A Modern Guide to Urban Poverty

This Modern Guide provides a new conceptual framework and vocabulary for understanding and addressing urban poverty in contemporary societies. Contributing authors examine detailed case studies from cities in the Global North and South, adopting a range of approaches from quantitative analyses to in-depth ethnographies.

Chapters highlight how large groups of newly urbanized populations develop informal strategies to cope with extreme living conditions in poor neighborhoods or shantytowns. They illustrate how, amid violence and conflict, these populations create networks of solidarity, forms of resilience and political collectives that demand better living conditions and the right to the city. The book also assesses the ambivalent role of public policies in mitigating or exacerbating urban poverty and explores the emerging realities and trajectories of urban poverty.

A Modern Guide to Urban Poverty is a crucial resource for scholars and students of sociology, urban planning, human geography and anthropology. Its insights on the complex interplay of the social, economic and political processes that generate urban poverty are also highly relevant to policymakers and researchers in international NGOs.