City: ‘Squatters and the cities of tomorrow’ by Robert Neuwirth

http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/section?content=a777240328&fulltext=713240928

Editorial
Author: Bob Catterall
Published in: journal City, Volume 11, Issue 1 April 2007 , pages 2 – 3

Introduction

‘We start where we are but we fight to bridge the gap between the rich and the poor. We fight to make those who are blind to poverty to be able to see the poverty that we see. We work to show those who are blind to the poor the strength of the poor.’

The speaker is S’bu Zikode, one of the leaders of a community organization working within the shack communities of Durban, South Africa. But can those of us that live among the blind, but have nevertheless taken the trouble to ensure that we can at least see a little, share his confidence that our people can be made to see that poverty? And if they can, will they understand it? What kinds of understanding are required?

Zikode’s is one of the views from below that Robert Neuwirth presents in this issue of City in his article ‘Squatters and the cities of tomorrow’. Zikode is confident about the strength of the poor. As, indeed, is Neuwirth who notes that squatters, while facing significant challenges, are collectively the largest builder of housing in the world.

He takes us on to Kibera, the largest mud hut neighbourhood in Nairobi, Kenya:

‘Despite the deprived conditions – no water, sewers, sanitation, or toilets – commercial life is energetic and vibrant. Thousands of businesses line the mud streets: a bewildering array of grocery stores, hair salons, clinics, schools, telephone kiosks, churches.’

Neuwirth, who has lived in squatter communities in Brazil, Turkey, Kenya and India, has a positive vision of these ‘cities of tomorrow’ where the squatters are ‘the change agentshellip[whose] actions will create the new urban forms of the 21st century’. He is aware of the plight of the ‘acutely tenure secure’, discussed by Jon Unruh in a contribution to our Debates series, of the blindness and destructiveness of those committed to ‘solutions’ from above but his emphasis is, with S’bu Zikode, on the strength of the poor.

In the country of the blind

The sheer atavistic blindness from above of powerful groups in the West is shown by Michael Schwarz in his ‘Neoliberalism on crack: cities under siege in Iraq’, and by Kevin Fox Gotham’s analysis of their response to the devastation of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina. In fact, as we note in an editorial introduction to these and other papers

‘there were US officers and elected officials who saw in the images of flooded New Orleans and Baghdad burning one same scene: the representation of those not worth our sympathy, aid, and solidarity’

One might argue that this blindness, this condition of supposed moral superiority, stems from deep inner security. But what are the circumstances in which such a condition flourishes? Partly it is the omnipresent light of those proliferating images of disaster and its victims, shaped into a series of spectacles, which creates a form of blindness in which others are relegated to a contemporary revival of the category of the ‘undeserving poor’. But beyond the moralized/demoralized and mediatized dimensions, there is a third, traced by Michel Schwarz, the continually metastasizing socio-economic project of neo-liberalism whose relentless impact, now speeded-up as if on crack, tears Iraq’s cities apart.

The one-eyed man is king?

But is our situation as stark as that? Can those that live among the blind, but have nevertheless taken the trouble to ensure that they themselves can at least see a little, have good reason to share S’bu Zikode’s confidence that our people can be made – or, rather, helped – to see that poverty as something other than a just reward for the undeserving poor? And if they can, how can we – those of us who claim to see a little as well as the hitherto blinded – come to share and develop our partial understandings and to challenge this imposed but supposedly legitimate poverty?

We need, first of all, to reconsider our established forms of knowledge. For Sharon Meagher this involves a re-grounding and reconstruction of philosophy so that it can contribute to the reconstruction of our streets. Drawing on Engels and de Certeau she takes a walk through Scranton, Pennsylvania, illustrating the role of the philosopher as critical and reconstructive streetwalker:

‘The philosopher as streetwalker walks in the shoes of those who are shunned and marginalized and acts as a conscience for the city by questioning oppressive norms and by imagining new possibilities.’

Such work is not a-theoretical, it puts philosophy to the test of contributing to the illumination of what can be seen and uncovered. A key theoretical contribution comes from historical materialism, from Engels and Marx, from the critical theorists who Fox Gotham puts beside Debord, and from the work of David Harvey and others that Schwartz deploys to uncover the economic restructuring and destruction that lies behind the conventionally foregrounded military action in Iraq.

On a different but parallel track, drawing on a vitalist or pragmatist phenomenology, that overlaps with, complements and challenges the historical materialist tradition, Ash Amin reflects on the convergence of a wide range of work that is defining a new social ontology that requires us ‘to rethink the staples of urban sociology such as community, inequality and belonging, as well as to imagine a politics of urban possibility that is in tune with contemporary technological moorings’. In its concern with ‘ghostly presences’ and the transhuman, this ontology brings us close to Derrida’s hauntology, considered in our endpiece, to his concern with the ‘spectral’, and to other work in the humanities. The strong sense in the new social ontology of intermingled spatialities will contribute to our urgent task of overcoming the blindness that separates the poor from the rich, both intra-nationally and internationally.

These apparently parallel but possibly ultimately converging traditions, together with notion of grounded practice, that Meaghan and Neuwirth point to, and the task of developing appropriate forms/styles of communication1 make it possible to share S’bu Zikode’s optimism. They help us in the words of the introduction to ‘Cities in the bombsight, cities from below’ to see

‘in the darkness of the blinding light of the spectacle that radiates from the mass media, past the commodified image to the eyes and face of human suffering.’

– and to begin to act accordingly.

http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/section?content=a777236588&fulltext=713240928

Squatters and the cities of tomorrow
Author: Robert Neuwirth
Published in: journal City, Volume 11, Issue 1 April 2007 , pages 71 – 80

Abstract
About 1 billion people live in squatter communities throughout the world, and while these communities face significant challenges, life is vibrant and squatters are collectively the largest builder of housing in the world. Based on the experience of living for two years in squatter communities in Brazil, Turkey, Kenya and India, the paper describes the everyday experience as well as the legal, political and organizational challenges of people living in so-called slums. It refutes the three popular myths that (1) squatter communities are emblems of human misery, (2) everyone in these communities is impoverished and starving, and (3) squatters are the enemy of civil society. Instead, the challenges and achievements of everyday life in the communities are contextualized and the paper concludes by emphasizing the need for organizing in the communities to secure title, access to services and avoid evictions through successful initiatives from the squatters themselves, not global institutions.
Introduction

Four of us edged into the room, our knees knocking against the small table that served as tea tray, desk, bedside bench and impromptu kitchen counter. Elocy Kagwiria Murungi scratched a match and lit a lantern and a small kerosene burner so she could cook supper. The uncertain light bounced off the corrugated metal walls, casting wild shadows on our faces and on the meager belongings around us. ‘I act like lice, the way lice act’, Elocy said as she sat on the edge of the bed in her single-room abode and rinsed a pot. ‘I burrow in and scrape out an existence.’

Like most of her neighbors, Elocy came to Kibera, the largest mud hut neighborhood of Nairobi, Kenya, with nothing except a willingness to work. At first, she thought Kibera was sickening, ghastly, terrible – an open sewer, not a community. But this massive shantytown (population somewhere between 500,000 and 1,000,000, depending on who’s doing the counting) was the only place she could afford. So she sold stationery on the street for a few shillings. She washed dishes at a local eatery for a few shillings more. Now she is a teacher in a school for street children. The pay is not great, but the work is challenging and important. Here in Kibera, the community known as a slum, Elocy has improved her life and opened up new horizons for herself and her young son Collins.

Yet this spirited, intelligent and hard-working woman describes herself as a parasite.

Every day, the world’s cities grow by close to 200,000 people. Most of this growth is due to migrants who leave their ancestral homes in the rural regions and trek to the cities. Like Elocy, they come seeking work, and like her, they find it. What they can’t find is a home. So these migrants do what people have always done throughout the ages: they become squatters, invading land they don’t own and building their own homes (Figure 1). These are not people motivated by ideology, or by the desire to get something for nothing. They are people desperate for work and a place to live that they can afford. They are people supporting extended networks of relatives both in the city and back in their rural birthplaces. Squatting, for them, is a family value.

There are a billion squatters in the world today, almost one in six people on the planet. And their numbers are on the rise. Current projections are that by 2030 there will be 2 billion squatters, and by 2050, 3 billion, better than one in three people on the planet. These squatters mix more concrete than any developer and lay more brick than any government. No one else is building for them, so they have to build for themselves.

All around the world, the cities of tomorrow are rising from mud puddle streets. The houses, like Elocy’s, can hardly be called structures at all. Just cardboard dwellings with plastic sheets for a roof or corrugated metal placed over a stick frame and tied together with twine (Figure 2).

Yet the squatters build and rebuild and build again, in a ceaseless drive to make their settlements permanent. The world may little note nor long remember their homes. But, over time, the cardboard gives way to stick and stick gives way to metal and metal to plaster. Ultimately, that will be removed, too, replaced with reinforced concrete and brick.

To understand how these communities develop, it’s necessary to destroy some myths that envelop life in the shantytowns of the world.

Myth 1: The ‘slums’ of the world are emblems of human misery.

A common misconception. Yes, there are communities, like Kibera, that have remained mired in mud. But many of the world’s squatter communities are success stories in that they have developed to the point that they are almost indistinguishable from legal neighborhoods.

Meet Jose Gerardo Moreira, squatter success story. Moreira, known to his friends as Zezinho, came to Rocinha, one of Rio de Janeiro’s favelas, with nothing. Today, three decades on, this modest favela fruit vendor lives in a three-story townhouse, built of reinforced concrete and brick, with water, electricity and a view of the ocean. And his community – on the steep incline of Two Brothers Mountain between the wealthy neighborhoods of Gavea and Sao Conrado – is proof that many of the world’s squatter communities are slums no longer.

Like most squatter outposts, Rocinha started small. In the 1950s, it was just a scatter of families hiding on the hillside, more an encampment than a community. When Zezinho arrived in the 1970s, Rocinha was still a crude place. The forest-dwellers had an unwritten rule: no permanent structures of any kind. So, for decades, favela families lived in wood or mud shacks. They hauled water up the steep hill and, if they were lucky, pilfered electricity from far-away poles.

But, as the community grew, residents understood that they had become a fixed part of the city. That was when, like Zezinho, they started to build. Their form is dynamic: bricks jutting out at odd angles, partial floors framed in concrete, walls that rise only to end abruptly in a tuft of rebar against the soft blue of the sky (Figures 4 and 5). Houses seem to twist towards the sun, crowding each other for light and air. From a distance there seem to be no roads, no yards, no restful space of any kind. Just a beehive of human habitations.

Rocinha today has a population of 150,000. There are no mud or wood shacks. Every home has access to water. And the local utility, finally recognizing that Rocinha is a permanent community, has been installing legal electricity – with the proviso that anyone who wants the service must take a meter. Rocinha has even become desirable turf for businesses from outside the squatter realm – and several major Brazilian chain stores have opened branches there.

Antonio Ramos lives in the favela and doesn’t have to leave his community to get to work: he works the counter at a favela pastry shop. ‘Anyone who lives in Rocinha doesn’t need to leave’, he says. ‘Rocinha has everything.’

Indeed, around the world, squatters invest in their communities, rehabilitating their homes again and again, one wall at a time, until, like Zezinho, they create something enduring.

Myth 2: Everyone in the world’s squatter communities is impoverished and starving.

Though conditions in some squatter communities can be grim, they are not simply a collection of the worst ills known to humanity. Take Elocy’s community, Kibera. Despite the deprived conditions – no water, sewers, sanitation or toilets – commercial life is energetic and vibrant. Thousands of businesses line the mud streets: a bewildering array of grocery stores, hair salons, clinics, schools, telephone kiosks, churches. Local tailors use pedal-driven sewing machines and charcoal-filled irons. Other entrepreneurs simply lay a blanket alongside one of the dirt paths to display their wares (Figures 6 and 7).

Indeed, the mud and metal houses of Kibera in Nairobi shelter people of all sorts of social classes. In my time in the community, I met scores of residents who were teachers, social workers, paralegals, factory laborers and retail store employees. I met Christine Nduku, a single mother who lived in a crude mud hut even though she owned and managed a successful employment agency that had its headquarters downtown. I met Maria Katheu David and Michael Owaga Obera. They are clerks for the Nairobi City Council yet live in this community whose existence the City Council doesn’t recognize. I met Joachim Maanzo, who holds a law degree but works at a bakery because he can’t afford to pay his school fees and get his diploma. All of them live in Kibera because an apartment in the legal neighborhoods of Nairobi costs too much. The cheapest apartment in the worst neighborhood of Nairobi costs 2500 or 3000 shillings (between $30 and $40) a month. Even with their decent salaries (a City Council clerk, for instance, earns about 5000 shillings – or about $65 – a month), this is too much. A room in a mud hut in Kibera, by contrast, costs between $10 and $20 a month. Even reasonably well-off families are forced to live in Kibera if they are to have enough for food and hope to save some money to educate their children (high school in Kenya usually costs around 20,000 shillings per semester).

Also in Kibera, I met the squatter millionaire. This man, who asked to remain anonymous, started in business by cutting a window into his mud hut and selling groceries to his neighbors. Through a combination of grit and shrewd deal-making, he has parlayed this into a business empire that transcends the squatter community in which he lives. He owns 10 apartment complexes in the legal city (he rents all the units out, contending that he is most comfortable remaining in Kibera, the community that has been his home for more than 30 years), as well as supermarkets, wholesale distribution companies, and a variety of other enterprises that straddle the formal and informal economy.

It’s like this all over the world. There are squatter landlords and squatter tenants, squatter businessmen and squatter consumers, squatter teachers and squatter schoolkids. The point: squatter communities are as economically, politically and socially diverse as any other community on the earth.

Myth 3: Squatters are the enemy of civil society and don’t want to participate in the system.

In almost every country, the middle and upper classes view squatters as outlaws, almost revolutionaries, who want nothing to do with the political structure. But this view isn’t true.

Indeed, given the conditions squatters must endure during the early years of their land occupation, the big miracle is that squatters don’t revolt. Instead, they patiently work with the system, taking every opportunity to improve their communities and make them permanent.

In South Africa, where squatters are still being beaten, shot at with rubber bullets and even arrested by police intent on preventing them from meeting and marching to demand their rights, shanty dwellers are still attempting to work within the system. ‘We are realistic’, S’bu Zikode, one of the leaders of Abahlali BaseMjondolo, a community organization that arose in several of the most deprived shack communities of Durban, said at a recent meeting.

‘We start where we are but we fight to bridge the gap between the rich and the poor. We fight to make those who are blind to poverty to be able to see the poverty that we see. We work to show those who are blind to the power of the poor the strength of the poor.The poor are the majority of this country and the majority is beginning to speak for itself.’

As Zikode has eloquently voiced, the poor do have power. They do have the ability to improve their lives. But leaders like Zikode also know that there are two main things that determine whether their communities will develop and become permanent or remain mired in mud and misery.

1. The first thing squatters need is a guarantee against arbitrary eviction.

The residents of Rocinha and most of the other 600 favelas of Rio de Janeiro no longer face the threat of eviction. Though nothing is enshrined in law, society accepts that the favela-dwellers have a legitimate right of possession. This gives them the confidence to invest. By contrast, the mud hut villages of Nairobi are controlled by the corrupt Provincial Administration, which takes pay-offs from rich outsiders for the right to build temporary structures which they then rent to the poor. In Kibera, I asked a local official what would happen if a resident replaced a mud hut with a concrete and brick home. His answer was simple and devastating: ‘I would knock it down.’

Makbul Khan, a tailor, understands first hand why squatters need this sense that their homes will not be knocked down. He moved to Mumbai’s Geeta Nagar, a small squatter colony at the tip of the peninsula called Colaba, 26 years ago. At the time, Geeta Nagar had no electricity and no water. The huts were mere bamboo and straw tents with thatched coconut palm leaves as a roof. The land was wet and muddy and Khan and his neighbors had to haul stones from the sea to use as fill to bring the land level up so they could have roads and solid foundations for their homes. Toilets were nonexistent and residents simply squatted in the waves, using the Arabian Sea one block away as their impromptu septic field.

For the first dozen years, Khan was a tenant – renting in the house he helped to build. In the early 1990s, he bought one of his neighbor’s huts for 25,000 rupees (or about $500). Over the years, he invested around 120,000 rupees (perhaps $2500) to transform it into a new concrete dwelling, where he lives with his wife and three children.

Now, however, he worries that this house that he built that has served his family for better than a decade, is threatened. Colaba is desirable property and the rumor is that the government wants his home to create a helipad for the nearby Navy installation, or to sell to a luxury hotel.

‘There is nowhere to go’, Makbul told me as we sat in the sunny upstairs kitchen of his home. ‘I have no idea what to do. If I invest in this place, I have no idea whether I will be able to stay. We all know this land is very valuable and we are hoping the government will work with us.’

Which brings up the second point.

2. Successful squatter communities need access to politics.

Like it or not, government controls the goodies of civic life – and when squatters have no access to government, it is difficult for their communities to grow. Rocinha, for instance, has access to politics. Indeed, the city government has an administrative office, a health clinic and a public school inside the favela. By contrast, though there are four city council districts that encompass parts of Kibera, Nairobi’s shanty dwellers feel no connection to local politics. ‘I’ve been here for six years’, Nicodemus Kimanzi Mutemi told me, ‘and I cannot say I’ve ever seen the area councilors for Kibera. I do not know if they exist.’ This is one of the reasons why Kibera has remained primitive – because there is no channel for organized political pressure to make things better.

In Mumbai, the women of Vikas Sagar are taking baby steps into politics. They still live in one-story huts hacked into the steep hillside above Mahim Bay. They still worry about floods and landslides. They are still concerned about having enough money to make ends meet. But today their homes are permanent, made of concrete instead of mud. Their walkways are paved with cement and tile to prevent erosion. And they have pooled their resources to create a communal savings plan – a small-scale bank, giving each of them the ability to get loans. They have transformed their lives and their community.

How did they make these improvements? Instead of agonizing they organized. Vikas Sagar is a tiny squatter community in Mumbai, India. It was founded decades ago, but the nine women sitting on the floor of Mumtaz Sadik Shaik’s house know that no matter how long they have been living there, the government considers them illegal. ‘Unless we take action, nothing will be granted to us’, says Lali Penday. Her neighbors nod approvingly.

It wasn’t always this way. Little more than a decade ago, the women of Vikas Sagar were traditional housewives, so controlled by their husbands that they seldom left their small community. ‘When we started’, remembers Sangita Duby, ‘we were not able to go out of our houses. We were illiterate and had to sign our names with a thumbprint. Now we are literate and can sign our names in Hindi and English.’ The women of Vikas Sagar know who the local politicians are. And, even more important, the politicians know who they are, too.

The most highly evolved example of squatters with access to politics is in Sultanbeyli, a squatter community on the Asian side of Istanbul, Turkey. Sultanbeyli started as a bunch of hovels in the 1970s and 1980s. But squatters in Turkey have rights. Build overnight without being caught and you cannot be evicted until you’ve had your day in court. In Turkish, squatter houses are called gecekondu, meaning ‘it happened at night’ (Figures 8 and 9). And when one of these night towns reaches a population of 2000, it can apply for recognition as a municipality, which gives the residents a chance at self-government.
Today, Yahya Karakaya, Sultanbeyli’s popularly elected mayor, sits in his air-conditioned office on the top floor of the seven-story squatter city hall and presides over an amazing squatter establishment: a planning department, a department of public works, a sanitation department, even municipal bus service. This squatter city of 300,000 has stores, offices, restaurants, banks, Internet cafes and a post office in its bustling downtown. The community has done all this without title deeds.

Squatters around the world must organize to demand their political and legal rights. But rights, as we all know, are abstract. They only truly exist when they are put to work. The right to the city is a wonderful thing on paper. But the question for squatters is not whether that right exists, but how to demand it and thus make it real. Here’s one proposal: squatters can band together to fight for a share of the goodies we all take for granted in society – the right to water, the right to electricity, the right to sewers, the right to services. These are the shared benefits of civic life, apportioned to every community simply because those communities exist. Yet they are denied to squatters because of the perception that their communities – many of which have existed for decades – are nonetheless illegal or temporary settlements.

When squatters fight for these things, their deprivation becomes real to the rest of the city. And when they win these city services, their communities become, quite literally, a bit more powerful, a bit more estimable and a bit more legitimate.

This is not to say that organized squatters will immediately create beautiful cities. Change in these neighborhoods is most often incremental – and organizing is not a panacea. I know. I was an organizer before I became a writer – working in Hartford, Connecticut and New York City – and I know that simply bringing people together in order to create a conduit for collective action will not immediately end bad conditions. It will not reverse decades of disinvestment and decay due to structural adjustment programs and corrupt government contracting. But what other option is there other than to throw up our hands and say the system is at fault? That’s simply an ideological cop out.

The truth is, whether it’s the disenfranchised residents of Kibera or the brutalized populace of Sadr City or Fallujah, organizing can make a difference. When shanty communities start to cooperate and to demand services, they may initially gain only a handful of communal water taps or a few shared electric lines or a couple of concrete culverts to handle sewage runoff. But those tiny changes are a massive improvement over current conditions. And each water pipe, each electrical wire, each concrete ditch demonstrates that their community has power. Power to act independently. Power that isn’t dependent on corrupt political ward heelers or repressive and violent militias. With dogged work over time, these communities can claim an increasing share of the rights guaranteed to all citizens and make real the loose concept of the right to the city. Along the way, they become permanent parts of the city.

The program I have outlined here is not all that different from what former World Bank President James D. Wolfensohn presented in a speech in February 2003 at Oxford University. With this exception: Wolfensohn believes that the World Bank and other global institutions are noble catalysts for change. He believes that action from above will change conditions on the ground in the developing world. But, sadly, the World Bank cannot provide water or electricity or sewers or city services on the scale that is required – for hundreds of millions of people all at once. Only the squatters themselves can do this. The demand – and the solution – must come from the bottom. The squatters should be telling the World Bank what to do. They are the change agents of the cities. Their actions will create the new urban forms of the 21st century.

But if the world is to move forward on this agenda, we first have to acknowledge a sin of our own: we have been talking about this issue for far too long. Thirty years ago, when the United Nations held the world’s first Habitat conference – a gathering of people who cared about the global urban future – the facts were already obvious. Here’s a statistic bandied about at that time (taken from Barbara Ward’s The Home of Man, which was published in coordination with the conference): ‘Various U.N. surveys put the number of houses that need to be built to keep up with growing numbers and repair the worst evils of the past at over forty-seven million units a year.’

And here’s how something from one of the most recent of those surveys, Financing Urban Shelter, the Global Report on Human Settlements from 2005: ‘In order to accommodate the increments in the number of households over the next 25 years, 35.1 million housing units per year will be required.’

Clearly, governments the world over know the dimensions of the problem. They have talked about it for three decades. But they have only talked among themselves while at the same time victimizing squatters, pulling down their homes and trashing their possessions. It is time to democratize the discussion and to recognize that squatters are not the enemy. It is time to make them full partners in the policy debate over how our rapidly urbanizing world will cope with the coming massive urban influx.

And when they’re at the table, squatters can articulate a simple demand that could change the way the World Bank and all the other global organizations that profess to care about poverty interact with developing world countries. The squatters should demand that these global NGOs agree to a single proviso: that no aid – not one dime – should go to countries that engage in or tolerate forced evictions. A person’s hut is not a simple thing. It is a repository of the dreams of his or her life. No matter how degraded that house may seem to an outsider, it is a truly special and magical place to the family that lives there. Which is why eviction is so serious a crime and why the world’s squatters, so often maligned, deserve a gesture of good faith to prove that they will no longer be treated as criminals. They deserve to know that governments that disrespect their rights will not be the recipients of global relief aid.

For, contrary to Elocy’s casual comment, squatters are not parasites. In fact, they are the largest builders of housing in the world (Figure 10). They are the key actors who have the will, the stamina and the need to build the cities of tomorrow.