Let no one romanticize what the slum conditions are. New squatter cities typically look like human cesspools and often smell like them. Usually there are no facilities at all for sanitation, for water, for electricity, for transportation. Everyone lives in dilapidated shacks that are jammed together wall to wall, every room full of people. A typical squatter city, which may stretch for miles, has grown without a plan or government, in an area generally deemed uninhabitable: a swamp, a floodplain, a steep hillside, or a municipal dump; clustered in the path of a highway project or squashed up against a busy railroad line.
But the squatter cities are vibrant. Their narrow lanes are bustling markets, with food stalls, bars, cafés, hair salons, dentists, churches, schools, health clubs, and mini-shops trading in cellphones, tools, trinkets, clothes, electronic gadgets, and bootleg videos and music. This is urban life at its most intense. It is social capital at its richest, because everybody in a slum neighborhood knows everybody else intimately, whether they want to or not. What you see up close is not a despondent populace crushed by poverty but a lot of people busy getting out of poverty as fast as they can.
Perhaps the most extreme case is Mumbai, with 17 million people more densely packed than anywhere else in the world. The city is half slum, yet it generates one sixth of India’s gross domestic product. Suketu Mehta, author of Maximum City (2004), wrote in 2007: Why would anyone leave a brick house in the village with its two mango trees and its view of small hills in the East to come here? So that someday the eldest son can buy two rooms in Mira Road, at the northern edges of the city. And the younger one can move beyond that, to New Jersey. Discomfort is an investment. . . .
One brother works and supports the others, and he gains satisfaction from the fact that his nephew takes an interest in computers and will probably go on to America. Mumbai functions on such invisible networks of assistance. In a Mumbai slum, there is no individual, only the organism. There are circles of fealty and duty within the organism, but the smallest circle is the family. There is no circle around the self.
It’s a place where your caste doesn’t matter, where a woman can dine alone at a restaurant without harassment, and where you can marry the person of your choice. For the young person in an Indian village, the call of Mumbai isn’t just about money. It’s also about freedom.
By 2004 I knew something important was up with the rampant urbanization of the developing world, but I couldn’t find much in the way of ground truth about it until the publication of Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, a New Urban World, by journalist Robert Neuwirth. His research strategy was to learn the relevant language and then live for months as a slum resident—in Rocinha (one of seven hundred favelas in Rio de Janeiro), in Kibera (a squatter city of 1 million outside Nairobi), in the Sanjay Gandhi Nagar neighborhood of Mumbai, and in Sultanbeyli, a now fully developed squatter city of 300,000 with a seven-story city hall, outside Istanbul. In each seemingly scary shantytown, Neuwirth found he could just walk in, ask around, find a place to rent, and start making friends. In Kibera he was the only white person for miles, and no one cared. He was frightened just once, when city police in Rio threatened him, apparently because he had neglected to bribe them.
Contrary to a standard assumption, Neuwirth discovered that the wretched quality of housing in squatter cities is never the main concern of the inhabitants. The sad fact is that when governments and idealistic architects try to help by providing public housing, those buildings invariably turn into the worst part of the slum. The people who build the shanties take pride in them and are always working to improve them. The real issues for the squatters, Neuwirth found, are location—they want to be close to work—and what the UN calls security of tenure: They need to know that their homes and community won’t be suddenly bulldozed out of existence.
They don’t worry about unemployment: Everyone works, including the children. They don’t worry about telephone service: Everyone has a cellphone or access to one. Medical care is available, and so is food; famine is now a rural phenomenon. The greatest need in every squatter city is infrastructure—water, electricity, and sanitation. Not always the hotbeds of criminal activity that everyone assumed, some squatter communities are victimized by criminals from outside because they have no police protection. Though the squatters join forces for what the UN researchers describe as “cultural movements and levels of solidarity unknown in leafy suburbs,” they are seldom politically active beyond defending their own community interests.
A depiction of contemporary slum reality even more vivid than Neuwirth’s is an autobiographical novel by an escaped Australian prisoner who went into hiding in Mumbai’s slums, joined its organized crime world, and fell in love with the city. The author of Shantaram (2005), Gregory David Roberts, writes with all of the intensity and journalistic detail of a Victor Hugo, but from a level of experience that Hugo never had.
Roberts found life in the slum a perpetual melodrama of relationships, dangers, quests, emotions, services, and confrontations so overpowering that he couldn’t wait to leave; but when he did leave, he kept going back because he missed all that drama. Rob Neuwirth found a similar phenomenon—some people who earned enough money to leave the favela and get an apartment elsewhere found they were bored and lonely. They returned for the excitement and sense of community. In Mumbai, some slum dwellers who have been moved into free apartments want out. “Before,” said one man, “there would always be four guys around your shanty. We sat, we chatted. Now it’s like being caged in a poultry farm.” (Women in the apartments, however, cherish having their own toilet and privacy.)
Social cohesiveness is the crucial factor differentiating “slums of hope” from “slums of despair.” This is where CBOs (community-based organizations) and the NGOs (national and global nongovernmental organizations) shine. Typical CBOs include, according to UN-HABITAT’s The Challenge of Slums (2003), “community theatre and leisure groups; sports groups; residents associations or societies; savings and credit groups; child care groups; minority support groups; clubs; advocacy groups; and more. . . . CBOs as interest associations have filled an institutional vacuum, providing basic services such as communal kitchens, milk for children, income-earning schemes and cooperatives.”
Robert Kaplan reported in 2007 that the NGOs in Bangladesh “represent a whole new organizational life-form.” In the cities and villages, they “make an end run around dysfunctional governments,” and “because Bangladeshi NGOs are supported by international donors, they have been indoctrinated with international norms to an extent unmatched by the private sector.”
• Women play a pivotal role in all this. The UN report notes that CBOs “are frequently run and controlled by impoverished women and are usually based on self-help principles, though they may receive assistance from NGOs, churches and political parties.” A major impact of the move from countryside to city is that it unleashes woman power. Lenders have learned that microfinance credit works best when provided to women instead of men, and women are the more responsible holders of property deeds. The Challenge of Slums summarizes: “In many cases, women are taking the lead in devising survival strategies that are, effectively, the governance structures of the developing world when formal structures have failed them. However, one out of every four countries in the developing world has a constitution or national laws that contain impediments to women owning land and taking mortgages in their own names.”
It is so important to free up newly urbanized women from their traditional role as fetchers of water and fuel that, as the UN report drily suggests, “the provision of water standpipes may be far more effective in enabling women to undertake income-earning activities than the provision of skills training.”
A 2007 UN report, Growing Up Urban, tells the story of Shimu, a woman in her early twenties who moved from a small village in northern Bangladesh to a garment-making job in Dhaka:For the first time in her life she had got rid of her husband, her in-laws, her village and their burdens. A few month
s after she arrived, Shimu, now able to support her children, mustered the courage to return to her town and file for divorce. . . .
Shimu prefers living in Dhaka because “it is safer, and here I can earn a living, live and think my own way,” she says. In her village none of this would have been possible. But she thinks that when she is older she will go back there. She plans to buy a piece of land and settle there.
That bond back to the village appears to be universal. The Challenge of Slums observes that “Kenyan urban folk who have lived in downtown Nairobi all of their lives, if asked where they come from, will say from Nyeri or Kiambu or Eldoret, even if they have never been to these places. They will be taken there to be buried on ancestral land when they die.” The persistence of that soul-bond to the land could be a great asset for assuring eventual environmental recovery in the developing countries, when love of the land plays out as protection of the land.
Religious groups have a stronger support role in the slums than most people realize. As Mike Davis wrote in Planet of Slums, Populist Islam and Pentecostal Christianity (and in Bombay, the cult of Shivaji) occupy a social space analogous to that of early-twentieth-century socialism and anarchism. In Morocco, for instance, where half a million rural emigrants are absorbed into the teeming cities every year, and where half the population is under 25, Islamicist movements like “Justice and Welfare,” founded by Sheik Abdessalam Yassin, have become the real governments of the slums: organizing night schools, providing legal aid to victims of state abuse, buying medicine for the sick, subsidizing pilgrimages and paying for funerals. . . . Pentecostalism is . . . the first major world religion to have grown up almost entirely in the soil of the modern urban slum. . . . Since 1970, and largely because of its appeal to slum women and its reputation for being color-blind, [Pentacostalism] has been growing into what is arguably the largest self-organized movement of urban poor people on the planet.
In the 2007 UN report, George Martine noted that “Rapid urbanization was expected to mean the triumph of rationality, secular values and the demystification of the world. . . . Instead . . . the growth of new religious movements is primarily an urban phenomenon. . . . In China, where cities are growing at a breakneck pace, religious movements are fast gaining adherents.”
• To me the most compelling image of hope in squatter communities is something you see everywhere—masonry and concrete building walls with rebar sticking out the top, ready for further construction. On the upper floors of hand-built high-rises, the rebar is there in the expectation that eventually another story will be added to the building—space for a related family or another source of rent. All around urban Turkey, you see heaps of tile bricks in people’s yards. When they get a little money, they buy some bricks, which are impervious to currency inflation. When they get some more money, they build a wall or two. Unfinished masonry holds up fine against weather.
In new squatter communities, and in ones that are constantly threatened by demolition, the shack materials are cardboard, cloth, plastic, scrap wood, flattened oil drums, and—the most prized—corrugated steel sheets. Rob Neuwirth chants in Shadow Cities: Praise be to plastic pipe. All honor the prefab window. Bow down to sheets of old plywood, stock-model sinks, mass-produced tile. Three cheers for cement and cinderblock. Exalt the lowly rebar. Let’s hear it for quick-drying concrete. Hooray for easy plastic wiring, easy plug outlets, and modular telephone service.
Over time, the walls get solider and higher, the materials more durable. The magic of squatter cities is that they are improved steadily and gradually, increment by increment, by the people living there. Each home is built that way, and so is the whole community. To a planner’s eye, squatter cities look chaotic. To my biologist’s eye, they look organic.
Prince Charles has the same opinion. After visiting Mumbai’s Dharavi slum, he told an audience in London, “I find an underlying, intuitive grammar of design that subconsciously produces [a place] that is walkable, mixed-use, and adapted to local climate and materials—which is totally absent from the faceless slab blocks that are still being built around the world to warehouse the poor.”
According to urban researchers, squatters are now the predominant builders of cities in the world.
• Inside the homes of the older squatter communities is another surprise. Field researchers in Thailand for the 2003 UN report found thatAll slum households in Bangkok have a colour television. The average number of TVs per household is 1.6. . . . Almost all of them have a refrigerator. Two-thirds of the households have a CD player, a washing machine, and 1.5 cellphones. Half of them have a home telephone, a video player and a motorcycle.
Back in 1970, Janice Perlman interviewed 750 residents in the favelas of Rio. Her resulting book, The Myth of Marginality (1976), observed that the favelados “have the aspirations of the bourgeoisie, the perseverance of pioneers, and the values of patriots.” Thirty years later, in 2001, she went back to interview her original informants and their children. The changes were dramatic. While the residents of the favelas still suffer discrimination because of where they live, their literacy rate has gone from 5 percent among the original migrants to 94 percent in their children. Everyone now lives in brick buildings, with electricity, water, and indoor bathrooms. All have refrigerators, TVs, cellphones, and washing machines, and are more likely to have microwave ovens and computers than are middle-class people elsewhere in Rio. Two thirds had left the favelas for more legitimate neighborhoods, but many who stayed now have genuinely luxurious wall tiling and furniture sets in their homes.
A reporter from the Economist who visited Mumbai wrote that “Dharavi, which is allegedly Asia’s biggest slum, is vibrantly and triumphantly alive. . . . In fluorescent-strip-lit shops, in snatched exchanges in the pedestrian crush, as a hookah is passed around a tea-stall, again and again, the stories are the same. Everyone is working hard and everyone is moving up.”
Slums are the scene of a world-changing economic event, but it escapes notice because it’s designed to escape notice. Squatters don’t formally own land or property. They don’t pay taxes. They take no part in any permit or licensing process. They pay no attention to government-approved exchange rates. And yet they thrive economically, charging each other rent for space in buildings with no legal ownership, employing each other in unlicensed businesses, and selling each other all manner of services and goods—some of the goods pirated, some of the services criminal. This is what is called the “informal economy.” It is to economic theory what dark energy is to astro-physical theory. It’s not supposed to exist, but there it is, and it’s huge.
While the informal economy specializes in being invisible to the formal world, of course it is highly visible to itself. This is where the social capital of a dense community pays off. Without formal property title, everyone knows who effectively owns a building and may charge rent for a room in it. If you have a skill as a language teacher or identity card forger or whatever, there’s no need to advertise: Your customers will find you, and the officials won’t.
The Challenge of Slums—the 2003 United Nations report—estimates that 60 percent of urban employment in the developing world is in the informal sector and that the informal economy has essential links to the success of the formal sector:The screen-printer who provides laundry bags to hotels, the charcoal burner who wheels his cycle up to the copper smelter and delivers sacks of charcoal . . . , the home-based crèche to which the managing director delivers her child each morning, the informal builder who adds a security wall around the home of the government minister, all indicate the complex networks of linkages between informal and formal.
In many cities, the roughest slums are pressed right up against the most affluent neighborhoods. It looks like grotesque inequity, and it is, but it’s mainly an efficient economic event typical of city density—service supply and service demand cleaving close to one another. The maids, nannies, gardeners, and security guards walk to work.
The poor have time but no money, a
nd the rich have money but no time; and so they deal. I find what needy people do with surplus time more interesting than what un-needy people do with surplus money. Ingenuity is the norm in the informal economy. For instance, there is a whole urban-farming subeconomy in the slums: Families save money and improve nutrition by growing their own food, and they can sell the produce a short distance from where it’s grown. In the Medellín slums in Colombia, “people raise pigs on the third-floor roofs and grow vegetables in cut-open bleach bottles they hang from their window sills,” according to blogger Ethan Zuckerman.
At the entry level, the informal economy is organized around pittances. Robert Kaplan wrote in 2008 thatFor the many rural newcomers to Bangladesh’s cities, there is the rickshaw economy, as much an animating force in urban areas as the search for usable soil is in villages. Dhaka alone, a city of more than 10 million people, has several hundred thousand bicycle rickshaws. A rickshaw driver generally pays a rickshaw mustan (a mafia-style gang, often associated with a political party) the equivalent of $1.35 a day to rent the rickshaw. He collects 30 cents from an average passenger and ends up making around a dollar a day in profit. His wife may earn a similar amount breaking bricks into road material, while their children sift through garbage.
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