Untitled - Rebel Studies Library

26 PLANET OF SLUMS
city like Seattle and a very poor city like Ibadan is as great as 739 to 1 -
an incredible inequality.22
Accurate statistics are in fact difficult to come by, because poor and
slum populations are often deliberately and sometimes massively undercounted
by officials. In the late 1980s, for example, Bangkok had an
official poverty rate of only 5 percent, yet surveys found nearly a quarter
of the population (1.16 million) living in 1000 slums and squatter
camps.23 Likewise the government of Mexico claimed in the 1990s that
only one in ten urbanites was truly poor, despite uncontested UN data
that showed nearly 40 percent living on less than $2 per day.24 Indonesian
and Malaysian statistics are also notorious for disguising urban poverty.
The official figure for Jakarta, where most researchers estimate that one
quarter of the population are poor kampung dwellers, is simply absurd:
less than 5 percent.25 In Malaysia, geographer Jonathan Rigg complains
that the official poverty line "fails to take account of the higher cost of
urban living" and deliberately undercounts the Chinese poor.26 Urban
sociologist Erhard Berner, meanwhile, believes that poverty estimates
for Manila are purposefully obfuscated, and that at least one eighth of
the slum population is uncounted.27
A Slum Typology
There are probably more than 200,000 slums on earth, ranging in population
from a few hundred to more than a million people. The five great
metropolises of South Asia (Karachi, Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, and
Dhaka) alone contain about 15,000 distinct slum communities whose
total population exceeds 20 million. "Megaslums" arise when shantytowns
and squatter communities merge in continuous belts of informal
housing and poverty, usually on the urban periphery. Mexico City, for
22 Sbi, "How Access to Urban Potable Water and Sewerage Connections Affects
Child Mortality," Appendix 3, derived from UNCHS Global Urban Indicators Database,
1993. A decimal point may be misplaced in the Ibadan figure.
23 Jonathan Rigg, SoutheastAsia: A Region in Transition, London 1991, p. 143.
24 Imparato and Ruster, Slum Upgrading and Participation, p. 52.
25 Paul McCarthy, "Jakarta, Indonesia," UN-HABITAT Case Study, London
2003, pp. 7-8.
26 Rigg, Southeas t Asia, p. 119.
27 Erhard Berner, Defending a Place in the City: Localities and the Struggle for Urban
Land in Metro Manila, Quezon City 1997, pp. 21, 25, 26.
THE PREVALENCE OF SLUMS 27
example, in 1992 had an estimated 6.6 million low-income people living
contiguously in 348 square kilometers of informal housing.28 Most of
the poor in Lima, likewise, live in three great peripheral conos radiating
from the central city; such huge spatial concentrations of urban poverty
are also common in Africa and the .Middle East. In South Asia, on the
other hand, the urban poor tend to live in a much larger number of
distinct slums more widely dispersed throughout the urban fabric in
patterns with an almost fractal complexity. In Kolkata, for instance,
thousands of thika bustees - nine hutments of five huts each, with 45square-meter
rooms shared, on average, by an incredible 13.4 people -
are intermixed with a variety of other residential statuses and landuses.29
In Dhaka, it probably makes more sense to consider the nonslum areas
as enclaves in an overwhelming matrix of extreme poverty.
Although some slums have long histories - Rio de Janeiro's first
fovela, Morro de Providencia, was founded in the 1880s - most
megaslums have grown up since the 1960s. CiudadNezahualc6yotl, for
example, had barely 10,000 residents in 1957; today this poor suburb
of Mexico City has three miJJion inhabitants. Sprawling Manshiet N asr,
outside Cairo, originated as a camp for construction workers building
the suburb of Nasr City in the 1960s, while Karachi's vast hill slum of
Orangi/Baldia, with its mixed population of Muslim refugees from
India and Pathans from the Afghan border, was founded in 1965. Villa
El Salvador - one of Lima's biggest bam'adas - was established in 1971
under the sponsorship of Peru's military government, and within a few
years had a population of more than 300,000.
Everywhere in the Third World, housing choice is a hard calculus of
I confusing trade-offs. As the anarchist architect John Turner famously
pointed out, "Housing is a verb." The urban poor have to solve a
complex equation as they try to optimize housing cost, tenure security,
quality of shelter, journey to work, and sometimes, personal safety. For
some people, including many pavement-dwellers, a location near a job
- say, in a produce market or train station - is even more important
than a roof. For others, free or nearly free land is worth epic commutes
from the edge to the center. And for everyone the worst situation is a
28 Keith Pezzoli, Human Settlements and Planningjor Ecological Sustainability: The Case
of Mexico City, Cambridge 1998, p. 13.
29 Nitai Kundu, "Kolkata, India," UN-HABITAT Case Study, London 2003, p. 7.