The world’s governments agreed at the Millennium Summit to halve the number of people who lack access to safe water, mainly in the world’s cities, by 2015. With rapidly growing urban populations the challenge is immense. Water and Sanitation in the World’s Cities is a comprehensive and authoritative assessment of the problems and how they can be addressed. This influential publication by the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) sets out in detail the scale of inadequate…

Demonstrates that most arguments leading to the current bias against rental housing are highly flawed. Argues for more tenure-neutral housing policies, and urges governments to modify regulatory frameworks, develop credit programmes and other forms of assistance to support housing production, with a view to creating more rental housing and to improve the existing stock.

The current paper presents the results of a first global enumeration of slums at the country level. The data are analyzed and comparisons established at sub-regional and regional levels while trying to understand what is happening globally. This document is the culmination of attempts to come to grips with changes in the way we measure slums, starting by providing an agreed universal definition of this type of settlements and a clear methodological approach. The preliminary estimations…

This guide represents a milestone in the efforts of the United Nations to monitor the Millennium Development Goals adopted by the UN member states in the year 2000.

Summary of existing UN-HABITAT publications, reports and other documents on building materials and construction technologies. Provides readers with an overview of work undertaken by UN-HABITAT in these fields during the last two decades. Provides a general introduction and summary of each reviewed report, as well as an indication of their availability in printed and/or electronic formats.

This publication is designed for national and local authorities, the police, and civil society organisations which contribute to urban safety development at the local level.

This survey report is part of the Safer Cities Nairobi Project aiming at shedding light on the hidden problem of violence against women, and to address the gaps of information that persist on this subject.

This publication is addressed to stakeholders at all levels, setting out specific promises and challenges of achieving sustainable urbanization. It elaborates on many of the issues raised at the first World Urban Forum that was held at UN-HABITAT headquarters in Nairobi in April-May 2002. At that Forum, a full range of Habitat Agenda partners came together to develop the concept of “sustainable urbanization” and to discuss its implementation.