ABSTRACT
Urban poverty and livelihood insecurity are global problems, meaning both that they affect people in all countries of the world and that they require solutions that draw from global experience and expertise. This chapter considers in turn the experiences of urban poverty and livelihood insecurity across the global south and within the global north. The scale and depth of the problem are far greater in the global south and for this reason we largely consider the conceptualisation and problems of poverty from a southern perspective. At the same time, we believe it is also constructive to compare this context with ‘new’ expressions of urban poverty found in advanced neo-liberal and post-socialist cities. Here, poverty increasingly involves not only multiple deprivations but also social isolation and a spatial concentration of poor households, especially lone-parent households, in stigmatised neighbourhoods and communities. Moreover, contrary to the common association of poverty with unemployment, the new urban poverty
Learning objectives
• to differentiate between the concepts of poverty, vulnerability and exclusion and to understand in what ways urban poverty and rural poverty differ
• to understand what livelihoods are and how this concept contributes to our understanding of the micro-level actions of individuals and households within the wider social, political and economic context
• to be able to critically apply the concepts associated with a sustainable livelihoods framework and with multiple economies to analyse urban poverty from a gendered perspective in different contexts of the global south and the global north
increasingly encompasses new sub-classifications of the ‘working poor’ (Smith et al. 2008; Buck et al. 2002; Castells and Portes 1989).
