Slums

In "Planet of the slums Mike Davis talks about the overview of the diverse religous, ethnic, and political movements of the new urban poor. Davis argues about health issues, justice issues, and social issues associated with slums. Many people don't understand what a slum is. A slum is a poor standard of living. There are five conditions that can label a place a slum. These five conditions are insecure tenure, pollution, inadequate/infrastructure, overcrowding areas, and poor housing. An interesting fact is that over 78% of people in the world lives in some type of those conditions. That percentage will most likely get higher as time goes on.
Slums are formed from a process called squatting. This is where people show up at a specific area and decide to stay there. Once you are there, you take possesion of the land, but it is not legal possesion, just physical possesion of that area. The periphery of cities is usually just dumps and rivers with no value and low value land. These are the areas where most of the people claimed and these are the areas that become the slums. Some history of this process of squatting...It dates back to the 40's, 50's, and 60's when revolutions were taking place in many colonies. Back then squatting was political and decolonized. In around the 1980's and on squatting became economic. As the population grew, each area that was claimed started to get divided. The population grew with migration and as these slum towns grew there were obviously more and more slums taking over.
Slums are a part of the process of Globalization, it is a global and globalizing phenomenon.
To read more on slums here is a recent newspaper article from March 2009...http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/03/01/learning_from_slums/?page=1