There is in turn much happiness and much misery to be found amongst the urban poor, as these portraits of three households in the outskirts of Manila testify. The point is not to draw lines between them, but to accept that poverty has several gradations, above and below the proverbial dollar-a-day, all of which require various degrees of assistance.
WaterAid's Timeyin Uwejamomere calls on lead agencies to reprioritise their water and sanitation expenditure on informal settlements to prevent slum conditions from spreading as urbanisation intensifies.
Singapore's experience suggests that housing supply can be increased only when matched by aggressive demand-side policies.
The Philippine government is planning to demolish 104,000 homes across Manila. Everyone involved knows that this is a bad idea, yet we have no international framework to stop them going ahead.
The community and government leaders committed to helping the residents of San Roque, and the unenviable challenges that confront them.
Manila's urban landscape is characterised by ineffective government planning alongside strong, ambitious private sector developers. Arguably, the city will only develop economically if the private sector takes over the role of planning the whole metropolis.
The Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology has warned that an earthquake preparedness plan it drew up with the MMDA and JICA in 2004 has not been properly implemented, leaving the city vulnerable to the possibility of an earthquake the magnitude of Haiti's.
Timeyin Uwejamomere is Senior Policy Analyst for urban water and sanitation services and current Country Representative for Nigeria at WaterAid.
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The Global Urbanist is an online magazine reviewing urban affairs and urban development issues in cities throughout the developed and developing world.
Its readers are drawn from the urban policy and international development sectors, and include urban planners, officers in local, national or international government agencies, civil society leaders, and researchers.
