Planet of Slums

In 2003, the UN Humans Settlements Programme published The Challenge of Slums, a report on urban living conditions and poverty. This report issues a clear warning, much like climate researchers have, that the future may be untenable.

The Challenge of Slums describes slums as “characterized by overcrowding, poor or informal housing, inadequate access to safe water and sanitation, and insecurity of tenure” (22-23). By this restrictive definition, UN researchers estimated that there were more than one billion citizens in slums in 2005. Davis is quick to point out that it is difficult to get accurate numbers because often poor populations are undercounted.

At the time of Davis’s writing, there were over 200,000 slums on earth. The five largest slum areas (Dhaka, Kolkata, Karachi, Mumbai, and Delhi) had around 15,000 slum communities, whose population exceeded 20 million. These are megaslums, where “shanty­towns and squatter communities merge in continuous belts of informal housing and poverty, usually on the urban periphery” (26).

Those in unstable housing have often been forced into slums to have access to the job market—a function of city shape. In American cities, large poor populations typically live in the city center, or the inner city. European cities are hubs, with migrant and unemployed individuals often in low-cost high-rise apartments around the edges of a city. In the developing world, poverty can be centrally or peripherally located, relying on tenements and rental housing from governments reluctant to spend money on such projects. A chawl, for example, is a city housing space in Mumbai that often crams six people into 15 square meters (160 square feet); the bathrooms are shared between six families. There are many variations of the same insufficient and unhealthy housing across the globe.

One of the new developments of urban growth is horizontalization: Cities are bigger geographically because low-cost housing that exists on the edges of the city always stretches further.

Davis categorizes residents of slums: Squatters, or people who take possession of a land that is not theirs; urban pirates, or squatters encouraged by landowners hoping to get state compensation and sometimes infrastructural development; renters, who lack political agency and whose presence often widens the gap between middle and lower classes; and finally the undefinable and usually unstudied and uncounted edge of the city. This liminal area, where the urban collides with the rural, is typically ignored by regulation—for instance, in China, Beijing’s garment sweatshops hide there, while in Bangalore, cheap labor can be found on the fringes, without much oversight by the state. Children that live there, without access to education, are often recruited into gangs or paramilitary groups.

Davis posits that “before considering why Third World cities and their slums grew so fast in the second half of the twentieth century, it is first necessary to understand why they grew so slowly in the first half” (50). Most megacities follow the same trajectory: slow growth followed by an abrupt spurt that began in the 1950s and 1960s and continues to this day.

One cause of this was European colonialism, which often denied Indigenous populations urban land ownership or residence. The extreme of this example was South African Apartheid, which uprooted inner-city communities of color, evicting them from white areas. British imperialists were the world’s greatest purveyor of slums—their policies forced many colonized peoples to live in poorly built, unsafe (both infrastructurally and medically) housing situations. Another cause of the sudden rise in city population were mid-20th century revolutions and civil wars, sometimes covertly influenced by would-be imperialist powers. For example, during the Vietnam War, the US forced the urbanization of South Vietnam, which made the country’s population less spread out and more centralized.

In response to the sudden influx of poor into cities, government policies denying city access to non-urban dwellers became commonplace. For instance, after the 1949 Chinese Revolution made cities a beacon to job-hungry peasants from the countryside, the Stalinist Mao regime created stringent regulations around internal migration, supporting the urban proletariat over rural workers. Similarly, in Latin America, post-WWII industrialization drove many poor urban dwellers from rental housing to squatting on the edges of cities. In response, the government launched crackdowns on informal housing as a way to actively support the property-owning middle class. In another example, in sub-Saharan Africa, the influx of many new city dwellers—primarily farmers—led the government to impose rigid policies that forced these peasants to deliver farm goods below market value or face harsh rural taxation—a dual pressure that highlights the urban bias prevalent in African development.

Despite all of this, Davis argues that slums could have been avoided. For instance, Cuba’s National Institute of Savings and Housing had an avant-garde approach to urban development in the early 1960s, undertaking a national effort to rehouse people living in poverty. Similar models were attempted in Brazil and Tanzania, offering glimpses of what could have been. Instead, however, “in the rest of the Third World, the idea of an interventionist state strongly committed to social housing and job development seems either a hallucination or a bad joke, because governments long ago abdicated any serious effort to combat slums and redress urban marginality” (62).

Governments are doubly guilty: They have failed to safely house poor urban dwellers while aiding middle-class poaching of public or state-subsidized housing. In Vietnam, for example, civil servants or army members entitled to municipal housing often sublet their units. In general, middle-class city residents and the urban elite are often much more adept at avoiding taxation that detrimentally affects poor people. Davis lays some of the blame at the feet of the IMF, which “everywhere advocates regressive user fees and charges for public services but never proposes counterpart efforts to tax wealth, conspicuous consumption, or real estate” (68).