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By clearing slums, they often eliminate better communities than they create, and at a huge cost. Squatter evictions have often created more misery than they have prevented. It has been brought to light that forced eviction is as bad a crime as the crimes that are committed in the slums. Berman (1987) describes instances like these as ‘urbicide’. For example, in Zimbabwe, 2005 operation Murambatsvina (‘restore order’) forcibly removed
64,677 families, leaving 700,000 unemployed and affecting 2.4 million countrywide (AP, 2005). These statistics definitely seem to fight in the slumdwellers corner;
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Mugabe, the Mumbai council and many others throughout the history of slum clearing have thought these people to be almost disposable and malleable to the city’s decisions. These figures show how integral slum-dwellers are to the city in providing an economy that not only keeps their low quality of lives above dismal, but also giving jobs to many others. One slum clearance that stands out above the rest is the Rio de Janeiro clearance, where 139,000 people were evicted from 1965-74. Davis (2006) describes it as “… gaining irresistible momentum as land values exploded”. One would hope that the government would plough-back some of the money earned from the land sales into slum-upgrading programs. Temporary housing for the poor One other option for the poor is temporary housing. These temporary structures are often made from local materials such as wood, bamboo and mud and can have a lifespan between a few months and 10 years. They have some but not all of the facilities that permanent housing has such as toilets, showers and kitchens. Sometimes, temporary housing is turned into permanent housing, even though it has a very poor building quality and infrastructure. Local authority housing estates In Slum and Squatter Settlements in SubSaharan Africa (1988), Mhlanga and Obudho describe a study by Charles Blankson which gives a very good insight into the problems that arise with housing estates. The housing estates were built as a reaction to the 1939 earthquake in 6 different places within Ghana. It wasn’t until 1949 that the scheme was implemented, and by this time is had been changed to incorporate housing shortages elsewhere in the country. In the study, it has been recorded in detail about the myriad of physical and spatial problems that these housing estates had. Housing developments built in Accra and Kumasi, Ghana, were so poorly designed that they did little to improve the quality of life, there was no regard for the end-user’s needs. This was because the government felt that they were doing the slum dwellers a favour
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and therefore didn’t commit a lot of time for money into the project.
“One of main problems identified was in the design of the buildings; they didn’t have any relation to the life-styles of the occupants. This could be explained by the absence of any sociospatial studies prior to the design and construction. The blatant disregard for the occupants needs by the housing corporation was probably a tactical admission of their own failure to provide housing to start with.” (Mhlanga & Obudho, 1988) The poor design and suitability of the building was mainly due to a lack of input from the inhabitants. Turner (1977), is very much in favour of community participation in this way and states that by communities getting involved with projects, will lead to liveable environments and inspire social well-being. In other words, by putting intellectual effort into projects, the inhabitants are more likely to protect their environment from things such as anti-social behaviour and extreme weather. In Blankson’s study, he found that the residents did indeed leave the building to rot and decay over time. However, this was mainly due to the lack of adequate resources, but maintenance by the residents would have gone a fair way to prolonging the building’s lifespan. What’s the best upgrading type? Slum demolition and/or relocation are counter-productive, it simply shifts the problem somewhere else, and for that reason, it can be argued that it carries least credentials. The sites and services projects are in principal, great ideas. They provide secure tenure to the dweller, which enables and empowers them to upgrade their dwellings to the best of their ability. However, these projects are too expensive for the poorest of the slum-dwellers which accounts for a large portion of the slum population. Upgrading with government assistance, gives the dwellers the tools and the means to upgrade, but hands the power to the government and the sustainability of upgrading is questionable due to the lack of funds.
Upgrading through the help of NGO’s is similar, however, they have the advantage of educated volunteers and charity workers who are very knowledgeable on upgrading and can educate the slum dwellers as well. I think it is very important to make the slumdwellers help themselves, but with help from NGO’s would go far to helping them achieve their aims quicker. For that reason I think that upgrading through self-help and with additional help from NGO’s is a very good way to upgrade. There is a dire need to stop rural-urban immigrants. They often come to the cities due to the government’s imbalance of resources; people in rural areas seem to be more deprived. Before slum upgrading can properly be achieved, there needs to be some emphasis on re-balancing the economic and social scales. Mhlanga (1988) supports this by stating that education should be designed to inform rural dwellers about the truth of town life so that they have a good basis for deciding whether or not to migrate rather than blindly migrating. “The more you invest in cities, the less you are investing in the countryside and you are just perpetuating the problem,” . (D’Monte, 2008) However, the possibility of rural-urban migration ceasing seems highly unlikely. It seems like slums will always be around and upgrading them will be like washing windows on a sky-scraper; once the last one is clean, the first one needs cleaning again. Over time the standard of living could be raised; by upgrading and securing tenure, it converts ‘sweat equity’ (the effort the owner has gone to, to upgrade his home) and materials into capital, which can be taxed. It also is considerably cheaper than demolishing and relocating a slum, which also avoids the loss of jobs in the area, preserves friendship and casual labour networks, keeps residents close to the CBD, and nurtures settlements into mature, integrated communities. (Perlman, 1981) On the other hand for squatters, upgrading implies a loss of freedom. Originally, they paid no rent and had no external controls on land or building use applied on them. With upgrading comes legislation, so squatters
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