Lesson 04 : Characteristics Of Rural And Urban Housing
Characteristics of Slum housing
A slum is an over populated urban area characterized by substandard housing. A squatter is a slum settlement (sometimes illegal or unauthorized) of impoverished people who live in improvised dwellings made from scrap materials
The menial workers who migrate from rural araeas enter into cities for wage employment or to serve as labour force, encroach on available open space especially near nallas or train tracks, and make shelters that have no facility for healthy living.
Most problems related to city slums and urban poor can be viewed as extensions of the rural impoverished process. Shelter for living are shacks built of mud walls, thatched roof, mud flooring, and some of the older slums have pucca structure with brick walls, mud plastering, Mangalore or country tiled roof , mud or stone flooring. These have very low roof and are ill ventilated.
As slums do not have drainage, soil water run onto streets as open drainage, which harbor mosquitoes and flies.
These shacks also have no sanitary toilet facility for nature calls and also water facilities. Families depend on common street tap and community toilets.
In order to improve the livable condition of this section of populations, State governments are making an effort to build colonies under slum improvement schemes.
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