The planet of slums. The challenge of mass urban poverty

Daniele Moschetti, Mccj 

During 2007, a woman will give birth in Ajegurie slum; a man will leave his village of Giava to move to Jakarta; a Peruvian peasant will try to escape the poverty trap going to one of the pueblos jovenes of Lima. It doesn’t really matter if any of these events will take place, because it will go unnoticed though they will mark a watershed in human history. For the first time, urban population will outgrow the rural one. As a matter of fact, this historical transition might already have taken place. The process of urbanization has grown more rapidly than foreseen by the Club of Roma Report “The limits of development”. In the ‘50s, there were 86 agglomerates with over 1 million inhabitants. Today they’re 400 and in 2015 they’ll be at least 550. As from 1950 urban areas have absorbed almost two third of the world demographic explosion, and it grows, on a weekly basis, of 1 million units, included new born and immigrants. Nowadays urban population (3.2 billion) is more numerous than the world population in the ‘60s. Forecast say that 95% of this growth will take place in the urban areas of developing countries. According to them, population of these areas will redouble in the next generation (the data of Brazil, China, India are almost the same of those of Europe and North America). The result will be the explosion of metropolis with over 8 million inhabitants, moreover, and more astonishingly, will be the impact of metropolis with over 20 million people (this data is equivalent to the entire world population at the time of the French Revolution). In 1995 only Tokyo had reached these levels. If the megalopolies are the bright stars of the urban firmament, three quarters of the urban growth will take place in smaller agglomerates, urban areas without any planning and social services. In China (officially a urbanized country in 1997 by 47%), the number of cities has grown from 196 of 1978 to 640 of nowadays.. However the relative ratio of metropolis, no matter their growth, has diminished compared to the total growth of urban population, the small-medium size urban areas have grown to become cities, they have absorbed the great majority of the rural population who has left the countryside because of the land reforms since 1979. Urbanisation doesn’t mean only the growth of cities but also it means the structural change and the interaction between the urban-rural continuum. The dynamic of urbanization in the Third world is a kind of synthesis and at the same time it has its own characteristics compared to those of Europe and North America of the XIX and XX centuries. In China, a rural country for a long time, the real revolution took place when the exodus from the countryside to urban areas took place. At the same time, in the great majority of developing countries, the growth is not fed by industries and exported led sectors neither by foreign capital inflows. In these countries the urbanization process takes place outside industrialization and any kind of social safety network. The explosion of the slums has been analysed by a report of a United Nation agency “The challenge of slums” that rings an alarm bell about urban poverty. Slums are defined as: overpopulated; having informal and-or precarious housing; limited access to safe and drinkable water; limited land rights. It is a restricted definition due to the fact that in 2001 at least 921 million people used to live in slums. 78.2% of the urban population live in slums. If the demographic pyramid is taken into account at least half of the total population is below the twenty years old age line. The most striking percentage of people living in slums are in Ethiopia (99.4), Chad ( 99.4), Afghanistan (98.5) and Nepal (92). In Delhi there are slums inside slums: in the peripheries, the working class expelled by the growth of the town, has been replaced by the new incoming dwellers. In Cairo and Phon Penh, new informal settlements are put up on the roofs. Actually the population of the slums is underestimated. In the ‘80s Bangkok used to have a poverty ratio of 5% while other estimates pointed out that at least a quarter of the total population (1.16 million people) used to live in the slums. There are 250 thousands slums around the world. The five metropolitan areas of southern Asia (Karachi, Bombay, Delhi, Calcutta, Dacca) have almost 15thousand slums with an estimated population of 20 million people. Western Africa has a greater slum population, while the poverty belts dot the landscape from Anatolia to Ethiopia, from the Nade to the Himalaya, Mexico City, Johannesburg, along the Nile, Congo, Tigri, Gange, Irrawddy and the Mekong. The slums are named in different and unique way: bustees in Calcutta, chawl and zopadpatti in Bombay, katchi abadi in Karachi, kampong in Jakarta, iskwater in Manila, shammasa in Khartoum, umjondolo in Durban, intra-muros in Rabat, bidonvilles in Abijan, baladi in Egypt, gecekoundou in Ankara, conventillos in Quito, favelas in Brazil, villa miseria in Buenos Aires e colonias populares in Mexico City. A recent study by the Harvard Law Revuew points out that at least 85% of Third world cities doesn’t have any legal property title. Therefore there is a deep-seated contradiction because while the land on which slums are built is government owned, the houses are private property, are owned by individuals who impose very high house rents on the urban poor who do not own even the shack in which they live.

There are different and various modalities in which slums are set up, from illegal and collective invasion of a parcel of land in Mexico City and Lima, to the rent system in Bejing , Karachi and Nairobi. The state apparatus usually are part and parcel of the illegal house market and they are able to impose their own view on people therefore taking advantage of bribes and irregular house rent. The offering of infrastructures is far below the rhythm of urbanization and quite often slums at the periphery lack basic social services. No matter they are often defined because of what they lack, slums are going to have by 2030 2 billion inhabitants because they are the only possible solution in so far as a house is concerned for the urban poor. May slums become hot spots ready to explode? May their inhabitants become active social actors? It is not an easy answer, provided that a culture of collective organization grows, though, as Kapushinski points out: “ The poor, usually keep silent. Poverty doesn’t cry, doesn’t have a voice. Misery suffers silently, misery doesn’t rebel. Poor people make a revolution only when they think that something can change.” Will we be part of this transformation?

Fr. Daniele Moschetti

P.O.Box 47714