Slum upgrading
Based on Wikipedia: Slum upgrading
In 1950, the city of Dhaka, Bangladesh was a modest urban center. Today, it is forty times larger. Lagos, Nigeria has grown by the same staggering multiple. This isn't just population growth—it's a wholesale transformation of how humanity lives on Earth, and it has produced one of the great challenges of our era: a billion people now live in slums, with that number projected to double by 2030.
What do you do about a slum?
For most of the twentieth century, the answer seemed obvious: bulldoze it. Clear out the ramshackle structures, relocate the residents (somewhere, anywhere), and build something proper in its place. Cities like Hong Kong and Tokyo pursued this approach aggressively. The logic was tidy. The results were not.
Slum clearance created its own nightmares. Where exactly were millions of displaced people supposed to go? The photographs of bulldozers crushing homes made for terrible press. And perhaps most damning, the cleared areas often remained empty for years while former residents simply established new informal settlements elsewhere. You can't solve a housing crisis by destroying housing.
A Different Philosophy
In 1972, an urban theorist named John F.C. Turner published a book called Freedom to Build that would reshape how governments thought about slums. Turner's insight was counterintuitive: stop trying to fix the houses. Fix everything around them instead.
His argument ran like this: if you install proper sewage systems, provide clean water, pave decent walkways, and extend electrical lines into a slum, the residents will gradually improve their own dwellings. They're not living in shacks because they lack ambition or capability. They're living in shacks because that's what you build when you have no running water, no sanitation, no legal claim to the land beneath your feet. Change those conditions, and people will invest in their homes.
This is the core idea behind slum upgrading. Rather than demolishing informal settlements and displacing their residents, you upgrade the infrastructure and legalize the residents' right to be there. You transform a slum not by erasing it, but by integrating it into the formal city.
What Slums Actually Lack
To understand why this approach matters, you need to understand what makes a slum a slum. It's not just poverty, though poverty is certainly involved. A slum is defined by specific deficits: inadequate sanitation, lack of safe drinking water, housing that won't withstand serious weather, too many people crammed into too little space, and—crucially—no legal right to occupy the land.
That last point deserves emphasis. Many slum dwellers are technically squatters. They built their homes on land they don't own, often in areas that were vacant because they were unsuitable for development: flood plains, steep hillsides, industrial margins. Because they have no legal claim, they can't get bank loans to improve their properties. They can't call the police when criminals target them. They can't demand that the city extend water pipes to their neighborhood. They exist in a legal shadow.
Slum upgrading attacks all of these problems simultaneously. Install water and sewer connections. Provide garbage collection. Pave roads wide enough for emergency vehicles. And critically, grant legal title to the land.
The Global Scale
The sheer scale of urban growth in the developing world defies easy comprehension. In 1950, the planet had perhaps a dozen cities with populations exceeding one million. By 2015, there were roughly 550 such cities. We've created an entirely new category—the megacity, defined as having more than ten million residents—and by 2025, Asia alone may have eleven of them. Tokyo already qualifies as what demographers call a hypercity, a designation that didn't even exist a generation ago.
Most of this growth has occurred in the global South. And much of it has been driven by migration from rural areas, as farming families leave for cities that promise opportunity but often deliver only overcrowded slums. The urban population boom isn't primarily about birth rates; it's about movement. People are voting with their feet, and they're voting for cities even when cities greet them with squalor.
Until the 1970s, the international community largely ignored this reality. The prevailing approaches to housing in developing countries were cautious and limited: subsidized mortgages for those who could qualify (which excluded most slum residents), prefabricated housing units shipped from abroad (which often proved unsuitable for local conditions), and something called "organized self-help," which amounted to providing materials and letting people build their own homes. None of these touched the fundamental problem.
What changed was the recognition that housing is a basic human need that requires active intervention. Governments couldn't simply hope the problem would solve itself.
The Millennium Development Goals
In 2000, all 192 United Nations member countries agreed to the Millennium Development Goals, a set of targets for reducing global poverty. Goal seven addressed environmental sustainability, and nested within it was a specific target: improve the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers.
One hundred million sounds like an enormous number. It's less impressive when you consider that a billion people lived in slums at the time. Still, the goal marked a turning point. Slums were now officially on the international agenda.
The United Nations Human Settlements Programme, known as UN-HABITAT, threw its institutional weight behind slum upgrading as the preferred approach. By the mid-2000s, the organization was publishing reports tracking which countries were making progress. Egypt, South Africa, Mexico, Tunisia, and Thailand emerged as leaders, managing to slow (though not reverse) the growth of their slum populations.
Slowing growth is not the same as solving the problem. If slums are still expanding, just more slowly, they're still expanding. But in a context where the default trajectory pointed toward catastrophe, even deceleration counted as progress.
How Upgrading Works in Practice
Consider what happened in Salvador, a coastal city in the Brazilian state of Bahia. A partnership between the Cities Alliance, the Italian government, and the World Bank launched a project with the bureaucratic name PATS—Technical and Social Support Project—but with straightforward goals: eliminate slums, engage the community, and connect residents to basic services.
Over five years, the project relocated 984 families from their informal settlement into newly constructed single-family homes. But the relocation was only part of the intervention. The families also received access to educational programs covering health, finances, and other life skills. By the time evaluators assessed the results, 80 percent of the families had garbage collection, 71 percent had water connections, 88 percent had electricity, and 84 percent had proper sewage service.
This is what success looks like in slum upgrading: not a dramatic demolition, but a patient accumulation of improvements that transform precarious lives into stable ones.
In Agadir, Morocco, a project called Marins-Pêcheurs faced different constraints. Land was scarce, so single-family homes weren't feasible. Instead, organizers built row houses and apartment buildings, accommodating 450 families in multi-family structures. The project required extensive community engagement because Morocco lacked a strong renting culture—many residents had never lived in apartment buildings and needed help understanding how such arrangements would work.
What made the Moroccan project distinctive was its emphasis on minimal social disruption. Rather than shipping families across the city, the new housing was built near their existing settlement. During construction, many residents found paid employment in the building work itself. The community participated at every stage, ensuring that the final housing actually fit people's needs.
The Alternative: Bulldozers
Not every country has embraced upgrading. China, most notably, often simply demolishes slums. Migrant workers arriving in Beijing face the constant threat that their homes will be crushed by construction equipment, part of an official policy to suppress informal settlements.
China's approach reflects its broader system of urban registration. Unlike in India, where rural residents can freely migrate to cities, Chinese citizens must be officially registered in a location to access services there. Migrants who come to Beijing from the countryside exist in a bureaucratic limbo: they can't access the low-income housing programs designed for registered city residents, but their informal alternatives keep getting demolished. It's a particularly harsh version of the old clearance approach.
In 2009, the president of India announced an ambitious goal: a slum-free India within five years. The plan called for massive investment in new affordable housing rather than upgrading existing slums. The target was not met. Whether you upgrade slums or try to replace them entirely, the sheer scale of the challenge humbles every intervention.
Thailand's Experiment
Thailand has tried something different. In 2003, the government launched Baan Mankong, which translates to "secure housing." The program works from the bottom up rather than the top down. Urban poor communities map out their own shelter needs, then access government subsidies and loans to fund improvements they design themselves.
This represents a philosophical commitment to resident agency. Rather than having planners decide what a slum needs and imposing solutions from above, Baan Mankong treats slum dwellers as experts on their own circumstances. They know which paths flood during monsoons. They know which walls are load-bearing and which are held together by hope. They know who actually lives where—information that official records often get wrong.
Why Upgrading Often Fails
For all its promise, slum upgrading faces serious obstacles. The humanitarian organization Habitat for Humanity International has catalogued the most common barriers: insufficient legal systems, excessive regulation, gender discrimination, corrupt or inadequate land registration, the breakdown of traditional property protections, and perhaps most damaging, simple lack of political will.
Land ownership poses particularly thorny problems. In dense slums, structures are sometimes literally built on top of each other. Figuring out who owns what becomes impossibly complicated. When the World Bank has tried to separate land ownership from infrastructure development—providing utilities without first establishing clear title—a new problem emerges: residents who don't legally own their land often don't pay for the utilities they receive. They have no stake in a system that doesn't recognize their existence. And developing nations can't afford to provide free services indefinitely.
There's also a gentrification problem. When infrastructure improvements make a slum more livable, property values rise. Sometimes the original residents get pushed out by wealthier newcomers who can afford the upgraded neighborhood. The slum gets better; the slum dwellers end up somewhere worse.
Quality matters too. When governments cut costs by installing substandard infrastructure, maintenance expenses balloon. Cheap pipes break. Badly paved roads wash out. According to World Bank assessments, only about half of urban improvement projects prove sustainable over time. The other half represent wasted investment.
Beyond Housing
Slum upgrading intersects with broader urban challenges. Mexico City provides an instructive example. The city implemented a driving restriction program that prohibits certain vehicles from operating on certain days, assigned through a color-coded sticker system based on license plate numbers. The goal wasn't housing—it was air quality. Yet cleaner air benefits slum residents as much as anyone, perhaps more, since informal settlements often cluster near industrial areas and highways.
Mexico City also invested heavily in expanding its public transit system, adding new rail lines and stations. More trains mean fewer cars, which means less pollution. The improvements took years to implement but produced measurable results.
This illustrates something important: slum upgrading isn't just about housing. It's about integrating marginalized communities into the urban whole. A slum with clean water but no transit connections, no access to jobs, no path to the formal economy, remains marginalized even if its residents no longer get sick from contaminated wells.
The Limits of Any Solution
Here is the sobering reality: slum upgrading does not stop slums from forming. It addresses existing slums—a billion people's worth of them—but it does nothing to stem the ongoing migration from countryside to city. Every year, millions more rural poor arrive in urban areas, and many end up in informal settlements. You can upgrade as fast as humanly possible and still fall further behind.
The World Bank has funded major slum upgrading projects since the 1980s. These projects have improved countless lives. But they haven't solved the underlying dynamic. People keep coming to cities because cities offer opportunity, or at least the hope of opportunity. They'll keep coming whether the cities are ready for them or not.
Some critics argue that upgrading merely papers over a deeper injustice. Why should anyone have to live in a slum in the first place? Why do we accept that a billion people lack basic sanitation as a starting point for policy rather than an ongoing emergency? Slum upgrading can seem like a way of managing poverty rather than eliminating it.
Yet the alternatives have their own problems. Slum clearance displaces people without housing them. Building new affordable housing takes years and costs fortunes. Restricting migration—as China does—requires an authoritarian apparatus that most countries lack and shouldn't want. In a world of imperfect choices, incrementally improving existing slums has powerful appeal.
An Ongoing Experiment
The story of slum upgrading is still being written. Projects in Brazil and Morocco and Thailand offer models that other countries study and adapt. The UN tracks progress. The World Bank provides financing. Academics debate effectiveness.
What we know is this: more than half of humanity now lives in cities, a proportion that will only increase. We know that urban growth has concentrated overwhelmingly in the developing world, where institutions are often weakest and resources scarcest. We know that informal settlements—call them slums, favelas, shanty towns, or any of the dozen other names—house a vast and growing share of that urban population.
And we know that those settlements can be improved. Not easily. Not quickly. Not without setbacks and failures and unintended consequences. But improved nonetheless. Water can flow from taps. Sewage can be carried away. Roads can be paved. Legal title can be granted. Lives can be transformed.
The question isn't whether slum upgrading works. The evidence suggests it often does, at least partially. The question is whether it can work fast enough and broadly enough to keep pace with the greatest demographic transformation in human history. On that question, the jury remains out.