Thread: Two Billion Slum Dwellers

Two Billion Slum Dwellers
Elisabeth Eaves 06.11.07, 6:00 PM ET


Forget about Utopia or even the dystopian Los Angeles depicted in Blade Runner. The future of the city is a vast Third World slum.

This year, the world will pass a milestone so profoundly significant that 2007 will become a touchstone for future historians. For the first time, more people will be living in cities than in the country. The individual who tips the scales might be a baby born to a city dweller or an adult migrating from the countryside, but in either case, it's likely that his or her new surroundings will include flimsy walls, disease and an enveloping stench of sewage and trash. The newcomer will have arrived in a Third World slum.

By 2030, an estimated 5 billion of the world's 8.1 billion people will live in cities. About 2 billion of them will live in slums, primarily in Africa and Asia, lacking access to clean drinking water and working toilets, surrounded by desperation and crime.

Already these slums are huge. According to Mike Davis, author of Planet of Slums, nearly 80% of Nigeria's urban population, or some 41.6 million people, live in slums. The comparable numbers in India are 56% and 158.4 million. Many of these slum dwellers are also squatters, lacking leases or legal title to their homes.

Not all slums are equal. By the United Nation's definition, their residents are missing at least some of the following: durable walls, a secure lease or title, adequate living space, and access to safe drinking water and toilets. A fifth of slum households are missing at least three of these basic needs.

To the outsider, many developing-world slums look unbearably awful, but to their residents they do function, complete with social hierarchies, commerce and a degree of home-grown government. Still, when one sees a family living in a flyblown concrete cell in Karachi, inside a mud hut in Nairobi or in a cardboard shack in Lagos, one might be inclined to ask, Are they really better off than in the villages they fled?

Dismal though the slums may be, the answer is often yes. After all, nearly all of the residents are there by choice (many, in fact, pay some sort of rent), so they themselves think they are better off. The vast majority moved to the city seeking better economic prospects, and many find them. A 2005 study on migration and poverty in Asia by the International Organization for Migration notes that "even if migrant jobs are in the risky informal sector, the gains to be made can be several times higher than wages in rain-fed agriculture."

Many slum dwellers are in fact entrepreneurs, albeit writ very small. They recycle trash, sell vegetables, do laundry. Some even run tiny restaurants and bars for their neighbors. Even though they are technically squatters, lacking legal title to their land, many also improve their dwellings--often just one brick at a time. After decades of home improvement, some of the best dwellings in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro sport balconies and ocean views.

Indeed, for many decades the slums offered a degree of upward mobility. Migrants squatted on city outskirts, drawn by free or nearly free land and proximity to urban jobs. Over the decades many of the residents built permanent housing and succeeded--often after a long wait--in getting services like water, sanitation and electricity routed to their neighborhoods. Onetime poor colonias in Mexico City have gentrified since the early 1980s. The favelas of Rio de Janeiro, the oldest of which date back to 1897, are famously vibrant, replete with lively bars and low crime rates--even if they happen to be "governed" by local drug gangs.

Davis, the author of Planet of Slums, comes to a darker conclusion. "That frontier of free land is essentially over," he says. "Squatting has now been privatized."

Since the 1980s, he says, new migrants to the slums have had to pay for the privilege of living there. In some cases, as in Pakistan and Kenya, the land is ostensibly public, but local police forces or corrupt politicians demand "rent." In others, as in many Latin American slums, the newest, poorest arrivals rent space from more-established squatters. A byproduct of this diminishing supply of free land is that new arrivals move onto more marginal land: steep gullies in Tijuana, vertical hillsides in Caracas, flood-prone flats in Dhaka.

Davis also argues that in cities like Mumbai, urban job growth has failed to keep pace with city growth since the 1990s. "These areas are now supersaturated with Darwinian competition," he says.

And even when there is more economic opportunity in the city, life in the slums is extremely perilous. According to the United Nations, slum children in sub-Saharan Africa are more likely to die from water-borne and respiratory illnesses than rural children, while women living in slums are more likely to contract HIV than their country cousins. In countries including Egypt, Bangladesh and Guatemala, slum children are less likely to be enrolled in primary school than their urban counterparts.

Still, the dream of a better life in the city persists. Overall, the world's urban population is expected to grow at an annual rate of 1.78% until 2030, while rural communities shrink.

Ways to mitigate poverty amid this massive shift are not easy to find. Just last month, the government of the Indian state of Maharashtra announced an ambitious plan to transform one of Asia's largest slums. The neighborhood, Dharavi, is home to about 600,000 people crammed into one square mile at the heart of Mumbai. But no sooner had the government proposed the $2.3 billion scheme, which would rehouse the slum dwellers for free, than local activists denounced it for favoring the rich and driving out Dharavi's myriad of small businesses.

Turkey offers some lessons to governments serious about grappling with urban poverty. As Robert Neuwirth documents in his book Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, a New Urban World, Turkey has two laws giving squatters legal and political rights, which encourages them to invest in their homes and neighborhoods. Neuwirth, who lived in the squatter communities of Rio de Janeiro, Nairobi, Mumbai and Istanbul, writes that a legal system like Turkey's could benefit squatters all over the world. Of course, that kind of legal reform presupposes a measure of democracy and good government, something much of the developing world doesn't have.

For decades, governments around the world simply abdicated responsibility for this massive urban influx. One result is that most of the world's slum dwellers--a billion people--remain cut off from the legal economy, working outside the tax system and with only tenuous rights to the land on which they live. Into this vacuum of power have stepped all sorts of organic movements. Some are potentially positive: Pentecostalism is on the rise in slums, according to Davis, and Indian slums have spawned influential groups that fight for squatters' rights. But for every benign community organization that rises to power in a slum, so does a criminal gang or a militant movement like Hamas.

Western security experts rightly fear failed states; in the future, they will have to worry about failed cities. Mega-cities, of 10 million or more, are on the rise across Asia, while cities like Dhaka, Jakarta, Lagos and Delhi will cross the 20 million threshold by 2020. Planning and building is not keeping pace. The world ignores the slums at its own peril.

http://www.forbes.com/home/business/200 ... slums.html

Pardon me how is this linked to immigration and americans losing jobs.

those slum dwellers in china who dont have access to clean water have put many of my fellow americans who have access to clean water supply out of work...we have to look out for americans. letz fix america and worry about the world after that

I don't believe for one minute you're an American. Not only your spelling and syntax, but your assumption that my post was a dig at non-Americans. I encounter many people from Asia with big chips on their shoulder - they are quick to assume that they are being put down and rejected because of racial or other discriminatory motives.

The article is about population and economy. If you discount immigration, America would have hit ZPG back in the seventies. Growth for growth's sake is the ideology of a cancer cell, but we get a lot of criticism from Mexico and Asia, claiming that we need their workers because we aren't having children and our workers are growing old and tired. Neither are exactly true, just wishful thinking by foreign job aspirants.

Originally Posted by bluecollar

Pardon me how is this linked to immigration and americans losing jobs.

Anytime i question something, u keep harping about if im an american !! not an american thing to do. Im a lot more american than a lot of toyota driving white collar folks. I work at Ford and the image on my posts is that of Henry Ford. anyway doesnt matter what u believe.

My point was, doesnt matter if there are slums in asia. Our focus has to be here in America. we have problems and immi is only one of them.

Conservative family values are becoming a thing of the past. More than half of us have been atleast divorced once. Many I see stop with one child and are single parents. Im yet to meet an asian immigrant who has been divorced or a latino family with one child. we will not own this country when we get old. I havent been able to find a non ethnic dr for myself. where did all the american drs go?

Betsy Ross,

I went to the United Nations World Urban Forum last year, since it was close to us, in Vancouver Canada. It is held once every other year, somewhere in the world. I have been trying to promote the following things that would make urban living more tolerable in developing nations
1. Correctly planned communities with self-help industries
2. Owner built housing constructed of long lasting, low maintenance materials
3. Density planning so that bicycles or other low impact transportation is the norm
4. Local asssociations and localized government

One thing that shocked me was that when I addressed a question to some governmental housing ministers about building entirely new housing in new commuinities, they said that most people would sell them and move back to the slums. I think they need to make the new communities more exciting, maybe by having parks and libraries with communication facilities.

Unfortunately, savvy third worlders are discovering that the migrant economy has more advantages for them, than staying on the farm or in the village. And when they can migrate to a Western country, or work in a connected industry, they hit the jackpot. The other thing I noticed was that so much of the discussion at the Forum, and the agenda of the UN, was directed to the "poor" who are presumably people of color. Apparently they don't think that Western nations have many, if any, "poor." There was a mind-boggling number of NGO' and projcts to help the wrold's "poor."

Perhaps in the liberal mindset (or should I say "those" liberals) Westerners now all live in McMansions or pricey urban condos, have more than one imported vehicle, don't do physical work and are Internet prodigies. And (continuing on) if you don't you are clearly a candidate of unfair treatment for which someone should be sued.

I don't want to paint too negative a picture. I became involved with the Urban Forum because I had met some decent UN personnel who were not anti American. And I have been and presently am involved in urban issues. Some US conservative criticize the family planning methods promoted by the UN. Would they rather see an even bigger population increase?

Thanks, Captain, and no two ways about it, the world is in a mess and we are feeling it.

Related article:


Planet of the slums: UN warns urban populations set to double

By Daniel Howden, Deputy Foreign Editor
Published: 27 June 2007


The combined forces of population growth and urbanisation are creating a planet of slums, where the urban population will have doubled by 2030, according to a report released by the United Nations today.

The shanty towns that choke the cities of Africa and Asia are experiencing unstoppable growth, expanding by more than a million people every week, according to the "state of the world's population" report.

The UN's findings echo recent predictions that 2008 will see a watershed in human history as the balance of the world's population tips from rural to urban. Many of the new urbanites will be poor and the shelters into which they move, or are born, will be slums.

"The growth of cities will be the single largest influence on development in the 21st century," the report states. It maintains that over the next 30 years, the population of African and Asian cities will double, adding 1.7 billion people - more than the current populations of the US and China combined.

In this new world the majority of theurban poor will be under 25, unemployed and vulnerable to fundamentalism, Christian and Islamic.

Mike Davis, a population expert, described this emerging underclass in his recent work Planet of Slums as: "A billion-strong global proletariat ejected from the formal economy, with Islam and Pentecostalism as songs for the dispossessed."

While some critics have accused Mr Davis of scaremongering, the UN's findings appear to back many of his basic assertions.

George Martine, a demographer and the author of today's report, said: "The urbanisation is jolting mentalities and subjecting them to new influences. This is a historical situation. And now one of the ways for people to reorganise themselves in this urban world is to associate themselves with new or strong, fundamentalist religion."

The rise of radical Islam in Africa, from the outskirts of Jakarta to the slums of Egypt, is well documented but the continent is also experiencing a Christian shift, with Pentecostalism winning converts from Uganda to the Democratic Republic of Congo.

In Latin America, identified by the UN as the other engine of urban growth, the once all-encompassing Catholic Church is battling for hearts and minds with radical evangelical churches. This battle was one of the key points of Pope Benedict XVI's recent trip to the world's most populous Catholic country, Brazil.

Urbanisation is inevitable, the report warns, and calls on planners to accept that the poor have the right to a place in the city. It argues that this influx can be positive if properly managed. No country in the industrial age has enjoyed economic growth without urbanisation.

"It's pointless trying to control urban growth by stopping migration," Mr Martine said. "It doesn't work. We have to change mindsets and take a different stance. We're at a crossroads and can still make decisions which will make cities sustainable. If we don't make the right decisions the result will be chaos."

UN-Habitat uses the term "slum household" to describe a group of individuals living under the same roof in an urban area who lack one or more of the following: durable housing, sufficient living area, secure tenure and access to clean water and sanitation.

Until now the response of national and municipal governments to ballooning growth has been to discourage newcomers but this is a failed policy, the report argues. "It has resulted in less housing for the poor and increased slum growth," the reports says. "It also limits opportunities for the urban poor to improve their lives and to contribute fully to their communities and neighbourhoods."

Mr Martine argues for a more positive approach to urbanisation, saying that by providing land for housing with at least some services and planning in advance to promote sustainability, progress can be achieved.

Slums have been part of human communities since Mesopotamia but our modern concept of segregated slums for the poor comes from the Industrial Revolution. The difference between then and now is a question of scale, with today's slum dwellers being one-in-three of all city dwellers.

More than 90 per cent of this underclass are in the developing world, with South Asia having the largest share, followed by eastern Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America. In sub-Saharan Africa, growth has become synonymous with slums and 72 per cent of the population live in slum conditions.

Growth of urbanisation

* By 2008, more than half of the world's current 6.7billion population will live in cities.

* By 2030, the urban population will have risen to 5 billion, 60 per cent of the world's population.

* Half of the world's urban population is currently under 25. By 2030, young people will make up the vast majority of the 5 billion urban dwellers.

* Between 2000 and 2030, Asia's urban population will increase from 1.3 billion to 2.64 billion. Africa's population will rise from 294 million to 742 million, Latin America and the Caribbean from 394 million to 609million.

* Mega-cities do not have a monopoly on population growth. More than half of the urban world lives in cities with a population of less than 500,000.


http://news.independent.co.uk/world/pol ... 714169.ece