Slums

Category: Grassland, Tundra, and Human Biomes.

Geographic Location: Global.

Summary: Slums are a challenge to cities around the world and a growing threat to a wide range of ecosystems.

According to estimates from the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat), nearly one-quarter of the world's urban population was living in slums as of 2018. Globally, 1 billion people lived in slums in developing regions as of 2018; based on this estimate, it is likely that one-third of the developing world's urban population lives in slums. Eastern and Southeastern Asia had the biggest share of slum dwellers, with more than 35 percent of its urban population residing in slums. The percentage of urban dwellers living in slums actually decreased from 28 percent to 23 percent in the developing world between 2000 and 2014. However, due to rising population, and the rise especially in urban populations, the number of slum dwellers has been rising worldwide.

The word slums is used to describe a wide range of poor living conditions coupled with urban areas of low income or poverty. It is thought to have originated from the Irish phrase ‘S lom é, meaning a bleak or destitute place. Slums encompass deteriorated as well as informal settlements. UN-Habitat defines a slum as a rundown area of a city characterized by substandard housing and squalor, and lacking security. In developed countries, slums could refer to housing areas that were once relatively affluent but deteriorated as the original dwellers moved on to newer and better parts of the city. In developing countries, slums refers mainly to the sprawling informal settlements found in cities.

Depending on the cultural and language background, slums are also known as bidonvilles, habitat précaire, shanty towns, favelas, skid row, barrio, ghetto, barraca, villa miseria, mabanda, mudun safi, chawls, and so on. Normally, they are erected on land of high risk (such as steep slopes, floodplains, or garbage dumps) with unclear or informal property rights. Largely, the identification of an area as a slum is based solely on socioeconomic criteria and much less on racial, ethnic, or religious criteria—although in most developed countries of Europe and North America, they have become associated with foreigners lacking job skills or entitlements to live in those countries.

Most slums, fundamentally, are characterized by being inhabited by poor and socially underprivileged populations of the society. Buildings in slums may vary from simple shacks to permanent and well-maintained structures; it is not uncommon to find relatively well-built structures within slums. Those sound structures may be owned by successful slum-based business owners who have made their fortune from the plight of slum dwellers, through activities such as selling water. Slums tend to lack clean water, electricity, sanitation, and other basic services. They are areas of high rates of poverty, urban decay, illiteracy, and unemployment. Government authorities perceive them as breeding grounds for social problems such as alcoholism, crime, drug peddling and addiction, mental illnesses, and even suicide. In many developing countries, they are often areas of high rates of disease due to unsanitary conditions, malnutrition, and lack of basic health care.

The low socioeconomic status of the residents is another common feature of slums. Many slum dwellers, therefore, employ themselves in the informal economy. In some cases, such as Kibera in Kenya or Mumbai in India, slums are places of thriving labor-intensive businesses such as garbage recycling, leather work, and various cottage industries. Common livelihood activities in the slums include domestic work, street vending, drug dealing, and prostitution. In some slums, people recycle refuse of different kinds, from household garbage to electronics, for a living, selling either the odd usable goods or stripping broken goods for parts or raw materials.

Emergence

Most slums are formed as a result of rapid urban population increase due to several factors:

• • Rural-urban migration. Many people move to urban areas in search of jobs and a better life. Lack of infrastructure in rural areas, and location of industries mostly within the urban centers in the developing countries, encourages those in the rural areas to move to urban centers. This in turn outpaces many urban facilities, especially housing.
• • Natural population growth. Most slums occur in developing countries with high population growth rates. The rate of population growth outnumbers the growth of facilities in many cases, leaving the urban poor unable to cope and desolate.
• • Population displacement. During conflicts or large-scale industrial development, people who have nowhere else to go settle informally within valleys, riverbanks, or hilly places usually least-preferred for urban development or settlement. In cases of conflicts, even people who once had good housing and sources of income may become desperate and lack the ability to afford decent housing.
• • Lack of income opportunities. Large portions of the population are unable to meet housing and related costs, and are thus relegated to the periphery of towns or areas that are least suitable for settlement.

In some of the cities, having a high population combined with urban-specific transformation processes result in segregation implications, such as inner-city deterioration, gentrification, and counter-urbanization. Moreover, rapid urban population increases and the often-related spatial segregation of urban population segments on socioeconomic and ethnic grounds is fertile ground for the growth of slums in the developing world. Urban authorities also contribute to the emergence of slums through a general failure of housing and land markets to provide for the land and housing requirements of rapidly growing urban low-income populations in a timely fashion, and in sufficient numbers and locations.

In many cases, there exists apathy toward the slums, or even a tendency to assume their nonexistence. Indeed, lack of planning for long periods by the urban authorities also results in illegal occupation of urban lands and commensurate flouting of building regulations and/or of urban zoning prescriptions. An example of this wanton flouting would be a drainage line constructed across a river channel in the Mukuru slums in Kenya, hindering the flow of water and increasing the likelihood of flooding during heavy downpours. Considerable political and institutional inertia permits slums to expand to levels where their sheer magnitude overwhelms the capacity of existing institutional arrangements to effectively address their issues.

In many cases, lack of planning overshadows the political desirability of intervention. Further, attempts to formally address issues such as urban degeneration, explosive growth of informal housing, and illegal urban land occupancy are all too often ad hoc, marginal, and insignificant in relation to the scale and scope of the issues at hand. The nature of such interventions appears to indicate that the phenomenon of slums and the related problems are generally little understood, and that public interventions more often than not address symptoms rather than the underlying causes.

With the rise of the cities as the predominant and preferred residential locus of the majority of the world’s population, the world is being faced with the reality that many large and medium-size cities are increasingly becoming areas of impoverished urban exclusion, surrounded by comparatively small pockets of urban wealth. This kind of inequality could lead to instability in many of the emerging cities.

Major Challenges

Slums by nature face myriad challenges. Some of these challenges are a result of the physical location of the slums. The growth or decline of slums may be closely linked to variations in the rural and urban economy and to related poverty levels. It is also a factor of demographics in terms of household formation rates, as well as the effectiveness of public interventions. Because slums are located in areas that are least habitable, and in many cases, residents pay no land rates to the government agencies, they remain a refuge for the poor or new immigrants still looking for sources of income. Slum residents tend to have low average incomes, high levels of unemployment, and relatively low levels of education. As a result, they are often stigmatized, leading to social discrimination.

There are exceptions such as Bangkok, Thailand, where only a minority of the slum dwellers are considered poor and stigmatization is less, and Havana, Cuba, where slum dwellers have secure tenure and access to the same social infrastructure as nonslum dwellers. The Havana experience is different due to the proactive attempt by the government to improve the general welfare of the slum dwellers.

The often-ignored isolation and victimization, difficult access to physical and social infrastructure, and generally higher incidence of violence and crime generate patterns of depressed urban areas where the inhabitants, despite their heterogeneity, find common interests on the basis of unsatisfied basic needs. In many developing countries, the proliferation of slums and their challenges are a result of these societal failures. In others, the problems may be a result of the mentality or the social orientation of the slum dwellers.

Underlying Problems

One of the leading causes of problems or challenges in slums is the lack of space. There are simply too many people within a small area of land. Slum residents are thus forced to use any small space available, regardless of its suitability in terms of exposure to floods, drainage channels, or need for open space for social amenities. As a result, housing structures may be constructed in inappropriate areas, such as blocking drainage channels, or in the path of floods.

Lack of space is also partly responsible for the small accessways common within the slums, which often double as walkways. Small accessways are in turn responsible for blockages, as their capacity to hold garbage is small.

The other major challenge within slums is lack of income-earning options. The majority of the slum dwellers are living below the poverty line and thus have limited possibilities to explore other alternatives. They are not able to put up more durable, flood-resistant buildings; neither are they able to acquire suitable land outside the danger of floods or overflowing drainages. They are also limited in terms of ability to coordinate responses to calamities such as floods or fire outbreaks because all their efforts are directed toward obtaining food for daily survival.

Slums, like other informal settlements frequented by the urban poor, receive little or no services from central or local governments. Due to lack of basic services in waste/garbage collection, there is often a huge accumulation of garbage, which flows into the drainage lines, leading to blockages. In cases where the garbage is emptied into a river channel, there are increased chances of blocked channels. Blocked river channels are known to cause back water flows, which can cause floods and riverbank erosion. Slums also lack proper drainage facilities. The drainage channels are few and largely interspaced, which increases the possibility of blockage and stormwater damage during heavy rainfall.

Poor maintenance of facilities within urban slums is often a cause for worry. There may be no schedule of maintenance of facilities like drainage systems. This lack of maintenance is also found in water pipes. It is not uncommon to see burst water pipes, making it easy for raw sewage to contaminate drinking water. This kind of contamination further reduces the availability of clean water within the slums. In many cases, the contamination of clean drinking water results in the spread of diseases such as cholera, dysentery, and typhoid. Lack of maintenance of the drainage way results in congestion or blockage of the drainage pipes or lines, creating fertile scenarios for flooding.

It should be noted that underlying problems cannot be solved internally within the slums and do require external intervention. The underlying problems are mostly the result of societal or economic failure and can best be solved through government policy intervention. The flood menace remains a big challenge to slums. In many cases, failures in drainage systems and blocked river channels increase the flood hazard and risk. Slum houses, due to the lack of space, are in many cases constructed close to the riverbanks, increasing the flood risk during heavy rains, and further disrupting riverine habitat.

The threat of fire is also intensified in slum environments, where cramped conditions may leave people unable to escape. Fires, indeed, are sometimes set by land owners or developers to clear areas for more profitable ventures. The environment in and around slums, therefore, is more likely to experience flooding and erosion, severe fire risk, and general degradation of the natural infrastructure.

Types

Generally, there are two main types of slums. On one hand are what could be considered slums proper, in many cases referring to inner-city residential areas that were laid out and built decades ago in line with prevailing urban planning, zoning, and construction standards; over time, they have progressively become physically dilapidated and overcrowded to the point where they become the residential zone for the lowest income groups. These slums could retain some underlying order and even admired architecture.

On the other hand are shanties or spontaneous housing. In many cases, these informal settlements are the result of illegal or semilegal urbanization processes or unsanctioned subdivisions of land at the urban periphery. An example of this type of land invasion would be squatters who erect housing units without formal permission from the land owner using materials and building standards not in line with local building codes.

Global Action

The situation for slum dwellers varies widely. In democracies where slum dwellers are citizens with voting rights, politicians have an interest in improving living conditions in slums in an attempt to attract slum dwellers’ votes and maintain political power. However, there have also been cases where governments have forced evictions and slum clearance programs because the slums were viewed as eyesores, for example cities have bulldozed slums prior to high-profile events such as sport tournaments. Relocation in such instances often neglects to consider such necessities as access to public transportation, social services, and food markets.

Wholesale urban renewal programs, slum regularization, upgrading, and community-based slum networking are increasingly being undertaken by city managers and governments. The UN-Habitat and similar global organizations have proposed administrative reforms for greater efficiency and reduction of corruption to permit the implementation of pro-poor social policies, with tangible successes in the areas of social housing, transportation, education, and public participation.

UN-Habitat argues that it is possible to reduce the number of slums or improve living conditions for their residents by having citywide, rather than ad hoc, slum improvement, environmental improvement, land regularization, housing finance provision, and urban poverty reduction, as well as by forming partnerships with the private sector, nongovernmental organizations, and communities. There is also the need to combine these actions with true decentralization and empowerment of local governments. Activists and organizers encourage residents and city managers to work together in setting local priorities, making decisions, and implementing policies and projects.

Bibliography

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