The 2009 Oscar winner for best picture, Slumdog Millionaire, may have introduced Hollywood to the ragpickers of Mumbai, but that city’s scrap-heap squalor is all too common everywhere else. In 2003, the United Nations reported that almost 1 billion people—about one-sixth of humanity, and a third of all city dwellers—lived in the slums of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and the number was projected to double by 2030. Planning can’t keep up, so people ad-lib housing, often illegally, in the space they can find on urban fringes.
April 21, 2025
