pioneering report, “The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844,” were slums in the shadows of factories. The residents were factory workers or industrial workers. Most of the slum
