Top UN official highlights impact of financial crisis on world’s urban poor

The current global financial turmoil must be viewed as a “housing finance crisis,” leaving the world’s urban poor to fend for themselves, the head of the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-HABITAT) said today in London.

“The financial crisis we are facing today cannot be seen as an event – it is a process that has been building up over time and this process has now bust,” Anna Tibaijuka said, launching UN-HABITAT’s biennial “State of the World’s Cities 2008/2009” report.

She called on governments to provide cheaper homes for those subsisting on lower incomes because the supply of affordable housing cannot be controlled entirely by market forces.

One out of three people living in cities reside in slums, and that proportion could rise due to the credit crunch, UN-HABITAT’s Executive Director noted, warning that with one billion people already living in slums, unrest could result if government do not take urgent action to address the urban poverty crisis.

“I am not surprised that world leaders are now seizing on the matter because without leadership, without governance, it is a clear test of social tensions.”

Half of the world’s population now resides in cities, and that fraction will grow to nearly 60 per cent in the next 20 years. Urban growth is occurring most rapidly in the developing world, where cities surge by 5 million residents on average very month.

“Cities embody some of society’s most pressing challenges, from pollution and disease to unemployment and lack of adequate shelter,” Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon wrote in the foreword to the new publication. “But cities are also venues where rapid, dramatic change is not just possible but expected.”

The report pointed out that income distribution varies considerably among poorer regions, with the divide most pronounced in African and Latin American cities.

The amount of deprivation slum dwellers face depends on the access to clean water; access to sanitation; the durability of housing; the size of living areas; and the security of tenure.

Based on this system, the report finds that the areas with the largest proportion of people living in slum conditions in cities are in sub-Saharan Africa, where nearly two-thirds of the urban population are slum dwellers.