Untitled - Rebel Studies Library

90
PLANET OF SLUMS
End of the Urban Frontier?
The squatter is still the major human symbol, whether as victim or
hero, of the Third World city. Yet, as we saw in the previous chapter,
the golden age of squatting - of free or low-cost occupation of peripheral
urban land - was clearly over by 1990. Indeed, as early as 1984, a
group of leading housing experts meeting in Bangkok warned that the
"no cost occupation of land is a temporary phenomenon," and that the
"options for informal solutions [to the housing crisis] have been
already reduced and will rapidly become more so" as "powerful and
integrated private organizations" take control of urbanization at the
periphery. "In their view, the formalization of transferable land titles
(as distinct from security of tenure) was actually accelerating the
process by which entrepreneurs who "circumvented or corrupted" the
planning process were able to privatize squatting.71
A few years later, Ellen Brennan repeated the same warning: "Many
options previously available to low-income people, such as unused
public land, are disappearing rapidly even as access to peripheral land
is becoming increasingly restricted. Indeed, vacant land on the urban
fringes and elsewhere is being assembled and developed by corporate
developers, legally and illegally." Brennan observed that the problem
was just as acute where most of the land was in the public domain
(Karachi and Delhi) as where the periphery was mostly private property
(Manila, Seoul, and Bangkok).72
.
In the same period, Alan Gilbert wrote with increasing pessimism
about the future role of squatting and self-help housing as safety valves
for the social contradictions of Latin American cities. He predicted that
the confluence of pirate urbanization, economic stagnation, and the
costs of lransportation would make homeownership in peripheral subdivisions
or shantytowns less attractive than in the past: "More families
will occupy smaller plots, will take longer to consolidate their homes,
and will be forced to live longer without services."73 Although emphasizing
that peripheral real-estate markets still provided an important
71 Baross and Jan van der Linden, "Introduction," in The Transformation f Land
Supply in Third World Cities, pp. 1, 2, 8.
72 Brennan, "Urban Land and Planning Issues Facing the Third World,"
pp. 75-76.
73 Gilbert et aI., In Search if a Home, p. 3.
ILLUSIONS OF SELF-HELP 91
alternative for middle-class families priced out of their former habitats,
Alain Durand-Lasserve, another world authority on land management,
agreed with Brennan and Gilbert that commercialization had "foreclosed
the informal and virtually free access to the land" that the very
poor had previously enjoyed.74
Everywhere, the most powerful local interests - big developers,
politicians, and military juntas - have positioned themselves to take
advantage of peripheral land sales to poor migrants as well as members
of the urban salariat. For example, a sampling of landownership on the
periphery of Jakarta revealed "that vast tracts of land, especially in the
hill country of the Priangan, have changed hands and now belong to
Indonesian generals and their families, higher government officials, and
other members of the Indonesian upper class."7s Similarly in Mexico
City, where most slum housing is now being subdivided from Ijidos,
Keith Pezzoli found that "ljidatarios lose out in the process of urbanization,"
as "developers and speculators are consolidating control over
unbuilt land."76 In Bogota, as big developers implant middle-class
housing estates on the periphery, urban-edge land values soar out of
the reach of the poor, while in Brazil speculation grips every category
of land, with an estimated one third of building space left vacant in
anticipation of future increases.77
In China the urban edge - as noted earlier - has become the arena
of a vast, one-sided social struggle between city governments and poor
farmers. In the face of development authorities' inexhaustible appetite
for new land for economic zones and suburbs, peasants are pushed
aside with minimal consideration or compensation; likewise, traditional
working-class neighborhoods and villages are routinely razed for more
upscale developments, often to the advantage of corrupt officials and
party leaders. When locals protest, they end up being confronted by
paramilitary police and often face prison terms.78
74 Alain Durand-Lasserve, "Articulation between Formal and Informal Land
Markets in Cities in Developing Countries: Issues and Trends," in Baross and van der
Linden, The Transformation if Land Supply in Third Warld Cities, p. 50.
75 Evers and Korff, Southeast .Asian Urbanism, p. 176.
76 Pezzoli, Human Settlements, p. 15.
77 Gilbert and Varley, Landlord and Tenant, pp. 3, 5.
78 See the fifth installment in Jim Yardley'S outstanding series on rural/urban
inequality in China in the New York Times, 8 December 2004.