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作者

Amit Patel;Phoram Shah;Brian E. Beauregard

来源

HABITAT INTERNATIONAL,Vol.101,P.102190

语言

英文

关键字

Sustainable development goals;Multiple housing deprivations;Slum definitions;Slum improvement policies;India;Enumeration

作者单位

University of Massachusetts Boston, USA;The World Bank Group, USA;University of Massachusetts Boston, USA;The World Bank Group, USA

摘要

Around one billion people who live in slums globally have low quality housing and poor living conditions (UN, 2020). However, such global estimates do not provide a full description of different types of deprivations experienced by the urban poor, often resulting in inaccurate estimates of the extent of housing challenge. An all-encompassing, single analytical category of “slums” limits its usefulness for planning and policymaking purposes. Slum population as an urban metric also presents challenge for comparative analysis mainly because slum definitions vary country by country. We argue that current approaches of slum enumeration fail to recognize the true extent and nature of housing deprivations, effectively undermining the urgent need to address housing issues for urban poor in developing countries and rarely providing any basis for concrete policy actions. We use a methodological framework originally developed by Patel et al. (2014) and apply it to a large-scale dataset from Census of India (2011) consisting of 1% sample of India's entire urban population. This is one of the first studies to use a large-scale micro-data to provide reliable estimates of the extent and nature of multiple housing deprivations in the country. This paper demonstrates how India's official slum statistics underestimate the extent of housing problems in India. Moreover, we show how levels of multiple deprivations may be useful in identifying the most deprived populations and, by logical extension, targeting the most deservingbeneficiaries of slum policies. Further, the paper discusses how such an approach can be helpful in determining types of interventions and targeting beneficiaries. The approach can be easily expanded to other countries and significantly contribute to current debates about measurement and monitoring of Sustainable Development Goals pertaining to housing and basic services for the urban poor across the globe.