Access inequalities to WASH and housing in slums in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs): A scoping review.

Urban inequalities are exacerbated due to rapid urbanisation. This is also evident within slums in low- and middle-income countries, where high levels of heterogeneity amongst the slum population lead to differential experiences in Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) and housing access. This scoping review provides evidence of the interconnection of WASH and housing and presents barriers to access and the consequences thereof for slum dwellers. It does so while considering the social stratification amongst urban slum dwellers and their lived experiences. A systematic search of journal articles was conducted in November 2022 in PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science. A total of 33 papers were identified which were full text reviewed and data extracted. Infrastructure, social and cultural, socio-economic, governance and policy and environmental barriers emerged as general themes. Barriers to WASH and housing were more frequently described concerning women and girls due to gender norms within WASH and the home. Barriers to WASH lead to compromised health, socio-economic burdens, and adverse social impacts, thus causing residents of slums to navigate their WASH mobility spatially and over time. Insights from this review underscore the need for an intersectional approach to understanding access inequalities to WASH and housing.

Africa's new cities: The contested future of urbanisation.

New private property investments in Africa's cities are on the rise, and they often take the form of entirely new cities built up from scratch as comprehensively planned self-contained enclaves. As these new city-making trajectories are expanding and empirical research is emerging, there is a need to provide more conceptual clarity. We systematically examine the diversity of new cities in Africa; elicit their financial trajectories; and set an agenda for critically examining their actual and expected implications, by learning transnational lessons from debates on gated communities, peri-urban land governance and displacement, and older waves of new city building. Although most new cities are private-led projects, they are inserted into diverse and dynamic political economies with states ranging from developmentalist to neoliberal to absent. The consumptive and supply-driven character of many projects so far (resembling gated communities for middle and higher classes), their insertion into 'rurban' spaces with complex land governance arrangements, and their tendency to implement post-democratic private-sector-driven governance will make them at best unsuitable for solving Africa's urban problems, and at worst they will increase expulsions and enclosures of the poor, public funding injustice and socio-spatial segregation and fragmentation.