Planet of Slums - Mike Davis

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as in São Paulo’s once-fashionable Campos Eliseos or parts of Lima’s colonial cityscape, whole bourgeois neighborhoods have devolved into slums. In Algiers’s famous seaside district of Bab-el-Oued, on the other hand, the indigenous poor have replaced the colon working class. Although the dominant global pattern is the eviction of the poor from the center, some Third World cities reproduce US-style urban segregation, with the postcolonial middle classes fleeing from the core to gated suburbs and so-called “edge cities.” This has long been the case in Kingston, where one quarter of a million poor people inhabit the crime-ridden but culturally dynamic Downtown, while the middle classes live Uptown. Likewise, as the rich began to abandon the center of Montevideo in the 1970s and 1980s for the more attractive neighborhoods of the east coast, homeless people moved into abandoned homes and derelict hotels. This sucession dynamic occurred much earlier in Lima: the middle and upper classes began leaving the historic city center after the large earthquake of 1940; a crackdown on street vending in 1996, however, supposedly inaugurated a government-led reconquista of the area from the Andean working classes.44 In Johannesburg, meanwhile, corporate offices and upscale stores have fled in recent years to the mainly white northern suburbs. With its mixture of slum tenements and middle-class apartment complexes, the central business district – once the financial capital of the entire continent – has become a center of informal trading and African micro-enterprises.45

      The most unusual example of an inherited housing supply is undoubtedly Cairo’s City of the Dead, where one million poor people use Mameluke tombs as prefabricated housing components. The huge graveyard, the burial site of generations of sultans and emirs, is a walled urban island surrounded by congested motorways. The original residents, in the eighteenth century, were tombkeepers for rich Cairene families, followed by quarry workers, and then, in the modern era, by refugees uprooted from Sinai and Suez during the 1967 war. “The invaders,” observes Jeffrey Nedoroscik, a researcher at the American University in Cairo, “have adapted the tombs in creative ways to meet the needs of the living. Cenotaphs and grave markers are used as desks, headboards, tables, and shelves. String is hung between gravestones to set laundry to dry.”46 Elsewhere in Cairo (formerly a city with 29 synagogues), smaller groups of squatters have taken over abandoned Jewish cemeteries. “On a visit in the 1980s,” writes journalist Max Rodenbeck, “I found a young couple with four children cozily installed in a particularly splendid neopharaonic vault. The tomb dwellers had unsealed the columbarium inside, finding it made convenient built-in shelving for clothes, cooking pots, and a color TV set.”47

      In most of the Third World, however, hand-me-down housing is less common than tenements and purpose-built rental housing. In colonial India, the tightfisted refusal of the Raj to provide minimal water supplies and sanitation to urban Indian neighborhoods went hand in hand with a de facto housing policy that relied on the greed of local landlord elites, who built the horribly overcrowded, unsanitary but highly profitable tenements that still house millions of Indians.48 In Mumbai the typical chawl (75 percent of the city’s formal housing stock) is a dilapidated, one-room rental dwelling that crams a household of six people into 15 square meters; the latrine is usually shared with six other families.49

      Like Mumbai’s chawls, Lima’s callejones were built specifically to be rented to the poor: many by the city’s leading slumlord, the Catholic Church.50 In the main they are miserable dwellings made out of adobe or quincha (woodframes filled with mud and straw), which deteriorate rapidly and are often dangerously unstable. One study of callejones showed 85 people sharing a water tap and 93 using the same latrine.51 Likewise, until the peripheral favela boom that began in the early 1980s, most of São Paulo’s poor were traditionally housed in rented rooms in inner-city tenements known as corticos, half of which were built as tenements, the other half hand-me-downs from the urban bourgeoisie.52

      Buenos Aires’s wood-and-sheetmetal inquilinatos were originally built for poor Italian immigrants in dockland barrios such as La Boca and Barracas. Since the last debt crisis, however, many formerly middle-class families have been forced out of their private apartments and now crowd into a single inquilinato room, sharing a communal kitchen and bathroom with five or more other families. Buenos Aires over the last crisis-ridden decade has also acquired an estimated 100,000-plus squatters in abandoned buildings and factories in the central Federal District alone.53

      In sub-Saharan Africa, in contrast, older inner-city tenement housing is more or less absent. “In the ex-British colonies,” geographer Michael Edwards points out, “tenements are rare because cities lack a historic urban core. Although renting was near universal among Africans prior to independence, tenants lived in hostels (if single men) or township houses (if families) rather than in tenements.”54 In older parts of Accra and Kumasi, customary landownership is still common; and while renting is dominant, clan ties usually preclude the rack-renting so pervasive in Lagos and Nairobi. Indeed, the kinship-based housing compound, where poor people dwell in extended family houses with wealthier kinfolk, makes most Ghanaian neighborhoods more economically diverse than their counterparts in other African cities.55

      Other inner-city housing options, both formal and informal, include an ingenious spectrum of illegal additions, flophouses, squats, and mini-shantytowns. In Hong Kong one quarter of a million people live in illegal additions on rooftops or filled-in airwells in the center of buildings. The worst conditions, however, are endured by the so-called “caged men” – “a local term referring to bedspaces for singles, the ‘cage’ suggested by the tendency of these tenants to erect wire covering for their bed spaces to prevent theft of their belongings. The average number of residents in one of these bedspace apartments is 38.3 and the average per capita living space is 19.4 square feet.”56 Variants on the old-fashioned American “flophouse” are also familiar in most Asian big cities. In Seoul, for example, evictees from the city’s traditional squatter settlements, as well as unemployed people, have crowded into the estimated 5000 Jjogbang which rent beds by the day and provide only one toilet per 15 residents.57

      Finally, there is the street itself. Los Angeles is the First World capital of homelessness, with an estimated 100,000 homeless people, including an increasing number of families, camped on downtown streets or living furtively in parks and amongst freeway landscaping. The biggest population of pavement-dwellers in the Third World is probably in Mumbai, where 1995 research estimated one million living on the sidewalks.60 The traditional stereotype of the Indian pavement-dweller is a destitute peasant, newly arrived from the countryside, who survives by parasitic begging, but as research in Mumbai has revealed, almost all (97 percent) have at least one breadwinner, 70 percent have been in the city at least six years, and one third had been evicted from a slum or a chawl.61 Indeed, many pavement-dwellers are simply workers – rickshaw men, construction laborers, and market porters – who are compelled by their jobs to live in the otherwise unaffordable heart of the metropolis.62

      Living in the street, however, is rarely free. As Erhard Berner emphasizes, “even sidewalk dwellers in India or the Philippines have to pay regular fees to policemen or syndicates.”63 In Lagos entrepreneurs rent out wheelbarrows, borrowed from construction sites, as ersazt beds for the homeless.64

      2. Pirate Urbanization

      The majority of the world’s urban poor no longer live in inner cities. Since 1970 the larger share of world urban population growth has been absorbed by slum communities on the periphery of Third World cities. Sprawl has long ceased to be a distinctively

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