Planet of Slums. Mike Davis

1988, for example, was 48 times larger in developed area than in 1955.⁶⁵ Indeed, the suburban zones of many poor cities are now so vast as to suggest the need to rethink peripherality. In Lusaka, for example, the outlying shantytowns house two-thirds of the city’s population – leading one writer to suggest that “these compounds are called ‘peri-urban’ but in reality it is the city proper that is peripheral.”⁶⁶ The Turkish sociologist Ça

lar Keyder makes a similar point about the gecekondus that surround Istanbul: “In fact, it would not be too inaccurate to think of Istanbul as a conglomerate of such gecekondu districts with limited organic unity. As new gecekondu areas are added – inevitably to the outer perimeters – more nodes are strung on the web in a serial manner.”⁶⁷

      In the sprawling cities of the Third World, then, “periphery” is a highly relative, time-specific term: today’s urban edge, abutting fields, forest, or desert, may tomorrow become part of a dense metropolitan core. With the exception of East Asia, where there are significant inventories of peripheral state-built housing (like Beijing’s older industrial suburbs of Shijingshan, Fengtai and Changxiandian), edge development in Third World urban areas takes two principal forms: squatter settlements and – to use the evocative Colombian term – urbanizaciones piratas. Both generate “shantytown” landscapes with large percentages of self-built, substandard housing with poor infrastructure provision. Although pirate subdivisions are often mislabeled as squatter communities, there are fundamental differences.

      Squatting, of course, is the possession of land without sale or title. “No-cost” peripheral land has often been discussed as the magic secret of Third World urbanism: a huge unplanned subsidy to the very poor. Squatting is seldom without up-front costs, however. Squatters very often are coerced to pay considerable bribes to politicians, gangsters or police to gain access to sites, and they may continue to pay such informal “rents” in money and/or votes for years. In addition, there are the punitive costs of an unserviced location far from an urban center. Indeed, when all the costs are added up – as Erhard Berner points out in his study of Manila – squatting is not necessarily cheaper than buying a plot. Its principal attraction is the “possibility of incremental development and building improvement which leads to a [phased] spreading of the costs.”⁶⁸

      Squatting can sometimes become front-page political drama. In Latin America from the 1960s to the 1980s, as well as in Egypt, Turkey, and South Africa at different times, squatting took the form of land invasions, often with the support of radical groups or, more rarely, populist national governments (Peru in the 1960s; Nicaragua in the 1980s). Dependent upon public sympathy, land occupiers have traditionally targeted undeveloped public land or the estates of a single large landowner (who sometimes is later compensated). Often squatting becomes a prolonged test of will and endurance against the repressive apparatus of the state. “It is not unusual,” wrote a UCLA research team about Caracas in the 1970s, “to hear of a squatter settlement that has been constructed overnight, torn down by the police the next day, constructed again the following night, destroyed again, and reconstructed until the authorities tire of fighting.”⁶⁹ Similarly, in her Tales from the Garbage Hills, Turkish writer Latife Tekin explains why Istanbul’s slums are called gecekondus (“set up overnight”): the heroic squatters of “Flower Hill” build and rebuild every shanty by night, because the authorities tear them down each morning. Only after a Homeric siege of 37 days does the government finally relent and allow the new gecekondu to take root on a garbage mountain.⁷⁰

      Most squatter communities, however, are the result of what sociologist Asef Bayat, writing about Tehran and Cairo, has called the “quiet encroachment of the ordinary”: the small-scale, non-confrontational infiltration of edge or interstitial sites. Unlike poor peasants’ “Brechtian mode of class struggle and resistance” – famously evoked in studies by James Scott – these struggles of the urban poor are “not merely defensive,” but, according to Bayat, “surreptitiously offensive” as they ceaselessly aim to expand the survival space and rights of the disenfranchised.⁷¹ Such encroachments, as we shall see in the next chapter, are frequently synchronized to a favorable opportunity for land occupation, such as a tight election, natural disaster, coup d’état, or revolution.

      Squatting of all varieties probably reached its peak in Latin America, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia during the 1970s. Today squatting, stricto sensu, continues primarily in low-value urban land, usually in hazardous or extremely marginal locations such as floodplains, hillsides, swamps, or contaminated brownfields. As the urban economist Eileen Stillwaggon notes: “Essentially, squatters occupy no-rent land, land that has so little worth that no one bothers to have or enforce property right to it.”⁷² In Buenos Aires, for instance, most of the villas de emergencia – often settled by illegal Bolivian and Paraguayan immigrants – are located along the reeking banks of the heavily polluted Río de la Reconquista and Río de la Matanza. “Stagnant water and untreated sewage,” writes geographer David Keeling of a visit to a typical villa along the Río Reconquista, “created an overpowering stench, and the entire area was overrun with rats, mosquitos, flies, and other insects.” The villas are tolerated only because such brownfield sites are temporarily worthless in a depressed economy.⁷³ Likewise, in Caracas precarious squatter ranchos continue to inch their way up rugged and landslide-prone mountain slopes that no sane developer would ever consider to be marketable real estate. Squatting has become a wager against inevitable disaster.

      But flat peripheral land, even desert, has market value, and today most low-income settlement on the urban edge, although often characterized as squatting, actually operates through an invisible real estate market.⁷⁴ This “pirate urbanization” was carefully studied for the first time by the World Bank’s Rakesh Mohan and his research team in Bogotá at the end of the 1970s:

      … these pirata subdivision settlements did not result from land invasions: the land has actually changed hands through legal purchases. It is the subdivision itself that is usually illegal. But these settlements are better described as extralegal rather than illegal. Low-, lower-middle-, and middle-income families, having been shut out of the formal housing market, buy lots from entrepreneurs who acquire tracts of undeveloped land and subdivide them without conforming to zoning laws, subdivision regulations, or service provision standards. The lots sold usually provide only a bare minimum of services, often nothing more than some streets and water standposts. Typically, this rudimentary infrastructure is incrementally upgraded after initial settlement has taken place.⁷⁵

Pirate urbanization is, in effect, the privatization of squatting. In an important 1990 study, housing experts Paul Baross and Jan van der Linden characterized pirate settlements or “substandard commercial residential subdivisions” (SCRSs) as the new norm in poor people’s housing. In contrast to true squatters, the residents of a pirate subdivision have obtained either a legal or de facto title to their plot. In the case of a legal title, the subdivider is usually a speculator, a latifundista or large farmer, a rural commune (for example, a Mexican ejido), or customary entity (such as a Bedouin tribe or village council). The landowners – as in the case of an asentamiento in suburban Buenos Aires discussed by David Keeling – may even encourage residents to organize themselves as a land invasion in the shrewd expectation that the state will be forced to guarantee eventual compensation as well as infrastructural development.⁷⁶

      In the second case of de facto tenure, the land is usually state-owned but settlers have purchased a guarantee of tenure from powerful politicians, tribal leaders, or criminal cartels (for example, the Triads, who are the major informal property developers in Hong Kong).⁷⁷ Another notorious example are Karachi’s dalals, whom Akhtar Hameed Khan, the founder of the famed Orangi Pilot Project, describes as “private entrepreneurs who have learnt the art of collaborating with and manipulating our greedy politicians and bureaucrats. With their costly patronage, the dalals secure possession of tracts of [public] land, buy protection against eviction, and obtain water and transport facilities.”⁷⁸ The dalals (the word can mean “pimp” as well as “middleman”) dominate the