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32Understanding Urban Safety and SecurityBox 2.2 Urban land-use processes and dynamicsA private investor in a city of 3 million people builds a factory in1960 to produce a chemically based product. Following municipalzoning procedures and industrial safety regulations, the factory islocated on the far periphery of the metropolitan area, outside theborders of the central municipality, allowing the noxious fumes toblow far away from any residential areas. Each year, however, theexpansion of the built-up urban area reaches closer to the factory.Eventually, the land near the factory becomes an unregulatedresidential area for poor households who had been evictedfrom downtown locations. Having been evicted once, the poorwisely do not invest heavily in their homes. Similarly, the poormunicipality on the periphery of the city has no interest or feels nopolitical pressure to provide water supply and other infrastructureto the illegally occupied area. Households drill their own wells oruse water from nearby waterways, both of which are probablypolluted by the factory. The incidence of disease and other healthproblems is significant, affecting employment and incomes. A consequenceis that the area becomes known for drug dealing and crime.By 1980, however, the location of this residential land isincreasingly considered to be in the first ring of the metropolitanarea or central zone of a rapidly expanding city. The now wealthierand politically more important municipality then decides to evictthe poor, clearing out ‘undesirable elements’, and announces that itwill provide infrastructure for a ‘proper’ residential neighbourhood.However, having failed to secure international funding, on environmentaland other grounds, the municipality had to mobilizeresources for this from the area’s new and wealthier residents. Fiveyears later, the factory is surrounded by a mixed residential area of50,000 people working in the formal sector. Residents form astrong neighbourhood organization to ensure the security of thearea and, among other tasks, to keep the drug dealers out.In 1990, with machinery in the factory now 30 years old,there is a serious industrial accident with escaping chemical fumeskilling hundreds of people living near the factory grounds andaffecting thousands in the neighbourhood. Fortunately for thepoorest households who had been forced to leave the area tenyears earlier, they have escaped the effects of the accident and livein a squatter area 16 kilometres to the west of the factory. Manyresidents of the neighbourhood are gravely injured and are unableto work. Neither the company nor public authorities at the municipalor national level are able to provide much compensation tocover medical costs or unemployment insurance.Postscript. In some European capital, thousands of kilometres away,the head of the Urban Development Division of the InternationalAid Agency thanked his or her lucky stars that, despite the intenselobbying efforts of the government of the city, the housing projecthad been turned down for financing in 1980. Perhaps there will nowbe an opportunity for a new development project includingenvironmental cleanup, showing the agency’s new ‘green awareness’.Aerial photographyof most cities vividlyshows that thepoorest and mostfragile quality ofhousing andinfrastructure iscoincident withphysical andnatural risksparticular, as well as those of the elderly and the disabled,before and at the time of Hurricane Katrina and later in reliefand recovery efforts. 36The cases of Mumbai and New Orleans are also veryinstructive about general patterns of the complex multiplefactors that operate at the urban level. Vulnerabilities appearto be cumulative; yet they also interact with one another,exacerbating safety and security. For example, the pooroccupy the most hazardous sites in most cities, such as thegecekondus and barrios on the hillsides of Ankara andCaracas, respectively, or in the kampungs along the canals inJakarta, or between the railway lines in Mumbai. They areunable to find ‘safe’ land in cities where land prices are highor where public policy is not intended to allow the poor tooccupy central or desirable locations. So they are forced toaccept the risk of physically dangerous sites in order to avoidthe risk of forced evictions if they settle in other ‘safer’, butprohibited, locations. In the event of a flood, their homes onthe banks of canals are the first to be flooded, with the riskthat they will lose everything.These patterns explain, for example, the origins ofsettlements such as Mathare Valley, an undesirable locationin Nairobi, or in the desert areas of metropolitan Lima.Nezahualcoyotl, a large settlement distant from employmentin central Mexico City, initially grew spontaneously inunhealthy, dusty and dry conditions, but is now home tomore than 2 million residents just across the border of theFederal District of Mexico City. 37The development of these settlements is essentiallydetermined by the distribution of risk in space. Aerialphotography of most cities vividly shows that the poorestand most fragile quality of housing and infrastructure iscoincident with physical and natural risks. If householddecisions about urban location are generally determinedby price and access, for the poor these decisions increasinglyinclude weighing the probability of risks fromdifferent forms of hazard. It is possible to identify a typologyof preferences among the poor in individual citiesaccording to such hazards, from living near waste disposalfacilities, to living near waterways, to settling betweenrailway tracks, to choosing between air pollution and thelikelihood of injuries to children playing near passingtrains or traffic.This distribution of risk in space is intensified by thegrowing proportion of slums in cities, such as Mumbai, withmore than 6 million people living in slums, 38 or São Paulo,Lagos and other cities, where slum dwellers are more thanhalf the population. As their number increases, the poorseek any available locations that offer cheaper access toemployment opportunities, including on environmentallymarginal land that no one else wants. A particularly dramaticexample of this scenario is the estimated 500,000 peopleliving in the City of the Dead in Cairo. 39 Cultural or religioustaboos about occupying cemeteries are at risk of beingoverridden in many cities.When considering the urban level as the unit of analysis,it is easier to include the role of various forms ofexternalities that operate at the urban and the metropolitanscale. The prototypical fictitious example presented in Box2.2 illustrates the various dynamics and processes found in