In Reducing Urban Poverty in the Global South we highlight five interventions, each of which follows a broadly similar approach. They invest in building up neighbourhood groups able to improve the lives of people in informal settlements — places where people lack secure tenure, running water, sanitation and waste collection. And these neighbourhood groups are led by women, doubly disadvantaged by gender as well as where they live. These groups develop their own solutions to previously intractable problems of urban development. They design new sanitation systems, build houses and document their communities. For the most part, women play a leadership role – gaining a new confidence as they demonstrate how they can improve local conditions. They network these groups so that they influence city politics. They come together in networks to challenge local politicians who first favour a ‘divide and rule’ strategy – and persuade these politicians to negotiate as they realise that communities across the city are now working together.

Excerpted from Diana Mitlin, the author of the new book, Reducing Urban Poverty in the Global South:

“Our new book reports on the approach that slum dwellers across Africa and Asia have used to achieve social justice and urban rights. This approach recognises the limitations of protest politics. It has emerged from those who have witnessed the struggles for independence in former colonial states. It also builds in the lessons of democratisation in countries such as Cambodia, the Philippines and South Africa. As such, it has at its heart scepticism towards efforts to contest power and gain control over the state.

While its leaders are sympathetic to the cause and are committed to the struggles for social justice and freedom, they doubt the effectiveness of such strategies. They recognise that, as difficult as it is to build a movement powerful enough to bring thousands onto the streets night after night to demand change, it is even harder to make progress stick.

Faced with government promises that are broken, public expenditures whose benefits are captured by the wealthy, and with revolutions that welcomes new elites who rapidly become inculcated into the behaviour of the old elite, they have refined an alternative practice.

In Reducing Urban Poverty in the Global South we highlight five interventions, each of which follows a broadly similar approach. They invest in building up neighbourhood groups able to improve the lives of people in informal settlements — places where people lack secure tenure, running water, sanitation and waste collection. And these neighbourhood groups are led by women, doubly disadvantaged by gender as well as where they live. These groups develop their own solutions to previously intractable problems of urban development. They design new sanitation systems, build houses and document their communities. For the most part, women play a leadership role – gaining a new confidence as they demonstrate how they can improve local conditions. They network these groups so that they influence city politics.

They come together in networks to challenge local politicians who first favour a ‘divide and rule’ strategy – and persuade these politicians to negotiate as they realise that communities across the city are now working together. As solutions emerge they work with their local authorities to make sure the government is on board and then they negotiate additional resources to scale up their efforts. To date, millions of people in the world’s poorest informal settlements have seen the benefits.

Other strategies have failed, in part because of the violence, political manipulation and neglect that are dominant in many urban centres. We show that while development professionals and in some cases politicians are well-meaning, they are not powerful enough to negotiate alternatives in these contexts, in which speculative profit-making creates and controls markets for every single basic need — determining that these are commodities that only go to those who can pay.

Decades of political campaigning and formal urban improvement programmes have brought them little. Reducing Poverty in the Global South shows how squatters and tenants —and the networks and federations they form— have defined their own strategies and solutions and can negotiate their own fates as they struggle for equity and justice in the towns and cities of the future.”