The Challenge of Slums: Global Report on Human Settlements 2003 is mainly concerned with the shelter conditions of the majority of the urban poor. It is about how the poor struggle to survive within urban areas, mainly through informal shelter and informal income-generation strategies, and about the inadequacy of both public and market responses to the plight of the urban poor. But the report is also about hope, about building on the foundations of the urban poor’s survival strategies and about what needs to be done by both the public and non-governmental sectors, as well as by the international community, if the goal of adequate shelter for all is to have any relevance for today’s urban poor.

Efforts to improve the living conditions of slum dwellers (especially within developing countries) have been feeble and incoherent over the last decade or so, having peaked during the 1980s. However, renewed concern about poverty has recently led governments to adopt a specific target on slums in the United Nations Millennium Declaration, which aims to significantly improve the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers by the year 2020. As this report emphasizes, slums are a manifestation of the two main challenges facing human settlements development at the beginning of the new millennium: rapid urbanization and the urbanization of poverty.

Slums areas have the highest concentrations of poor people and the worst shelter and physical environmental conditions. Among the most important findings of The Challenge of Slums is the global estimate of the magnitude of the challenge of slums. The total number of slum dwellers in the world stood at about 924 million people in 2001. This represents about 32 per cent of the world’s total urban population. At that time, 43 per cent of the combined urban populations of all developing regions lived in slums, while 78.2 per cent of the urban population in least developed countries were slum dwellers. In some developing country cities, slums are so pervasive that it is the rich who have to segregate themselves behind small gated enclaves.