Untitled - Rebel Studies Library

98 PLANET OF SLUMS
the colonial design of urban exclusion and social separation. Gooptu
writes: "Implicitly or explicitly, the poor were denied a place in civic life
and urban culture, and were seen as an impediment to progress and
betterment of society."12
Removing "Human Encumberments"
Urban segregation is not a frozen status quo, but rather a ceaseless
social war in which the state intervenes regularly in the name of
"progress," "beautification," and even "social justice for the poor" to
redraw spatial boundaries to the advantage of landowners, foreign
investors, elite homeowners, and middle-class commuters. As in 1860s
Paris under the fanatical reign of Baron Haussmann, urban redevelopment
still strives to simultaneously maximize private profit and social
control. The contemporary scale of population removal is immense:
every year hundreds of thousands, sometimes milJions, of poor people
- legal tenants as well as squatters - are forcibly evicted from Third
World neighborhoods. The urban poor, as a result, are nomads, "transients
in a perpetual state of relocation" (as planner Tunde Agbola
characterizes their plight in his native Lagos),u And like the sans-culottes
driven from their ancient quartiers by Haussmann - to whom Blanqui
apostrophized a famous complaint - they "are weary of grandiose
homicidal acts ... this vast shifting of stones by the hand of despotism."14
They are also exasperated with the ancient language of
modernization that defines them as "human encumberments" (to
quote the Dakar authorities who cleared 90,000 residents from central
bidonvzlles in the 1970s).15
The most intense class conf1icts over urban space, of course, take
place in downtowns and major urban nodes. In an exemplary study,
Erhard Berner discusses the case of .Manila, where globalized property
values collide with the desperate need of the poor to be near central
sources of income.
12 Gooptu, The Politics f the Urban Poorin Twentieth- Century India, p. 421.
13 Tunde Agbola, Architecture if Fear, Ibadan 1997, p. 51.
. . .
14 Auguste Blanqui "Capital et travail" (1885), quoted in Walter BenJamm, The
Arcades Pro/eel, Cambridge 2002, p. 144
15 Richard Stren, "Urban Housing in Mrica," p. 38.
HAUSSMANN IN THE TROPICS
Metro Manila [is] one of the most densely populated areas in the world.
The price of one square meter anywhere near the commercial centers far
exceeds the annual income of any jeepney driver or security guard. Yet,
the very nature of the income-generating possibilities requires one to
stay close to where the action is, because distance from place of work
means prohibitive costs in time and money .... The logical result is wide­
spread squatting. Virtually all the gaps left open by city development are
immediately filled with makeshift settlements that beat every record in
population density.16
Street vendors and other informal entrepreneurs also crowd Manila's
central plazas, street corners, and parks. Berner describes the failure of
market mechanisms or even private security to turn back this invasion
of poor people who, after ail, are only behaving like rational economic
actors - in the end, landowners are dependent upon state repression to
keep squatters and vendors at bay, as well as to help evict residual populations
of working-class renters and tenement-dwellers.
Regardless of their political complexions and their different levels of
tolerance for squatting and informal settlement on their peripheries,
most Third World city governments are permanently locked in conflict
with the poor in core areas. In some cities - Rio is a famous case - slum
clearance has been going on for generations, but it gained irresistible
momentum in the 1970s as land values exploded. Some metropolitan
governments - Cairo, Mumbai, Delhi, and Mexico City, to name a few
- built satellite cities to induce poor residents to relocate to the periphery,
but in most cases the new towns simply sucked more population
from the adjacent countryside (or, in the case of New Bombay, middleclass
commuters) while the traditional urban poor clung desperately to
neighborhoods closer to centrally located jobs and services. As a result,
squatters and renters, sometimes even small landlords, are routinely
evicted with little ceremony, compensation or right of appeal. In big
Third World cities, the coercive Panoptican role of "Haussmann" is
typically played by special-purpose development agencies; financed by
offshore lenders like the World Bank and immune to local vetoes, their
mandate is to clear, build, and defend islands of cyber-modernity
amidst unmet urban needs and general underdevelopment.
16 Berner, Dfending a Place, p. xv.
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