The increasing development of informal settlements and slums in the years to come is a humanitarian challenge we are facing worldwide. The reasons for this development are mainly given by an urbanization of poverty and the lack of affordable housing in urban areas. Consequently, the majority of slum dwellers are forced to live in housing conditions which are simply unacceptable. In order to fight urban poverty and develop strategies to reduce the number of slum dwellers it is essential to inventory and monitor slums and to understand the underlying mechanisms of slum genesis. However, systematic spatial knowledge about these mechanisms is still absent. This paper addresses the capabilities of mapping and structural analysis of informal settlements using remote sensing data and modelling their genesis based on agent based approaches.