Squatter City
The illegal settlements of billions of men
Robert Neuwirth
Rochina down hill | Stealing electric current | Kibera sewage
Photo Robert Neuwirth
Sartaj Jaipuri became an illegal land invader in Bombay in 1962. He occupied a plot far from the centre of the city, on a steep unused parcel of land near the tracks of the Western Railway in a scantily developed area called Malad.
It was rough living, but it was home. Sartaj and his fellow settlers built their houses from bamboo topped with grass mats. The jungle was their toilet. They carried water from the public taps near the train station, a kilometre or so away. They christened their new community with an admirably straightforward name: Squatter Colony.
The residents maintained a low profile for nine years before they took the risk of laying permanent foundations for their homes. Those who had money ripped out their original wood and mud platforms and laid a brick base for their bamboo huts. Then they were quiet again for another decade, before paying a contractor to run water pipes and open communal taps.
A few years on, they brought those water lines directly into each home. In 1989, they finally built something more permanent than their bamboo homes. They tore down the structures and built anew with steel and concrete. They waited seven more years for the final piece of the puzzle - electricity.
According to estimates there are about a billion squatters in the world today - one of every six people on the planet. Within 25 years, their number will grow to 2 billion, and 1/4 of the world’s population will be squatters
Today, a thousand families live in Squatter Colony. Their homes are permanent. Most have water and toilets built inside. Sartaj’s district is a narrow lane paved with tiles and cement. His home, though on a tiny plot, is built to maximize space. The ground floor does quadruple duty as kitchen, living room, bedroom, and bathroom. There’s a steep staircase that leads to a mezzanine, used for storage or an extra bed, and on to a top floor where his youngest son, Aasif, bunks. Another son, Aarif, lives a few blocks down the hill, in a spacious, airy second-floor studio apartment. He’s also a squatter. “These houses are all illegal,” Sartaj said. “Even where you are sitting right now is illegal”.
Mumbai, as the metropolis has been called since 1996, is India’s richest city. The metropolitan area accounts for 40 percent of the tax revenues of the entire nation. Yet approximately half the inhabitants - more than six million people - have created their homes the same way Sartaj Jaipuri did. They built for themselves on land they don’t own. Mumbai is a squatter city.
Every day, close to 200,000 people leave their homes in the rural regions and move to the cities. Almost a million and a half people a week, 70 million a year. Most find a job, but can’t find a house. So they sneak onto land and build as squatters.
According to estimates there are about a billion squatters in the world today - one of every six people on the planet. Within 25 years, their number will grow to 2 billion, and 1/4 of the world’s population will be squatters.
They have little money, so their communities start in a crude fashion: they mix dirt and water and then layer the mud onto a thatch of sticks, scrap, cardboard, and paper. But these elements should not be mocked their developments: squatters are building the cities of tomorrow.
Nairobi is a squatter city. Kibera, the city’s largest mud hut community, home to perhaps 1 million people, is a sea of homes made from earth and sticks rising from primeval mud-puddle streets, without water, electricity, sewers, or sanitation. Each structure in Kibera is divided into single rooms, approximately 10 by 10, or 100 square feet, their only ventilation coming from the front door and, sometimes, a small window.
They have little money, so their communities start in a crude fashion: they mix dirt and water and then layer the mud onto a thatch of sticks, scrap, cardboard, and paper. But these elements should not be mocked: squatters are building the cities of tomorrow
Nicodemus Mutemi came to Kibera in 1996. The Mutemi family cultivates corn and millet on a small holding in the parched hills of Kenya’s Mwingi district, an hour’s walk from the nearest village. The land is dry and growing crops in the cracked earth is a struggle. The problem, he said, is economic: you can grow enough to eat, but you can’t grow enough to make a living.
His room in Kibera, Nicodemus joked, was self-contained, meaning that for his family one room was all rooms: living room, dining room, kitchen, washroom, study, bedroom, and even, depending on how safe it was after dark, temporary toilet.
Nairobi’s newer shantytowns are made from corrugated steel sheets set into thin concrete foundations. Metal sheeting may seem more durable and protective than mud, and it certainly looks cleaner. But mud beats metal, hands down. The sun rules the world on the equator and mud, opaque and dense, blocks light and heat from penetrating the room inside. In the evenings, mud also repels the cold air. Metal, by contrast, is a bad insulator and good conductor, so the huts made from galvanized steel sheets are stifling during the day and bone-chilling at night. Prefabricated metal is, of course, cheaper than mud: erecting walls from sheet steel takes much less time and labor than building a sturdy mud hut. So, sadly, modern squatters are increasingly living in less desirable metal constructions.
Rio de Janeiro, too, is a squatter city, but one that has risen far beyond mud and sheet steel. Jose Geraldo Moreira, known as Zezinho, came to Rocinha, the largest favela in Rio, as a child. That was more than 30 years ago. At the time, there was no electricity or water. People stole power by looping long strands of wire through the trees and pilfering current from faraway poles. They hauled water up the hill in buckets and wheelbarrows and sometimes on the back of a burro.
Today, Zezinho’s wooden shack is a three-story house made from concrete and brick. There are 30,000 homes like Zezinho’s in Rocinha. Many boast shiny tile facades or fantastic Moorish balustrades or spacious balconies, which look out over the endless waves crashing on the beach far below. Electricity and water have come to this illegal city, and commerce, too. Rocinha today is a squatter village 150,000 people strong - the largest in Rio de Janeiro. Like Zezinho, most Rocinha residents occupy their hilltop redoubt between the wealthy neighborhoods of Gávea and São Conrado with the confidence of a modern, self-built Renaissance hill town.
The medieval Jewish sage Rashi proclaimed that being (or what it means to be a human being - to act, to live, to do things, even the most mundane things, in this world) is essentially having a standpoint, a position, a base of operations. A massive number of people around the world have been denied that right. So they have seized land and built for themselves. With makeshift materials, they are building a future in a society that has always viewed them as people without a future. In this very concrete way, they are asserting their own being.
