Urban Poverty and Conflict
Urban Poverty and Conflict
It is estimated that within a quarter of a century, poverty will primarily be an urban phenomenon. Urban contexts have long been associated with conflict, and it is widely speculated that rising poverty will exacerbate this.
How and why this may be is an issue that is poorly understood, however. This research programme explores the interrelation between urban poverty, inequality, and conflict.
It is being developed in close collaboration with two of the University of Manchester’s flagship centres for urban research, GURC and MARC, and currently involves two major initiatives, with a third one currently under funding consideration.
(a) Understanding the Tipping Point of Urban Conflict: Violence, Cities and Poverty Reduction in the Developing World (Directors: Caroline Moser, GURC, and Dennis Rodgers)
Although there is a long academic tradition linking urban contexts with conflict, the relationship between the two is neither preordained nor predetermined. Rather, there is a growing awareness that a range of specific factors lead to social conflict in cities 'tipping' into overt violence. Such factors include poverty, the existence of youth bulges, governance voids, and particular gender relations. This joint GURC-BWPI project explores the dynamics of these factors on urban violence in four cities in Asia, Africa and Latin America: Dili (Timor Leste), Patna (India), Mombasa (Kenya) and Santiago (Chile).
(b) ClimUrb: Poverty and Climate Change in Urban Bangladesh (Directors: Manoj Roy and David Hulme)
This research project explores climate change impacts on the living conditions of poor urban people and communities in Bangladesh. It focuses on the problems of earning a living, accessing basic services, keeping healthy and raising children, including in particular the conflicts and insecurity that these can generate in poor urban communities, and how this impacts on broader poverty trends. The project also seeks to establish new avenues for innovative policy determination.
(c) Gangs, Violence and Poverty (Director: Dennis Rodgers)
Gangs are among the most paradigmatic forms of urban violence, intimately associated with poverty, yet they are also highly misunderstood and prone to sensationalist representation. This particularly applies to the dynamics and consequences of gang economic activities, which often constitute attractive forms of capital accumulation in impoverished contexts, and frequently have a significant impact on poverty levels. Understanding the logic of gangs, and the consequences of their violence for poor communities, is thus critical for the coherent elaboration of poverty-reduction strategies in an urbanising world. Two project proposals are under consideration: one on the socio-economic trajectories of gang members once they leave the gang; the second on violence and the criminalisation of poverty in Central America.