Densely populated informal housing has mushroomed in formerly segregated South African townships, attracting migrants who survive on the edges of the economy, excluded from basic services. In the pandemic, they have been even more vulnerable, unable to practice social distancing and forced to continue with marginal work such as scavenging to eke out a living. Drawing on interviews with residents of a Johannesburg settlement, the authors emphasize how urban space structures inequalities in every aspect of everyday life, requiring a new approach to city planning and governance with a focus on justice.

Comparing China, India, and Brazil reveals that current housing policies in all three countries have produced new forms of exclusion for inhabitants of informal settlements.

“In the course of the Great Recession, already fragile black and Hispanic middle-class households lost huge amounts of wealth, which had often been painstakingly accumulated over many decades.” Third in a series on social mobility around the world .

The prospects for sustainable urban development are embedded in larger political struggles.

NGOs and other foreign entities took control of the humanitarian response to the 2010 earthquake, creating parallel structures that contributed to the very duplication and state weaknesses that NGOs were supposed to solve.

Most of Pen'a Nieto's legislative achievements remain incomplete, and they have been accompanied by serious missteps that must be rectified and oversights that can no longer be ignored.