Transcript Lecture 18: Planet of Slums

Lecture 18: Planet of Slums
Outline
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Inside a slum
The urban explosion
Explaining slum growth
Slum language
The future: what can be done?
1. Inside a Slum
Javier Auyero
2. The Urban Explosion
UN: 3.2 billion urbanites 2007, nearly 5 billion
2030
2030: 60% in cities
Biggest increase: Asia and Africa - poorest, leasturbanised, least able to cope
By 2017: nearly 500 cities of 1m+
2025: 8 cities 20m+ - Tokyo, Mumbai, Manila,
Dhaka, São Paulo, Mexico City, New York, and
Kolkata
Mega-City Growth:
A Developing-World Phenomenon…
Africa, Asia catch up
Growth of the Mega-Cities
3. Explaining slum growth
Dharavi, Mumbai
Kibera, Nairobi
“People prefer urban squalor to
rural hopelessness.”
THE ECONOMIST
Statistical Horrors
In 2005 the number of slum dwellers worldwide exceeded 1 billion
(one third of the world’s urban population)
Ethiopia, Chad, Afghanistan and Nepal: 90%+ of urban dwellers live
in slums
78.2% of the urban population of the world’s least developed
countries live in slums
Mumbai is the global capital of slum dwelling (between 10 and 12
million people, with 1 million living on pavements)
The poorest urban populations are in Luanda, Maputo and
Kinshasa, where child mortality (under 5) exceeds 320 per 1000
One quarter of the world’s urban population live in absolute poverty
(“a condition characterised by severe deprivation of basic human
needs, including food, safe drinking water, sanitation facilities,
health, shelter, education and information.” WHO, 1995)
Unless massive action is taken, by 2030 there will be 2 billion slum
dwellers worldwide, and half of all urban dwellers will live in poverty
Qualitative horrors
We’re not just talking about poor people living in
classic shantytowns on the peripheries of Global
South cities, but living on rooftops, in filled-in
airwells in the centre of buildings; in cages of
wire netting erected to protect their few
belongings; on pavements; in former graveyards
(>1 million people in Cairo); on swamps,
floodplains, volcano slopes, unstable hillsides,
rubbish mountains, chemical dumps, railroad
sidings, desert fringes……
The new urban precariat (as opposed to
proletariat)
a) Rural-urban migration
Today we are seeing dramatic urban growth without economic
growth – no investment, no jobs, shrinking public sector, soaring
cost of land/living. Why are people moving?
People move for the opportunity, if not the job. There is always
somebody, 1 in 100, 1 in 1000, 1 in 10,000, who has made it. The
alternative is subsistence agriculture – which runs the risk of
starvation, or eviction by commercial agriculture/mechanization, or
devastation by climate change.
Other factors: people are displaced by wars and become refugees;
‘natural’ disasters.
Almost impossible now to tell where city ends and the countryside
begins – in many parts of the Global South, people no longer have
to move to the city; the city is growing so fast it moves to them.
“Urbanization has been radically decoupled from
industrialization, even from development per se.”
(p.13)
Echoes Henri Lefebvre (1968) in La Revolution
Urbaine, who argued that urbanization had
supplanted industrialization as the major vehicle
of capital accumulation throughout the world, to
the point where we could one day see “the
complete urbanization of the world.”
b) Natural increase
Becoming an ever-increasing factor in
slum expansion (now surpassing rural to
urban migration)
Rate of growth of births over deaths in
slums is increasing the population by tens
of thousands of people every year
c) Structural Adjustment Policies
IMF/WB economic pre-conditions for the granting of loans.
Beginning in the early 1980s: short, sharp macro-economic shocks
(currency devaluation to stop imports and encourage exports,
removal of state subsidies on foodstuffs, water, transport, electricity),
followed by economic deregulation, trade liberalisation, privatisation
of public services.
Aim = to get the state out of the development process - “the market
will provide” via trickle-down. Governments were forced to radically
downsize the public sector, with devastating consequences for the
urban poor (education, housing, water, food, sanitation, health care
etc etc)
People have thus become marginalised by market-oriented
economic change, creating a new non-migrant, indigenous urban
poor who are devoid of the incomes and basic human needs (and
human rights) that perhaps their parents or grandparents had.
“The weird logic of this economic programme seemed to
be that to restore life to the dying economy, every juice
had first to be SAPped out of the underprivileged
majority of the citizens. The middle class rapidly
disappeared, and the garbage heaps of the increasingly
rich few became the food table of the multiplied
population of abjectly poor. The brain drain to the oil-rich
Arab countries and to the Western world became a
flood.”
Fidelis Odun Balogun (1995) Adjusted Lives: Stories of
Structural Adjustment (Princeton U.P.) p.80
“The Washington Consensus”
The World Bank has pursued the same set of anti-poverty policies for almost 40
years. These have three elements:
•
•
•
Broad-based economic growth
Development of human capital, primarily through education
Minimum social safety nets for the poor
But it has pursued these policies by rigidly adhering to neo-liberal economic
orthodoxy (see Joseph Stiglitz 2002):
1. Privatisation – which tends to raise prices for the poor
2. Capital market liberalisation – which can allow speculators to destabilise
countries’ economies, as has happened in Asia and South America
3. Market-based pricing – which raises the costs of basic foods and fuel for the poor
and has caused rioting, particularly in South America, e.g. Bolivia, Ecuador and,
recently, Argentina (economists should not be provoking riots around the
world)
4. Free trade – which is governed by World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules that
severely disadvantage poorer countries/producers
4. Slum Language
The term ‘slum’ was first published in 1812 in a glossary of London
slang by James Hardy Vaux, but was equated with ‘racket’ or
‘criminal trade’.
By the 1830s and 1840s, that use had shifted: the poor were now
living in slums (infected by cholera epidemics) rather than practicing
them.
In late-Victorian Britain, the term slum didn’t just describe poor
areas; it was used pejoratively, a comment on the supposed moral
degeneracy of those who dwelled in poor areas. Read anything by
Charles Dickens – is it by chance that he housed Fagin and the
Artful Dodger in a slum?
Worst of all, the official labelling of a poor area as a ‘slum’ can justify
its demolition and clearance (such as in Haussman’s Paris, and in
many slums in the Global South today)
Words are never innocent….
“What makes the word ‘slum’ dangerous is the series of
negative associations that the term conjures up, the false
hopes that a campaign against slums raises and the
mischief that unscrupulous politicians, developers and
planners may do with the term. ….I am complaining
about resuscitating an old, never euphemistic,
stereotype; one that was long ago denounced as
dangerous and yet has now resurfaced in the policy
arena.”
Alan Gilbert (2007) “The Return of the Slum: Does
Language Matter?”, IJURR 31 (4) p.701.
UN operational definition
A slum household is a household that lacks any one of the following
five elements:
Access to improved water (access to sufficient amount of water for
family use, at an affordable price, available to household members
without being subject to extreme effort)
Access to improved sanitation (access to an excreta disposal
system, either in the form of a private toilet or a public toilet shared
with a reasonable number of people)
Security of tenure (evidence of documentation to prove secure
tenure status, or de facto or perceived protection from evictions)
Durability of housing (permanent and adequate structure in nonhazardous location)
Sufficient living area (not more than two people sharing the same
room)
5. The future: what can be done?
The UN’s 1999 “Cities without Slums” initiative
A major element of its Millenium Development
Goals campaign
Two broad purposes:
1) To publicise the seriousness of urban
problems, especially in the Global South
2) To improve its ability to attract funding with
which to tackle the issue
“The Challenge of Slums….is
mainly concerned with the shelter
conditions of the majority of the
urban poor. It is about how the poor
struggle to survive within urban
areas, mainly through informal
shelter and informal incomegeneration strategies, and about the
inadequacy of both public and
market responses to the plight of
the urban poor. But the report is
also about hope, about building on
the foundations of the urban poor’s
survival strategies and about what
needs to be done by both the public
and non-governmental sectors, as
well as by the international
community, if the goal of adequate
shelter for all is to have any
relevance for today’s urban poor.”
“The world’s biggest killer and the greatest cause of ill
health and suffering across the globe is listed almost at the
end of the International Classification of Diseases. It is
given code Z59.5 -- extreme poverty.”
World Health Organisation (1995)
“Seven out of ten childhood deaths in developing countries
can be attributed to just five main causes - or a combination
of them: pneumonia, diarrhoea, measles, malaria and
malnutrition. Around the world, three out of four children
seen by health services are suffering from at least one of
these conditions.”
World Health Organisation (1996; 1998).
Severe Deprivation of Basic Human Need
Almost a third of the world’s children have to live in dwellings with
more than five people per room or which have a mud floor.
Over half a billion children (27%) have no toilet facilities whatsoever.
Almost 400 million children (19%) are using unsafe (open) water
sources or have more than a 15-minute walk to water.
About one in five children (aged between 3 and 18) lack access to
radio, television, telephone, computers or newspapers at home.
Fifteen percent of children under five years in the world are severely
malnourished, almost half of whom are in South Asia.
300 million children (14%) have not been immunised against any
diseases, or have had a recent illness causing diarrhoea and have
not received any medical advice or treatment.
144 million children aged between 7 and 18 (11%) are severely
educationally deprived - they have never been to school.
Source: UNICEF, 2004
Champagne glass of income distribution
The stem of the
glass is getting
thinner. In 1960
the income of
the wealthiest
fifth was 30
times greater
than that of the
poorest fifth;
now it’s more
than 80 times
greater.
The Price of Life?
The cost of achieving universal access to basic social services
Need
Annual cost
(US$ billions)
Basic education for all
6
Basic health and nutrition
13
Reproductive health and family planning
12
Low cost-water supply and sanitation
9
Total for basic social services
40
The Cost of Food and Health for All
Over ten million of the world’s young children die each
year and, in over half of these deaths, malnutrition is a
contributory cause.
The cost of preventing these deaths is relatively small:
$13 billion a year for ten years would provide basic
health and nutrition for every person on the planet
(UNDP, 1997).
By comparison, $30 billion was spent on pizza in the
US in 2002 (Pizza Marketing Quarterly, 2003) and $12
billion on dog and cat food (Euromonitor International,
2003).
Can Economic Growth Halve Poverty by 2015?
Developing
World
East Asia
and Pacific
Eastern
Europe and
Central Asia
Latin
America and
Caribbean
Middle East
and North
Africa
South Asia
SubSaharan
Africa
Annual growth rate
needed to halve world
poverty by 2015
3.8%
2.7%
2.4%
3.8%
3.8%
4.7%
5.6%
Historical growth
1960–1990
1.7%
3.3%
2.0%
1.3%
4.3%
1.9%
0.2%
Total growth needed to
halve world poverty by
2015
95%
70%
61%
94%
95%
117%
141%
How likely is it that the annual economic growth rate in Sub-Saharan Africa can
be increased from 0.2% to 5.6% - a 28 fold increase?
Can Redistribution Halve Poverty by 2015?
Developing
World
Poverty
decline after a
one standard
deviation
reduction in
inequality
67%
East
Eastern
Asia and Europe
Pacific
and
Central
Asia
31%
42%
Latin
America
and
Caribbean
45%
Middle
East and
North
Africa
34%
South
Asia
17%
Source: Besley, T. and Burgess, R. (2003) “Halving global poverty.”
Journal of Economic Perspectives 17 (3) pp. 3-22.
SubSaharan
Africa
62%
Why is nothing done?
Neoliberal Concepts of ‘Justice’
A neoliberal philosophical position equates justice and liberty with
freedom from intentional coercion. Intentionality is seen as the key
concept for defining ‘liberty’.
Neoliberals argue that, although the operation of the market may
result in mass death and disease, since it is not the ‘intention’ of
anyone that this should happen, no injustice occurs.
To take this argument about intentional coercion to its extreme
would mean that a family starving in rural sub-Saharan Africa has
more ‘freedom’ than e.g. Bill Gates’ family, as the African family are
not being intentionally coerced into paying ‘taxes’.
Friedrich von Hayek
Hayek developed this argument to its logical conclusion,
that societies had no obligation to meet the social and
economic needs of people, as societies did not exist.
In his 1979 Heidelberg lecture, he argued that the word
‘social’ had no objective meaning as an adjective or a
noun; he stated that nobody knows what the ‘social’ in
fact is.
Hayek concluded that a social market economy is no
market economy, a social constitutional state is no
constitutional state, a social conscience is not
conscience and that social justice is not justice.
Margaret Thatcher-Hayek!
In 1987, then UK Prime Minister, she spelt out
Hayek’s argument in simple terms:
“I think we've been through a period where too
many people have been given to understand
that if they have a problem, it's the government's
job to cope with it. 'I have a problem, I’ll get a
grant.' 'I’m homeless, the government must
house me.' They’re casting their problem on
society. And, you know, there is no such thing
as society. There are individual men and
women, and there are families.”
Effective and Efficient Anti-Poverty Measures
Progressive tax and income policies, with income redistribution from ‘rich’
to ‘poor’ and from men to women (in addition to redistribution of income
across an individual’s life span by taxing and reducing income levels in
middle age balanced with then paying social benefits to increase income
during childhood and old age).
Active labour market interventions to create higher quality jobs.
Enforcement of minimum standards on wages and working conditions of the
low paid within an international framework.
Universal social insurance and public social services - the ‘basic needs
services’ – by introducing internationally agreed minimum levels of benefit
Greater accountability and increased social and democratic control over
trans-national corporations and international agencies, to remedy the
‘democratic deficit’.
Some food for thought
Poverty is currently the world’s largest source of harm; it causes
more death, disease, suffering and misery than any other social
phenomenon. Poverty is a bigger scourge of humanity than plague,
pestilence or drought. Each year over 10 million children die from
preventable causes which go untreated due to poverty.
Yet there is no need for any person in the 21st century,
anywhere, to starve and rot in a slum, go without clean drinking
water, toilets or access to basic health care and education. Providing
poor people with all these things would not have any significant (or
even noticeable) impact on the lifestyles of the ‘rich’. Poverty is not
an ‘act of god’ nor ‘inevitable’. It is a political choice. What is lacking
is not sufficient money but the political will to end poverty.
In addition, all over the world, there have been social movements
organised around fighting poverty and inequality. We’ll learn more
about these on Wednesday.