Entrepreneurship in slum dwellers : social inclusion and the ‘Right to a City’

According to UN data, the global urbanisation rate is currently 55%, and in 2050 it is expected to reach 68%. The leading causes of urban population growth are economic development and polarisation, agricultural change, political instability, climate change and population growth. Additionally, in many countries local authorities are unable to provide adequate living conditions for the newcomers. The scale of the phenomenon of informal urbanism and slums has been known for decades and is still high. Slum dwellers face many barriers on their way to improving living conditions and top-down attempts to improve them have proved ineffective, e.g. mass social housing, the fight against crime. The paradigm of treating slum dwellers, however, as low-skilled, demoralised, deprived of all kinds of capital and any sign of entrepreneurship is changing. The paradigm shift in aid to slum dwellers is based on bottom-up stimulation of their entrepreneurial attitudes, social inclusion and activation. The article has two main objectives, the first one – descriptive and cognitive – to develop a background and geographical synthesis of information on the phenomenon of global slum formation based on the most recent data. The second objective is an attempt to demonstrate the legitimacy of changing the approach and activating the entrepreneurship of slum dwellers.