Untitled - Rebel Studies Library

64 PLANET OF SLUMS
In their restructuring of Hong Kong's spatial economy, planners
seldom paid attention to actual livelihood strategies of the urban poor,
including their frequent use of their homes as workshops or their
need to be located close to central markets or factories. The incompatibility
of peripheral, highrise housing with the social structures and
informal economies of poor communities is, of course, ancient
history: it's an original sin repeated over decades by urban reformers
and city czars everywhere. Indeed, back in the 1850s Baron
Haussmann's Second Empire showcase of workers' housing, the Cite
Napoleon in Paris, was rejected by its intended residents because of its
uniformity and "barracks-like" quality. According to historian Ann­
Louise Shapiro: "They complained that philanthropists and building
societies were beginning to relegate the labouring population to
special quarters as in the Middle Ages, and urged instead that the government
tax vacant apartments to force down the rental price and
make available a greater number of lodgings in the mixed housing of
the city centre." In the end, Haussmann's famed project " housed only
bourgeois tenants. ,, 40
The Cite Napoleon has many modern Third World descendants. In
Jakarta, for example, public housing is unattractive to the huge
informal labor force because it provides no space for home workshops;
as a result, most tenants are military personnel and civil servants.41
In Beijing, where highrise construction has led to real quantitative
improvements in residential space, tower-dwellers nonetheless bemoan
the loss of community. In surveys residents report dramatic declines in
social visits, intercourse with neighbors, and frequency of children's
play, as well as the increased isolation and loneliness of old people.42
Likewise in Bangkok, according to a survey by two European
researchers, the poor actively prefer their old slums to the new towerblocks.
40 Ann-Louise Shapiro, "Paris," in M. J. Daunton (ed.), Housing the Workers,
1850-1914: A Comparative Perspective, London 1990, pp. 40-41.
41 Hans-Dieter Evers and Rtidiger Korff, Southeast Asian Urbanism: The Meaning
and Powerf Social Sp ace, New York 2000, p. 168.
42 Victor Sit, Beijing: The Nature and Planning if a Chinese Capital City, Chichester
1995, pp. 218-19.
I
,
THE TREASON OF THE STATE
' The agencies who plan slum eviction see an alternative for the people in
, the cheap highrise flats: the people in the slums know that eviction and
, life in these flats would reduce their means of reproduction and the pos­
, sibilities for subsistence production. Furthermore access to work is more
ifficult due to the location of these flats. This is the simple reason why
the slumdwellers prefer to stay in the slum and are starting to fight
against evictio For them the slum is the place where production under
_
deteri a,g circumstances is still possible. For the urban planner, it is a
mere cancer i ' the city.43
Meanwhile, middle-class "poaching" - as housing experts call it - of
public or state-subsidized housing has become a quasi-universal phenomenon.
Algeria in the early 1980s, for example, began to subdivide
urban land reserves into plots, ostensibly for development by housing
cooperatives; building materials were furnished at subsidized prices. As
architect Djaffar Lesbet observes, however, this theoretically elegant
balance between state aid and local initiative did not democratize access
to housing: "The building plots have allowed those whom the system
privileged to hold onto their lead, to achieve their own housing. They
have also helped to reduce the dramatic and political tone of the
housing crisis, by transforming this national issue into an individual
problem."44 As a result, civil servants and others have acquired subsidized
detached homes and villas, while the truly poor have ended up in
illegal shacks in bidonvilles. Although lacking the revolutionary elan of
Algeria, Tunisia also developed substantial state-subsidized housing,
but 75 percent of it was unaffordable by the poor, who instead
crowded into Tunis's sprawling slums such as Ettadhamen, Mellassine,
and Djebel Lahmar.45
India illustrates the same trend in several different guises. In the
1970s, for example, municipal and state authorities launched a hugely
ambitious scheme to create a modern twin city on the mainland,
opposite the Bombay peninsula. The urban poor were promised new
homes and jobs in glittering New Bombay (now Navi Mumbai), but
43 Evers and Korff, Southeast Asian Urbanism, p, 168,
44 Lesbet, "Algeria," pp. 264-65.
45 Frej Stambouli, "Tunis: Crise du Logement et Rehabilitation Urbaine," in Amis
and Lloyd, Housing Africa} Urban Poor, p. 155,
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