What Matters: Urban squatters save the world

Cities and the global economy: Test your knowledge

Urban squatters save the world

7 January 2011

Cities have always created wealth, and have always been a population sink. Still, a world now more than half urban and headed toward 80 percent urban by mid-century is something new in history.

Population will peak by 2050, probably below 9 billion, and then decline rapidly. That’s never happened before, either. Unless climate change or some other calamity intervenes, city-driven wealth and technology will accelerate worldwide, the bulk of humanity will continue its climb out of poverty, and peasant life dependent on subsistence agriculture will nearly disappear. Such a world four decades from now would reflect nothing more radical than a continuation of what’s been going on for the last four decades.

Villages all over the world are emptying out as people flood into cities in search of opportunity. They keep coming because they are succeeding in town. Every year there are 70 million new residents in cities, decade after decade, most of them in the developing world, the “global south,” where five out of six of us live (5.7 billion). The ex-peasants often start in nearby small towns to acquire urban savvy and then head to big city slums. When the existing slums are full, they build new ones—squatter cities. A billion people live in such places now, and another billion is expected.

It can be rough. New shanty-towns lack sanitation, water, electricity, and organization. In the early years, the place stinks, water and power are stolen and irregular, organization is improvised and sometimes criminal, and the homes are hovels. The whole community is always under threat of being bulldozed out of existence. But the outlaw citizens find themselves in a cash economy at last, and it is vibrant. Every lane among the shacks teems with food stalls, cafés, hair salons, clothing racks, temples, health clubs, and mini-shops selling everything. Cell phones abound. Most of the economy is “informal”—no deeds, no licenses, no taxes. Everyone works, including the children, many of whom are also getting some education, often from private informal schools. Rupee by rupee, shilling by shilling, peso by peso, real by real, squatter families are working their way up in the world.

As they do so, they lift the world with them. Mumbai, a city of 17 million, is half slums, but it accounts for one-sixth of India’s domestic product. The new city dwellers form a vast, young labor force, unencumbered by large families. They are ambitious, resourceful, and entrepreneurial. They buy goods and services and provide an enormous new market for cash-crop agriculture back in the countryside. The women, liberated from the strictures of village life, become economic players themselves—the preferred customers for microloans, for example.

According to urban experts, squatters are now the dominant city builders in the world. Over time the tarpaper shacks are rebuilt of masonry, four and five stories high. The homes eventually have refrigerators, TVs, washing machines, and computers. Motor scooters multiply. Air conditioners require new levels of electricity.

Meanwhile the marginal-land subsistence farms the squatters abandoned are growing back—the trees and shrubs no longer cleared for crops or burned for cooking, the wildlife no longer eaten. According to a 2005 UN report, fifty-five times more rainforest is growing back as second growth in the newly empty rural areas than is being cut down from primary forest. In town, the squatters are the world’s most efficient users of energy and materials. They recycle everything themselves, and provide extensive recycling services for the city at large. Dharavi, the biggest slum in Mumbai, has four thousand recycling units and thirty thousand ragpickers.

All the great cities in the world once began as shantytowns. The difference now is scale and pace. London, Paris, Berlin, New York, and Tokyo continue to grow, but the new great cities—Lagos, São Paulo, Mexico City, Jakarta, Delhi, Shanghai, Karachi, Manila, Tehran, and many more—are growing three times faster and nine times bigger. A 2006 UN report says that “fully 85 percent of the world’s working-age youth, those between the age of 15 and 24, live in the developing world.”

So what’s new? For the next three decades we will have huge, churning new cities full of young people pursuing opportunity in the global south, contrasted with sclerotic old cities full of aging populations holding on to what they have in the global north. Where do you think the action’s going to be?

Comment [16]

Agree? Disagree? Let us know what you think. Please include your full name with your comment. Comments may be edited.

and what will those urban slum dwellers,without water, electricity or SEWAGE DISPOSAL … eat, while the forests are growing verdantly back?
nuclear mushroom, factory chicken and lots of steroids
sounds like my idea of hell, and im so glad i will be stone dead and beyond caring by 2050.

Posted 19 January 2011, 23:36 by chands
“Population will peak by 2050, probably below 9 billion, and then decline rapidly”. The second part is most concerning to me. I will most likely make it to 2050, but what about future generations? Should we not rather focus on a positive post-2050 outcome than how we can profit most from the coming 4 decades?

Posted 18 January 2011, 04:01 by Martin
In the ‘brave new world’ a few of us will eat more, and most of us will starve more, but all of us will endure varying stages of deprivation- in our cities and our villages. A farmer struggling to survive on a small patch of land that costs more to cultivate than it does to purchase cheaper produce abundantly made available from another village/country because of globalization cannot insist that his/her children satisfy their hunger by looking out of the window and soak in the picturesque countryside. Impoverished families and hungry children care less for their parents’ ecological concerns as much as they do for their next meal.

We are all hungry. Most for food. Some for thought provoking insightful articles. Not all of us are satisfied.

Posted 17 January 2011, 00:57 by Sam
“Rupee by rupee, shilling by shilling, peso by peso, real by real, squatter families are working their way up in the world.”

How blatantly naive, this view! Of course, this is also the perfect excuse for enforced deregulation and globalization under the regime of a so-called meritocracy, the like McKinsey and other free riders of modern society like it.

Fact however is that on one hand, every year, the growing percentage of poor people in this world gets even poorer per capita.
On the other hand, the small percentage of super rich people accumulate more wealth from year to year. Any guesses where this wealth might come from?

Get real! Or be at least man enough to point out the negative externalities in our economic exploitation system.

If our “meritocracy” were a real meritocracy, things would level-out over time, unlike what we observe.

Thanks for your consideration.

Posted 16 January 2011, 16:58 by George Goldman
“Which new skills has to be developed by national and local government to best manage megalopolis?”

I think you’re trying to solve too many problems all at once, Francesco. If you direct government to manage it, you’re going to waste all your resources on bureaucracy and social planning. I think what Stewart is describing is a self-organizing system (one that will evolve regardless of our opinions about the environmental implications).

Might it not be more effective to have government stay out of the way – let people continue to find their own solutions, let them choose the professions that are most useful to their neighbors – and direct the government’s resources to instances where people start to do one another harm, and to provide a venue (courts) for resolving disputes? Seems likelier to have a good outcome, to me.

I find Stewart’s description of this potential future in the cities fascinating. Should be well worth the effort of checking some of his facts.

Posted 13 January 2011, 17:08 by Dug
If squatter cities are so wonderful, why is Haiti such a mess, as are the squatter neighborhoods of Brazil? I used to think the old Stewart Brand was wonderful, but the new one, I dunno.

Posted 13 January 2011, 14:12 by Marc Brenman
Rising commodity price coupled with climate change, corporate sector will takeup the agriculture production in future in the rural areas, which already started some parts of the Asia in terms of vertical integration by supermarket chains. Again there always a pressure on corporate against indigenius method factory type production.Once the corporate venture starts in full scale in rural areas, there will be again shift in the human migration.

Posted 12 January 2011, 23:54 by Rajiq
In reply to Nathan above. Agreed. As the consumer adopts modern consumer lifestyles, they reduce the earths carrying capacity further.

For readers interested in more on population and sustainable challenges, see:

http://8020vision.com/2010/06/21/the-real-population-problem/

I put together some charts that show the trends in income and energy consumption for US, China, India and Brazil.

Jay Kimball
8020 Vision

Posted 12 January 2011, 10:50 by jaykimball
Agree with Nathan above. I am witnessing it right now in India. Process of shift from agriculture is not accompanied by rise in agricultural productivity. This is happening because the investment in agriculture (and in villages) is dismal. This is the real reason for the ‘emptying villages’. This is forced migration. Instead of a rosy future of urban future, the real issue will be food security.

Posted 12 January 2011, 10:25 by Ganesh Kulkarni
If “fifty-five times more rainforest is growing back as second growth in the newly empty rural areas than is being cut down from primary forest” have intelligent timber companies now focused their attentions on these easily accessed areas as opposed to the more remote logging territories? Or are they being used as wood fuel lots to provide charcoals to slum dwellers?

In terms of intrinsic biodiversity value, implying an equivalency between primary rainforest and secondary pioneer forest regrowth on former cultivated plots is like setting a ferrari on a par with a lada.

Posted 12 January 2011, 05:01 by Simon Jennings