This paper presents an approach to automated identification of slum area change patterns in Hyderabad, India, using multi-year and multi-sensor very high resolution satellite imagery. It relies upon a lacunarity-based slum detection algorithm, combined with Cannyand LSD-based imagery pre-processing routines. This method outputs plausible and spatially explicit slum locations for the whole urban...

Instead of criminalizing slums, the global discourse on slums and urban poor is changing towards integration, rehabilitation, internationalizing cities. As pleasant as it may look, important to critically reflect evaluate policies upgradation especially in south. Is change from criminalization rehabilitation integration true its spirit or just another policy gimmick? This article uses critical ...

One of the key 21st century challenges in population health is the challenge of improving the global urban condition. 2 Starting in 2007, and for the first time in human history, the majority of the world's population will live in urban areas. According to the latest UN projections, 3 by 2030, the world's urban population will increase by more than two billion, while the rural population will d...

Rapid urbanisation in the 20th century has been accompanied by the development of slums. Nearly one-third of the world's population and more than 60% of urban populations in the least developed countries live in slums, including hundreds of millions of children. Slums are areas of broad social and health disadvantage to children and their families due to extreme poverty, overcrowding, poor wate...

We present here a report from Kolkata, India, which illustrates the persisting deeply anchored roots of stigma in leprosy and our failure to make a significant change in the situation. Kolkata is a metropolitan city in West Bengal, which is one of the states with a persisting leprosy problem (10 321 new cases were detected in 2010–2011). It is the third most populous metropolitan urban area in ...

Massive slums have become major features of cities in many low-income and middle-income countries. Here, in the first in a Series of two papers, we discuss why slums are unhealthy places with especially high risks of infection and injury. We show that children are especially vulnerable, and that the combination of malnutrition and recurrent diarrhoea leads to stunted growth and longer-term effe...

This socio-economic review provides an overview of the sanitation crisis in slum areas, and re-emphasizes the importance of sanitation. It highlights a lack of recognition of actual drivers for sanitation improvements, and the complexities in the provision of sanitation services in the context of urban slums with a mix of tenants and landlords. It elaborates how the drivers of demand for sanita...

BACKGROUND Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is a rising health burden among the world's poor with hypertension as the main risk factor. In sub-Saharan Africa, hypertension is increasingly affecting the urban population of which a substantial part lives in slums. This study aims to give insight into the profile of patients with hypertension living in slums of Nairobi, Kenya. METHODS Sociodemograph...

Spatial analysis techniques were used to estimate the interurban differential HIV prevalence among pregnant women in the city of Porto Alegre, Southern Brazil. The estimates were produced through the spatial smoothing of residence pinpoints with live newborns and HIV infected pregnant women for the year of 2003. The overlay of high prevalence areas in city slums was identified. This finding con...