Untitled - Rebel Studies Library

62 PLANET OF SLUMS
housing for unionized workers and state employees which compared
favorably to northern European models. In Brazil, meanwhile, President
Jio Goulart and radical Rio Grande do SuI governor Leonel Brizola \vere
winning broad support for their vision of an urban New DeaL And later
in the decade, the left-leaning military dictator of Peru, Juan Velasco
Alvarado, would steal a step on Fzdelismo by sponsoring mass urban land
invasions and establishing an ambitious state program to upgrade bam'adas
(which he op1imistically renamed pueblos jovenes).
Almost a half-century later, Cuba's progressive shelter program has
now been slowed to a snail's pace by the austerities of the "Special
Period" following the collapse of the USSR, and housing provision lags
far behind the country's more impressive achievements in health and
education. Apart from the special cases of Hong Kong and Singapore,
the Chinese state alone in the developing world during the 1980s and
1990s managed to construct vast quantities of decent mass housing
(although even this "unsung revolution," as urban expert Richard
Kirkby calls it, fell far short of the needs of the tens of millions of
peasants moving to the cities).36
In the rest of the Third World, the idea of an interventionist state
strongly committed to social housing and job development seems either
a hallucination or a bad joke, because governments long ago abdicated
any serious effort to combat slums and redress urban marginality. In too
many poor cities, citizens' relationship to their government is similar to
what a Nairobi slum-dweller recently described to a Guardian reporter:
"The state does nothing here. It provides no water, no schools, no sanitation,
no roads, no hospitals." Indeed, the journalist found out that
residents bought water from private dealers and relied on vigilante
groups for security - the police visited only to collect bribes.37
The minimalist role of national governments in housing supply
has been reinforced by current neo-liberal economic orthodoxy as
defined by the IMF and the World Bank. The Structural Adjustment
Programs (SAPs) imposed upon debtor nations in the late 1970s and
1980s required a shrinkage of government programs and, of ten, the
36 Richard Kirkby, "China," in Kosta Mathey (ed.), Beyond Self-Help Housing,
London 1992, pp. 298-99.
37 Andrew Harding, "Nairobi Slum Life," (series), Guardian, 4, 8, 10 and 15,
October 2002.
THE TREASON OF THE STATE 63
privatization of housing markets. However, the social state in the Third
World was already withering away even before SAPs sounded the death
knell for welfarism. Because so many experts working for the
"Washington Consensus" have deemed government provision of
urban housing to be an inevitable disaster, it is important to review
some case histories, beginning with what, at first sight, seem to be the
major 'exceptions to the rule of state failure.
The two tropical cities where large-scale public housing has
provided an alternative to slums are Singapore and Hong Kong. As a
city-state with tight migration policies, the former doesn't have to face
the usual demographic pressures of a poor agrarian hinterland. "Much
of the problem," Erhard Berner explains, "is exported to Johar Baru,"
Singapore's Tijuana.38 Hong Kong, on the other hand, has had to
absorb millions of refugees, and now, migrants from the l'vIainland. But
the former Crown Colony'S success in rehousing squatters, tenementdwellers,
and civil war refugees in new public apartment blocks is not
quite the humanitarian miracle often depicted.
As Alan Smart has shown, housing policy in Hong Kong has been
a shrewd triangulation of the separate interests of property developers,
manufacturing capital, and popular resistance, with potential PRC
intervention looming in the background. The challenge was to reconcile
a continuing supply of cheap labor with soaring land values, and
the preferred solution was not high rents - which would have forced
up wages - but peripheralization and overcrowding By 1971, writes
Smart, one million squatters had been resettled "on land equivalent to
only 34 percent of the land previously occupied, and on peripheral land
of much lower value." Likewise hundreds of thousands of poor
tenants had been relocated from their former rent-controlled housing
in the central area. Space allocation in public housing in the early 1960s
was a minuscule 24 square feet per adult, with toilets and kitchens
shared by an entire floor. Although conditions improved in projects
built later, Hong Kong maintained the highest formal residential
densities in the world: the price for freeing up the maximum surface
area for highrise offlces and expensive market-price apartments.39
38 Berner, "Learning from Informal Markets," p. 244.
39 Smart, Making Room, pp. 1, 33, 36, 52, 55.