Introduction to livelihoods and urban development
By 2050, the urban population is expected to expand by 1.8 billion in Asia and 0.9 billion in Africa. While most livelihoods thinking originally derived from rural contexts, livelihoods approaches can provide insight into issues of urban poverty and of rural-urban linkages.
Urban areas offer opportunities for poverty reduction given economies of scale and proximity, which can result in more cost effective basic infrastructure and service delivery. However, poor people are often excluded from access to these basic services. According to UN-Habitat, 840 million people lived in slums in 2005; over 600 million of whom lacked access to adequate sanitation and 180 million lacked access to clean water.
A livelihoods approach to urban poverty highlights several key factors:
- the importance of governance at all levels, from streets and neighbourhoods to municipalities. Poor governance both restricts access to resources and services, and makes the urban poor more vulnerable to crime
- urban livelihoods strategies are largely cash-based with households relying primarily on selling labour, often within the informal sector or within service industries of the formal sector
- the importance of shelter: to be close to employment opportunities poor people often live on unsafe land in squatter settlements with limited access to services and increased vulnerability to disease
- social capital in urban areas can be undermined by fragmentation caused by the social and economic heterogeneity of urban communities.
Many poor households have both rural and urban components to their livelihoods, as members live and work in different places. Livelihoods approaches can help analyse the growing links between rural and urban areas so that insight into rural-urban linkages can inform more integrated policies, structures and systems.
This section provides recommended reading and a regularly updated list of resources on livelihoods approaches to urban poverty and to the understanding of rural-urban linkages
Recommended reading
- Urban and rural change: interactive resource guide
- ( Eldis Document Store , 2004)
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This resource comes in the form of an interactive guide, setting out the key challenges facing policy makers in a rapidly changing relationship between rural and urban livelihoods. As a starting po...
- Policy planning and implementation overview: rural-urban linkages
- ( Overseas Development Institute, London , 2002)
- This key briefing paper in the DFID series is concerned with the changing relationship between the rural and the urban and its implications for policy makers. Its clear format provides a concise overv...
- Dynamic livelihoods: making the most of rural-urban connections
- ( J. Garrett / International Food Policy Research Institute , 2005)
- This briefing seeks to dispel myths surrounding rural as opposed to urban; and challenge the way that these categories are often simplistically used in development policy. Instead of seeing the rural ...
