ArchiAfrika-April-Magazine-English-final-v2

Above: London Victorian slum children. Image Credit: Gilbert Nii-Okai Addy Image Credit: Sean Blaschke
Much of nineteenth century London was
made up of slums, as anyone who ever read
Charles Dickens would imagine or know.
It was the same with New York and other
American cities. Many Indian cities like
Mumbai and Calcutta are mostly slums,
depending on how one defines a slum and the
numbers and living conditions of the people
living there.
In London for instance the great 19th century
slum clearances like what we are seeing in
Lagos, never really solved the problem. The
slums and slum dwellers just shifted to other
geographical areas like St Giles, and newer
slum areas like Bermondsey, Brixton and
others. In fact the poorer parts of London
today very much have their roots and origins
in the Dickensian slums of the Victorian era.
The political and intellectual lexicon may have
changed with the times, as has the economy
and the provision of social housing, but the
underlying socio-economic dynamics are still
there. There is still a constant debate about
issues like urban regelation, poverty and social
deprivation in places like the East End of
London, Tower Hamlets, Brixton, Peckham
and others. Immigration from non-European
parts of the world since the end of the second
World War have added issues of race and
ethnicity into the equation, but basically the
issues are about human beings trying to make
a living in an urban environment with a highly
unequal access to economic and political
power.
In Africa these issues are compounded by
the fact that, almost uniquely in economic
history, we have been witnessing urbanisation
on an unprecedented scale without much
industrialisation. This is the main reason for
the economic dominance of the informal
sector in most of urban modern Africa. A
largely informal economy necessarily goes
hand in hand with a largely informal housing
infrastructure.
What is happening in Lagos is happening all
over Africa including South Africa and our
own Ghana. Ever heard of Accra’s Sodom
and Gomorrah and the City Mayor’s almost
weekly attempts to get street traders out of
the city centre? The trouble though is that
slums and slum dwellers never go away. The
politicians and town planners- or village idiots
as some cynically call them- often seem to get
it wrong. They thought they would escape
Lagos by building Abuja in the 1970s and
now Abuja itself is becoming or has become a
majority slum city!
Most of Accra and Kumasi, our two main urban
centres, are mostly slums. Even the pockets
of affluence we have are under relentless
pressure from the surrounding slums. If not in
terms of people then certainly in terms of the
now almost permanent water and electricity
crises which are a direct result of the explosive
growth in the city’s population from around
200,000 at independence to over 4 million
today - in just over 50 years.
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