Untitled - Rebel Studies Library

60 PLANET OF SLUMS
September 1966 - he was deposed by President Gustavo Diaz Ordaz,
a politician notorious for his many ties to foreign capital and land spec­
ulators. A fast-growth agenda that included tolerance for pirate
urbanization on the periphery in return for urban renewal in the center
became the PRI policy in La Capita1.32
A generation after the removal of barriers to influx and informal
urbanization elsewhere, China began to relax its controls on urban
growth in the early 1980s. With a huge reservoir of redundant peasant
labor (including more than half of the labor force of Sichuan, accord­
ing to the Peop!e DazIY) the loosening of the bureaucratic dike
produced a literal "peasant flood."33 Of ficially sanctioned migration
was overshadowed by a huge stream of unauthorized immigrants or
"floaters." Without the official citizenship in the city provided by a
valid household registration card, this immense mass of poor peasants
(currently estimated at 100 million) had no legal entitlement to social
services or housing. Instead they became super-cheap human fuel for
the export sweatshops of the Pearl River Delta and the building sites
of Shanghai and Beijing, while housing themselves in makeshift shacks
and overcrowded rooms at the edges of the cities. The return of capi­
talism to China brought with it the squalid urban shantytown.
Finally, in the late 1980s South Africa's rulers, faced with the most
significant shantytown uprising in world history (the "civics"
movement in the black townships), were forced to dismantle the total­
itarian system of controls - first, the Pass Law in 1986, then the Group
Areas Act in 1991 - that had restricted African urban migration and
residence. Writer Rian Malan described the resulting impact in metro­
politan Cape Town, where the black African population more then
tripled between 1982 and 1992:
After . .. the hated pass laws were scrapped, it was if a distant dam had
broken, allowing a mass of desperate and hopeful humanity to come
flooding over the mountains and spread out across the Cape Flats. They
came at the rate of eighty, ninety families a day, and built homes with their
bare hands, using wooden poles, tin sheeting, bits and pieces of trash
32 Davis, Urban Leviathan, pp. 135, 177-80.
33 Solinger, Contesting Citizenship in Urban China, p. 155.
I
THE TREASON OF THE STATE
rescued from landfills and plastic garbage bags to keep out the rain. Within
two years, the sand dunes had vanished under an enormous sea of shacks
and shanties, as densely packed as a mediaeval city, and populated by fan­
tastic characters - bootleggers, gangsters, prophets, Rastafarians, gun
dealers and marijuana czars, plus almost a million ordinary working
people.34
Broken Promises and Stolen Dreams
The slum was not the inevitable urban future. In early 1960, for
example, Cuba's new National Institute of Savings and Housing, led by
the legendary Pastorita Nunez, began to replace Havana's notorious
shantytowns (Las Yaguas, Llega y Pon, La Cueva del Humo, and so on)
with prefabricated homes erected by the residents themselves. Seven
years earlier, during his trial for the Moncada barracks attack, Fidel
Castro had promised Cubans a revolution that would enforce the pro­
gressive 1940 Constitution's guarantee of decent housing. In 1958
almost a third of Cubans lived in slums or squatter settlements.
Accordingly, in the first golden years of the revolution, there was a
huge national effort to rehouse the poor, even if many of the projects,
in retrospect, were drab adaptations of modernism.35
Although revolutionary Cuba's commitment to a "new urbanism"
was avant-garde, the ideal of a poe1!lar_.e!i!lntJQ..Ql:s no!
i unique in the contemporary-Third World in the late 1950s and early
1960s: Nasser, Nehru, and Sukarno also promised to rebuild slums and
create immense quanitities of new housing. In addition to subsidized
housing and rent control, Nasser's "contract with Egypt" guaranteed
public-sector jobs to every secondary-school graduate. Revolutionary
Algeria legislated free universal healthcare and education, together with
( rent subsidies for poor city-dwellers. "Socialist " African states, begin-
1 ning with Tanzania in the early 1960s, all started off with ambitious
programs to relocate urban slum-dwellers into new low-cost housing.
Mexico City in the Uruchurtu years enlisted the services of stellar emigre
architects, such as the Bauhaus's Hannes Meyer, to design highrise
34 Rian Malan quoted in Westen, p. xxii
35 Joseph Scarpaci, Roberto Segre, and Mario Coyula, Havana: Two Faces 0/ the
Antillean Metropolis, Chapel Hill 2002, pp. 199-203.
61