irishtimes.com. October 7, 2013. Thousands of Nairobi slum dwellers are threatened with eviction from their homes and businesses in the Kenyan capital to facilitate a new European Union-funded road, Amnesty International has claimed in a new report.

Released today to mark World Habitat Day, We are like rubbish in this country is an investigation into forced eviction in the city, which is home to an estimated 3.1 million inhabitants, half of whom live in slums or informal settlements.

The report’s researchers use recent developments around the Nairobi Informal settlements Deep Sea and City Carton to highlight how, despite constitutional protection, slum dwellers live in constant fear of losing their homes.

Read more: http://www.irishtimes.com/thousands-of-nairobi-slum-dwellers-face-eviction-over-new-road-says-amnesty

nydailynews.com. October 6, 2013. The nonprofit Enterprise Community Partners says New York’s next mayor should support a plan that invests in and builds affordable housing, and provides funding and services to keep families from becoming homeless.

The next mayor of New York City will inherit quite a lot: a growing local economy, historically low crime rates, shiny new developments peppered throughout the city — and perhaps most importantly, an unprecedented homelessness crisis.

Tonight, roughly 57,000 New Yorkers will sleep on the street or in a shelter, an all-time high. The number of homeless families in the city’s shelter system has risen a staggering 73% since 2002. There are currently enough homeless kids in the city to fill Madison Square Garden and still leave a few thousand for the Barclays Center.

While there are several reasons for this spike, the primary culprit is a lack of decent, affordable housing, especially for the lowest-income New Yorkers. Median rent in the city has increased by almost 9% over the past half-decade while wages have dropped by about 7% after adjusting for inflation.

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/guest-solution-homeless-housing-article

theafricareport.com. October, 2, 2013. With a housing shortage across Africa, governments and developers are creating new models that enable people on modest incomes to buy their own homes.

Shantytowns, slums, squatter set­tlements – everyone has a word for it, but solutions are less easy to come by. Booming African cities and towns are drawing in rural migrants eager for jobs.
Urban dwellers are sett­ ling down and starting families. Often based on colonial­ era plans and infra­ structure, African cities are struggling to cope. Informal settlements flourish both beyond the city limits and tucked within established urban architecture: under bridges, next to highways and in marketplaces.

African leaders have not always been receptive to the plight of the poorly housed – the view from the windows of State House is often of manicured gardens rather than plastic­strewn, open­gutter tenements. But the North

African uprisings have focused minds at the highest levels. Though by no means the only factor, it is pertinent that the Moroccan government, which survived protests by angry citizens, has the most active social housing policy in the Maghreb.

Read more: http://www.theafricareport.com/

economictimes.indiatimes.com. October, 3, 2013. New Delhi: Over a third of the slum population in India lives without any basic facility being provided by the state as the slums are not recognized. In the case of some states like Rajasthan, Gujarat and Bihar, the entire slum population of several lakhs remains unrecognized by the state governments.

For the first time, the census data on slums identified slum dwellers as the people living in compact areas with a population of at least 300, in unhygienic environment with inadequate infrastructure and lacking proper sanitary and drinking water facilities. Earlier, only people in areas notified or recognized as slums by state or local authorities were counted.

Read more: http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/slum-population-literacy-rate

bbc.com. September 30, 2013. There is growing interest in deep sea mining for minerals and metals, especially around island nations such as the Cook Islands, the Seychelles and Tonga. The Chinese in particular have been investing in deep sea expeditions to investigate the viability of mining manganese nodules, rocks that contain nickel, copper, cobalt, manganese, gold and also valuable rare earth minerals. This work is being done remotely, however if large-scale operations do go ahead they might be simplified by having people continuously on-site at depth, according to Koblick.

Life aquatic

Then there are those who see underwater living as a way of preserving our species in the event of an apocalyptic catastrophe. In the event of a disaster that put paid to human life, communities could perform reverse versions of Noah’s ark. With that in mind, Philip Pauley, a futurist and the founder of the London-based visual communications consultancy Pauley, designed the self-sustaining habitat Sub-Biosphere 2. His design includes circular structures that could be floated out to sea and then sunk, creating a haven for 50 to 100 lucky people.

Read more: http://www.bbc.com/can-we-build-underwater-cities

Photo: fastcoexist.com

www.fastcoexist.com. September, 25, 2013. Micro-apartments have been experiencing a renaissance of late. They represent a seemingly straightforward antidote to persistent affordable housing shortages in dense growing cities: If the rent-per-square-foot is too damn high, why not lower the number of square feet?

In New York City’s headline-grabbing example, apartments from 250 to 370 square feet are being built in the first multi-unit building in Manhattan to use modular construction. New Yorkers were recently allowed to sleep inside a prototype at a museum exhibition, whose director called it “a glimpse into the future of housing in our city.”

Read and see: http://www.fastcoexist.com/photostinyfuturisticjapaneseapartments