This paper is about the current and potential role of community-driven initiatives to significantly improve the lives of hundreds of millions of slum dwellers and squatters at local, city and national levels.

Please note that this paper has been superceeded by 'The transition to a predominantly urban world and its underpinnings'- Urban Change:4

Innovative strategies to enhance shelter finance based around the strengthening of savings and savings organizations can transform conventional finance into a catalyst for empowerment and development.

Are local governments able to give more power to poorer groups? And support their capacities for action and partnership? Are the urban poor able to make a creative contribution to the considerable challenges of urban management? The April 2004 issue of Environment and Urbanization describes how local governments, citizen groups and social movements are developing more participatory ways of working together. Much has been made possible by more democratic and decentralized government structures, and by bottom-up pressures and coherent alternative development approaches from citizens and civil society organizations. This issue explores new approaches and assesses their effectiveness

This paper discusses the limitations in the income-based poverty lines that are widely used to define poverty and to measure urban poverty in Africa, Asia and Latin America. This includes a discussion of whether the poverty lines defined by international agencies and national governments are set at levels that are realistic in relation to the costs of living in the larger/more prosperous/more expensive cities and the prices that the urban poor have to pay for essential non-food items. It also includes a discussion of what poverty definitions based only on income fail to take account of in regard to identifying deprivation and to helping inform poverty reduction policies and practices. This paper assembles data from many empirical studies which suggest that the scale and depth of urban poverty is systematically under-estimated in most of the official statistics produced or used by governments and international agencies.

The report documents the proceeding of an expert group meeting held on community-based housing credit arrangements in low-income housing. The objective of the expert group meeting was to bring together experts on community-based housing finance in low-income urban areas to share and assess the experiences on the potentials and feasibility of promoting this approach to a wider spectrum of low-income communities.

The State of the World's Cities 2004/2005 charts the progress and the challenges we face in this rapidly urbanising world. With contributions from some of the world's leading urban scholars, writers and experts, this report carries extensive examples, illustrations and facts that are of use to experts and non-experts alike.

This paper reviews 23 recent Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) to consider how they define and measure urban poverty and the extent to which they actually consider urban poverty.