1.5 million internally displaced people – mainly Southerners – live in scores of large squatter settlements around the Sudanese metropolis.101
Likewise, hundreds of thousands of war victims and returned refugees from Iran and Pakistan squat without water or sanitation in scores of hillside slums above Kabul. “In the Karte Ariana district,” reported the Washington Post in August 2002, “hundreds of families who fled combat between Taliban and opposition forces in rural northern Afghanistan are now squeezed into a maze of vertical slums without kitchens or bathrooms, sleeping 15 and 20 to a hut.” There has been little rain for years and many wells have stopped working; children in these slums suffer from continual sore throats and various diseases from contaminated water. Life expectancy is among the lowest in the world.102
Two of the world’s largest populations of IDPs are in Angola and Colombia. Angola was forcibly urbanized by more than a quarter-century of civil war (1975 to 2002) – spurred on by the machinations of Pretoria and the White House – which displaced 30 percent of the population. Many refugees never returned to their former homes in the ruined and dangerous countryside, but squatted instead in the bleak musseques (shantytowns) that surround Luanda, Lobito, Cabinda, and other cities. As a result, Angola, only 14 percent urban in 1970, is now a majority urban nation. Most of its city-dwellers are both desperately poor and almost totally ignored by the state, which in 1998 was estimated to spend only 1 percent of its budget on public education and welfare.103
The unending civil wars in Colombia likewise have added more than 400,000 IDPs to Bogotá’s urban poverty belt, which includes the huge informal settlements of Sumapaz, Ciudad Bolívar, Usme and Soacha. “Most displaced,” explains an aid NGO, “are social outcasts, excluded from formal life and employment. Currently, 653,800 Bogotanos (2002) have no employment in the city and, even more shocking, half of them are under the age of 29.” Without urban skills and frequently without access to schools, these young peasants and their children are ideal recruits for street gangs and paramilitaries. Local businessmen vandalized by urchins, in turn, form gupos de limpieza with links to rightwing death squads, and the bodies of murdered children are dumped at the edge of town.104
The same nightmare prevails on the outskirts of Cali, where anthropologist Michael Taussig invokes Dante’s Inferno to describe the struggle for survival in two “stupendously dangerous” peripheral slums. Navarro is a notorious “garbage mountain” where hungry women and children pick through waste while youthful gunmen (malo de malo) are either hired or exterminated by local rightwing paramilitaries. The other settlement, Carlos Alfredo Díaz, is full of “kids running around with homemade shotguns and grenades.” “It dawns on me,” writes Taussig, “that just as the guerilla have their most important base in the endless forests of the Caquetá, at the end of nowhere on the edge of the Amazon basin, so the gang world of youth gone wild has its sacred grove, too, right here on the urban edge, where the slums hit the cane fields at Carlos Alfredo Díaz.”105
1 Chris Abani, Graceland, New York 2004, p. 7.
2 Anqing Shi, How Access to Urban Potable Water and Sewage Connections Affects Child Mortality, Development Research Group working paper, World Bank, January 2000, p. 14.
3 DPU/UCL and UN-Habitat, Understanding Slums: Case Studies for the Global Report on Human Settlements, London 2003 – available on-line at www.ucl.ac.uk/dpureports/Global_Report. Most of these studies are summarized in an appendix at the back of The Challenge of Slums. Missing, however, is the brilliant survey of Khartoum by Galal Eltayeb: deleted, one supposes, because of his characterization of the “Islamist, totalitarian regime.”
4 See discussion: Challenge, p. 245.
5 Branko Milanovic, True World Income Distribution: 1988 and 1993, World Bank working paper, New York 1999, np.
6 Prunty, p. 2.
7 J. Yelling, Slums and Slum Clearance in Victorian London, London 1986, p. 5.
8 Robert Woods et al., The Poor in the Great Cities (from Scribners Magazine), New York 1895, p. 305; Blair Ruble, Second Metropolis: Pragmatic Pluralism in Gilded Age Chicago, Silver Age Moscow, and Meiji Osaka, Cambridge 2001, pp. 266–67 (Khitrov); Rudyard Kipling, The City of Dreadful Night, London 1891, p. 71.
9 Rev. Edwin Chapin, Humanity in the City, New York 1854, p. 36.
10 See Carrol Wright, The Slums of Baltimore, Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia: Seventh Special Report of the Commissioner of Labor, Washington 1894, pp. 11–15.
11 Challenge, pp. 12–13.
12 UN-Habitat executive director Anna Tibaijuka quoted in “More than one billion people call urban slums their home,”City Mayors Report, February 2004: www.citymayors.com/report/slums.html.
13 UN-Habitat, Slums of the World: The Face of Urban Poverty in the New Millennium?, working paper, Nairobi 2003, annex 3.
14 These estimates are derived from the 2003 UN-Habitat case-studies and an averaging of dozens of diverse sources too numerous to cite.
15 Christiaan Grootaert and Jeanine Braithwaite, “The Determinants of Poverty in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union,” in Braithwaite, Grootaert, and Milanovic (eds), Poverty and Social Assistance in Transition Countries, New York 2000,p. 49; UNCHS Global Indicators Database 1993.
16 Office of the Mayor, Ulaanbaatar City, “Urban Poverty Profile,” submitted to World Bank, n.d. (PDF at infrocity.org/F2F/poverty/papers2/(UB(Mongolia)%20Poverty.pdf).
17 Simon, p. 103; Jean-Luc Piermay, “Kinshasa: A Reprieved Mega-City?,” in Rakodi (ed.), p. 236; and Maria Ledo Garcia, Urbanization and Poverty in the Cities of the National Economic Corridor in Bolivia, Delft 2002, p. 175 (60% of Cochabamba on dollar per day or less).
18 Alternately, Luanda’s child mortality is 400 times higher than that of Rennes, France, the city with the lowest under-5-years death rate (Shi, p. 2).
19 Challenge, p. 28.
20 Kavita Datta and Gareth Jones, ‘Preface,’ in Datta and Jones (eds), Housing and Finance in Developing Countries, London 1999, p. xvi. In Kolkata, for example, the poverty line is defined as the monetary equivalent of 2100 calories of nutrition per day. Thus the poorest man in Europe would most likely be a rich man in Kolkata and vice versa.
21 World Bank report quoted in Ahmed Soliman, A Possible Way Out: Formalizing Housing
