‘A better life awaits you’ Plastic recycling in Dharavi, Mumbai Caroline Knowles A better life is the promise of a real estate billboard towering over the informal settlement — some call a slum — of Dharavi in Mumbai. This isn’t any old slum: it is Asia’s biggest, which shot to…

Caroline Knowles This photo sets the scene. It is taken in Shomolu, a low-income neighbourhood in Lagos, notorious for its violence, its bands of workless youths, and for spontaneous protests at the egregious behaviour of the political class and the runaway inflation that eats up people’s attempts to survive. Resilience…

Caroline Knowles & David Garbin The entrance to the Mountains of Fire and Miracles (MFM) revivalist church HQ in the Onike neighbourhood of Lagos is behind high spiked walls and gates guarded by CCTV cameras. Inside, its vast auditorium is divided into sections so that congregants can seek redress for…

Caroline Knowles Composing the intricate choreographies of Hanoi traffic, millions of motorcycles — the people’s transport — sometimes carrying entire families, weave in and out of cars, taxis, trucks, minibuses, and pedestrians, in a dazzling kaleidoscope of motion. In this city-on-the-move, pavements are repurposed as parking lots, or as places…

What’s in a Metre? Water and Power in Mumbai Caroline Knowles Rahul looks up from fixing a motorbike outside the cluster of a 7 story building in Sangharsh Nagar, Mumbai. The bike isn’t his — he is a mechanic in his mid-twenties who lives in a one-roomed apartment with a…

Churches, Gangs, Water and Sanitation in Lusaka and Cape Town Caroline Knowles On the edge of the business centre in Kuils River with its post-Apartheid government housing, now the delipidated territories of the “Sexy Boys” and other ‘gangs’ that express the desperation of youth with bullets; people in the Wesbank…

Water Management on the Periphery of Medellin, Colombia Caroline Knowles Marita stomps into the meeting at the community centre in Bello Oriente in pattered wellies. She is flushed from the climb and from arguing with city authorities over the closure of the school. The school needs repairs. The landowner won’t…

Jumping for Health in Nairobi Caroline Knowles Vanita and her classmates stream out of the school gates at the end of the day. Brightly coloured uniforms stream through the Kasarani Mwiki neighbourhood in Nairobi, moving in all directions through this north-eastern residential neighbourhood. Today is different. Vanita is clutching her…

Navigating Nairobi Caroline Knowles Looking out on Mathare; an informal, low-income settlement in Nairobi, home to between 200,000 and 500,000 people the city authorities have been unable to count, I see a dense tangle of shelters, rigged together from wood and rusting corrugated iron stretching into the distance. Women are…