Shanty Towns

The South African city is World Design Capital 2014, yet residents of Khayelitsha township live in cramped, unhygienic conditions. The need for long-promised urban reform is urgent

Urban growth in LEDCs can cause problems due to shanty towns, waste, pollution and poor infrastructure. Learn more about attempts to improve shanty towns and promote sustainable growth.

In the Philippines' urban slums, families are unable to afford electricity and often have no access to the grid anyway. But Filipino actor Illac Diaz is looking to change that. With his organization My Shelter Foundation, he's come up with an innovative idea: turning empty plastic bottles into lamps.

Metro Manila is home to 14 million people, with four out of every 10 residents living in slums. The Philippine government is trying to relocate these "informal settlers" by 2016 and it is building affordable houses, and having schemes to help them buy their own homes.

Short documentary examining overpopulation in Manila, Philippines.

Manila isn't the poorest city on earth but it is the most densely populated with about half of it's residents living in slums. One of the most remarkable is Smokey Mountain, a community literally situated on a garbage dump.

What attracts people to move to a megacity? Find out by watching this clip, which tracks Jakarta's rapid population growth and the issues inherent in living in a megacity, such as overcrowding and access to health and education services. Listen to the story of a family who made the rural-urban shift, and hear from people in Jakarta providing support.

This short film shows the levels of pollution and trash in the Dharavi slum. Produced by Sagar and Rohit, both students of Shree Ganesh Vidya Mandir School in Dharavi.

The curious case of missing plastic is a short film made for artist & architect - Venkat & Prakriti, exhibiting at the Dharavi Biennale festival 2015 organized by SNEHA, a Mumbai based non-profit organization working on healthcare issues in urban communities. Dharavi is a big plastic recycling hub and the film showcases this plastic recycling industry in Dharavi, Mumbai (India), its process involving low healthcare or environmental health standards and indiscriminate, unnecessary use of of plastic in our day to day lives.

Poorly-constructed toilet blocks have led to the deaths of seven people in three months, but politicians are yet to act on their promises for change

In this two-part series Kevin goes on an epic two-week journey to experience the beauty and horror of one of the most extreme urban environments on earth.

Kevin's immersive journey through Dharavi continues as he explores the extraordinary recycling industry. Here, 80 per cent of the city's plastic waste is recycled.

Travel inside India's biggest slum and see what it's really like to live and work there.

The teenagers experience life in the Mumbai city slums as they are set to work in segregated sweatshops barely a stone's throw from the enticing glamour of Bollywood. One saving grace is that unlike the locals, they do not have to sleep at their sewing machines, but with children below the legal minimum working age with them, they finally agree that something has to be done.

MILLIONS of people are now leaving their poor rural surroundings, once the hub of their dreams and aspirations, for the lights, action and glimmer of opportunities that big cities of the country seem to offer. The lure of that apparently happy crowd has transformed the cities, once sleepy towns or manageable urban centres, into bursting human hives. From Dhaka to Chittagong and even to Khulna, there is no turning back.