Assignment 5: Planet of the Slums

By Joel Katz

Cities Harvesting the World Agrarian Crisis Poor farmers are increasingly vulnerable to any

exogenous shock: drought, inflation, risinginterest rates, or falling commodity prices.

Illness is also a huge rural push. For example, anestimated 69% of Cambodian small peasants whosell their land move to the city are forced to to doso by medical debts.

“Rapacious warlords and chronic civil wars, oftenspurred by the economic dislocations of debt-imposed structural adjustment or foreigneconomic predators were uprooting wholecountrysides.”

Despite ruined import-substitution, shrunkenpublic sectors, lack of necessary infrastructure,educational facilities, or public health systems,people are moving to the cities now more thenever before.

Rural push factors outweigh negative urban pullfactors, which has led to an inevitable masspopulation growth in urban slums.

Since 1970, slum growth everywhere in the Southhas outpaced urbanization.

Slum Typology’s and housing locations

There are probably more than 200,000 slums on earth, ranging in population from a few hundred to morethan a million people.

Megaslums arise when shanty-towns and squatter communities merge in continuous belts of informalhousing and poverty, usually on the urban periphery.

“Housing is a verb” The urban poor have to solve a complex equation as they try to optimize housing cost, tenure

security, quality of shelter, journey to work, and sometimes personal safety. Homeless people sometimes move into abandoned homes and derelict hotels after the reach leave for

more attractive neighborhoods. In sub-Saharan Africa, tenements are rare because of a historic urban core. Examples of shelter strategies in Cairo:

1. Renting an apartment in the city core with a central location, secure tenure, and expensive rent.2. Centrally located informal shelter often times on a rooftop, poor quality environment, cheap rent,

central access to job opportunities, and have no secure tenure.3. The cheapest housing solution is to squat on publicly owned land, on the outskirts of the city, “down-

wind of poullution”, very high cost of commuting to work.4. The most preferred solution is buy a house site in a semi-formal development area, with legal tenure,

far distance from jobs but are secure and have basic municipal services.

Pirate Urbanization

Flat peripheral land, even desert, hasmarket value.

Operates through an invisible real-estatemarket.

Pirate settlements did not results fromland invasions, the land actually changeshands through legal purchase.

It’s in effect the privatization of squatting. Also known as Substandard Commercial

Residential Subdivisions (SCRSs). In contrast to true squatters, pirate sub-

division residents obtain either a legal orde facto title to their plot.

They are generally subdivided intouniform lots with conventional streetgrids.

Planned layouts, low service levels,suburban locations, high tenure security,non-conformity with urban developmentplans, and self-help housing are thegeneric features of SCRSs.

Living in Shit

The global sanitation crisis defies hyperbole. It’s origins, as with many Third World urban populations, arerooted in colonialism. Jakarta for example, still depends on open ditches for disposal of most of its wastewater.

“This privy is so dirty that the inhabitants can only enter or leave the court by wading through puddles ofstale urine and excrement.”

Even the richest cities only flush their excrement downstream or dump it into a nearby ocean. Constant intimacy with other people’s waste is one of the most profound of social divides. A study of 22 slums in India found 9 with no latrine facilities at all; in another 10, there were just 19 latrines

for 102,000 people. Catch 22 for poor urban women:

They are expected to maintain a strict standard of modesty while lacking acces to any private means of hygiene, this isthus devastating for women.

Men can urinate at any time at any place, whereas women can only be seen following the call of nature before sunriseand after sunset.

People defecate all around the toilets, because the pit have been clogged for months or even years.

The City Beautiful

Slum dwellers dread the high-profile international events (dignitary visits, sporting events, internationalfestivals, etc) that come to the cities that they live in.

160,000 squatters were moved out of the media’s field of vision and dumped on Manila’s outskirts for aMiss Universe Pageant, visit from President Gerald Ford, and World Bank meeting in subsequent years.

In preparation for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Summit, demolition crews attackedthe local slum. The residents formed a human wall and were met by a SWAT team armed with M16s andlooking to kill.

“The Plan” is to get rid of troublesome elements in the working-class barrios of the upper town by shuntingthem to the outskirts.

The 1988 Seoul Olympic Games saw as many as 720,000 people forced out of their homes and torelocated somewhere else.

Recently, the 2008 Beijing games saw 350,000 forced out of their homes for stadium construction. “Whole city blocks disappear in a matter of days, the population loaded onto trucks and forcibly relocated to

the new townships that the government has established on rice fields outside the major cities.” The most unprecedented mark came where 1.5 million residents (16% of the total urban population) were

removed from their homes as a result of the urban beautification program in Asia.