[from The Technium]
Cities are technological artifacts, the largest technology we make. Their impact is out of proportion to the number of humans living in them. As the chart above shows, the percentage of humans living in cities averaged about one or two percent for most of recorded history. (The chart’s Y axis is a logarithmic scale of percentage.) Yet almost everything that we think of when we say “culture” arose within cities. After all, the terms “city” and “civilization” share the same root. But the massive citification, or urbanization, that characterizes the technium today is a very recent development. Like most other charts depicting the technium, not much happens until the last two centuries. Then populations booms, innovation rockets, information explodes, freedoms increase, and cities rule.Cities may be engines of innovation, but not everyone thinks they are beautiful, particularly the megalopolises of today, with their sprawling rapacious appetites. They seem like machines eating the wilderness, and many wonder if they are eating us as well. Is the recent large-scale relocation to cities a choice or a necessity? Are people pulled by the lure of opportunities, or are they pushed against their will by desperation? Why would anyone willingly choose to leave the balm of a village and squat in a smelly, leaky hut in a city slum unless they were forced to?
Well, every city begins as a slum. First it’s a seasonal camp, with the usual free-wheeling make-shift expediency. Creature comforts are scarce, squalor the norm. Hunters, scouts, traders, pioneers find a good place to stay for the night, or two, and then if their camp is a desirable spot it grows into an untidy village, or uncomfortable fort, or dismal official outpost, with permanent buildings surrounded by temporary huts. If the location of the village favors growth, concentric rings of squatters aggregate around the core until the village swells to a town. When a town prospers it acquires a center — civic or religious — and the edges of the city continue to expand in unplanned, ungovernable messiness. It doesn’t matter in what century or in which country, the teaming guts of a city will shock and disturb the established residents. The eternal disdain for newcomers is as old as the first city. Romans complained of the tenements, shacks and huts at the edges of their town that “were putrid, sodden and sagging.” Every so often Roman soldiers would raze a settlement of squatters, only to find it rebuilt or moved within weeks.
Babylon, London, and New York all had seamy ghettos of unwanted settlers erecting shoddy shelters with inadequate hygiene and engaging in dodgy dealings. Historian Bronislaw Geremek states that “slums constituted a large part of the urban landscape” of Paris in the Middle Ages. Even by the 1780s, when Paris was at is peak, nearly 20% of its residents did not have a “fixed abode” — that is they lived in shacks. In a familiar complaint about medieval French cities, a gentleman from that time noted: “Several families inhabit one house. A weaver’s family may be crowded into a single room, where they huddle around a fireplace.” That refrain is repeated throughout history. Manhattan was home to 20,000 squatters in self-made housing. Slab City alone, in Brooklyn (named after the use of planks stolen from lumber mills), contained 10,000 residents in its slum at its peak. In the New York slums “nine out of ten of the shanties have only one room, which does not average over twelve feet square, and this serves all the purposes of the family.”
San Francisco was built by squatters. As Rob Neuwirth recounts in his wonderful book Shadow Cities, one survey in 1855 estimated that “95 percent of the property holders in [San Francisco] city would not be able to produce a bona fide legal title to their land.” Squatters were everywhere, in the marshes, sand dunes, military bases. One eyewitness said, “Where there was a vacant piece of ground one day, the next saw it covered with half a dozen tents or shanties.” Philadelphia was largely settled by what local papers called “squatlers.” As late as 1940, one in five citizens in Shanghai was a squatter. Those one million squatters stayed and kept upgrading their slum so that within one generation their shantytown became one of the first 21st century cities.
That’s how it works. Over time slums gain permanency. Ad hoc shelters are upgraded, infrastructure extended, and makeshift services become official. What was once the home of poor hustlers becomes, over the span of generations, the home of rich hustlers. Propagating slums is what cities do, and living in slums is how cities grow. The majority of neighborhoods in almost every modern city are merely successful former slums. The squatter cities of today will become the blue-blood neighborhoods of tomorrow.
Slums of the past and slums today follow the same description. The first impression is and was one of filth and overcrowding. In a ghetto a thousand years ago and in a slum today shelters are haphazard and dilapidated. The smells overwhelming. But there is vibrant economic activity. Every slum boasts eateries, and bars. And most have rooming houses, or places you can rent a bed. They have animals, fresh milk, grocery stores, barber shops, healers, herb stores, repair stands, and strong armed men offering “protection.” A squatter city is, and has always been, a shadow city, a parallel world without official permission, but a city nonetheless.
The improvisation and creative energies unleashed by a squatter city are so attractive that we build them just for the pleasure of their raucousness. Take Burning Man, the arts festival arising every year in the Nevada desert. It is a bona fide squatter city built and run semi-legally by its inhabitants. It is, in essence, a slum with porta potties. It draws 40,000 residents who bang together huts, shanties, tents, and make-shift shelters, and then, like any other slum, trade, barter, and share their few skills and belongings. The owner-built architecture of Burning Man is thrilling, and the gift economy bracing. Because this futuristic slum is so dense and temporary, it has one of the highest concentrations of creativity I’ve seen anywhere.
Like any city, a slum is highly efficient. Maybe even more than the official sections because nothing goes to waste. The rag pickers and resellers and scavengers all live in the slums and scour the rest of the city for scraps to assemble into shelter, and to feed their economy. Slums are the skin of the city, its permeable edge that can balloon as it grows. The city as a whole is a wonderful technological invention which concentrates the flow of energy and minds into computer chip-like density. In a relatively small footprint, a city not only provides living quarters and occupations in a minimum of space, but a city also generates a maximum of ideas and inventions.
The squatter city at Black Rock, Nevada
As Stewart Brand notes in the City Planet chapter of his upcoming book Whole Earth Discipline, “Cities are wealth creators; they have always been.” He quotes urban theorist Richard Florida who claims that 40 of the largest megacities in the world, home to 18% of the world’s population, “produce two-thirds of global economic output and nearly 9 in 10 new patented innovations.” A Canadian demographer figured that “80 to 90 percent of GNP growth occurs in cities.” The raggedy new part of each city, its squats and encampments, often house the most productive citizens. As Mike Davis points out in Planet of Slums, “The traditional stereotype of the Indian pavement-dweller is a destitute peasant, newly arrived from the countryside, who survives by parasitic begging, but as research in Mumbai has revealed, almost all (97 percent) have at least one breadwinner, and 70 percent have been in the city at least six years…” Slum dwellers are often busy with low paying service jobs in nearby high rent districts; they have money but live in a squatter city because it’s close to their work. Because they are industrious, they progress fast. One UN report found that households in the older slums of Bangkok have on average 1.6 televisions, 1.5 cell phones, a refrigerator; two-thirds have a washing machine and CD player, and half have a fixed line phone, video player and a motor scooter. In the favelas of Rio, the first generation of squatters had a literacy rate of only 5%, but their kids were 97% literate. (more…)
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