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Homelessness is a global challenge.

The United Nations Human Settlements Program estimates that 1.1 billion people live in inadequate housing, and the best data available suggest that more than 100 million people have no housing at all.

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How can we nuance our understanding of homelessness?
Ashwin Parulkar
Homelessness is generally described as an absence of a physical dwelling. However, homelessness triggers many social and economic factors that, together, perpetuate patterns of vulnerability amongst the urban homeless. This case is an anthology of three long-form narratives that relate the complexity of vulnerability and deprivation in the lives of the homeless in the streets of Delhi. Through action research, photo-...
Becoming homeless, surviving homelessness: The lives of six working homeless men in Yamuna Pushta, Delhi
Ashwin Parulkar
This working paper from CPR’s and TISS' Understanding Metropolitan Homelessness project tells stories of six migrant homeless men from Uttar Pradesh and Nagaland who live, for various durations, in shelters along the western bank of the Yamuna river in North Delhi, locally referred to as ‘Yamuna Pushta’. By tracing their journeys from villages and towns to Delhi’s streets, the paper explores how these men became homeless and...
An Overview of Global Homelessness and Strategies for Systemic Change
Katherine Johnson
Mark McGreevy
Molly Seeley
Homelessness is a problem that can be solved with the right mix of program interventions, well-coordinated local systems, and effective policy. We know homelessness can be ended because there are cities that have ended it. Others have seen meaningful reductions in homelessness among certain targeted populations, such as chronically homeless individuals or veterans. In broad terms, the processes and interventions required to...
The housing provision system in Malaysia
Syafiee Shuid
Since Habitat I in 1976, the housing provision system in Malaysia have gone through various phases to keep pace with country's political economy changes and globalization as promoted by the international agencies such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF). Malaysia have made tremendous progress to address severe housing shortage, substandard housing and slums in the urban areas since independence in 1957....
“This is no longer the city I once knew”. Evictions, the urban poor and the right to the city in millennial Delhi
Gautam Bhan
Millennial Delhi is changing rapidly. Between 1990 and 2003, 51,461 houses were demolished in Delhi under “slum clearance” schemes. Between 2004 and 2007 alone, however, at least 45,000 homes were demolished, and since the beginning of 2007, eviction notices have been served on at least three other large settlements. Fewer than 25 per cent of the households evicted in this latter time period have received any alternative...
Homeless in Dhaka: Violence, Sexual Harassment, and Drug-abuse
Tracey Pérez Koehlmoos
Md. Jasim Uddin
Ali Ashraf
Mashida Rashid
Bangladesh has experienced one of the highest urban population growth rates (around 7% per year) over the past three decades. Dhaka, the capital city, attracts approximately 320,000 migrants from rural areas every year. The city is unable to provide shelter, food, education, healthcare, and employment for its rapidly-expanding population. An estimated 3.4 million people live in the overcrowded slums of Dhaka, and many more...
A Global Framework for Understanding and Measuring Homelessness
Volker Busch-Geertsemaa
Dennis Culhane
Suzanne Fitzpatrick
There is no globally agreed definition of homelessness. Even within countries, the topic can be contentious. At the same time, we know we can’t measure and solve a problem we can’t define, so in 2015 IGH made developing shared language on homelessness a top priority. The result of this project is the IGH Framework, the product of collaboration from researchers, policy experts and on-the-ground leaders in six continents. While...
‘GeoSlum1 ’ - Empowering local authorities for slum improvement through an opensource Geospatial Platform
Ravi Sivakumar
Sivakumar DK
Rajat Chopra
Urbanization has emerged as a key policy and governance challenge in India in recent years. Cities and towns contribute to more than 60 percent of GDP. While urbanization can be an engine of economic development and inclusion, unless managed properly, it can create serious socio-economic consequences which would potentially negate the benefits of urbanization. With the rapid growth of urban population, expected to occur due...
How do we assess vulnerability to climate change in India? A systematic review of literature
Chandni Singh
Tanvi Deshpande
Ritwika Basu
In this paper, we conduct a systematic review of literature to identify the span of methodologies used to assess climate change vulnerability in India and locate gaps between conceptualisation and assessment of vulnerability. We begin with a short review of how the concept of vulnerability has evolved in global research and within India. Using examples of VAs in India, we demonstrate that the methodologies to assess...
From the Basti to the ‘House’: Socio-spatial Readings of Housing Policy in India
Gautam Bhan
In June 2015, the Government of India approved a national housing program called the Prime Minster’s Awas Yojana (PMAY; Prime Minister’s Housing Plan), the latest in a series of ‘urban missions’ that have seen the urban emerge as an object for policy intervention in a country long rurally imagined. The emergence of these missions has necessitated the construction of a new urban grammar. Concepts, categories and...
Housing Markets and Housing Policies in India
Piyush Tiwari
Jyoti Rao
This paper argues that to address the housing shortage in India, there is desperate need to prepare a framework for housing by (i) including housing as a constitutional right; (ii) resolving issues of unclear land titles and ensuing claims; (iii) building adequate financial resources for affordable housing programs; (iv) building responsive instruments to facilitate the affordability of housing by all income segments; and (v...
Decoding housing for all by 2022: India’s commitment to inclusive, sustainable, and affordable development
KPMG
Housing in India varies significantly and can reflect the socio-economic mix of its vast population. In the last decade, there has been tremendous growth in the country’s housing sector, along with demographic changes, rise in income, growth in the number of nuclear families, and urbanisation. The commitment to have housing for all by 2022 is the vision of the new government, and realising this dream can be a step towards...
The Right To Adequate Housing In New Delhi, India
From 14 to 28 March, 2014, three students in the International Human Rights Clinic at the University of Chicago Law School, Brian Ahn, Alex Kiles and Marco Segatti, accompanied by Clinical Professor Sital Kalantry and Clinical Lecturer in Law Brian Citro, in partnership with Nazdeek, a legal capacity-building organization based in India, spent two weeks in New Delhi, researching housing rights and policy. The goal was to...
Neak Loueng, Cambodia: Street Children Survey
Judith Fiss
Cambodia currently has a total population of over 15, 25 million people and has one of the youngest populations in Southeast Asia: with 41 per cent aged 18 and under, and more than a third between the ages of 10 and 24. Three decades of war and conflict, a post-war boom and an average low life expectancy are some of the reasons for this imbalance in demography. Over the past two decades, despite staggering economic...
Which Place for the Homeless in Delhi? Scrutiny of a Mobilisation Campaign in the 2010 Commonwealth Games Context
Véronique Dupont
The socio-spatial restructuring of Delhi was accompanied by large-scale slum demolitions that increased homelessness. This paper focuses on the people made homeless, and their struggle to assert their place in the city. First, it expounds the context of homelessness in Delhi and analyses the mechanisms behind its aggravation. Then, it examines a decisive moment in this struggle: a mobilisation campaign for the homeless’ right...
Scoping Study: The State Of Social Housing In Bangladesh
Marco Bonetti
Tatiana de Feraudy
The Study has been structured to provide an overview on Bangladesh’s housing challenges, policies and stakeholders with an emphasis on social housing, urban issues and low-income population. The Sustainable Social Housing initiative (SUSHI), developed by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), promotes sustainable building practices in affordable housing units around the world through an integrated approach for social...
Bangkok Street Children Profile (2010)
Friends International
This is a broad study designed to analyze ongoing trends and changes within the street child population in Bangkok. Two complementary methods have been applied in the present survey. The first method assembles Street Children Snapshot Surveys and the second gathers the information collected from Case Management forms of individual children.
Iswar Sankalpa: Experience with the Homeless Persons with Mental Illness
Debashis Chatterjee
Sarbani Das Roy
This is the story of an organization called Iswar Sankalpa, working with homeless persons with mental illness in the streets of Kolkata, a large metropolitan city in India. After discussing the issues of homeless persons with mental illness in general and describing briefly the current relevant situation in the city in the introduction, the write-up describes the birth of the organization, the ideas and ideals driving the...
Conspicuous consumption and rural poverty in farming community: An empirical investigation based on two DS divisions in Kurunegala District in Sri Lanka
H.M. Senevirathne
N.A. Rajasinghe
D.A.M. Perera
Researchers and Practitioners have been interested in the field of conspicuous consumption (CC) for the past few decades. Much of these works have been concerned with defining and measuring the CC tendencies among leisure class. Less effort has been directed toward determining the factors that underlie the tendency to consume conspicuously by ‘less income earners’, such as small-scale farmers (SCFs). This paper examines...
Forced Evictions and Human Rights
International human rights law establishes norms and principles touching on virtually all facets of life. This is reflected in the consistent reaffirmation by the international community of the indivisibility and interdependence of all human rights, whether civil, cultural, economic, political or social. The indispensable equality of all human rights, now firmly entrenched in the provisions of international human rights...