It is estimated that one billion humans live in shanty towns. That estimate sometimes rises to two billion. That there is a margin of error of one billion humans in those estimates says a lot about what kind of problem the slums are. While the West is obsessed with terrorism in the Middle East or socialism in Latin America, it is the catastrophic growth of urban poverty that is defining our epoch. The list of the world’s most populous cities now features names with whom progress cannot be associated: Cairo, Lagos, Tehran, Dhaka, Kinshasa among many others. Urbanization is no longer a symbol of industrialization and wealth. (In fact one of the most urbanized peoples of the world, the Palestinians, have seen nothing but destitution.)
There seems to be two driving forces behind the rural exodus taking place in the second and third world. The collapse of the nation state is, particularly in Africa, making productive land too dangerous to exploit as warfare engulfs the heart of the continent. (The Congo war, 1998-2003, a war nobody paid any attention to, killed approximately 4 million people.) And on the supply side, the presence of centralized western aid bureaucracies makes suffering poverty in the capital much easier than taking the risk of silent starvation in the countryside.
The defining characteristic of these new megaslums, what sets them apart from anything ever seen in history, is morphological. Worldwide, they are built literally out of rubbish, discarded metal, cardboard, tarp. They are made to be built and rebuilt rapidly. You don’t even see mud houses, just vast fields of rusted metal housing millions of poor. This globalized feature of the slum is evidence of the precariousness of slum living. Not only are people who live in slums poor, they are permanently at war with the local government. Slum clearing campaigns periodically throw tens of thousands out of their only shelter, while planning agencies and state land ownership makes the production of adequate housing impossible.
The French were shocked when, coming back from WWII, they discovered the existence of bidonvilles, towns of rubbish, discarded metal, cardboard and tarp, on the outskirts of their great capital. Nothing as such had ever been seen in the history of the country, despite the fact that the country had been much poorer in the past. Not coincidentally, the Vichy government had made the whole of the national territory non aedificandi without a construction permit, and the fourth republic had kept these new powers. (It is outrageous how many Nazi-era laws were kept on the books in Europe.) The existence of a slum is the consequence of the violation of the fundamental human right to build and own property, and the silence coming out of the leftist defenders of the poor on this subject demonstrates either a complete contempt for the poor and their rights, or astonishing ignorance and stupidity.
Of further interest:
The Mystery of Capital, Hernando de Soto
Planet of Slums, Mike Davis
