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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 and Wad al-Bashir) warehousing 400,000 victims of drought, famine and civil war. Another 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 Informality in Egyptian Cities, Dallas 2004, p. 125.

22 Shi, Appendix 3, derived from UNCHS Global Urban Indicators Database, 1993. A decimal point may be misplaced in the Ibadan figure.

23 Jonathan Rigg, Southeast Asia: A Region in Transition, London 1991, p. 143.

24 Imparato and Ruster, p. 52.

25 Paul McCathy, Jakarta, UN-Habitat Case Study, London 2003, pp. 7–8.

26 Rigg, p. 119.

27 Berner, Defending a Place, pp. 21, 25, & 26.

28 Keith Pezzoli, Human Settlements and Planning for Ecological Sustainability: The Case of Mexico City, Cambridge 1998, p. 13.

29 Nitai Kundu, Kolkata, UN-Habitat Case Study, London 2003, p. 7.

30 Scores of sources were consulted and median figures were chosen over extremes.

31 Includes Nezahualcoyotl (1.5 million), Chalco (300,000), Iztapalapa (1.5 million), Chimalhuacan (250,000) and 14 other contiguous delegations and municipios in the southeast quadrant of the metropolis.

32 Includes S. J. de L. (750,000), Comas (500,000) and Independencia (200,000).

33 ‘Cono Sur’ = Villa El Salvador (350,000), San Juan de Miraflores (400,000) and Villa Maria de Triunfo (400,000).

34 ‘Cape Flats’ = Khayelitsha (400,000), Mitchell’s Plain (250,000), Crossroads (180,000) and smaller townships (from 1996 Census).

35 Islamshahr (350,000) plus Chahar-Dangeh (250,000).

36 See John Turner, “Housing priorities, settlement patterns and urban development in modernizing countries,”Journal of the American Institute of Planners 34 (1968), pp. 354–63; and “Housing as a Verb,” in John Turner and Robert Fichter (eds), Freedom to Build, New York 1972.

37 Ahmed Soliman, A Possible Way Out: Formalizing Housing Informality in Egyptian Cities, Dallas 2004, pp. 119–20

38 Ibid.

39 Keith Pezzoli, “Mexico’s Ubran Housing Environments,” in Brian Aldrich and Ranvinder Sandhu (eds.), Housing the Urban Poor: Policy and Practice in Developing Countries, London 1995, p. 145; K. Sivaramakrishnan, “Urban Governance: Changing Realities,” in Michael Cohen et al., (eds), Preparing for the Urban Future: Global Pressures and Local Forces, Washington D.C. 1997, p. 229; Fix, Arantes and Tanaka, p. 9; and Jacquemin, p. 89.

40 David Glasser, “The Growing Housing Crisis in Ecuador” in Carl Patton (ed.), Spontaneous Shelter, Philadelphia 1988, p. 150.

41 Oscar Lewis, The Children of Sanchez, New York 1961.

42 Kalinga Silva and Karunatissia Thukorala, The Watta Dwelllers, Lanham 1991,p. 20.

43 Feng-hsuan Hsueh, Beijing: The Nature and the Planning of the Chinese Capital City, Chichester 1995, pp. 182–84.

44 Hans Harms, “To live in the city centre: housing and tenants in central neighborhoods of Latin American cities,”Environment and Urbanization 9:2 (October 1997), pp. 197–98.

45 See Jo Beall, Owen Crankshaw, and Susan Parnell, Uniting a Divided City: Governance and Social Exclusion in Johannesburg, London 2002, esp. chapter 7.

46 Jeffrey Nedoroscik, The City of the Dead: A History of Cairo’s Cemetary Communities, Westport 1997, p. 43.

47 Max Rodenbeck, Cairo: The City Victorious, New York 1999, pp. 158–59.

48 See Nandini Gooptu, The Politics of the Urban Poor in Early Twentieth-Century India, Cambridge (UK) 2001, pp. 91–102.

49 Alain Jacquemin, Urban Development and New Towns in the Third World: Lessons from the New Bombay Experience, Aldershot 1999, p. 89.

50 Geert Gusters, “Inner-city Rental Housing in Lima,”Cities 18:1 (2001), p. 252.

51 Ibid, p. 254.

52 Mariana Fix, Pedro Arantes, and Giselle Tanaka, São Paulo, UN-Habitat Case Study, London 2003.

53 David Keeling, Buenos Aires: Global Dreams, Local Crisis, Chichester 1996, p. 100.

54 Michael Edwards, “Rental Housing and the Urban Poor” in Philip Amis and Peter Lloyd (eds), Housing Africa’s Urban Poor, Manchester 1990, p. 263.

55 A. Graham Tipple and David Korboe, “Housing Poverty in Ghana,” in Aldrich and Sandhu, pp. 359–61.

56 Alan Smart, Making Room: Squatter Clearance in Hong Kong, Hong Kong 1992,p. 63.

57 Seong-Kyu Ha, “The Urban Poor, Rental Accomodation, Housing Policy in Korea,”Cities 19:3 (2002), pp. 197–98.

58 Asian Coalition for Housing Rights, “Building an Urban Poor People’s Movement in Phnom Penh, Cambodia,”Environment and Urbanization 12:2 (October 2001) p. 63; Soliman, p. 119.

59 Bruce Taylor, “Hong Kong’s Floating Settlements,” in Carl Patton (ed.), Spontaneous Shelter, Philadelphia 1988, p. 198.

60 Minar Pimple and Lysa John, “Security of Tenure: Mumbai’s Experience,” in Durand-Lasserve and Royston (eds), Holding Their Ground: Secure Land Tenure for the Urban Poor in Developing Countries, London 2002, p. 78.

61 Jacquemin, p. 90.

62 Frederic Thomas, Calcutta Poor: Elegies on a City Above Pretense, Armonk (NY) 1997, pp. 47, 136.

63 Erhard Berner, “Learning from informal markets,” in David Westendorff and Deborah Eade (eds), Development and Cities, Oxford 2002, p. 233.

64 Amy Otchet, “Lagos: The survival of the determined.”UNESCO Courier, 1999.

65 Galal Eltayeb, Khartoum, UN-Habitat Case Studies, London 2003, p. 2.

66 K. Sivaramakrishnan, “Urban Governance: Changing Realities,” in Michael Cohen et al. (eds), Preparing for the Urban Future: Global Pressures and Local Forces, Washington D.C. 1997, p. 229.

67 Çalar Keyder, “The Housing Market from Informal to Global,” in Keyder (ed.), Istanbul: Between the Global and the Local, Lanham 1999, p. 149.

68 Berner, Defending a Place, pp. 236–37.

69 Kenneth Karst, Murray and Audrey Schwartz, The Evolution of Law in the Barrios of Caracas, Los Angeles 1973, pp. 6–7.

70 Latife Tekin, Berji Kristin: Tales from the Garbage Hills, London 1996 (published in Turkey in 1984).

71 Asef Bayat, “Un-civil society: The politics of the ‘informal people’”, Third World Quarterly 18:1 (1997), pp. 56–57.

72 Eileen Stillwaggon, Stunted Lives, Stagnant Economies, New Brunswick 1998, p. 67.

73 Keeling, pp. 102–05.

74 Paul Baross, “Sequencing land development: The price implications of legal and illegal settlement growth,” in Paul Baross and Jan van der Linden (eds), The Transformation of Land Supply Systems in Third World Cities, Aldershot 1990, p. 69.

75 Rakesh Mohan, Understanding the Developing Metropolis, World Bank, New York 1994, pp. 152–53.

76 Keeling, pp. 107–08.

77 On Triads’ control of squatting, see Alan Smart, Making Room: Squatter Clearance in Hong Kong, Hong Kong 1992, p. 114.

78 Akhtar Hameed Khan, Orangi Pilot Project: Reminiscences and Reflections, Karachi 1996, p. 72.

79 Urban Resource Center, “Urban Poverty and Transport: A case study from Karachi,”Environment and Urbanization 13:1 (April 2001), p. 224.

80 Paul Baross and Jan van der Linden, “Introduction,” in Baross and van der Linden, pp. 2–7.

81 Ayse Yonder, “Implications of Double Standards in Housing Policy: Development of Informal Settlements in Istanbul,” in Edesio Fernandes and Ann Varley (eds), Illegal Cities: Law and Urban Change in Developing Countries, London 1998,p. 62.

82 Philip Amis, “Commercialized Rental Housing in Nairobi,” in Carl Patton (ed.), Spontaneous Shelter, Philadelphia 1988, pp. 240, 242.

83 Marianne Fay and Anna Wellenstein, “Keeping a Roof over One’s Head,” in Fay (ed.), The Urban Poor in Latin America, Washington D.C. 2005, p. 92.

84 Rigg, p. 143.

85 Soliman, A Possible Way Out, p. 97.

86 Alan Gilbert, In Search of a Home: Rental and Shared Housing in Latin America, Tucson 1993, p. 4.

87 Eckstein, pp. 60, 235–38.

88 Alain Durand-Lasserve and Lauren Royston, “International Trends and Country Contexts,” in Durand-Lasserve and Royston, p. 7.

89 Diana Lee-Smith, “Squatter Landlords in Nairobi: A Case Study of Korogocho,” in Amis and Lloyd, pp. 176–85.

90 Jo Beall, Owen Crankshaw, and Susan Parnell, “Local Government, Poverty Reduction and Inequality in Johannesburg,”Environment and Urbanization 12:1 (April 2000), pp. 112–13.

91 Peter Ward, Mexico City, London 1990, p. 193.

92 Ellen Brennan, “Urban Land and Housing Issues Facing the Third World,” in Kasarda and Parnell, p. 80.

93 See Seabrook, p. 187.

94 Mohamadou Abdoul, “The Production of the City and Urban Informalities,” in Enwezor et al., p. 342

95 Guy Thuillier, “Gated Communities in the Metropolitan Area of Buenos Aires,”Housing Studies 20:2 (March 2005), p. 255.

96 Hans Schenk, “Urban Fringes in Asia: Markets versus Plans,” in I. Baud and J. Post (eds), Realigning Actors in an Urbanizing World, Aldershot 2002, pp. 121–22, 131.

97 Cristobal Kay, “Latin America’s Agrarian Transformation: Peasantization and Proletarianization,” in Bryceson, Kay and Mooij, p. 131.

98 “Special Issue on How Poor People Deal with Eviction,” ACHR, Housing by People in Asia 15 (October 2003), p. 19.

99 Monique Skidmore, Karaoke Fascism: Burma and the Politics of Fear, Philadelphia 2004, pp. 150–51, 156.

100 Fact sheet, Al-Dameer Association for Human Rights in Gaza, 2002.

101 Eltayeb, p. 2.

102 Washington Post, 26 August 2002.

103 Hodges, p. 22.

104 Project Counseling Service, Deteriorating Bogotá: Displacement and War in Urban Centers, Bogotá, December 20002, pp. 3–4.

105 Michael Taussig, Law in a Lawless Land, New York 2003, pp. 114–15.