According to the World Bank, the number of urban poor in the world will triple from the year 2000 to 1.5 billion by 2025. Nearly, one-third of all city dwellers already live in substandard housing. In a few decades, it is probable that the process of urbanisation of poverty will have gone its course in India also. Then, the situation now found in Latin America, with about 90 per cent of the poor living in urban areas, would be a fact for India too. According to the Planning Commission of India, the incidence of poverty in Gujarat has for several decades been higher in urban areas than in rural. Similarly, it is estimated that the proportion of poor population in Ahmedabad – the largest city of Gujarat – is somewhere between 17 and 32 per cent. This volume is primarily based on the extensive research carried out in Ahmedabad under the urban research project jointly undertaken by the School of Planning, Centre for Environmental Planning and Technology (CEPT), Ahmedabad (India) and the Department of Human Geography, University of Oslo (Norway). The chapters included in the book mainly deal with the emerging issues related to urbanisation, such as the role of NGOs in shelter and slum improvement, land markets, marginalisation of labour unions and the utilisation of health services, especially in the context of Ahmedabad. The book will be extremely useful to policy makers, administrators and urban managers.
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