Skyscrapers and shanties, gleaming malls and rundown markets, palatial houses and the piss-poor guys who build them: Those are the divides in cities like Mumbai, Nairobi and Manila. Rich and poor do not much mingle.

But a movement is afoot to change that. It aims to integrate the poor into the urban bloodstream, instead of shunting them from sight. For this "inclusive cities" movement, urban renewal doesn't require razing slums and markets. — npr.org

A Milwaukee bar called Nomad World Pub wanted to create a special place for its customers to watch the World Cup, so it decided to set up a faux favela inspired by Rio de Janeiro’s poverty-stricken mountainside slums. The fact the space comes with a taco hut — a type of food not even served in Brazil — reveals the depth of ignorance out of which it was created. You have to wonder: is the menu in Spanish too? — hyperallergic.com

Cars offer more than just convenience: they can give lower income Americans an economic leg up. [...]

While tracking households that had participated in two federal housing voucher programs, [a study] found that car owners were twice as likely as transit users to find jobs and four times likelier to retain them. Car-owning households were also able to locate near better neighborhoods and schools. This reaffirmed previous work ... arguing that car ownership plants the seeds for upward mobility. — thedailybeast.com

On the World Design Capital (WDC) website, Cape Town presents some remarkable shack design projects aimed to solve a nationwide slum problem. Yet even with more than 200 informal settlements and 600,000 residents waiting for formal housing, the Western Cape has been slow to implement the 'transformative design' it celebrates. [...]

The backlog hit 2.1m units in 2013 and at least 1.9 million people (more than 10% of all households) live in shacks or other makeshift dwellings. — theguardian.com

Last week, the city of Phoenix made a startling announcement. The Arizona capital had previously identified 222 chronically homeless veterans living in the city, more than half of them veterans of the Vietnam War. [...]

Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton said last week that every last one of them now had a roof overhead. The city has effectively ended chronic veteran homelessness, according to the mayor [...].

Phoenix did this – prioritizing housing first, then wrapping other services around it. — theatlanticcities.com

Because of Beijing’s sky-high apartment rental costs, as many as two million people—about a tenth of the city’s population—are said to be living below street level in underground storage basements and air-raid shelters partitioned into cramped, windowless rooms. Many of those who have to crowd into these homes are migrant workers like Wang, from the nearby province of Hebei. — qz.com

Are you interested in visiting South Africa? Interested in seeing the real South Africa? Interested in experiencing how the real people live? Interested in tasting the poverty and hardship of life in a shanty town? And—most importantly—are you fearful and white? Congratulations! You're a perfect guest for the Shanty Town at Emoya Luxury Hotel and Spa, where, for less than $100 a night, you can get the authentic experience of living in a shanty town—without the bothersome shanty dwellers. — gawker.com

Welcome to the world’s tallest slum: poverty-ridden Venezuela’s Tower of David. Squatters took over this very unfinished 45-story skyscraper in the early 1990s, and they’ve been there ever since. The tower was originally intended to be a symbol of Caracas’ bright financial future, complete with a rooftop helipad, but construction stopped because of a banking crisis and the sudden death of the tower’s namesake, David Brillembourg. — vocativ.com

The Lagos state commissioner for housing, Adedeji Olatubosun Jeje, provided a different version of events.

“It’s a regeneration of a slum,” he said. “We gave enough notification. The government intends to develop 1,008 housing units. What we removed was just shanties. — NYT

High joblessness and the weak economic recovery pushed the ranks of the poor in the U.S. to 46.2 million in 2010 -- the fourth straight increase and the largest number of people living in poverty since record-keeping began 52 years ago, the Census Bureau reported Tuesday. — LA Times