Housing Disablement: Market Failures, Haphazard Policies and the Global Proliferation of Slums

Abstract

A few years ago, humankind crossed a significant watershed: for the first time in history, more than half of the world’s population are now living in urban areas. Cities, particularly those in developing countries, have absorbed almost all of the population growth of the last decades and will continue to do so. Most newcomers end up in overcrowded, underserviced, smelly and noisy informal settlements, often in hazardous locations, exploited by slumlords, and harassed and often brutally evicted by the police. The MDG target of ‘significant improvement in the lives of 100 million slum dwellers by 2020’ has sounded ambitious, but implies, even in the case of success, an increase in the number of residents of unimproved slums by 400 million to 1.4 billion. Since then, it has been carelessly mixed up with the Cities Alliance’s slogan ‘cities without slums’ and abused to justify the eradication of the informal settlements of the poor (Huchzermeyer 2011: 1).

The breeding places of disease, the infamous holes and cellars in which the capitalist mode of production confines our workers night after night, are not abolished; they are merely shifted elsewhere! The same economic necessity which produced them in the first place, produces them in the next place also.

Friedrich Engels (1935 [1872]: 77)