The slum is not only a manifestation of mismanaged urban planning in the countries of the South.

The existence of slums worldwide is also a sign that the slum is a crucial element of contemporary
urbanisation.

Introduction

Slums are residential buildings and settlements that are less integrated, directed, planned. They do
not pay attention to the completeness of necessary infrastructure and facilities such as clean water,
sanitation, waste management systems, and rainwater channels that tend to be degraded. Slums are
a product of population growth, poverty, and a lack of government in controlling growth and
providing adequate urban services.

According to the National Centre of Competence in Research on Mitigating Syndromes of Global

Change (NCCR N-S) (cf. Hurni et al., 2004), the slum (identified as the ‘favela syndrome’; Kropp
et al., 2001) is a form of ‘socio-ecological degradation through uncontrolled urban growth’,
characterised by strong negative impact in the following areas: soil degradation, fresh water
scarcity and global development disparities. The ‘urban sprawl syndrome’, a second characteristic
of worldwide urbanisation, leads to the ‘destruction of landscapes through the planned expansion
of urban infrastructures’, and generates soil degradation, climate change, loss of biodiversity and
fresh water scarcity.

The dirty environment is synonymous with slums. Urban slums often occur due to the
process of urbanization, namely the movement of residents from village to city. Urban
slum areas are not desirable but are unavoidable, this is as a result of the attraction of the city,
in order to minimize the increase in slum settlements efforts need to be made that can hinder the
emergence of slums. The emergence of housing and slum problems is caused by several things,
namely poor control of housing and settlement development which has led to the emergence of
slums in several parts of the city which have an impact on reducing environmental carrying
capacity, limited capacity and capacity in providing decent housing and housing from the
government , private and community, the development of human resources and community
institutions that are still not optimal, especially regarding awareness of the importance of
healthy living, lack of understanding of technical criteria for residential and residential land use,
especially those based on environmental carrying capacity and space capacity. The
construction of housing and settlements that are less integrated, directed, planned and not
paying attention to the completeness of basic infrastructure and facilities such as clean
water, sanitation (waste), waste management systems, and rainwater drainage channels will
tend to be degraded in environmental quality or termed slum areas.

In developing countries, the population having access to clean drinking water has moved from
71% in 1990 to 79% in 2002, and from 34% to 49% for access to sanitation facilities.

Slum conditions result from the combined effects of natural ageing of buildings, lack of
maintenance and neglect, wrong use of the buildings, poor sanitation in the disposal of sewage and
solid waste, wrong development of land, and increasing deterioration of the natural landscape.
Often the dirty living habits of slum dwellers and the neglect of the buildings bring about the
emergence of slums while the physical deterioration of an area encourages slum habits in the
dwellers. In less developed countries (LDCs), rapid urbanisation often outpaces the ability of local
authorities and national governments to provide adequate shelter and basic amenities for the urban
poor. The high level of poverty of most urban households places the available housing stock out of
their economic reach. Many of the households resort to constructing makeshift dwellings with all
sorts of refuse materials in illegally occupied land. The result is the development of slums and
squatter settlements. Large slums and squatter communities live illegally on government and
private lands, especially in big cities such as Mumbai, Mexico City, Manila, Lagos, Ibadan, and
Port Harcourt.

The environment in which buildings in slums are located is squalid in most cases. This is with
regard to the material characteristics of the buildings on the one hand and their organisation as
spatial units on the other. The buildings are badly maintained, they lack sanitary facilities, and
light, air, and privacy are grossly inadequate. They are often unsafe and insecure, and they do not
provide adequate shelter from the elements of weather. There is poor layout of buildings with
inadequate roads between them and inadequate drainage and provision for refuse evacuation. A
filthy and decaying environment is a health hazard since such an environment provides a breeding
ground for a variety of diseases such as cholera, dysentery, and tuberculosis, which are contagious.
However, poor housing conditions alone may not be responsible for the poor health of slum
dwellers as it could also be attributed to inadequate medical facilities, unbalanced diet, and wilful
disregard for personal hygiene.

The situation of slums:

1. Unhygienic conditions.
2. Lack of medical facilities.
3. Lack of sanitation.
4. Congested.
5. No access to drinking water and electricity.
6. Most of the inhabitants of the slums can’t be beneficiaries to Govt schemes.
7. Only a few slums are recognized by Govt. Conditions in unrecognized slums are even worse.
8. No drainage system. In most slums, wastewater flow in between houses.
9. The little medical facilities available in slums is provided by NGOs.

Causes of the formation of slums:

1. Increasing rural to urban migration.

2. Urban areas are not being improved enough to accommodate the new inhabitants.
3. Poor planning of cities.
4. Poverty and lack of job opportunities in rural areas are the push factors of migration.
5. The high cost of living in urban areas.
6. Natural disasters.
7. Increasing population.
8. Urbanization – Pull factor of rural migration.
9. Social exclusion.
10. Informal economy.
11. Some politicians use slum inhabitants as their vote banks. Though they give fake promises of
improving the living conditions, they encourage slums.
12. Social conflicts – civil wars.

Effects on the people living in slums:

1. The reduced life expectancy of slum inhabitants.
2 Health problems due to drinking contaminated water.
3. Environment pollution.
4. The low standard of living.
5. Degraded health conditions.
6. Those living in slums get victimized easily by alcohol and drugs.
7. Slums inhabitants will become the worst victims of natural disasters.
8. Slums breed violence, crime, diseases, epidemics and psychological illnesses.
9. Preterm births.
10. Malnutrition in children.
11. Child labour.
12. No safety for women living in slums due to high no. of drunkards.

Urbanization is not merely a modern phenomenon, but a rapid and historic transformation of
human social roots on a global scale, whereby predominantly rural culture is being rapidly
replaced by predominantly urban culture. The first major change in settlement patterns was the
accumulation of hunter-gatherers into villages many thousand years ago. Village culture is
characterized by common bloodlines, intimate relationships, and communal behaviour, whereas
urban culture is characterized by distant bloodlines, unfamiliar relations, and competitive
behaviour. This unprecedented movement of people is forecast to continue and intensify during
the next few decades, mushrooming cities to sizes unthinkable only a century ago. As a result, the
world urban population growth curve has up till recently followed a quadratic-hyperbolic pattern.
[8]

INTRODUCTION

Urbanization is the steady increase in the number of people living in cities or urban centres. This
occurrences result from the continuous mass movement of people from the villages or rural
settlements to cities or urban areas. It can also result from natural increase (the excess of births
over deaths) especially where this population increase take place in areas where advance
technology and developmental projects are present.

In the first stage of urbanization the number and size of cities varied with the amount and
productivity of the agricultural land available. Cities were confined mainly to the valleys and
flood plains, like the Nile, the Fertile Crescent, the Indus and the Hwang Ho. Increase of
population in any one city was therefore limited. The second stage of urbanization began with the
development of large-scale river and sea transport and the introduction of roads for chariots and
carts. In this new economy the village and the country town maintained the environmental balance
of the first stage; but, with the production of grain and oil in surpluses that permitted export, a
specialization in agriculture set in and, along with this, a specialization in trade and industry,
supplementing the religious and political specialization that dominated the first stage. Both these
forms of specialization enabled the city to expand in population beyond the limits of its
agricultural hinterland; and, in certain cases, notably in Greek city of Megalopolis, the population
in smaller centers was deliberately removed to a single big center ---a conscious reproduction of a
process that was taking place less deliberately in other cities. At this stage the city grew by
draining away its resources and manpower from the countryside without returning any equivalent
goods. Along with this went a destructive use of natural resources for industrial purposes, with
increased concentration on mining and smelting.
The third stage of urbanization does not make its appearance until the nineteenth century, and it is
only now beginning to reach its full expansion, performance, and influence. If the first stage is one
of urban balance and cooperation, and the second is one of partial urban dominance within a still
mainly agricultural framework, behind both is an economy that was forced to address the largest
part of its manpower toward cultivating the land and improving the whole landscape for human
use. The actual amount of land dedicated to urban uses was limited, if only because the population
was also limited. This entire situation has altered radically during the last three centuries by reason
of a series of related changes. The first is that world population has been growing steadily since
the seventeenth century, when the beginning of reasonable statistical estimates, or at least tolerable
guesses, can first be made. According to the Woytinskys [Woytinskys, 1953], the average rate of
population increase appears to have gone up steadily: 2.7 per cent from 1650 to 1700; 3.2 per cent
in the first half of the eighteenth century and 4.5 per cent in the second half; 5.3 per cent from
1800 to 1850; 6.5 per cent from 1850 to 1900; and 8.3 per cent from 1900 to 1950. As the
Woytinskys themselves remark, these averages should not be taken too seriously; yet there is a
high probability that an acceleration has taken place and hardly any doubt whatever that the world
population has doubled during the last century, while the manpower needed to maintain
agricultural productivity in mechanized countries has decreased.
By itself this expansion might mean no more than that the less populated parts of the earth would
presently acquire densities comparable to those of India and China, with a great part of the
increase forced to undertake intensive cultivation of the land. But this increase did not take place
by itself; it was accompanied by a series of profound technological changes which transformed the
classic «age of utilities» into the present «age of the machine» and a predominantly agricultural
civilization into a urban one ---or possibly a suburban one. These two factors, technical
improvement and population growth, have been interacting since at least the sixteenth century, for
it was the improvement in the sailing ship and the art of navigation that opened up the almost
virginal territory of the New World. The resulting increase of food supply, in terms of added
tillage, was further augmented by New World crops like maize and the potato. Meanwhile, the
increased production of energy foods ---vegetable oils, animals fats, and sugar cane and sugar
beet--- not merely helped support a large population but in turn, through the supply of fat, turned
soap from a courtly luxury to a household necessity; and this major contribution to hygiene ---
public and personal--- probably did more to lower death rate that any other single factor. From the
beginning of the nineteenth century the surplus population made it possible for old cities to
expand and new cities to be founded. As Webber long ago pointed out [Webber, 1899], the rate
was even faster in Germany in the second half of the nineteenth century than it was in the United
States.
This wave of urbanization was not, as is sometimes thought, chiefly dependent upon the steam
engine or upon improvements in local transportation. The fact is that the number of cities above
the 100,000 mark had increased in the seventeenth century, well before the steam engine or the
power loom had been invented. London passed the million mark in population by 1810, before it
had a mechanical means of transportation or the beginning of an adequate water supply (in parts of
London piped water was turned on only twice a week). But a marked change, nevertheless, took
place in urban growth during the nineteenth century.
At this moment the four natural limits on the growth of cities were thrown off: the nutritional limit
of an adequate food and water supply; the military limit of protective walls and fortifications; the
traffic limit set by slow-moving agents of reliable transportation like the canalboat; and the power
limit to regular production imposed by the limited number of water-power sites and the feebleness
of the other prime movers ---horse and wind power. In the new industrial city these limits ceased
to hold. While up to this time growth was confined to commercial cities favorably situated at the
merging point of two or more diverse regions with complementary resources and skills, urban
development now went on in places that had easy access to the coal measures, the iron-ore beds,
and the limestone quarries. Pottery towns, cotton towns, woolen towns, and steel towns, no longer
held down in size, flourished wherever the tracks for steam locomotives could be laid and the
steam engine established as a source of power. The only limitation on the spread and
multiplication of towns under this regime was the disability of the steam locomotive to operate
efficiently on grades of more than 2 per cent. Whereas the water power and wind power of the
eotechnic period had tended to distribute industry in the coastal cities of high winds or along fast-
running upland streams, coal power tended to group industry in the valleys near the mine pits or
along the railroad lines that constituted a continuation of the mine and the mining environment
[Mumford, 1934]. Industry, like agriculture, competes for the heavy lowland soils. As for the
railroad itself, it is one of the greatest devourers of land and transformers of landscape. The
marshaling yards of its great urban terminal put large areas out of urban or agricultural use.[

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