Urbanization, Slums, and the Question of Natural Rights

Urbanization is considered a sign of advancement. Skyscrapers, transportation networks, and digital lines of communication are often regarded as symbols of progress. But behind these shiny facades, more than 1 billion people in the world live in slums characterized by deprivation, the UN Statistics Division says. From Kibera in Nairobi to Dharavi in Mumbai and Rio de Janeiro’s favelas, slums remind us that rapid urban expansion is not synonymous with better living conditions. They also pose a more fundamental moral question: If every human being is endowed with natural rights, including the right to life and dignity, how can this standard of living be normalized?

The Negation of Natural and Human Rights

There is deprivation on every side of life in a slum. Crowded, makeshift housing of tin, plastic, or scrap materials puts residents at risk in the face of disease and disaster. Sanitation is poor, clean water is scarce, and medical care is inaccessible. In many areas, residents face a constant threat of eviction with no secure title to the land under their homes.

These are not merely social ills; they are violations of natural rights. The right to life is more than just a matter of survival; it also encompasses the right to live with health and dignity. The right to liberty is violated when structural poverty and neglect drive them into insecure, unsafe settlements. The fundamental human right to shelter, implied by the basic right to life, is obviously not respected when millions are reduced to nothing but makeshift dwellings.

Cause? Unplanned Urbanization.

The proliferation of slums is not inevitable; instead, it results from unplanned urban growth. Throughout large swaths of the Global South, rural-to-urban migration driven by those with aspirations for opportunity has outstripped city planning. Housing policies are unaffordable for most residents, as elites dominate land markets, and infrastructure design is geared toward the wealthier. The poor are being shoved into shanty towns where their human rights do not count.

Governments also often exploit slum dwellers as a source of inexpensive labor but withhold from them the security of formal recognition - violating their natural rights. This paradox of using slum dwellers in planning without their involvement intensifies urban inequality and denies the rights of residents.

Global Patterns of Local Failures

The numbers are astounding: UN-Habitat estimates that the proportion of urban people living in slums worldwide exceeds 1 in 4, and Sub-Saharan Africa now hosts around 60% of its own city residents under such conditions. What these numbers reflect is not only poverty but also a near absolute contempt for natural rights. Cities that deny so many access to sanitation, clean water, or security are effectively denying them their right to dignity.

The situation lays bare a hypocrisy of modern urban development: cities are held up as hubs of growth, yet the very labor that supports them, people from the working class, is derived from places like slums, where fundamental rights are trampled.

The Significance of Planning with Natural Rights in Focus

Cities that do inclusive planning show us slums are not inevitable. Efforts in Latin America, where the slum upgrading of favelas brought investment to sanitation, electricity, and schools for residents, have shown that recognizing slum dwellers as rights-holding citizens can change urban life. On the other hand, where expansion is market-driven without control, slums multiply and human misery descends.

As the book Sovereignty for Nature, Survival for All: Natural Rights Led Governance Towards Sustainable Future (EXTINCTION OR PROSPERITY?) by M. Zakir Hossain Khan reminds us, planning cannot be reduced to efficiency metrics or economic expansion alone. It must be anchored in the moral foundation of natural rights.

Safe housing, secure tenure, and clean water are not luxuries but the very conditions of human dignity. Where these rights are ignored and urban growth is left to unchecked markets, slums multiply and misery deepens; where they are upheld, cities become spaces of justice and shared prosperity.

Skyscrapers, highways, or rising GDP numbers cannot gauge a city’s quality of life. It should be judged by how cities respect the natural rights of the most vulnerable among us. That slums still exist in the 21st century is not just an abject failure of urban planning; it is a more profound moral failure; a denial of the most basic human rights to life, dignity, and shelter. To create fair and decent cities, state leaders must pursue an inclusive urbanization that respects natural rights before economic prosperity. We need to pose the question: who is the economic prosperity for? Why is it exclusive? Who, in an urban land built on an indigenous one, deserves a standard living environment? Most of all, we need to hold the people who violate natural rights (of humans and their surrounding natural environments) accountable, asking, "Who benefits from this exclusion, and who pays the price for it?"