Who Cares About Urban Poverty? While the United Nations recently
claimed victory for the Millennium Development Goal on slums,
the global population of slum-dwellers continues to grow. It is
time for governments and civil society to give the problem of
urban poverty the attention it deserves, writes Adam Parsons.
Thousands of people and various world leaders have now returned
from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, following the largest international
meeting of civil society and policymakers on the future of
cities. The broad theme of the fifth World Urban Forum,
‘Bridging the Urban Divide’, went to the heart of the problem of
rapid urbanisation: the inequalities between rich and poor. As
the United Nations Human Settlements Programme emphasised in
their latest report launched to coincide with the Forum, the
number of city-dwellers is expected to rise to two-thirds of
humanity by 2030, and unless drastic action is taken the global
slum population will probably grow by six million people each
year (over 115,000 people ea