In 1961, the scholar Lewis Mumford wondered whether the modern city would disappear, or ‘the whole planet turn into a vast urban hive? – which would be another mode of disappearance.’ The mega and hyper cities of the early twenty-first century, many of which now contain more than twenty million people suggest that we are well on the way to becoming a vast hive of townsfolk, but it is still difficult to grasp the rate and scale at which urbanisation has spread in the last fifty years. The current global urban population (3.2 billion) is greater than the entire world population when president Kennedy was inaugurated. Births and new migrants increase this number by one million each week, intensifying, perhaps irretrievably, the social and political pressures that have created the 200,000 slums now dotted all across the globe.
In his absorbing and unsettling book Planet of Slums, Mike Davis points out that the growth of slums has often defied traditional economic theory. In the 1980s, for example, the population of Lagos grew twice as fast as the rest of Nigeria, even though the economy was in deep recession. Migrant labour in the developing world often has no choice but to seek out the big cities, but even populations that don’t move can be overrun by urban sprawl. In Malaysia, after Penang fishermen had “their homes cut off from the sea by a new highway, their fishing grounds polluted by urban waste, and neighbouring hillsides deforested to build apartment blocks they had little choice but to send their daughters into nearby Japanese sweatshops,” according to Davis.
The brave new world of neoliberal economic policy is responsible for much of this. Caught between their traditional way of life and the unstoppable ‘creative destruction’ of unfettered free markets, millions of people now find themselves faced with a series of desperate choices just to clothe, feed and house themselves. There is plenty of evidence that many of them simply fail to solve this dilemma. Los Angeles, for example, has an estimated homeless population of 100,000, Beijing has 200,000 “floaters” – new migrants who tend to live in slums at the edge of the city. Even more remarkably: “One out of ten inhabitants of Phnom Penh sleeps on a roof, as do an incredible 1.5 million Cairenes and 200,00 Alexandrians.”
As these numbers show, there are few if any countries in which the social and political problems which give rise to slum populations have been successfully tackled. Even so, there are levels of failure: In Chad and Ethiopia, for example, 99.4 percent of the urban population are slum dwellers, in Afghanistan and Nepal the figures are 98 and 92 percent respectively. While nothing in the Caribbean remotely approaches this level of squalor, it is a sobering reminder of just how far it is possible to fall. Throughout the developing world, slum populations are becoming a fact of life. From Caracas to Karachi, they are seen as inevitable consequences of modernisation, and there is very little political will to do anything serious about them. Beset with the cares of finding the basic necessities of life, the poor lack most of the resources needed for effective political organisation. Politicians of every stripe tend to make ambitious promises about poverty reduction before retreating from their goals when the full scope of the problem becomes clearer. (Even Gordon Brown, one of the few politicians whose actions have exceeded his promises in this regard, conceded, as quoted in the Los Angeles Times of October 4, 2004 that “Sub-Saharan Africa will not achieve universal primary education until 2130, a 50 percent reduction in poverty in 2150 and the elimination of avoidable infant deaths until 2165”.)
Our collective apathy allows decades to pass without any improvement in the delivery of such basic services as running water and electricity, even though the cities that contain or are encircled by the slums frequently experience waves of economic prosperity. The resulting inequality has a predictable effect on prostitution, drug dealing and gun violence but instead of solving the underlying problems, most governments prefer to fight the symptoms.
Georgetown, despite appearances, has relatively good prospects when it comes to the long-term solutions for inadequate housing. Surrounded by dormant or under-utilised agricultural land, and with a vast undeveloped interior to expand into, there is no reason why our capital should be allowed to slip towards the urban wastelands of Latin America’s barrios or Africa’s shantytowns. With our tiny population and considerable potential for human development we will really have only ourselves to blame if a generation from now we have not arrived at a level of political and social stability that allows us to move forward from the rather meagre returns of our fifty years of independence.
Our planet may be threatened by slums, but there is still time in small, undeveloped countries like our own, to plan for a different future, one in which slum populations are small and temporary rather than just another fact of life.
