Recovering slums : determinants of poverty and upward social mobility in urban slums : case studies from India

This book assumes that urban poverty, reality of hundreds of millions of people in the developing world, is not a given, uninfluencable condition. Using a case study approach, this book reflects on the local forces processes and adaptive capacities in the slums themselves that help move people out of poverty. Urban poverty and life in slums, is not seen as a situation in which there exist only losers and by which no winners could possibly emerge. Rather, the phenomenon of urban poverty and slum living may be seen as a spectrum along which there exist to varying degrees opportunities to beak out of a situation, even if one is born into it. Some of these local opportunities may pertain to initial conditions of slums, be it better housing and infrastructural provision on part of planning agencies, or be it the social and economic conditions of the inhabitants. Some of the local strengths may derive from behavioral factors that relate to the motivation to achieve in education in order to have better employment and wages, to seek and use health care, to contribute to the provision of infrastructural services, to pay for the legalization of illegally occupied land, or to actively seek and receive help from governmental and nongovernmental sources. In the social science studies of four slums in the Indian City of Bhuj, Gujarat, particular attention is given to the conditions and ways people utilize their own capacities towards change and the improvement of living conditions. In sum, these lead to considerable qualitative and quantitative differences in the level of slum development processes.