Other inner-city housing options, both formal and informal, include an ingenious spectrum of illegal additions, flophouses, squats, and mini-shantytowns. In Hong Kong one quarter of a million people live in illegal additions on rooftops or filled-in airwells in the center of buildings. The worst conditions, however, are endured by the so-called “caged men” – “a local term referring to bedspaces for singles, the ‘cage’ suggested by the tendency of these tenants to erect wire covering for their bed spaces to prevent theft of their belongings. The average number of residents in one of these bedspace apartments is 38.3 and the average per capita living space is 19.4 square feet.”56 Variants on the old-fashioned American “flophouse” are also familiar in most Asian big cities. In Seoul, for example, evictees from the city’s traditional squatter settlements, as well as unemployed people, have crowded into the estimated 5000 Jjogbang which rent beds by the day and provide only one toilet per 15 residents.57
Some impoverished inner-city-dwellers live in the air. One out of ten inhabitants of Phnom Penh sleeps on a roof, as do an incredible 1.5 million Cairenes and 200,000 Alexandrians.58 It is cooler in Cairo’s so-called “second city” than inside the tenements, but roof-dwellers are more exposed to air pollution from traffic and cement plants, as well as dust from the desert. Floating slums, meanwhile, although still common in Southeast Asia, are rapidly disappearing in Hong Kong, where boats once provided 10 percent of the Crown Colony’s shelter, mainly for Tanka and Hakka people considered inferior by the majority Han.59
Finally, there is the street itself. Los Angeles is the First World capital of homelessness, with an estimated 100,000 homeless people, including an increasing number of families, camped on downtown streets or living furtively in parks and amongst freeway landscaping. The biggest population of pavement-dwellers in the Third World is probably in Mumbai, where 1995 research estimated one million living on the sidewalks.60 The traditional stereotype of the Indian pavement-dweller is a destitute peasant, newly arrived from the countryside, who survives by parasitic begging, but as research in Mumbai has revealed, almost all (97 percent) have at least one breadwinner, 70 percent have been in the city at least six years, and one third had been evicted from a slum or a chawl.61 Indeed, many pavement-dwellers are simply workers – rickshaw men, construction laborers, and market porters – who are compelled by their jobs to live in the otherwise unaffordable heart of the metropolis.62
Living in the street, however, is rarely free. As Erhard Berner emphasizes, “even sidewalk dwellers in India or the Philippines have to pay regular fees to policemen or syndicates.”63 In Lagos entrepreneurs rent out wheelbarrows, borrowed from construction sites, as ersazt beds for the homeless.64
2. Pirate Urbanization
The majority of the world’s urban poor no longer live in inner cities. Since 1970 the larger share of world urban population growth has been absorbed by slum communities on the periphery of Third World cities. Sprawl has long ceased to be a distinctively North American phenomenon, if it ever was. The “horizontalization” of poor cities is often as astonishing as their population growth: Khartoum in 1988, for example, was 48 times larger in developed area than in 1955.65 Indeed, the suburban zones of many poor cities are now so vast as to suggest the need to rethink peripherality. In Lusaka, for example, the outlying shantytowns house two-thirds of the city’s population – leading one writer to suggest that “these compounds are called ‘peri-urban’ but in reality it is the city proper that is peripheral.”66 The Turkish sociologist Ça
In the sprawling cities of the Third World, then, “periphery” is a highly relative, time-specific term: today’s urban edge, abutting fields, forest, or desert, may tomorrow become part of a dense metropolitan core. With the exception of East Asia, where there are significant inventories of peripheral state-built housing (like Beijing’s older industrial suburbs of Shijingshan, Fengtai and Changxiandian), edge development in Third World urban areas takes two principal forms: squatter settlements and – to use the evocative Colombian term – urbanizaciones piratas. Both generate “shantytown” landscapes with large percentages of self-built, substandard housing with poor infrastructure provision. Although pirate subdivisions are often mislabeled as squatter communities, there are fundamental differences.
Squatting, of course, is the possession of land without sale or title. “No-cost” peripheral land has often been discussed as the magic secret of Third World urbanism: a huge unplanned subsidy to the very poor. Squatting is seldom without up-front costs, however. Squatters very often are coerced to pay considerable bribes to politicians, gangsters or police to gain access to sites, and they may continue to pay such informal “rents” in money and/or votes for years. In addition, there are the punitive costs of an unserviced location far from an urban center. Indeed, when all the costs are added up – as Erhard Berner points out in his study of Manila – squatting is not necessarily cheaper than buying a plot. Its principal attraction is the “possibility of incremental development and building improvement which leads to a [phased] spreading of the costs.”68
Squatting can sometimes become front-page political drama. In Latin America from the 1960s to the 1980s, as well as in Egypt, Turkey, and South Africa at different times, squatting took the form of land invasions, often with the support of radical groups or, more rarely, populist national governments (Peru in the 1960s; Nicaragua in the 1980s). Dependent upon public sympathy, land occupiers have traditionally targeted undeveloped public land or the estates of a single large landowner (who sometimes is later compensated). Often squatting becomes a prolonged test of will and endurance against the repressive apparatus of the state. “It is not unusual,” wrote a UCLA research team about Caracas in the 1970s, “to hear of a squatter settlement that has been constructed overnight, torn down by the police the next day, constructed again the following night, destroyed again, and reconstructed until the authorities tire of fighting.”69 Similarly, in her Tales from the Garbage Hills, Turkish writer Latife Tekin explains why Istanbul’s slums are called gecekondus (“set up overnight”): the heroic squatters of “Flower Hill” build and rebuild every shanty by night, because the authorities tear them down each morning. Only after a Homeric siege of 37 days does the government finally relent and allow the new gecekondu to take root on a garbage mountain.70
Most squatter communities, however, are the result of what sociologist Asef Bayat, writing about Tehran and Cairo, has called the “quiet encroachment of the ordinary”: the small-scale, non-confrontational infiltration of edge or interstitial sites. Unlike poor peasants’ “Brechtian mode of class struggle and resistance” – famously evoked in studies by James Scott – these struggles of the urban poor are “not merely defensive,” but, according to Bayat, “surreptitiously offensive” as they ceaselessly aim to expand the survival space and rights of the disenfranchised.71 Such encroachments, as we shall see in the next chapter, are frequently synchronized to a favorable opportunity for land occupation, such as a tight election, natural disaster, coup d’état, or revolution.
Squatting of all varieties probably reached its peak in Latin America, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia during the 1970s. Today squatting, stricto sensu, continues primarily in low-value urban land, usually in hazardous or extremely marginal locations such as floodplains, hillsides, swamps, or contaminated brownfields. As the urban economist Eileen Stillwaggon notes: “Essentially, squatters occupy no-rent land, land that has so little worth that no one bothers to have or enforce property right to it.”72 In Buenos Aires,
