Informal settlement

node · earth · Global

Housing built and occupied outside the formal system of land title, planning permission and building control — which is how a very large share of the world's urban population is housed. UN-Habitat's estimate for the end of 2024 is that more than 1.1 billion people live in slums and informal settlements, within a broader 1.6 billion in inadequate housing, plus roughly 300 million with no stable shelter at all. The word covers extremely different things: consolidated neighbourhoods forty years old with electricity, shops and second storeys; recent peripheral occupations with no services; and waterfront settlements on land nobody has formally allocated. What they share is not poverty of construction but absence of recorded right, and that absence is what determines whether a household will invest in its own roof, whether a utility will extend a pipe to it, and whether a municipality will collect anything from it. Informality is therefore best read as a legal and fiscal condition with physical consequences, not as a description of building quality.