How to improve the lives of 100 million slum dwellers by 2020.

• Author: Huchzermeyer, Marie

PROGRESSIVE THINKING ON SLUMS or informal settlements must engage in two processes that underpin their formation and perpetuation: distorted urban land markets and the way the competition politics of globalization shape local land markets and urban policy. Can global governance offer a progressive approach to this challenge?

In the 2000 Millennium Declaration, UN Member States asserted that they "believe that the central challenge we face today is to ensure that globalization becomes a positive force for all the world's people. For while globalization offers great opportunities, at present its benefits are very unevenly shared, while its costs are unevenly distributed." The United Nations further affirms its belief that globalization can be made fully inclusive and equitable, a position supported by international bestseller Hernando de Soto, who argues that "[e]veryone will benefit from globalizing capitalism within a country, but the most obvious and largest beneficiary will be the poor". (1) This underpins his argument that the integration of the poor into the (globalizing) urban land market is the answer to poverty. However, in his book Mr. de Soto does not consider the sub-Saharan African reality of extreme distortion in the urban land market and the overwhelming demand for urban land from a class of better-off but under-housed households, who are ready to take advantage of the benefits of land programmes targeted at the poor. Whatever degree of globalization has reached this region, it has done little to correct the imbalance. The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and targets were formulated, influenced by seemingly land market and globalization.

Most of the outcome-based MDG targets are to be achieved by 2015, by which time they aim to halve or substantially reduce the incidence of various indicators of underdevelopment--poverty, hunger, gender disparity, child and maternal mortality, the spread of HIV/AIDS and incidence of malaria, lack of access to water, sanitation and primary education. Only target 11 of MDG 7--nsure environmental sustainability--is to be achieved five years later and does not set out to halve or substantially reduce the slum population. It aims to achieve a significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers by 2020, as proposed in the "Cities Without Slums" initiative. This represents no more than 10 per cent of the world's population living in slums in 2000.

The "slum target" is...