The International

The Kenyan Railway Corporation announced on March 21 that it would evict 50,000 people living illegally along its tracks. The plan, which would leave thousands homeless, was temporarily suspended on April 29. There are roughly one billion people living in makeshift communities around the globe, and the number is steadily rising. The United Nations expects that the number of people living in slums and shantytowns will grow by 500 million in each of the next two decades, bringing the total to two billion by 2030. An estimated one-third of all city dwellers live in what are generally known as “informal settlements,” according to the UN Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing, and Amnesty International counts more than 200,000 world communities that can be defined as slums.

All of the largest informal settlements surround or are inside large cities, such as the Kibera slum in Nairobi, Kenya. The shanty town inside the Indian city of Mumbai, known as Dharavi, is home to between 600,000 and 1 million people. The increased presence of slums coincides with increased urbanization, as those in rural areas flock to cities for economic and social opportunities. According to the University of Michigan, the percentage of the world’s population that lived in cities rose from 30 to 47 percent between 1950 and 2000, and is expected to grow to 60 percent by the year 2025. Much of this growth will occur in developing countries.

Worldwide, more than 90 percent of slum dwellers live in developing nations, where they constitute 42 percent of the entire urban population, according to UN figures. The numbers differ regionally. For example, in Sub-Saharan Africa, 72 percent of the urban population lives in slums, and in southern Asia, 59 percent of city residents are in such communities.

When a population quickly moves into a city, there is a new need for housing and shelter, which the urban area cannot immediately accommodate. Slums are often of a homemade nature, with new residents building domiciles out of found material such as scrap metal. The “informal” in the term “informal settlement” comes from the fact that slums are rarely state or municipally-zoned, although they are of a high population density and infused with both housing and commercial ventures.

For example, Dharavi is located in a one-square mile area in the center of Mumbai. It was originally a mangrove swamp, but Dharavi became the populated area it is today thanks to various industries, such as tanning and textile, and now has a population density of 350,000 people per square kilometer. This number is 11 times the average population density of Mumbai, according to International Alliance of Inhabitants.
With each new generation increasing the number of people living in slums, how will state governments and international entities respond? Can the rising rate of urbanization and the growth of informal communities be curbed, or will a different solution arise?

Deplorable conditions

While a growing population brings slums, slums themselves bring problems to the population within. UN-Habitat confirmed during the twenty-first General Council meeting that overcrowding and a lack of social services and infrastructure can lead to serious health concerns in these communities. Residents in Nairobi’s Kibera use what are known as “flying toilets” to dispose of human waste; they simply use plastic bags for fecal matter and toss them aside, as reported by multiple sources, such as the BBC and the Kenya Build project.

Additionally, since there is rarely a government presence inside slums, gang violence is prevalent, UN-Habitat notes. In the reestablished shanty town of Cite Soliel in post-earthquake Haiti, escaped inmates have captured the slum using the same violent techniques that spurred President Rene Prevail to originally incarcerate the warlords. "No one’s in charge except the [gang] bosses,” a resident of Cite Soliel told The New York Times.

Slums, by design, can also be structurally dangerous. They are generally built by residents using found materials, brick or concrete and are improperly supported. According to insurance research from Risk Management Solutions, homes in Haiti were built with heavy materials, often with no reinforcement, causing “numerous building collapses, resulting in extensive property damage and loss of life,” after the earthquake.

On April 26, a fire in a shantytown outside of Manila destroyed about 600 houses, rendering more than 10,000 people homeless. Additionally, because the alleys in the settlement were narrow and not designed for cars, fire trucks had trouble navigating through the blaze, the Associated Press reported.
Yet despite the inadequacies, people have the right to a home, as stated in both UN and Amnesty International codes. But that right is in danger. State governments sometimes do not hesitate to initiate forced evictions for informal settlements, leaving thousands homeless.

Forced evictions

“The phenomenon of forced evictions in Africa is a massive human rights scandal that must be stopped immediately,” declared Amnesty International on World Habitat Day. Governments, especially in Africa and parts of southern Asia such as India and Cambodia, will bulldoze shantytowns and slums without giving residents long-term notice or housing solutions, according to Amnesty International African researcher Simeon Mawanza. Currently, 50,000 residents in Nairobi are waiting to see if their homes will be destroyed. In March, the Kenya Railway Corporation said it would demolish informal houses built alongside train tracks in order to begin a track expansion. The residents, who do not pay rent on the land, were given 30 days to relocate and were not offered compensation or a housing solution, the Associated Press reported.

“People have been living and working on these lands for years and a 30-day notice period is wholly inadequate. Without proper safeguards the proposed mass evictions will have a devastating impact on people’s access to water, sanitation, food and schools and could well create a humanitarian emergency,” stated Justus Nyang’aya, director of Amnesty International in Kenya. “To put 50,000 of your poorest and most vulnerable citizens at risk of homelessness is unacceptable.”

States as well as corporations like the Kenya Railway Corporation are responsible for en masse evictions of its poorest residents. Beautification is a rather tautological term used to describe large-scale redevelopments. The “urban renewal” project for the Beijing Olympics displaced around 1.5 million people from their homes, often during the night by masked men, according to the UN Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing.

Sometimes countries make plans that aren’t as subtle. In 2005, Zimbabwe initiated Operation Drive Out Trash, a government maneuver to bulldoze slums and informal settlements which, according to the UN, has affected 2.4 million people. The government said the operation was a way to curb the spread of infectious disease and to stop illegal housing.

Mega-events

Beautification efforts are generally associated with large, multi-national events. The United Nations’ UN-Habitat group has labeled these happenings, such as the World Cup and the Olympics, “mega-events.” During the 1994 World Cup, part of which occurred in Dallas, Texas, 200 to 300 people were evicted from informal settlements, as noted in a UN report. To prepare for the upcoming 2010 Commonwealth Games, 35,000 families in New Delhi have been removed from public land.

To prepare for this summer’s World Cup, South Africa created the Elimination and Prevention of Re-Emergence of Slums Act in 2007. The act would demolish slums and place residents in transient camps during and after the event. The act was declared unconstitutional and repealed in 2009.
Similar actions take place outside of informal communities during mega-events as well. Homelessness was made illegal during the Atlanta Olympics, leading to 9,000 citations, and transients were forced out for the Barcelona Games of 1992 and out of Seoul in 1988.

However, mega-events can leave a positive legacy for a country’s improvised citizens. When the games are over, the residencies constructed for athletes and visitors are vacated. After the Atlanta Olympics, the Olympic Village was converted into 3,000 units of subsidized housing, providing homes to 10,000 low-income residents. London, host of the 2012 summer games, has pledged that 1,400 units of the Olympic Village will become affordable housing, alongside 35 percent of 10,000 new homes built in Olympic Park. Moreover, mega-events require proper civic infrastructure, promoting the construction of new roads, plumbing and other basic services to prepare for visitors. There are also environmental upgrades that happen. For the 1964 games, Tokyo built three new sewage treatment plants and for the Seoul Olympics, the polluted Hang River was cleaned up and new systems were developed for collecting garbage. Ms. Raquel Rolnik, the UN Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing, reported all of these instances in her December address to the Human Rights Council.

Housing: A human right

The United Nations has determined that slum life does not fit the standards formally established in General Comment Number Four of the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Hospitability factors determine livability and the committee has broken down housing rights into eight categories: the right to legal security and tenure; availability of services; infrastructure and facilities; affordability; habitability; accessibility; location; and cultural adequacy. Certainly some informal settlements achieve one or more of these goals. Dharavi is in the center of Mumbai and between two major railways. Slums free of landlords are technically affordable. And while there are no large businesses, settlements such as Mexico City’s Neza-Chalco-Itza barrio are full of local merchants and industrious residents. But despite the occasional fringe benefit, slums are hardly the ideal housing situation. In South Africa, Senegal, and Rio de Janeiro, slums are built on landfills, and many lack plumbing like in Nairobi.

“The right to housing should not be interpreted in a narrow or restrictive sense which equates it with, for example, the shelter provided by merely having a roof over one’s head or views shelter exclusively as a commodity. Rather, it should be seen as the right to live somewhere in security, peace and dignity,” the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights stated at a General Council presentation in 1991.

During the April 2007 United Nations General Council Meeting, UN-Habitat attributed the multilateral rise of slums to a rapid rural to urban migration of immigrants and poor looking for “actual or perceived economic opportunities.” Jobs move to the city and are followed by those looking for work. Additionally, as noted by UN-Habitat, 78 percent of non-rural jobs are in the “informal” sector, at generally small-scale, unregulated businesses. Rapid population movements overwhelm city management systems, leaving the incoming masses without proper infrastructure or housing.

Political conflict can also lead to a massive movement of people. Civil wars and other conflicts force populations out of unsafe areas. A decade of civil turmoil in Mozambique displaced 4.5 million people to urban areas in the 1980s.

Globalization plays a key role as well. During the same General Council Meeting, UN-Habitat stated that the formation of slums is linked to global economic cycles. Market booms and busts unevenly distribute wealth while labor demands shift from unskilled to skilled workers, leaving migrants and the underprivileged without means or opportunity.

Through the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural rights, the United Nations has ruled that states have a legal obligation to bring housing conditions to a common standard. This requirement includes legislative, judicial, economic, social and educational measures that must be followed through “to the maximum of [a state’s] available resources.” Governments are obliged to adopt a national housing strategy and to not only establish proper domiciles, but also to maintain a “continuous improvement of living conditions.”

Furthering its commitment to informal communities, the UN has made the improvement of slums part of its eight Millennium Development Goals. The MDGs were created in 2001 to assist impoverished nations and were agreed to by all of the 192 member states. Task 11 of Goal 7 aims to “significantly improve” the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers by 2020.

Is there a solution?

It’s notable that in the MDGs, Task 11 was established to improve – not eliminate – slums. The migration from rural to urban areas is not expected to relent, so UN-Habitat is determined to protect human rights within the informal settlements themselves. UN-Habitat is continually conducting research into economic and environmental sustainability. The organization is also trying pro-active techniques and has initiated the Disaster Management Programme to continue development activities in areas like Sudan and Kosovo and is building necessary infrastructure in these communities.

Cities Alliance, an organization created by UN-Habitat and the World Bank, defines slum upgrading as “physical, social, economic, organizational and environmental improvements undertaken cooperatively and locally among citizens, community groups, businesses and local authorities.” A few countries are already following through on these actions without help from the UN. In Rio de Janeiro, the local government has been working to improve city slums for two decades. In the community of Tijuacu, on the city’s outskirts, residents are currently building a water supply system and concrete staircases up the city’s hills, as noted by both the UN and Brazilian correspondent Anthony Flint.

In Colombia, officials in the city of Medellin have extended the public transportation system to and built playgrounds and libraries in the areas slums. In India, National Geographic’s Mark Jacobson reported that many residents in Dharavi have running water and electricity.

One architect is actually turning to slums as a source of inspiration on formal projects. University of California San Diego professor Teddy Cruz actually sees slums as a prototype for a model community and is taking the impromptu designs he has seen in Latin America into suburbs in the United States. Mr. Cruz is working on a redevelopment of the town of Hudson, New York, integrating low-income housing and the poorer immigrant population with the wealthier areas of the New York City suburb.

“Developers in Tijuana would build entire neighborhoods of generic 400-square-foot houses – miniature versions of suburban America,” Mr. Cruz told The New York Times. “What I noticed is how quickly these developments were retrofitted by the tenants.”

With the approval of Hudson’s mayor, Cruz has designed affordable housing units that resemble the stacked stucco shanties of Mexico yet are next to new parks, an amphitheater, a co-op grocery store and communal playgrounds. They are also intertwined with higher-income buildings by narrow parks and commercial streets.

In regards to mega-events, the UN Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing insists that the International Olympic Committee and FIFA, the governing bodies of the Olympics and the World Cup, amend their selection process. With the changes, these mega-events would only consider cities that promise to not to evict residents without a viable alternative and to build low-income housing.

Slums have become a fixture in the cities of the developing world. Multi-national fair-housing organization Cities Alliance insists that Governments must acknowledge and engage informal settlements if human rights concerns are to be rectified.

"Slum dwellers are part of the urban populace, with the same democratic rights to environmental health and basic living conditions as all residents. These rights are often limited by a government’s ability to realise them," Cities Alliance, which partners with the European Union, UNEP, UN-HABITAT and the World Bank states. "The process of realizing the rights of slum dwellers hinges on their capacity to engage actively with the government. It is a question of creating a space where slum dwellers and the government can engage in a dialogue about slums and upgrading their communities."