Planet of Slums. Mike Davis
3. El Sur/Ciudad Bolivar (Bogotá)
In a more sophisticated analysis, housing expert Ahmed Soliman discusses four basic shelter strategies for the poor in Cairo. First, if access to central job markets is paramount, the household can consider renting an apartment; the rental tenements offer centrality and security of tenure, but are expensive and hold out no hope of eventual ownership. The second option is centrally located but informal shelter: a situation described by Soliman as “a very small room or rooftop with a location with a poor quality environment and a cheap rent, or no rent at all, with good access to job opportunities but with no hope of secure tenure. Such illegal dwellers will eventually be forced to move to squatter camps or semi-informal housing.”37
The third and cheapest housing solution is to squat on publicly owned land, usually on Cairo’s desert outskirts and almost always downwind of pollution; negative trade-offs include the very high cost of commuting to work and the government’s neglect of infrastructure. “For example, the squatter area in El Dekhila district has been a settlement for 40 years with no public action or intervention from the local authority.” The fourth solution, eventually preferred by most poor Cairenes, is to buy a house site in one of the vast semi-informal developments (often on land purchased from Bedouins or peasant villages) with legal tenure but without official building authorization. Although far from jobs, such sites are secure and, after considerable community mobilization and political negotiation, are usually provided with basic municipal services.38
Similar rational-choice models can be specified for all cities, generating a huge array of locally specific tenure and settlement types. The typology displayed in Figure 8 is an analytic simplification that abstracts from locally important features for the sake of global comparability. Other analysts might give priority to legal housing status (formal versus informal), but I think most urban newcomers’ first decision is whether or not they can afford to locate near the principal job concentrations (core versus periphery).
Figure 8. Slum Typology
In the First World, of course, there is an archetypal distinction between “donut”-shaped American cities, with poor people concentrated in derelict cores and inner suburbs, and European “saucer” cities, with immigrant and unemployed populations marooned in highrise housing on the urban outskirts. The American poor, so to speak, live on Mercury; the European poor, on Neptune or Pluto. As Figure 9 illustrates, Third World slum-dwellers occupy a variety of urban orbits, with the greatest concentration in lowrise peripheries. In contrast to Europe, public housing for the poor in the South is an exception – Hong Kong, Singapore, China – rather than the rule. Somewhere between one fifth and one third of the urban poor live within or close to the urban core, mainly in older rental multifamily housing.
1. Inner-City Poverty
In North American and European cities, there is a basic distinction between “hand-me-down” housing, such as Harlem brownstones and Dublin Georgians, and built-for-the-poor tenements, such as Berlin’s Mietskaserne and the Lower East Side’s notorious “dumbbells.” Although rare in the newer cities of Africa, hand-me-down housing, including converted colonial mansions and Victorian villas, is quite common in Latin America and in some Asian cities. Whatever their former splendor, most of Guatemala City’s palomares, Rio’s avenidas, Buenos Aires’s and Santiago’s conventillos, Quito’s quintas, and Old Havana’s cuarterias are now dangerously dilapidated and massively overcrowded. Architect David Glasser visited a former single-family villa in Quito, for example, that housed 25 families and 128 people but had no functioning municipal services.40 Although rapidly being gentrified or torn down, some of Mexico City’s vecindades are still as crowded as Casa Grande, the famous tenement block housing 700 people which anthropologist Oscar Lewis made famous in The Children of Sanchez (1961).41 In Asia the equivalents are the decayed (and now municipalized) zamindar mansions of Kolkata and the poetically named “slum gardens” of Colombo which constitute 18 percent of the city’s rundown housing.42 The largest-scale instance, although now reduced in size and population by urban renewal, is probably Beijing’s inner slum, the Old City, which consists of Ming and Qing courtyard housing lacking modern facilities.43
Figure 9. Where the Poor Live39
(percent of poor population)
