Orum, A.M. and Gilbert, A. (2023) - Slums and Shanties.
Orum, A.M. and Gilbert, A. (2023) - Slums and Shanties.
Orum, A.M. and Gilbert, A. (2023) - Slums and Shanties.
See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
Slums and Shanties Public awareness of the “housing problem”
did not develop until millions of people
ALAN GILBERT began to flood into Britain’s Victorian cities
University College London, UK and subsequently into industrial cities in
France, Germany, and the USA. However,
For millennia the great majority of people such awareness was driven less by sympathy
had lived in inadequate housing and no one for the occupants than by fear that disease
in authority paid them much attention. Until would spread from the rat-infested tenements
the nineteenth century housing did not figure to decent neighborhoods. Civic authorities
in government programs and little was done first introduced “housing” policies because
to help the poor until the following century. low income areas were perceived to be dan-
The majority lived in the countryside and gerous to other people’s health. So-called
most housing lacked any kind of infrastruc- “unhealthy areas” might incubate diseases
ture; facilities like piped water, sanitation, and that might launch an epidemic that would
electricity were unavailable, some of course endanger everyone. In Paris a commission
had not even been invented. The well-off lived on unhealthy dwellings was set up in 1851
in luxury but the bulk of the urban popula- in the wake of the 1849 cholera epidemic.
tion occupied overcrowded accommodation, Toward the end of the nineteenth century
whether in the seething cities of Elizabethan the authorities decided to use tuberculosis
England or the medinas of Muslim countries rates as an indicator of properties requiring
Poor residential living conditions were clearance. By 1904 six areas of the city had
reflected in short life expectancies. Disease been designated as îlots insalubres. In South
spread easily in overcrowded living condi- America, yellow fever and cholera were major
tions, in a world where antibiotics had not killers in the River Plate and Brazil and, later,
yet been created and where fresh water was the plague and Spanish flu. Fear of these
in short supply. The quality of shelter was one diseases justified the first modern attempts at
reason why Thomas Hobbes could comment urban planning and renovation. When plague
that life was “nasty, brutish and short.” hit Buenos Aires in the late nineteenth cen-
In many ways industrialization made living tury, major attempts were made to improve
conditions worse. In 1851, a boy born in inner sanitary conditions and major urban works
Liverpool had a life expectancy of only 26 programs destroyed large areas of tenement
years, compared with a boy born in the small housing. In Rio de Janeiro, the threat of
market town of Oakhampton, who could disease led to the launch of a major sanitary
expect to live to 57. Of course, the quality of campaign in the early years of the twentieth
life and shelter in the countryside was dis- century and justified the introduction of a
mal, which motivated increasing numbers to major urban renewal project between 1902
move to the cities even in times unaffected by and 1906 which transformed the central
famine, war, or pestilence. But the problems areas.
of the countryside were hidden; it was much Concern about the poor who actually lived
more difficult to conceal the degrading living in these insanitary areas came only when
conditions of so many in the city. social reformers, like Charles Booth in the
The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Urban and Regional Studies. Edited by Anthony Orum.
© 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118568446.eurs0286
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2 SLUM S AN D SHAN TI ES
UK, began to document the appalling social and planning techniques could create proper
conditions to be found there, when novelists homes.
like Dickens or Zola began describing the Growing awareness of the housing problem
life of the poor, and when photographers like in the cities began to spawn a new vocabulary.
Jacob Riis began to publish pictures of life The blighted areas were full of rookeries, a
in the tenements of New York. At last some descriptor of the poor quality accommoda-
authorities began to pay attention. tion to be found in attics at the top of houses
In the booming industrial cities of the nine- in the nineteenth English city, or in basement
teenth century, the response was twofold. The hovels. In France, the terms quartier pauvre
first was that philanthropists began to provide or un taudis (a hovel or pigsty) appeared. The
some housing for the most needy. George term slum only emerged gradually and we
Peabody built many homes for the needy in don’t really know when or where the word
London and Joseph Rowntree, Edward Cecil was first used. Seemingly its first use did not
Guinness, and Octavia Hill began to set up apply to housing at all; it was used to describe
model communities in the UK. The second a criminal racket; a “lodging slum” was “the
was that governments began to take action. practice of hiring ready furnished lodgings
Unfortunately, government action seldom and stripping them of the plate, linen and
actually helped the poor resolve their housing other valuables” (Prunty 1998, 2).
situation. The recommended policy tended to The growth of slums generated a debate
be slum demolition. In London, large swaths among the powerful in society about its
of overcrowded housing were demolished to causes. Many blamed the poor quality of the
create new streets and railway lines. In Paris, housing on the bad habits of the inhabitants
Baron von Haussmann destroyed vast areas while others claimed that overcrowding and
of the inner city to create a healthier and insanitary housing created both poverty and
more aesthetically pleasing city. the undesirable style of living that much later
Slum clearance in London and Paris in the Oscar Lewis (1966) described as a “culture
nineteenth century seemed to work mainly of poverty.” The debate, one that continues
to increase overcrowding elsewhere. In hind- to this day, was well summarized by the
sight, it seemed to be more important as a chairman of the London County Council
means of improving the transport situation Housing Committee when he asked, rather
than to solve the housing problem. Baron contentiously: “Does the slum make the slum
Haussmann, after all, is remembered for his dweller or the slum dweller the slum? Would
boulevards, not for his solution to the taudis someone who is ‘filthy in one room, be clean
of Paris. The construction of London’s rail- in two?’” (cited in Garside 1988, 25).
ways and of New Oxford Street worsened the Of course, there was another, more radical,
housing situation of the metropolitan poor interpretation that emerged from the political
rather than improving it. left. Friedrich Engels argued, on the basis of
When, immediately after World War I, the his observations in Manchester in the early
British government promised its returning 1840s, that the Industrial Revolution made
forces “houses fit for heroes,” they meant workers worse off (Engels 1962). The overall
knocking down the slums and building in the death rate in Manchester and Liverpool was
suburbs. The British New Town movement significantly higher than the national rate,
and high rise flats represented the modernist a consequence of industrial workers having
epitome of this idea. The housing that existed lower wages and living in less healthy and
was hopeless and only modern architecture more unpleasant environments. In short, the
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SLUM S AN D SHAN TI ES 3
slum problem was an inevitable symptom of Peru; and the inquilinato in Colombia and
the ills of capitalism. Venezuela. Living conditions in the poorest
In Europe and, to a lesser extent, in the tenements were often terrible; in 1919, the
USA, governments began to engage more average Buenos Aires inquilinato and con-
and more with the housing question. In large ventillo had 15 rooms and accommodated an
part this was motivated by fear of a social average of 3.3 persons per room. There were
revolution, especially after the Russian Revo- few services and repairs to the structure were
lution of 1917. In Britain, the return of troops infrequent.
from World War I led to the introduction Gradually, however, the tenements were
of the first government-led social housing unable to accommodate the massive inflows
programs. The survivors of such a tragic war of people. Clearly, the poverty of most of
demanded better living conditions. the newcomers meant that the private sector
Until the twentieth century, the slum was would find building decent homes for these
a problem of the Global North. Industri- people uneconomic. Similarly, the limited
alization was extremely limited in most of resources and capacity of governments in the
Africa, Asia, and Latin America and most Global South meant that the construction of
industrial production took place in the home. social housing would never be able to meet
Artisans toiled in their own backyards rather the demand for accommodation.
than in the satanic mills of Victorian cities. The solution, or at least the sticking plaster
Around 1900, the vast majority of people in on the wound, was found by leaving people
Africa, Asia, and Latin America lived in the to solve their own shelter problems. Govern-
countryside. Of the 25 largest cities in 1900 ments would turn a blind eye to undesirable
only six were in today’s Global South: Beijing, forms of urban development given that they
Buenos Aires, Bombay, Calcutta, Istanbul, had no other answer to the growing shelter
and Shanghai, and none had as many as problem. Some colluded with the poor to
1 million inhabitants. Gradually, however, the avoid political difficulties. In Rio de Janeiro,
cities began to grow and, by the 1950s, the the first favela was created at the end of the
urban population of Latin America, the first nineteenth century when veterans from the
Southern region to urbanize, was growing at war of the Canudos demanded to be paid.
an annual rate of 4.4 per cent. Between 1950 They settled on one of Rio’s hills and renamed
and 1990, the population of Latin America’s it the Morro da Favela. They were never paid
towns and cities increased from around 69 but nor were they ever removed. As Rio and
million to 313 million. other cities grew, similar kinds of informal
At first, the growing urban population was housing solution became more common
accommodated in similar ways to those in but they did not accommodate a substantial
earlier times in the North. The new arrivals proportion of the population until after 1940.
were accommodated in rental accommoda- In Lima, there were only five self-help settle-
tion close to the city center. A typical rooming ments in 1940 compared with 784 by 1984.
house in Latin America was constructed on The poor in the Global South in the twen-
two stories, with rooms overlooking a central tieth century generally built their own shelter
patio which contained the services such as whereas the poor in the Global North in the
water closets and washing facilities. They nineteenth century did not. The difference
were known collectively as the vecindad in lay principally in terms of differences in the
Mexico; the conventillo in Bolivia, Chile, available technology and patterns of land
Argentina, and Uruguay; the callejón in ownership. In the North most people lived
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4 SLUM S AN D SHAN TI ES
close to their work because in the absence of of the authorities. Elsewhere, landowners
cheap public transport they had no choice but were not punished for subdividing their land,
to walk. It was only gradually that the con- despite the lack of services and planning
struction of railways allowed cities to spread permission. The simple fact was that self-help
and rich and poor began to move into sub- housing represented a means by which the
urbia. By contrast, transport improvements poor could be accommodated at little cost to
came relatively early in the urbanization pro- the state. It was politically expedient to ignore
cess in some parts of the South. Buenos Aires, the government’s own planning regulations.
the pioneer of mass transportation in Latin Of course, the precise mechanism through
America, was the first to experience extensive which the poor obtained land varied from
suburban development. In 1919, the electric city to city. In much of Africa, migrants asked
tram was operating over a 405-mile system permission of a tribal chief. In many Latin
and was carrying 3,245,000 passengers a year. American cities, the poor were allowed to
Elsewhere, the growth of suburbia awaited invade land. In others, however, invasions
the coming of the bus; new routes linked were vigorously opposed because the land
even the most distant residential areas with was valuable and ownership lay in the hands
the workplace. As the numbers of buses of the powerful. In cities like Bogotá, Quito, or
increased, so did the size of the city; Mex- São Paulo, an alternative was found: land was
ico City virtually doubled its area between sold illicitly by private developers. The partic-
1940 and 1950 and Bogotá’s urban areas grew ular form of land occupation that developed
more than three times in the 1940s and 1950s. depended upon the local pattern of land own-
Unlike suburbia in the North, the suburbs ership, the price of peripheral land, the atti-
were built by the poor themselves. tude of the political authorities, the political
Second, the spread of self-help hous- organization of the poor, the physical nature
ing was dependent on nonintervention by of the terrain, and the pace of urban growth.
the authorities. In many parts of Africa, The growth of low income settlement was
self-help housing was permitted by the also permitted by improved technology and
tribal chiefs who controlled the communal increasing government budgets. Modern
land on the edges of cities. In Latin Amer- engineering provided the means to generate
ica, the authorities turned a blind eye to and distribute electricity and water. Indus-
new communities ignoring the planning trial and commercial development provided
ordinances. Settlements developed without governments with funds to develop their
planning permission or services. In places, education and health systems. However
the authorities were fully prepared to tolerate deficient the servicing of the low income
invasions or illegal forms of settlement. In areas something was done to placate their
São Paulo, “Governor Ademar de Barros inhabitants and to prevent the spread of
made no bones about it when in 1946 he epidemics. Of course, there were moments
told the poor: ‘Go ahead and build your when governments attempted to stem the
homes without a permit. City Hall will turn tide of self-help suburbia, but these were
a blind eye’” (Kowarick and Bonduki 1988, not common. The state not only tolerated
6). In some cities governments allowed poor self-help housing but encouraged its devel-
families to invade state land. In Lima, Rio de opment through the gradual introduction of
Janeiro, Salvador, Caracas, Guayaquil, and services and infrastructure. Taps, electricity
Barranquilla vast swaths of public land were lines, schools, and clinics slowly trickled into
occupied “illegally” with the tacit approval the self-help suburbs.
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SLUM S AN D SHAN TI ES 5
THE NATURE OF SELF-HELP HOUSING may be several stories high. Gradually, most
settlements gain connections to the electricity
Today, millions of people live in self-help and water systems, sanitation usually coming
housing and well over half of the urban pop- some years later. However, in much of Africa
ulation of the Global South live in this kind and Asia, progress is slower. Households
of housing. It is estimated that between half are generally poorer and building materials
and three-quarters of the accommodation in relatively more expensive. In addition, there
Mexico City has been constructed informally. is little tradition of building in anything but
In very much poorer sub-Saharan Africa and wood, which restricts the height of the build-
the Indian subcontinent, the percentages have ings. The ability of the authorities to provide
been even higher; UN-HABITAT (2003, 81) services is also limited. As such, vast areas of
estimated that, in 2001, 99.4 percent of the flimsy self-help settlement last for years.
urban population of Ethiopia lived in slums
and 98.5 percent of those in Afghanistan! ATTITUDES TOWARD SHANTY TOWNS
Quite how much self-help housing there
is depends on how this term is defined; Initial attitudes to the growth of informal
the problem being that no one is wholly settlement were almost always hostile. One
agreed on how best to do so. Most planners, academic observer in Rio de Janeiro observed
however, would probably agree that the dis- that:
tinctive characteristics of self-help housing
The favelas crawl in cancerous disorder up the
are that it always begins as a flimsy form steep morros, divided by labyrinthine paths
of shelter lacking all kinds of service and is and gullies that serve as precarious avenues of
developed on land which either lacks plan- movement and natural sewers. … As a group,
ning permission or which has been invaded. the favela population is on the wrong side of
The adjective “self-help” stems from the fact every standard index of social disorganization,
that the occupier has built some or all of the whether it be illiteracy, malnutrition, disease, job
accommodation, even if some form of profes- instability, irregular sexual unions, alcoholism,
criminal violence, or almost any other on the
sional help has almost always been involved.
familiar list. (Bonilla 1961/1970, 74–75)
The typical architect is the local jobbing
builder or bricklayer, the building manual is The shanty towns were the new slums, inhab-
the advice received from family and friends. ited by ignorant peasants, newly arrived, in
The quality of self-help shelter varies excessive numbers, directly from the coun-
considerably. Initially, living conditions are tryside. Planners and architects were appalled
poor. The accommodation is flimsy and is by the lack of services and infrastructure,
intended to be temporary, especially when and by the primitive construction methods
the settlers fear that they might be moved employed by the informal builders. Some
elsewhere. Once some security of tenure academics argued that such settlements were
is achieved, however, improvements begin. full of people “marginal” to the real urban
However, progress depends on household economy. Such ideas were frequently cited
income, on whether the settlers wish to by the more affluent and powerful as reasons
remain in the city, and on the ability of the why city-ward migration should be discour-
city to provide services and infrastructure. In aged and why self-help settlements should be
much of Latin America, self-help settlements destroyed.
change remarkably quickly. After a few years, Public opinion and the media were wont to
most self-help homes are brick-built and portray these settlements negatively (Gilbert
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6 SLUM S AN D SHAN TI ES
2007). In English the pejorative term slum The reaction of the authorities was more
was frequently used, ignoring the diversity of nuanced and variable. Politicians generally
these settlements. In French the commonly did not like to see their cities developing
used term bidonville is seemingly derived what they considered to be a form of social
from bidon (phoney or bogus) – a town cancer and some authorities decided to eject
that is not really a town – and the taudis the residents and demolish their housing.
is a hovel or pigsty; also a miserable room, This reaction was most common among mil-
a dirty hole, a hovel. In Spanish America, itary regimes. Ostensibly benevolent leaders
the housing of the poor is sometimes called knocked down shanty accommodation in
more just that, barrios bajos (lower-class Caracas, Rio de Janeiro, and Santiago and
neighborhoods) or increasingly barrios pop- rehoused the population in purpose-built
ulares (popular neighborhoods). Generally, accommodation. In China, India, and Zim-
most cities have their own local terms, most babwe such an attitude continues to this day,
of which are descriptive of the look of the although sometimes eviction occurs without
poor settlements or of the way that they were the offer of alternative shelter.
formed. The “pirate urbanization” of Bogotá But increasingly planners turned against
refers to the illegal sale of land and is to be eviction and relocation. Relocation disrupted
distinguished from the even more “illicit” existing commercial and social networks,
invasion. In Argentina, sympathy imbues the increased the journey to work, raised housing
term villa miseria, used to describe flimsy costs, and generally disrupted people’s lives.
invasion settlements. In Chile, the callampa Fortunately, the validity of Abrams’s (1964,
(mushroom) describes how flimsy settlement 126) famous jibe against slum demolition
grows overnight, the toma (taking) refers to was gradually absorbed in many cities: “In
the invasion of land, and the población (set- a housing famine there is nothing that slum
tlement) of the ordinary poor is contrasted to clearance can accomplish that cannot be
the campamento (camp) founded in the late done more efficiently by an earthquake. …
1960s by the parties of the left. The musseque Demolition without replacement intensifies
of Angola describes the sandy places where overcrowding and increases shelter cost.”
so many are located. Whatever the local term And, when academics, architects, and
used, it is almost always imbued with negative planners in the 1950s began to investigate
feelings. In Brazil, a favelado is not just some- the reality of life in the shantytowns of Latin
one who lives in a favela, he or she is thought America, they found that most were places
to be someone who deserves to live there. of gradual improvement. Mangin (1967, 65)
Favelados have always been seen to be people observed that writers about squatter settle-
who are different; the maid who lives there ments in Latin America “agree, sometimes
may be decent but most favelados are not; the to their own surprise, that it is difficult to
negative stereotype is fixed solidly into the describe squatter settlements as slums. The
middle-class Brazilian psyche. The same gut differentiation of squatter settlements from
reaction is true of the middle class in most inner-city slums is, in fact, one of the first
other cities in the world. The fundamental breaks from the widely shared mythology
problem with slums is the people who live about them.” Study after study during the
there; an image that evokes fear among the 1960s and 1970s confirmed the fact that what
middle class and stimulates demand for gated might begin as a shantytown often developed
communities. into a serviced, consolidated, low income
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SLUM S AN D SHAN TI ES 7
suburb. Most of the inhabitants had been liv- wage. The new thinking also freed govern-
ing in the city for some time, they were well ments from their obligation to adequately
adjusted to urban life. These people were not house their citizens. Workers should have the
suffering from social anomie: they led regular right to proper housing without having to
family lives, they knew something about the build them in their free time. By encouraging
political situation, and, when permitted, they self-help construction, governments were
actually cast votes. The so-called “culture withdrawing from what was their moral duty
of poverty” was a figment of Oscar Lewis’s to society.
imagination. Even the doyen of self-help advocates, John
By the 1970s, the World Bank among Turner, who came under strong attack from
others was responding to this new kind of the left, had severe doubts about the effi-
thinking, pushing the dual concept of slum cacy of what was happening on the ground.
upgrading and sites and services. Instead of He argued that he had been misunderstood
removing informal settlements, governments (Turner 1976). He supported collective efforts
should upgrade them by providing services at self-help rather than the individual efforts
and infrastructure. Over the years, more of millions of poor families. If communities
and more governments have followed this hired professional help and bought materials
strategy. The other idea was to anticipate in bulk, they would produce better housing
more cheaply than through their individual
future urban growth by providing the poor
efforts. Efforts should be made to encourage
with serviced land. Lots with minimal ser-
a cooperative spirit among the poor.
vicing would provide land for the poor to
Ironically, governments from the right,
build their own homes. By anticipating the
as well as the left, have implicitly accepted
demand for housing, such a strategy would
this argument. For years, some attempted to
prevent the poor locating on land that was
build public housing for the poor. This was
susceptible to natural hazards or where it
successful in some parts of northwest Europe
was difficult to provide services. Offering
but never managed to reduce the queue of
cheap land on a planned development would candidates for rehousing. It also led in the
save money in the future. While upgrading worst cases to the creation of problem estates,
tended to work rather well, sites and services some of which were eventually demolished.
schemes were less successful. Governments In France, the experiment of building grands
were not very effective in providing cheap ensembles led to marginalization of many of
sites for the projects. Of course, neither kind the new occupants. High levels of unemploy-
of solution was perfect but both were a huge ment, poor education, and racial segregation
improvement on either demolition or pre- help to recreate new slums. Experience in
tending to build perfect homes for imperfect all these countries demonstrates that, with-
people. out attacking poverty in a holistic fashion,
It was around this time that a major offen- housing reform will bring only marginal
sive was launched against self-help housing improvements.
from the political left. In a decent society, Unsurprisingly, in much poorer coun-
employers would pay wages that covered the tries few governments were successful in
costs of a proper shelter for their workers. To cutting their housing deficits. Given rapid
encourage self-help was a means of reducing urban growth, the numbers of people in
the cost of the “reproduction of labor,” it was a need of decent housing grew. And it became
way of undermining the need to pay a proper increasingly clear that government housing
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8 SLUM S AN D SHAN TI ES