Creating Humane and Sustainable Cities
April 2007
Banner photo: Lawrence Worcester/Getty Images
The Human Face of Slums
Robert Neuwirth is a writer who spent two years living in "slums" in Rio de Janeiro, Nairobi, Mumbai and Istanbul. His book Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, A New Urban World offers an intimate perspective on life in these communities and looks at how cities around the world might begin to accommodate the thousands of new inhabitants that stream into them each day.
SGI Quarterly: How did your perceptions of squatter communities change after living in them?
Robert Neuwirth: At the outset I had no idea what to expect, except that these communities would be repositories of misery, poverty and danger, because that's the image that we're spoon-fed by the media. These communities don't often get covered unless there's something that draws attention to misery, poverty and danger--shootings in the favelas in Rio de Janeiro, flooding in Indonesia more recently. We see these teeming masses of horrid humanity living in filth. And that's what I thought I would find.
SGIQ: What did you find?
RN: I certainly can't minimize the troubling physical conditions in these communities. Yes, these are communities that lack proper infrastructure. But I also found a lot of really smart, energetic and creative people. The reason why these communities exist is not because people want to live like this; it's because the economics don't serve them.
Residents of Kibera, a squatter community in Nairobi, must buy their water from vendors
[Simon Marina/AFP]
When it comes to housing, the classic economics of supply and demand just don't function in these circumstances. There is no way that the average--I wouldn't even say impoverished--Kenyan living on quite low wages can even afford an apartment. The same is true in Rio and in Mumbai and Istanbul. The apartment rents are just too high, and the need of people coming to cities for jobs is too great. So what do they do? They build for themselves, precariously and, initially, rather shoddily, because they have to get a roof over their head. The longer people stay, though, and the more that they are able to save some money, the more they begin to replace the cardboard with wood and wood with brick and brick ultimately with concrete. And so the community would improve. The issue is much more the bigger economic situation than it is the fault of the people themselves.
And within each of these communities, if you go in and meet the people, you find all sorts of very interesting people, with all sorts of backgrounds, all sorts of ideals. Just to pluck one example from Kenya: In the middle of Kibera, in this community that's somewhere between 500,000 and a million people, all of them living in mud and tin structures, no water, no sewers, no sanitation, no electricity--unless you're lucky enough to pay a lot to string in an illegal wire--there was my friend Joachim who's a law graduate. But because he doesn't have enough money to back-pay his school fees, he can't technically receive his degree. So now he's working for a bakery, loading trucks. And there are business people who choose to stay and do business in these communities, and they do very well for themselves. These communities are much more differentiated and interesting than that sort of splashy slum image would have us believe.
Dirt and Crime
SGIQ: It seems the major negative perceptions that people have are about crime and hygiene.
RN: Yes, the hygiene can be troubling, but no one desires to live without a toilet. They know what the 21st century has to offer. They know what a toilet is and what sewers are and what water pipes are! But all of this happens because fundamentally the city is not making the investment in the infrastructure that that community needs.
And you have to be in these communities to understand how hard people work to keep their homes clean. When you live in a mud hut, cleanliness is hugely important. People are washing their clothes fanatically. In Kenya, people will iron blue jeans because having a crease in your trousers is a matter of status, a matter of pride. It's very hard work.
As far as crime goes, I don't think that it's any more than any other neighborhoods. Certainly in Turkey I never experienced any crime in the squatter area I was living in. In Mumbai, I also never saw any crime.
Rio is a special case. The drug gangs operate in the favelas, and there are periodic shootouts between drug gangs and between the gangs and police. But the truth of the matter is that the drug gangs don't want any crime in the favelas, they don't want to call police attention to the area. So there actually is no street crime in the favelas in the sense that we might talk about it--break-ins, pickpockets, theft. I was safe in the favelas all the time, that's the way I felt. In Rocinha, the favela in which I lived, I could come home at three or four o'clock in the morning--walk through the unlit pathways up the hills to my flat, no problem.
Because they enjoy some security of tenure, the residents of Rocinha, Rio's largest favela, have been able to develop services comparable to the "legitimate" areas of the city
[Mauricio Lima/AFP]
I knew a woman who had a jewelry store in Flamengo, a rich neighborhood in central Rio. After her store was broken into several times, she decided to move her store to the favela. She knew that she would never be broken into there. Is it an argument for vigilante justice? I am not sure. But for the favelas it works. And don't forget that these are the communities where the police have refused to police.
In all the squatter communities I lived in, I have always been welcomed. I've never been treated badly or seen anyone else treated badly in that sense.
Development Possibilities
SGIQ: What needs to happen for these communities to develop?
RN: The best way for improvement to occur is for partnerships to be created between the government and the squatter communities, so they can work together to determine what the community's needs are and how they are going to be able to provide those things. And at the same time, recognizing what are the municipality's needs and how can the community work toward an understanding of that. That would require two important things. In order for improvements to happen, people have to know that they're not going to be summarily evicted, because no one will work to improve their home and community if they think they can be thrown out tomorrow.
The second thing is that these communities need some form of access to politics, preferably by the squatter communities doing some self-organizing and coming together and then reaching out to the political sector.
If those two things can happen, then the communities and politicians can define a way forward for the communities that will include all the facets of life being improved.
There's no indication that rural-to-urban migration and urban growth are stopping. These squatter communities will continue to grow, so, pragmatically speaking, the only way forward is for the formal sector and informal communities to work together. If you just go in, bulldoze down the shanty town and then erect flats, who will be able to afford them?
SGIQ: You've described in your book how development initiatives imposed from outside the communities often fail miserably.
RN: Yes, because they don't know how to intervene in any appropriate way. Very often when they upgrade one of these shanty towns, they try to mimic the kind of gated community that passes for the middle-class standard in these cities. What that leaves out is that when you have a mud hut, you can have any income-generating activity right outside your house. You can fry potatoes and sell them in the pathway outside your house, or create a little kiosk for sundries. But when you build a more traditionally planned environment, there isn't space for that. People may get a better house, but they lose their income.
SGIQ: Do you think that we need to rethink our notions of private property and land ownership in the face of such massive urban migration?
RN: I do. I think the biggest thing that these communities force us to do is to recognize that possession is an important right--that no matter who on paper owns the land, the people who live there and possess it have some sort of a right. Land ownership is not the key way forward for these communities, it is one tool among many, but for these communities individual and communal possession is something to investigate. I don't say we have to take away the property of people in the wealthier communities. I'm talking about recognizing that the squatter communities that now exist and have existed for dozens of years, sometimes decades, are built on something different. And in order for them to improve and in order for them to become real neighborhoods of the city, we have to recognize that and move forward based on that different form of land tenure.
