Untitled - Rebel Studies Library

92 PLANET OF SLUMS
Poor Manilenos, meanwhile, have been driven further into illegality
by berserk land values that preclude formal housing for a large minority
of the population. "In the 1980s," reports urban-environmental historian
Greg Bankoff, "land prices rose 35 to 40 times in Quezon City, 50
to 80 times in Makati, 250 to 400 times in Diliman and a staggering
2000 times in Escolta. In 1996, the CBD was registering an annual
increase of 50 percent and even the value of land in peripheral areas
rose by 25 percent."79 Formal housing, as a result, became inaccessible
to hundreds of thousands of poor people. With land inflation raging
even on the distant urban edge, the only choices seemingly left to the
poorest Manilenos are either to risk death in the flood-prone metropolis
by squatting in the beds of esteros or along the precarious banks of
rivers, or to occupy the interstices of wealthier barangqys where violent
eviction is an imminent threat.
Throughout the Third World, then, the (John) Turnerian frontier of
free land for poor squatters has ended: the "slums of hope" have been
replaced by urban /atifundia and crony capitalism. The constriction or
closure of opportunities for non-market settlement at the edge, in turn,
has immense repercussions for the stability of poor cities. In lockstep
with the increasing percentage of renters, the most dramatic consequence
in the short run has been soaring population density in Third
World slums - land inflation in the context of stagnant or declining
formal employment has been the piston driving this compression of
people. Modern mega-slums like Kibera (Nairobi) and Cite-Soleil (Portau-Prince)
have achieved densities comparable to cattle feedlots:
crowding more residents per acre into low-rise housing than there were
in famous congested tenement districts such as the Lower East Side in
the 1900s or in contemporary highrise cores such as central Tokyo and
Manhattan. Indeed, Asia's largest contemporary slum, Dharavi in
Mumbai, has a maximum density more than twice that of the nineteenthcentury
New York and Bombay streets that Roy Lubove believed were
the "most crowded spots on earth" in late-Victorian times.80
79 Greg Bankoff, "Constructing Vulnerability: The Historical, Natural and Social
Generation of Flooding in Metropolitan Manila," Disasters 27:3 (2003), p. 232.
80 "A certain disllrict of the eleventh ward had 243,641 people per square kilometer,
and Koombarwara in Born bay, 187,722." Roy Lubove, The Progressives and t he Slums:
Tenement House Reform in New York City, 1890-1917, Pittsburgh 1962, p. 94.
ILLUSIONS OF SELF-HELP 93
This urban population implosion via relentless infill and overcrowding
almost defies credulity. In Kolkata's bustees, for example, an average
of 13.4 people are somehow shoehorned into each occupied room. If
municipal statistics can be believed, Dharavi compacts an incredible
18,000 people per acre into 1O-by-15-foot rooms stacked on top of one
another.81 Manshiyet Nasr, at the foot of the Muqattam Hills east of
the Nile, is only slightly less congested: more than one-half million
people share a mere 350 hectares. (At its southern edge, "in conditions
of Dantesque degradation" according to the Financia/ Times, the
famous Zaballeen pick through rubbish for their subsistence.)82 Rio's
fave/as, meanwhile, are being rapidly Manhattanized in response to a
lack of squattable land and thus a burgeoning demand for rental rooms.
"We can see side by side with the peripheralization of Rio fave/as,"
writes Suzan a Taschner, "a verticalization of the oldest ones, where
buildings with four to six stories appear, often for rent."83
Thanks to the commercialization of edge development, densification
has become almost as ubiquitous on the periphery as in the urban
core. In Caracas, for example, banios are densifying at the rate of
almost 2 percent per year: much of this is vertical growth up the mountainsides.
Columbia University scientists, researching the city's landslide
hazard, were amazed by the mountaineering challenge of being poor in
the Venezuelan metropolis. "Indeed some residents are required to
climb up the equivalent of 25 stories to reach their rancho houses and
the average banio dweller needs almost 30 minutes on foot to reach
public transportation."84 In Bogota the southward expansion of the
zone of poverty has preserved high density despite increasing household
size toward the periphery.8 s
Lagos's greatest slum, Ajegunle, exemplifies the worst of worlds:
overcrowding coupled with extreme peripherality. In 1972, Ajegunle
contained 90,000 people on 8 square kilometers of swampy land; today
1.5 million people reside on an only slightly larger surface area, and
81 Sharma, Rediscoveling Dharmi, pp. xx, xxvii, 18.
82 James Drummond, "Providing Collateral for a Better Future," Financial Times,
18 October 2001.
83 Suzana Taschner, "Squatter Settlements and Slums in Brazil," pp. 196, 219.
84 Urban Planning Studio, Disaster Resistant Caracas, p. 27.
85 Mohan, Understanding the Develojing Metropolis, p. 55.