Vikas Sagar is a tiny squatter community in Mumbai (formerly. Bombay) ... The women of Vikas Sagar are ready. .... and sewers to every home in the district.
informal settlements
Squatters and the cities of tomorrow
T
BY ROBERT NEUWIRTH he women of Vikas Sagar still live in one-storey huts hacked into the steep hillside above Mahim Bay. They still worry about floods and landslides. And they are concerned about having enough money to make ends meet. But they have also transformed their lives and their community. Today, their homes are permanent, made of concrete instead of mud. Their walkways are now paved with cement and tile, to prevent erosion. And they have pooled their resources to create a communal savings plan that functions like a small-scale bank, giving each of them the ability to get loans. How did they make these improvements? Instead of agonising, they organised. Vikas Sagar is a tiny squatter community in Mumbai (formerly Bombay), India. It was founded decades ago, but the nine women sitting on the floor of Mumtaz Sadik Shaikh’s house know that no matter how long they have been living here, the government still considers them illegal. But they also know that being squatters doesn’t mean they cannot fight for their rights. ‘Unless we take action, nothing will be granted to us,’ says Lali Penday. Her neighbours nod approvingly. It wasn’t always this way. Little more than a decade ago, the women of Vikas Sagar were traditional housewives, so controlled by their husbands that they seldom left their small community. ‘When we started,’ remembers Sangita Duby, ‘we were not able to go out of our houses. We were illiterate and had to sign our names 44 | DELIVERY
with a thumbprint. Now we are literate and can sign our names in Hindi and English.’ The women of Vikas Sagar know who the local politicians are. And, even more important, the politicians know who they are, too. There are a billion squatters in the world today, almost one in six people on the planet. And the numbers are on the rise. Every day close to 200 000 people leave the world’s rural regions and head for the cities. That’s 130 people arriving every minute, two every second. They all face the same struggle. They come to the city in search of work. And they find work, too, but they can’t find a place to live. No developer is building for them. No government seems willing to make the investment required to provide decent homes that they can afford. So they become squatters, invading unused turf or joining communities established by people who made the same journey long before them. If current trends continue, there will be two billion squatters by 2030. And by 2050, halfway through this new century, there will be three billion squatters. At that point, one-third of the people on the globe will be squatters. Most governments have responded to this massive migration with outrage, attempting to drive squatters out of the city. This stone-age approach remains the norm today. A year ago, Mumbai embarked on a drive against squatters. The goal: to remake crowded Bombay as a city open for development. Local officials sent the police to flatten 90 000 homes, leaving hundreds of thousands of citizens homeless. More recently, in June 2005, Zimbabwe embarked on Operation Murambatsvina (‘Clean up the Trash’), which brutally up-
rooted thousands of long-term squatters from Harare and Bulawayo. Some families were forced to live without shelter in the middle of winter until authorities trucked them to villages far from their homes and dropped them off with a horrifying final message: if you come back to the city we will kill you. And in November 2005, Kolkata (Calcutta, to those not attuned to the postcolonial spelling) started its own effort to evict squatters. A panel of judges ordered the city to eject 20 000 families from a well-established squatter village alongside one of the city’s commuter rail lines. The residents had to block the rail service to demand that the city take some steps to provide land for them elsewhere. These gover nment-sponsored pogroms are based on a fundamental misunderstanding of squatters and their communities. Most outsiders see these neighbourhoods solely as outposts of misery, lawlessness and criminality. And it’s certainly true that you will find hunger, poverty and disease among the squatters. Still, hike the sodden pathways of any of the world’s squatter communities and you will also find health clinics, beauty salons, grocery stores, bars, restaurants, tailors, clothiers, churches and schools. In most squatter communities, the residents build
and rebuild and build again, often one wall at a time, to make their homes better. In the midst of the squalor and open sewage that typifies many of their communities, you’ll find commerce, thrift, energy and hope. The way forward for the world’s cities is not to muscle the squatters out, but to tap this energy. With a guarantee that they won’t be evicted and the ability to participate in political structures, squatters will rebuild their communities and their cities.
There are a billion squatters in the world today, almost one in six people on the planet. And the numbers are on the rise. The women of Vikas Sagar are ready. They are part of a mandal, or savings society, organised through Navjeet Community Centre, a small non-profit organisation affiliated with Holy Family Hospital, which is owned and operated by
the Catholic Church. Navjeet, however, is non-denominational, and has brought together scores of women in various squatter communities in and around Mumbai’s Bandra neighbourhood. Each women’s organisation started with savings, but political action was not far behind. In Vikas Sagar, women won electricity for their community by holding a noisy demonstration in front of the public utility office. Indeed, one member recounts, they had to threaten to break the windows of the electricity board office to win adequate electrical service in their community. Another mandal, in the Muslim community of Behrampada, has taken a different tack towards community empowerment. It has formed a community court, which passes civil and religious decrees and intervenes in community disputes. To be fair, Navjeet’s activities are a tiny effort in a city with 12 million residents and six million squatters. But Mumbai is also the headquarters of a world-wide squatter organising effort: Slum/Shack Dwellers International. SDI got its start under a different name back in the 1970s, but the movement is now international, with chapters in 14 countries. As with the women of Vikas Sagar, SDI bases its mobilisation on creating communal savDELIVERY | 45
Photographs: Robert Neuwirth
informal settlements
A generation ago it was a hamlet: today Sultanbeyi in eastern Istanbul, Turkey, is an established squatter city of 300 000 people.
Rocinha houses.
ings groups and its 5,6 million members around the globe have amassed nearly $32 million in savings. The principle is simple: each squatter community that joins SDI creates a savings association. Any family can join if they are willing to contribute a small amount every day. The pooled money is returned to the community in the form of small loans. ‘Through savings, we don’t have to demand that the politicians improve living conditions or economic conditions or homes,’ says Jockin Arputham, a longtime squatter activist in Mumbai who is the founder and president of SDI. A slight man with thinning hair, a sparse grey moustache, and the suggestion of a Buddha belly, Jockin might be called the philosopher king of squatter activism. A firebrand organiser before he became a devotee of savings (he once locked a government official in a latrine to win the promise of new toilets for his community), Jockin now sees savings as a more efficient way of getting things done. ‘Because of savings, we can do what we want to and achieve what we want to. Because of savings you empower yourself.’ SDI uses the power of savings, plus surveying, mapping, and conducting population counts in squatter areas to force
night’. Further, once a squatter community has 2 000 residents, it can petition the federal government to be recognised as a legal municipality. This gives squatters a chance at self-government. Sultanbeyli, on the Asian side of Istanbul, is a perfect test case of the value of political rights in unleashing squatter creativity. A generation ago, Sultanbeyli was a tiny hamlet that was just beginning to attract immigrants from the east. These early arrivals lived in hovels, pirated electricity, and survived without water or toilets. But as more residents came, Sultanbeyli opted to pursue political rights. The area became a legal municipality in 1989 and a district (a designation with a bit more power and independence) in 1992. Today, Yahya Karakaya, Sultanbeyli’s popularly elected mayor, sits in his airconditioned office on the top floor of the seven-storey squatter city hall and looks out on an amazing squatter empire: a city of 300 000 people, most of whom live in solid concrete and brick buildings, with a bustling main road full of shops, offices, restaurants, banks, and even car dealerships. Using its new-found political weight, Sultanbeyli arranged with Istanbul’s big-city government to bring water
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governments to work with squatters to redevelop communities. So far, the group’s strategy has led to the construction of almost 80 000 permanent homes. In addition, it has helped secure land for 125 000 squatter families. In a sense, Jockin and his allies are developing a parallel government, one that perhaps, when money and capacity meet, will be able to provide services that governments currently refuse to provide to squatter areas. Jockin is also a master of media relations. After authorities intent on demolishing Mumbai’s squatter communities insisted that the poor who flock to the city should simply return to their former rural homes, Jockin told one interviewer, ‘I’m willing to give Mumbai’s middle class a plane ticket to go back to their villages. They have acres to go back to. Will they?’ Sitting cross-legged on the floor of his office in a former garage behind Mumbai’s Byculla municipal infirmary, Jockin sums up this thinking: ‘We very strongly believe that the problems of the urban poor can only be solved by the urban poor, not by anybody else. The urban poor will be the change agents of the city.’ But that doesn’t mean there’s no role for government. Enlightened laws and
policies can work in tandem with dynamic organised communities. In Thailand, for instance, the government’s Urban Community Development Office funds improvements in squatter areas by working through co-operative community networks. This government initiative doesn’t seek to remake these communities, but rather to engage the residents themselves in determining the kinds of progress they want to achieve. And sometimes what people want is not new housing, but rather infrastructure improvements, like clean drinking water or adequate electrical service. Similarly, several Brazilian cities – most notably Porto Alegre and Recife – have reached out to their favelas, or squatter communities. With participatory budgeting and the creation of special zoning rules to guide development of the favelas, they have essentially attempted to incorporate squatters into the legal city. An even more effective approach, which exists, so far as I know, only in Turkey, involves giving squatters political rights. In Turkey, if squatters build overnight without being caught, they cannot be evicted without being taken to court. This is why Turkey’s squatter areas are known as gecekondu, meaning ‘it happened at
and sewers to every home in the district. In exchange, Sultanbeyli’s squatter politicians agreed to rein in their city’s growth, and passed strict rules against encroachment in surrounding forests, which are crucial to Istanbul’s water supply. But moving into agitation, organizing and politics takes self-confidence. And, in my two years living in squatter communities across the developing world, I found that this was the very thing most squatters lacked. Consider Elocy Kagwiria Murungi, a squatter in Nairobi, Kenya. I think of her as a squatter success. But that’s not how she sees herself. She leans towards the flickering kerosene lantern in her cramped single-room dwelling and says, ‘I act like lice, the way lice act. I burrow in and scratch out an existence’. The uncertain light bounces off the corrugated metal walls of the cabin, casting wild shadows on her face. We are in Kibera, Nairobi’s largest and most primitive shanty community. Between 500 000 and a million people live here, without water, sewers or services. Many people here don’t even have toilets. Like most of her neighbours, like most squatters around the world, Elocy came to the city with nothing. She had
to scrounge to make ends meet. She sold paper and pencils on the street. She took jobs washing dishes and serving food in cut-price restaurants inside the squatter community. Now she is a teacher, working in a school for street children. It is not a high-paying job, but it is rewarding work. In her time in Kibera, Elocy has improved her life and opened up opportunities for her young son Collins. Yet this intelligent and hard-working woman has a different view of her reality. She describes herself as a parasite. Changing that self-perception is the key to moving forward in the world’s burgeoning squatter communities. For it’s people like Elocy and Collins who, when they recognise that they are leaders and not parasites, will be the most powerful force for change in their cities. With permanence, stability and political rights, squatters will build the cities of tomorrow. Robert Neuwirth, from New York city, spent two years living in squatter communities in the developing world to write Shadow Cities: A billion squatters, a new urban world (Routledge, 2005.) See subscriptions, page 62 DELIVERY | 47
