Untitled - Rebel Studies Library

22 PLANET OF SLUMS
La Chapelle, the Gorbals or the Liberties, Pig Alley or Mulberry Bend.
In an 1895 survey of the "poor in the great cities," Scribner's Magazine
voted Naples's fondaci as "the most ghastly human dwellings on the face
of the earth," but Gorky was certain that Moscow's notorious Khitrov
district was actually the "lower depths," while Kipling laughed and took
his readers "deeper and deeper still" to Colootollah, the "lowest sink of
all" in Calcutta's "city of dreadful night."B
These classic slums were notoriously parochial and picturesquely
local places, but reformers generally agreed with Charles Booth - the
Dr. Livingstone of outcast London - that all slums were characterized
by an amalgam of dilapidated housing, overcrowding, disease, poverty,
and vice. For nineteenth-century liberals, of course, the moral dimension
was decisive, and the slum was first and above all envisioned s a
place where an incorrigible and feral social "residuum" rots in i111!l1ral
and often riotous splendor; indeed, a vast literature titillated the
Victorian middle classes with lurid tales from the dark side of town.
"Savages," rhapsodized the Reverend Chapin in Humanity in the City
(1854), "not in gloomy forests, but under the strength of gas-light, and
the eyes of policemen; with war-whoops and clubs very much the
same, and garments as fantastic and souls as brutal as any of their
kindred at the antipodes."9 Forty years later, the new US Department
of Labor, in the first "scientific" survey of American tenement life (The
Slums of Baltimore) Chicago) New York) and Philadelphia, 1894), still defined
a slum as "an area of dirty back streets, especially when inhabited by a
squalid and criminal population."lo
A Global Slum Census
The authors of The Challenge of SIu..ms discard these Victorian.calumnies
buf otherwise preserve the classical definition of a sll 1 m, c _ a:rterz _ ed
8 Robert Woods et aI., The Poor in Gre at Cities: Their Problems and What is Being Done
to Solve Them, New York 1895, p_ 305 (Scribners Magazine); Blair Ruble, Second Metropolis:
Pragmatic Pluralism in Gilded Age Chicago, Silver Age Moscow, and Meiji Os aka, Cambridge
2001, pp. 266-67 (Khitrov); Rudyard Kipling, The Ci ty of Dreadful Night, and Other
Poems, London 1891, p. 71.
9 Rev. Edwin Chapin, Humanity in the Ci ty, New York 1854, p. 36.
10 See Carroll D. Wright, The Slums f Baltimore, Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia,
Washington 1894, pp. 11-15.
THE PREVALENCE OF SLUMS 23
by overcrowding, poor or informal housing, inadequate access to safe
--water and sanitation, and insecurity of tenure. This operational defini-
-cion, officially adopted at a UN meeting in Nairobi in October 2002, is
"restricted to the physical and legal characteristics of the settlement,"
and eschews the more difficult-to-measure "social dimensions,"
althoughjt..qu2:tes unger most circumstances to economic and social
marginality.l1 Encompassing peri-urban shantytowns as well as arche-
-typal inner-city tenements, this multidimensional approach is in
practice a very conservative gauge of what qualifies as a slum; many
readers \vill be surprised by the UN's counter-experiential finding that
only 19.6 percent of urban Mexicans live in slums (it is generally
conceded by local experts that almost two-thirds of Mexicans live in
colonias populares or older tenements). Even using this restrictive definition,
the UN researchers estimate that there were at least 921 million
slum-dwellers in 2001 and more than one billion in 2005: nearly equal
to the population of the world when the young Engels first ventured
onto the mean streets of St. Giles and Old Town Manchester in 1844.12
Indeed, neoliberal capitalism since 1970 has multiplied Dickens's
notorious slum of Tom-all-Alone's in Bleak House by exponential
powers. Residents of slums, while only 6 percent of the city population
of the developed countries, constitute a staggering 78.2 percent of
urbanites in the least-developed countries; this equals fully a third of
the global urban population.
According to UN-HABITAT, the world's highest percentages of
slum-dwellers are in Ethiopia (an astonishing 99.4 percent of the urban
population), Chad (also 99.4 percent), Afghanistan (98.5 percent), and
Nepal (92 percent). Bombay, with 10 to 12 million squatters and
tenement-dwellers, is the global capital of slum-dwelling, followed by
Mexico City and Dhaka (9 to 10 million each), and then Lagos, Cairo,
Karachi, Kinshasa-Brazzaville, Sao Paulo, Shanghai, and Delhi (6 to 8
million each).13
11 Challenge, pp. 12 -13.
12 UN-HABITAT executive director Anna Tibaijuka quoted in "More than One
Billion People Call Urban Slums Their Home," City lvIqyors Report, February 2004:
www.citymayors.com/report/slums.html.
13 UN-HABITAT, "Slums of the World: The Face of Urban Poverty in the New
Millennium?," working paper, Nairobi 2003, annex 3.