Slums

The definition of slums: overcrowding, poor or informal housing, inadequate access to safe water and sanitation, and insecurity of tenure. We do not have the exact numbers of the inhabitants of the slums. Slum populations are often deliberately undercounted according to “Planet of the slums”. The classic slums where in inner parts of the city The new slums are more typically located on the edge of urban spatial explosions. The slums creating the answer to the developed worlds suburban sprawls.

The urbanization of earth is going rapidly faster than first predicted. The country sides has reached its maximum population and its population will start to shrink after 2020. As a result all future world population growth will take place in the cities. Ninety-five per cent of this population growth will occur in the urban areas of the third world. There is little or no planning to accommodate these people or provide them with services.

I enjoyed the Mike Davies reading and that it is well founded in statistics. But after going through all of the readings for this week it ended up being a lot of numbers and lists.

From the “Habitat Debate” we learn that the primary direction of both national and international interventions during the last twenty years has actually increased urban poverty and slums, increased exclusion and inequality, and weakened urban elites in their efforts to use cities as engines of growth.

According to the “Six Misconceptions about Squatter Settlements” reading squatters are generally quite well organized. Culturally they are highly optimistic and aspire to better education for their children and to improving the condition of their houses. It almost sounds like a well working society. One of the main problems might be the western world labeling the “slums” as slums, which could lead to an enhancement of the segregation.

slum_cindy moon

The problem of slum is not really in architectural or urban boundary. Even though we know the way, architect or urban planner couldn’t solve the problem because it is from social conflicts. Like article ‘seventeen reasons why the squatter problem can’t be solved’, the way of exit from slum seems so hard in current system of capitalism and economic development. To pursue the strongest and most innovate culture, society ignore loser as squatter and they lose their place to leave in a city. However, they don’t have anywhere to leave, and then they start making their own area as ghetto in a city.

All of these problems as ‘habitat debate’ mentioned originated from negligence of central government. The government didn’t hear squatter’s voice and they just made and follow its policy. However, to make habitat program effective squatter around the world must band together and to overcome this situation, political policy and their demand of participating is essential (habitat debate, 12)

Also ‘housing as a verb rather than a noun’ is so notable phrase. Just saying home or housing is not sufficient. To make comfortable home, the policy needs to lead squatter to build up their area through self-particiation. For the usual normal urban people housing became shop, factory, and rental income. However, for the people who remain in slum, they don’t have anything to live.

I am not sure how architect or urban planner could approach this problem. In this case, I have usually so pessimistic view to the role of architect. We could say some opinion, but all the decision usually comes from politics. And usually politics could pretend to solve this problem but not usually get into it because they never been in slum culture.

Informal settlement

Jungmi Won


Slum/getto and squatter district have some different primary perceptions to me.
In order to begin our conversation about the contemporary city and read it’s behind logic as well as avoid preconception, I think we need rearrange the meaning of these vocabularies at the aspect of urbanism. We need words for urban phenomenon, broad enough to disciplines we want to address. Slum, getto, squatter district and economically depressed area are some narrow downed words in terms of possibility of its nature. Especially, those words are not appropriate to cases of Asia or Latin America large cities. Janice Perlman mentioned the nature of informal settlement. I would say the word ‘informal’ which has opposite meaning of ‘formal’ is a better word to read nature of the settlement. Because ‘informal’ means ‘not done, not made according to a recognized or prescribed form, not according to order, unfinished and something that arises from within itself and its makers.


‘Despite their visual disarray and special distinction from the rest of other urban grid, squatter settlements have both highly organized within themselves and highly integrated into the rest of housing system’ (page2). The urban poor have to solve a complex equation as they try to optimize housing cost, tenure security, quality of shelter, journey to work, and sometimes, personal safety. (The prevalence of slums: page27)
Therefore, income, occupation, size and material of dwelling units are highly transparent in ‘informal’ settlement whereas its appearance is enormous heterogeneity. Also, it is not a hopeless pool rather it is a flexible body achieving the ‘highest and best use’. Living in informal sector is precarious and unpredictable. (page4)


Janice Perlman says that people who live informal sector have the aspiration of the bourgeoisie, the perseverance of pioneers, and the values of patriots. What they do not have is an opportunity to fulfill their aspiration. As persons who have that opportunity, the image of ‘standard housing’ is a result that people narrow down our view toward informal city and take an attitude as a governor, activist or developer. What we need is how we read the informal settlement.

slum

The problem of slum is not really in architectural or urban boundary. Even though we know the way, architect or urban planner couldn’t solve the problem because it is from social conflicts. Like article ‘seventeen reasons why the squatter problem can’t be solved’, the way of exit from slum seems so hard in current system of capitalism and economic development. To pursue the strongest and most innovate culture, society ignore loser as squatter and they lose their place to leave in a city. However, they don’t have anywhere to leave, and then they start making their own area as ghetto in a city.

All of these problems as ‘habitat debate’ mentioned originated from negligence of central government. The government didn’t hear squatter’s voice and they just made and follow its policy. However, to make habitat program effective squatter around the world must band together and to overcome this situation, political policy and their demand of participating is essential (habitat debate, 12)

Also ‘housing as a verb rather than a noun’ is so notable phrase. Just saying home or housing is not sufficient. To make comfortable home, the policy needs to lead squatter to build up their area through self-particiation. For the usual normal urban people housing became shop, factory, and rental income. However, for the people who remain in slum, they don’t have anything to live.

I am not sure how architect or urban planner could approach this problem. In this case, I have usually so pessimistic view to the role of architect. We could say some opinion, but all the decision usually comes from politics. And usually politics could pretend to solve this problem but not usually get into it because they never been in slum culture.

Exponential Slum

Exponential Slum

Mike Davis estimates in his book “The Prevalence of Slums” that there are two hundred thousands slums on earth today and are continuing to grow into mulit-million person mega-slums . The definition of the word slum has changed from the early eighteen hundreds meaning a room or ally occupied by unscrupulous characters to later defining an overcrowded, informal housing sector of the city which lacks basic infrastructure needs. Whatever the definition, Davis points out alarming numbers about the slums in cities around the world and further startlingly descriptions of the slums damaging effect in regions of the Soviet Union. John Turner’s powerful rephrasing of ”Housing” from a noun into a verb helps to reinforce the understanding of constant struggle for shelter sought by those living in the slums.
Slum has always carried a negative connotation however the dynamics of the place are only slowly being understood today as shown by Janice Perlman’s study “Six Misconceptions about Squatter Settlements.” She systematically breaks six common stereotypes of slums including: kinds of people living there, why do they live there, the nature of informal settlements, image of housing, meaning of self help, and the definition of success. Her point is not to demonstrate that these places do not need help, but rather reinforces the need to reanalyze the complex fabric of the slum so that we can better address the needs as sought after by the inhabitants.

Interestingly the United Nations is aware of it’s misdiagnosis and prescription for the slums and continues create new paradigms for addressing what seems like an insurmountable problem. From the first United Nations Conference on Human Settlements of 1976 in Vancouver, the UN believed that the slum conditions could be solved by a large central government eliminating with its all mighty hand the problems of the world. Unfortunately this model did not meet the needs of slums on a local communities scale. This combined with the Structural Adjustment Program led to the sharpest rise in urban poverty levels in the 1980’s. A new decentralized approach was applied in the 1990’s that work closer to communities and the private sector to provide basic needs and shelters. This approach also failed do to local authorities not implementing the provisions, improper understanding of success, and the inequality of recourses. Todays approach strives to understand more closely the economies and understandings of success by the inhabitants of the Slums and to further balance recourses amongst all parties.

Kofi Annan state’s an alarming statistic claiming that more than half of the urban population in the developing world lives in slums, with little or no access to decent housing, clean water, basic sanitation, regular jobs or steady income. However he ends his speech with an optimistic tone on future cities having the potential for efficiency for living, consuming and producing. Finally he believes the design community will play an important role stating that “we have ideas and best practices to guide us, including participatory planning, “green” architecture, cooperative housing finance and successful instances of inner city revival.”

slumming

Slums

It seemed that many of these articles when speaking of slums also referenced words like misconception and myth. It’s interesting to note that some of these misconceptions could have been derived from the evolution of the word “slum” itself. Mike Davis in Planet of Slums defines slums by citing mid nineteenth century sources with words and phrases like “racket”, “criminal trade”, “room with low goings-on occurred”, and “an area of dirty back streets, especially when inhabited by a squalid and criminal population” (pg. 22). He defines the word with a more classical definition of “overcrowding, poor or informal housing, inadequate access to safe water or sanitation, and insecurity of tenure”. What is important to note is that the previous definition had a negative connotation of crime and implied that the people living there were prevalent to social disorder.

Janice Perlam addresses this in Six Misconceptions. She point that squatters are traditionally stigmatized and accused of “social breakdown, crime and prostitution, and maladaptive rural behaviors” and “seen as parasites on the economy” but in reality they “have the aspirations of the bourgeoisie, the perseverance of pioneers, and the values of patriots. She follows up by saying that “What they do not have is an opportunity to fulfill their aspirations”.

The global community and nations in response to such a statement have attempted to give squatters such an opportunity. But again due to misconceptions of slums those attempts have failed to give viable solutions. Shlomo Angel and Stan Benjamin have noted this by describing what they call “technological transfer”. They define it as “the largely unsuccessful attempt to take housing solutions from developed societies and modify them for application in the developing world”. They continue to say “It has the great advantage of fitting well into elite middle-class aspirations. But it fails on three important counts; lack of realism…a complete misunderstanding of people’s needs and poor use of available resources” (pg. 20).

In terms of solving the issues of slums many of the articles were getting to the point of eradicating these misconceptions by actually studying the conditions of the slums and their realities. One article went so far as to define the typology of slums.

While reading these articles I couldn’t help but think back to when Alejandor Aravena came to speak last semester. He discussed a low income housing project that he worked on. He described that the process of the project involved speaking to the community to understand their needs. It was interesting to note that the project did not “look complete” with it cinderblock construction and unfinished walls. But when referencing back to Angel and Benjamin’s article they talk about this “aesthetic desire to produced finished projects”. For the people of the slums, cinderblock meant security and permanence and the ability for them to add on and invest in their homes.

sha_slum

These set of articles made me realize the wide variety of ways this topic is approached, because it affects so many. Angel Benjamin's article almost argues for the slum typology, approaching it as a series of myths or social preconceptions that have led to the miscasting of the slum as "bad" or "inefficient". The statement about families having "no stake" in the large housing projects and how they are "often hostile to them" was a nice encapsulation of the failure of the Corb sort of city. ( I actually got a sense of the article tying back to a more crass article I read sometime last week, Nussbaum's "Are Designers the Enemy of Design?", especially when I was reading reasons 5 and 6, Completeness and Professionalism. It seemed to tie me back to what I've been thinking about all semester, and now I can describe it: is myspace a slum of the internet? Are we as designers squeamish of the visual atrocities while we forget the new ownership that arises from Nussbaum's "democratic design"? )

The other articles all provide differing perspectives and perceptions on the inhabitants of the slum. Planet of Slums inhabits an almost completely statistical approach. Mike Davis's voice is almost absent, and only surfaces in a few locations "but I think most urban newcomers'..." and when he compares the population of slum-dwellers with the population of the world in 1844. I wish there was a mediating article between the Planet of Slums sort of barrage of numbers with the Colors Magazine personality -- a New Yorker "The Apartment" for slums, using impossible numbers and making them real, or at least a little easier to grasp. The same sort of anonymity persists in the UN Habitat article, consistently referring to inhabitants of slums as a vague "they", never referring to people in quantities less than 300.

In that sense the Janice Perlman article is a relief, a softer look at some of the reasons Angel Benjamin proposes, almost as a way to do what Angel Benjamin proposes -- shifting our perception of slums. She, like Benjamin, consistently uses "our" and "we" to include (or implicate) the reader in this discovery of the misconceptions of slums. It is sad, though, that the only article that really sets aside "they" in favor of people is the Colors Magazine article.

http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/NussbaumOnDesign/archives/2007/03/are_designers_t.html

Slum

Architecture 209X, Spring 2007

Words and Cities: The rhetoric and meaning of statistically improbable phrases

Nicholas De Monchaux

Qing Wang

Slum

Does slum count as architecture? If so, does the architecture training help us to design it? The slum has been built without drawings, diagrams, models. It has been built with the available materials around its location. The structure has been lifted up without calculation. It seems all we learn in architecture school doesn’t help to do this? The way that slum has been built raises the question about architecture as a shelter. Slum is nothing but a shelter. If architecture is considered as a shelter, the architect’s task becomes to build a place to protect people from nature. To protect people from nature is not only an architectural problem. Technologically, there is no difficulty to build shelter. Without architects, people in slum do good jobs always. The difficulty architects face when they try to solve this residing problem is that it is merely such a complicated problem associated with social, economical, political and legal problems. It is a social problem more than an architectural problem, even eventually it will materialized as an architectural form. Architects are just one tiny role in this system. Mostly, every architect’s attempt fails in history. High-rise building is one of them. After World War II, Berlin needs be rebuilt over the debris. Architects find new materials and techniques to build buildings faster to accommodate more people who just lost their homes and families in the war. As the city grows, the land value rises as well. Architects solved this problem by stacking floors higher to use space vertically. However, the recent studies shows that the tower needs much high maintenance and construction cost than low-rise and mid-rise. Architects found a new building type, but didn’t solve the problem. Meanwhile, it causes some other problems like rush hours traffic jam, disconnection between people, and pollution. In this design “game”, architects always play with themselves. Another example is that architects design a stereotype and mass produce to reduce the cost in construction and materials. It is inevitable unsuccessful because it takes more cost on the administration and organization. In this design “game”, architects still don’t win. So if architecture is not just a “shelter”, otherwise there is no need of architects as an independent profession, and architecture is not to solve the social problems, which here refers the slum, what is architecture and what is architect’s task. The answer is simple: architecture doesn’t solve social problem. It is more the representation of the human being’s power. As in , I just read recently: “We build for emotional and psychological purpose, as well for ideological and practical reason. The language of architecture is used to project power.”

slums_liwen

Slums
Liwen Zhang

Davis’ Planet of Slums presents highly astonishing figures. In a more recent edition of his work, he highlights that by 2050, “cities will account for all future world population growth” and that the number of residents in slums has reached a “staggering 78.2 percent of urbanities in the least-developed countries”. It has been long apparent that the issue of slums has reached what he deems as a global catastrophe upon which these slums serve not only as “warehouses for the poor”, but also as huge social and economical disasters.

The questions posed and debated by many scholars such as Janice Perlman, Shlomo Angel and Stan Benjamin collectively evaluate our perceptions, misunderstandings in the operations that uniquely happen in a slum environment and inappropriate ways upon which we have dealt with the problem up to date.

In Angel and Benjamin’s work, despite the seemingly pessimistic outlook on the many ways we have failed to resolve the problem of slums, we are presented with a very rational and logical point toward the end of the piece. They state that before any realistic solutions could materialize, there needs to be a “considerable change in attitudes and perceptions, the squatter problem simply can’t be solved”. This seemingly cynical outlook is perhaps a contrast to Perlman’s work, where her “myth of marginality” presents the mentality of those who inhabit the slums to be a positive one – where they are “highly optimistic and aspire to better education for their children and to improving the condition of their houses”. The myth in this case is a misconception on our part – in the parasitical ways we view them, hence limiting the opportunities for them to “fulfill their aspirations”.

What is interesting about Perlman’s work is the piece that she has most recently done titled the New Marginality. Notice that the title is in direct opposition to her previous assertions on the myth of marginality. In her new work, she went back and surveyed nearly all the same people that she did for her first research piece which resulted in the myth of marginality. In her second extensive research session, her findings were not so optimistic – hence the fact that marginality is no longer a myth. She notices that unlike in the 1960s, where slum inhabitants still had hope and saw their residences as transitional spaces, the 1990’s presents itself as an era of hopelessness. The same inhabitants that she surveyed back in the 60’s have now lost a lot of the previous aspirations and hopes they have had about leaving the slums. There is now sustained stigmatism in such areas, where slum inhabitants no longer feel comfortable and safe venturing into the formal streets of non slum areas. They explicitly state that based on what one wears, how one talks and one's lack of a permanent street address, these telling impressions then lead to many new forms of violence, thus sustained stigmatism and a new form of marginality.

I realize that up to this point I have generalized the many years of research and work of many renowned scholars; this is mainly attributed to the general purpose of this response piece and for clarity sake. I find Perlman’s work promising and extremely pertinent upon framing the course of action for what is to come. From her work, we realize another layer of added complexity to the already existing predicaments imposed. How do we then position ourselves as designers and planners for those subjected to this new form of marginality?

The Slum Solution: No Lists and Back to Week 6

Upon reading the six slum articles assigned, I was overwhelmed by the impulse to classify and define. Every text is replete with statistics, numbers and charts. If this is not enough, it is even evident in the titles: “Six Misconceptions about Squatter Settlements” by Janice Perleman and “Seventeen Reasons Why the Squatter Problem Can’t Be Solved” by Angel and Benjamin. It seems the popular solutions are all in outlined format, such as the Habitat Agenda in the UN-HABITAT’s State of the World’s Cities Report. Even Davis’ chapter The Prevalence of Slums, the author spends most of the text simply defining what a slum is. From these articles, one gets the sense that it is difficult just defining what a slum is and setting up committees to address them. Davis recognizes that this is due in large part to the disconnect between the committees and the slum inhabitants, citing that the governments that are positioned in between do not always want to divulge the numbers on which the committees depend. Nevertheless, it seems that the overwhelming urge to classify is a typical top-down, western approach that may not be very effective, especially when you consider how the world’s population in slums is growing.

With this established method, I am not surprised that one article was entitled “Thirty Years of the Urban Agenda: What Has Been Achieved?” Maybe it is the method itself that needs to be challenged. In Angel and Benjamin’s reason number five the squatter problem cannot be solved, entitled “completeness,” I thought of a word from weeks past—emergence. The article states, “communities take shape over time,” a bottom-up quality essential to emergence. However, the top down nature of committees, conferences and resolutions is prone to articles entitled “Seventeen reasons why the squatter problem can’t be solved.” Instead, maybe if slums are not addressed as a “problem” to be classified, but instead a set of design parameters, less lists and less slums would exist.

slum

Slum/Bin Wang

These articles inspire my consideration for the one third population on this planet, squatters, most of whom live in developing countries. Although there are also many squatters in the States, things are totally different. Based on my experience living in China and America, I feel most homeless people in America don’t intent to get a job. Many of them live in cities. Living in slums seems more a life style. While in China, most slum people have jobs (not good for sure) and are trying to get better ones for moving into cities.

My hometown, Suzhou, has one of the most well preserved city walls of the world. Attached to the outside wall, there used to be a lot of slums. As a child, I liked to go through these intimate neighborhoods. The fabric of the slums is still beautiful to me. After developing for decades, the slum had well organization and emerged into the typical housing style. However, when I went back from university last year, most slums (actually old houses) had been tore down, leaving the lonely city wall behind and several “nail residents” among the ruins. It was cruel to all the residence. I’ve be wondering where they are right now. Must be somewhere in the city. The ironical thing is that the position where they lived, from where they wanted to move into the city, had already become the centre of the city. The concept of “city” changed dramatically in the last 20 years. So they probably moved not into the “city” but to the edges of the “new city”.

The reason why most slums in China appear at the edge of cities is interesting. In China, we have policy for “registered permanent residence” according to which people can only live in their “permanent residence city”. For example a citizen born in Shanghai can’t work in Beijing under equal benefits unless changing the “registered permanent residence” to Beijing. That why people be restricted immigrating even in their own country makes no sense to me at all. But this is a policy. As a result, those people coming from the suburb have huge difficulties to get a “right identity” so it is hard to find a good job in the city. On reverse, without a job means no identity and no normal housing. The consequence is that more and more people gathered on the edge of the city waiting for an opportunity to move into the city. The slum areas thus become an in-between of suburb and cities. They witness the process of urbanism.

“Housing is a verb.” But the economic and political power have pushed this verb way beyond an architectural issue, or it never was.