organize tenants’ organizations or mount rent strikes. As two leading housing researchers explain: “Tenants are scattered throughout irregular settlements with a wide range of informal rental arrangements, and they are often unable to organize as a pressure group to protect themselves.”88
Large peripheral slums, especially in Africa, are usually complex quiltworks of kin networks, tenure systems, and tenant relationships. Diana Lee-Smith, one of the founders of Nairobi’s Mazingira Institute, has closely studied Korogocho, a huge slum on the eastern edge of the city. Korogocho includes seven villages offering a menu of different housing and rental types. The most wretched village, Grogan, consists of one-room cardboard shacks and is largely populated by female-headed households evicted from an older shantytown near the city center. Barracks-like Githaa, on the other hand, “is an entirely speculative village, built by entrepreneurs for rent,” despite the fact that the land is publicly owned. Nearby Dandora is a sites-and-services scheme where half the owners are now absentee landlords. Lee-Smith emphasizes that petty landlordship and subletting are major wealth strategies of the poor, and that homeowners quickly become exploiters of even more impoverished people. Despite the persistent heroic image of the squatter as self-builder and owner-occupier, the reality in Korogocho and other Nairobi slums is the irresistible increase in tenancy and petty exploitation.89
Soweto, having grown from a suburb to a satellite city of almost 2 million, likewise demonstrates a broad spectrum of housing statuses. Two-thirds of its residents live either in formal-sector private homes (the professional middle class) or, most commonly, council homes (the traditional working classes); in the backyards of the latter, residents have illegally constructed shacks that are rented to younger families or single adults. Even poorer people, including rural immigrants, either room in hostels or squat on the outskirts of Soweto. Johannesburg’s other famous slum from the high Apartheid era, Alexandra, is more destitute and has fewer formal-sector homes. Most of the population are squatters, renters, or hostel-dwellers.90
This diversity of property rights and housing forms in large African and Latin American slums, not surprisingly, generates very different perceptions of interest. As geographer Peter Ward points out in the case of Mexico City, “one’s ideological perspective is likely to be shaped by one’s housing status:”
the hetereogeneity of irregular settlement … undermines collective response by dividing settlements on the basis of mode of land acquisition, the “stage” of consolidation, the servicing priorities of residents, community leadership structures, social classes, and above all tenure relations (owners versus sharers versus renters). These tenure splits multiply still further the constituencies into which people fall or may be divided. … Renters, harassed squatters, displaced downtown tenants are likely to be more radical and disposed to anti-government demonstrations than are those who have, in effect, been bought-off by the government through successive housing policies.91
4. The Pariah Edge
The further analysis moves away from the center of the Third World city, the thicker the epistemological fog. As historian Ellen Brennan stresses, “Most [Third World] cities lack accurate, current data on land conversion patterns, number of housing units (informal and formal) built during the past year, infrastructural deployment patterns, subdivision patterns and so forth.”92 And governments know least about their peri-urban borders: those strange limbos where ruralized cities transition into urbanized countrysides.93
The urban edge is the societal impact zone where the centrifugal forces of the city collide with the implosion of the countryside. Thus Dakar’s huge impoverished suburb, Pikine, according to researcher Mohamadou Abdoul, is the product of the convergence of “two large-scale demographic influxes beginning in the 1970s: the arrival of populations that had been forced out – often by the military – of Dakar’s working-class neighborhoods and shantytowns, and the arrival of people caught up in the rural exodus.”94 Likewise, the two million poor people in Bangalore’s rapidly growing slum periphery include both slum-dwellers expelled from the center and farm laborers driven off the land. On the edges of Mexico City, Buenos Aires, and other Latin American cities, it is common to find shantytowns of new rural migrants next to walled suburbs of middle-class commuters fleeing crime and insecurity in the city center.95
A migrant stream of polluting, toxic and often illegal industries also seeks the permissive obscurity of the periphery. Geographer Hans Schenk observes that the urban fringe in Asia is a regulatory vacuum, a true frontier where “Darwin beats Keynes” and piratical entrepreneurs and corrupt politicians are largely unfettered by law or public scrutiny. Most of Beijing’s small garment sweatshops, for example, are hidden away in an archipelago of still partly agricultural villages and shantytowns on the city’s southern edge. Likewise in Bangalore, the urban fringe is where entrepreneurs can most profitably mine cheap labor with minimal oversight by the state.96 Millions of temporary workers and desperate peasants also hover around the edges of such world capitals of super-exploitation as Surat and Shenzhen. These labor nomads lack secure footing in either city or countryside, and often spend their lifetimes in a kind of desperate Brownian motion between the two. In Latin America, meanwhile, an inverse logic operates: labor contractors increasingly hire urban shantytown-dwellers for seasonal or temporary work in the countryside.97
But the principal function of the Third World urban edge remains as a human dump. In some cases, urban waste and unwanted immigrants end up together, as in such infamous “garbage slums” as the aptly named Quarantina outside Beirut, Hilat Kusha outside Khartoum, Santa Cruz Meyehualco in Mexico City, the former Smoky Mountain in Manila, or the huge Dhapa dump and slum on the fringe of Kolkata. Equally common are the desolate government camps and crude site-and-service settlements that warehouse populations expelled in the course of municipal wars against slums. Outside of Penang and Kuala Lumpur, for example, slum evictees are marooned in minimalist transit camps. As housing activists explain:
The term “long house” (rumay panjang in Bahasa Malay) conjures up comfortable images of some long-ago form of Malay vernacular housing, but the reality of these transit camps is quite different. These long houses are bleak lines of flimsy plywood and asbestos shacks, attached at the sides and facing across unpaved and treeless lanes onto more shacks opposite, with spotty basic services, if any. And these long houses have turned out to be not so temporary after all. Many evictees are still there, twenty years later, still waiting for the government to realize its promise of low-income housing….98
Anthropologist Monique Skidmore risked arrest to visit some of the dismal peri-urban townships – so-called “New Fields” – outside Rangoon where the military dictatorship forcibly relocated hundreds of thousands of urbanites whose former slums stood in the way of the tourist-themepark rebuilding of the city center. “Residents speak of the sorrow and pain of loss of former neighborhoods … alcohol shops, rubbish piles, stagnant water, and mud infused with untreated sewage surround most homes.” On the other hand, things are even worse in Mandalay’s peripheral shantytowns. There, Skidmore explains, “township residents must walk to the foothills of the Shan mountains looking for firewood, and there are no industrial zones, garment factories, and other sweatshops to underemploy laborers as there are in some of Rangoon’s relocated townships.”99
International refugees and internally displaced people (IDPs) are often more harshly treated even than urban evictees – and some of the Third World’s huge refugee camps have evolved into edge cities in their own right. Thus Gaza – considered by some to be the world’s largest slum – is essentially an urbanized agglomeration of refugee camps (750,000 refugees) with two-thirds of the population subsisting on less than $2 per day.100 Dadaad, just inside the Kenyan border, houses 125,000 Somalis, just as Goma in Zaire during the mid-1990s was a pitiful refuge for an estimated 700,000 Rwandans, many of whom died of cholera due to the appalling sanitation conditions. Khartoum’s desert periphery includes four huge camps (Mayo Farms, Jebel Awlia, Dar el Salaam
