Overcrowding Innovation: How informal settlements develop sustainable urban practices
Overcrowding Innovation:
How informal settlements develop sustainable urban practices
Jota Samper
Ten thousand years
ago, climate change initiated the desertification of the Sahara Desert, pushing
ancient communities away from their land to areas where they could survive. The
migrating populations arrived in mass at the rivers of the Nile River, where
they filled the ranks of surplus labour that fuelled the first nation-state of
the world, the Egyptian empire (Brookfield,
2010)[WJ1] . A critical path of this process and one that
would continue over thousands of years is that societies with larger
populations would become more successful due to the opportunity to extract
value out of surplus labour.
However, under the industrialisation
success of the 19th century, a new idea emerged. Population growth was
starting to be seen as unfavourable, possibly resulting in the world's end,
with ideas of Thomas Malthus seeking to determine
the planet's capacity to support growing populations. Malthus concluded that planet
population would eventually surpass food supply capacity, basing his conclusion
on the incongruence of the continued exponential population growth vs.
arithmetic growth of planet food production (Malthus, 2018). Eric Ross proposes that this way of thinking was
rooted in the good living conditions of the Malthus’ contemporary wealthy
London elite more than an argument against population growith, with Malthus concerned
with London's overcrowded slum populations.
Ross argues that
Malthus’ writing "continues to produce in the West and among
Western-influenced elites an unremitting anxiety about 'over-population'" (1998), the argument centring on world population and
resources limitation continuing to today. More importantly however, this
alarming argument continues to be directed to the world's poor populations, now
not living in London but those of the Global South where the concept of the slum
has been applied to countless communities.
Contrary to Malthus
and followers' predictions, the planet is not on an infinite population
exponential growth path. Instead, we are approaching a maximum population peak
somewhere in the next fifty years of this century (Vollset et al., 2020). Most estimates place the planet on a downward
population track by the end of the century. Some scenarios suggest that the
world population at the end of the century might be lower than today (Samir and Lutz, 2017). We also know that planet food production
surpasses population estimates—today we produce enough to support our population,
the billions suffering from starvation suggess that the issue is not food
production but resource distribution.
Most population growth
over the remainder of the 21st century will occur in African
countries as they reach peak urbanisation. As a result, access to education and
changes in quality of life suggest these populations will adopt fertility modes
similar to those in the Global North, until an expectation that all nations
will follow similar mortality and fertility trends by the end of the century. Using
the UN 2019 Revision of World Population Prospects, Max Roser concludes,
"One of the big lessons from the demographic history of countries is that
population explosions are temporary. For many countries, the demographic
transition has already ended. As the global fertility rate has halved, we know
that the world is approaching the end of rapid population growth" (2019). However, we regularly observe alarmist
predictions for the future of developing countries.
These Western ways
of looking at development and urbanisation have their foundations in
colonialist academic perspectives about growth. The alarmist perspective dismisses
enormous advances countries like those in Africa have gone through in the last forty
years, dismissing the challenges and the resilience of such communities and countries
that have improved the quality of life for millions living in informal
settlements across the world.
Informal settlements
can be broadly described as self-built neighbourhoods outside of city
regulations in conditions of extreme poverty, with over a billion people live
in informal settlements worldwide (UN DESA, 2013) today. The UN Department of Economic and
Social Affairs projects the world’s population to be 68 percent urban by 2050,
with an urban population of 6.7 billion, of which 3 billion would reside in
informal. Informal settlements are emerging as a dominant and distinct urban
typology in developing cities, environments which will be home to one in three of
all people by 2050, often without potable water, adequate sanitation, and in
conditions of extreme poverty (UN DESA 2017). The scale of this issue makes informal settlements
the most common form of urbanisation of the planet.
The paradox of
informal settlements is that while they are vast and commonplace, they and
their residents are almost invisible. The Global North does not deeply know about
informal settlements, an ignorance which creates barriers to the development of
supportive tools. A first step to make these populations visible is to document
their conditions. However, many countries where informal settlements are do not
have the resources to map these populations, and the countries that do such resources
often have legal restrictions impeding state organisations from supporting work
on informal settlements (Samper, 2014). Informal settlement data unknowns
create vacuums of understanding, which can increase misconceptions about such developments’
actual challenges and opportunities.
Most of our
understanding of informality comes from separate and unreliable sources, and there
is no single database containing all global informal settlements. As an
alternative, I created the Atlas of Informality (AoI) alongside hundreds of
collaborators (Samper, Shelby, & Behary 2020) to initiate the conversation. The AoI is a
creative attempt to visualise these invisible populations in order to
understand the unique process of informal city-making. We wanted to resolve a
crucial question: how do these places evolve over time? Understanding settlement
expansion is essential to understanding both the past and—more importantly—the
future of such settlements, and consequently the future of all world cities.
We created a protocol
with open-access software, remote sensing tools, and direct mapping to identify
and map changes to global informal settlements over the last twenty years. The
key was to develop a simple to use a measuring tool that allowed us to reach
most places and enable us to compare across sites. The AoI currently provides
data on more than 446 informal settlements in 149 cities, 89 countries, and five
continents worldwide, and in the process we have realised how these places are
changing and expanding due to the arriving populations.
We have data to confirm
observations: regions are expanding at different rates, with informal
settlements in Latin America and Africa expanding more rapidly than those in
Asia.; importantly, we also discovered that the entire sample is expanding at a
rate of 9.85 percent (Samper, Shelby, & Behary, 2020). Such a growth rate means that informal
settlements are growing by 2,300 km² each year, an expansion larger than some
of the world's largest cities, including Moscow, Houston, or Tokyo. As these
places continue to grow under-reported, we are blinded to the developing
sutuations.
With such darkness and
damaging Malthusian thinking around the growth of informal settlements, many
jump to fears of the planet's impending doom, a kind of apocalyptic scenario books
such as Planet of Slums by Mike Davis has predicted (2006). The publisher, Verso, summarised the book as
a portrayal of "A vast humanity
warehoused in shantytowns and exiled from the formal world economy. [Davis] argues
that the rise of this informal urban proletariat is a wholly unforeseen
development, and asks whether the great slums, as a terrified Victorian middle
class once imagined, are volcanoes waiting to erupt" (n.d.). The problem with such a portrait of informal
settlements is that the “apocalyptic rhetoric feeds into longstanding
anti-urban fears about working people who live in cities” (Angotti, 2006). Furthermore, the connection between slums as
a planetary security threat pushes older ideas of urban poverty density as a
danger to the planet. However, I want to present a different notion about such
urban density.
From a 2019
perspective, we might have expected that a world pandemic would have hit
informal settlements many times harder than the developed areas of our
planet. However, our experience with the current pandemic indicates that this
is not the case. What we have seen between 2020 and 2022 is something entirely
different than much literature tells us about their fragility, that informal
settlements have proved far more resilient than formal areas over the pandemic.
Residents of such undeveloped areas have deep expertise in dealing with
poverty, disease, and constant change. This is not acknowledged to glorify or
romanticise what it means to live in such conditions, nor are reasons vast
numbers of the world's population are displaced and forced to construct and
reside in them. I emphasise that this pandemic experience shows how we have a
lot to learn from informal settlements in terms of how they cope in the face of
a significant challenge. The discrepancy between our expectations and the
evidence of the resiliency clarifies the need to study informality instead of
imposing foreign frameworks upon them.
The first important
question to resolve is why informal settlements even exist. One reason is that
housing is an inflexible commodity, with a theory developed by Eduardo Rojas speaking
to Latin America suggesting that only 5% of the population can access housing
through their economic resources. Proposing house financing as a population pyramid,
Rojas states that another 25-30% access housing through savings and mortgages,
leaving the remainder of the population in to rely on informal solutions (Rojas 2005; 2011). Rojas's Housing pyramid demonstrates the
challenges that governments, international lending agencies, and developing
institutions face in providing systems and structures of housing supply within Latin
America. Research suggests Latin America is similar to other regions including Asia
and Africa, while also demonstrating the immensity of the challenge globally
where most arriving urban populations have no alternative to informal housing.
The scale of the
housing issue is why most lending agencies, such as the World Bank, have moved
away from supporting physical projects as tools of intervention with urban
poverty. An important conclusion from mapping informal settlements is evidencing
that their growth
is equal to global urbanization growth[WJ2] . Most cities are today expanding through new
informal settlements, though Janis Perlman’s seminal work shows that such populations
are not living in poverty but migrated to cities to try to get out of
poverty (1976). She further emphasises that they maximize the quality
of life by minimizing housing[WJ3] . Finally, I want to argue through the
development of informal settlements we can observed improved sustainable paths of
development, potentially supporting alternate urban models to alleviate poverty.
We are living in an
era of environmental crises. Current urbanisation models are partially at fault
for the challenges posed by climate change and our abuse of the planet's
resources (Grimmond, 2007). As countries increase the capacity to supply
the needs of their citizens, they develop through modes of urbanisation initiated
in the early years of the 20th century. In other words, the existing
model of formal urbanisation applied globally is also the mode of urbanisation killing
the world. A simple example of such a process considers the United States' use
of energy resources. With under 5% of the planet's population, the US uses 25%
of the world’s energy resources (GFN, 2016). With almost 20% of the planet's population,
China also uses 25% of the world’s total energy resources, however as China
continues its development plan toward parity with the Western countries we
could forecast that China alone will soon account for the planet’s total energy
resources. This urbanisation process of resource depletion is a result of using
20th century development logic. Following such trends and models
presents global challenges when applied to the urban growth of today’s China.
However, though China
is an example it is clear that while most of the Global North is to blame for
our situation, we can look to the billions of people in informal settlements, experimenting
with new and more ecological models of development, who are producing the kind
of urban transformations that might eventually save the planet. The
technologies and forms of organising they adopt embrace sustainable practices and
present opportunities for a more sustainable future.
A great example of how
technology can enter the discussion is the introduction of mobile phone technology
within a development context. Jeffrey Sachs has said that "the cell phone
is the single most transformative technology for development"( 2006), and they can offer a great example of how technology
can radically change the lives of poor populations. For instance, in the late
20th century, organisations determined the level of development of countries via
the coverage of land telephone lines. Low coverage was a proxy for a low levels
of development, and countries like Nigeria, Ghana, and Uganda, with less than
1% landline coverage, represented areas with giant development gaps. These gaps
were significant compared to countries like the United States which had 60% landline
coverage. However, by 2014, the pervasive expansion of mobile phone technology
radically changed standard understanding of development. Mobile phones achieved
vast coverage in developing countries, territories such as South Africa,
Nigeria, and Ghana—with 89, 89, and 83% of coverage respectively—was near
parity with the United States’ 89% (PRC, 2015). This goes to demonstrate that by absorbing technological
processes, poorer economies could match advanced countries for uptake and
impact.
The data suggests that
such countries could go beyond parity, and leapfrog developed countries.
For example, in 2011 Kenyan mobile phone users accounted for more than 50
percent of all money transferred via mobile phones globally, totalling over $11billion,
according to Dr. Bitange Ndemo, Permanent Secretary in Kenya’s Ministry of
Information and Communications (NBC, 2015). The incredible statistic here is that the accomplishment
of developing a digital banking system to resolve problems of poverty happened three
years before the introduction of Apple Pay (Liébana-Cabanillas et al., 2020). Furthermore, THINK Economic and Financial
Analysis ING expects that 2022 will be the year mobile banking becomes the
predominant form of banking in Europe, a decade after it Kenya reached this
level (Nijboer and Slijkerman, 2022).
Adopting
transformative and innovative technologies in the context of scarcity presents
opportunities for the rest of the planet. Today, many other innovations are
emerging, including: the Metrocable in Medellin, Colombia, cable car public transportation
operating since 2004 (Brand and Davila, 2011); or water purification and solar
electrification in informal settlements. These forms of innovation share a bypassing
of existing models of wasteful infrastructure to supply the needs of
populations with scarce resources. As a result, these new innovative solutions
require strategies to be more efficient and sustainable.
One-third of the world’s
population bypassing wasteful and outdated technologies could be the most
outstanding contribution this group of informal dwellers have made the survival
of the entire human race. Informal communities have created unique urbanisation
and economic models both supporting and contesting the current neoliberal
system, and there is much to learn from these informal innovation processes.
Scholars and agencies
have traditionally approached informal settlements and economies as spaces of
scarcity—with insufficient services, goods, and even ideas. Modern approaches
to addressing urban informality improve inadequate qualities of such spaces,
whether this is housing, products, markets, or services, and while at some
level such approaches can help, this one-sided view erases the significant
reality that informal settlements are an urban solution to the incapacity of
the formal market to provide for one-third world's urban population. The
informal economy is the source of income for over half of the world's working
population (ILO, 2018), and is the most common vehicle for income
generation, suggesting informality is not a pathology but a norm. This should
lead to a reframing of the way we look at informality.
The reality of
informality is then more nuanced. This context of scarcity and need
creates the milieu for innovation in which products and services are invented
without ties to modern and cumbersome infrastructure, or lengthy and
problematic bureaucratic processes. This inventiveness, which we sometimes call
ingenuity, results from a calculated invention strategy in response to scarcity
and away from traditional power structures. Products that result from such
methods have the possibility of becoming tremendously transformative. For
example, we see new products developed in this 21st century that
blur the line between formal and informal processes, regulations, and markets.
Products like Uber, Airbnb, and the likes are challenging well-established
markets by capitalising on the flexibility of informal procedures. Cities worldwide
are grappling with how to respond to these flexible dynamics embodied by both
large corporations and people-led structures in informal settlements and informal
economies. I count myself among a group of scholars interested in contributing
to revealing such knowledge, products, tools, and markets emerging from
communities working in these places. By living under these challenging
conditions, informal dwellers are pushed to invent out-of-the-box solutions to modern
needs.
To better understand
these creative processes, I have begun co-production with informal settlement communities
not only to find ways of improving their living conditions but also to learn
from them about their unique processes of informal city-making. Working with
families and community members over the decades, I have learned that new
cutting-edge strategies are needed to solve informal settlements' most
challenging problems, and that the source of innovation already resides within these
communities. I have learned that there are community-based solutions for each
and every problem spearheaded by those experiencing the circumstances. For
example, we have heard from communities like Carpinelo or Manantiales de Paz, both
in Colombia, who collaboratively organise the construction of infrastructural
improvements. What they call "convites" vary from water systems to stairways
and roads. At the family level, we observe incredible financing mechanisms, like
renting rooms to pay for home expansions, or the creation of micro-businesses
tailored to the surrounding populations’ needs—an example being unofficial
Motorcycle-taxis as private vehicles serving public functions, responding to
the lack of affordable transportation networks (Ehebrecht, Heinrichs, & Lenz, 2018).
One of my goals is now
the emulation of these strategies on larger scales. Creative, informal
solutions follow disruptive process that breaks away from traditional ways of thinking
about urban issues. Planners, city officials, and architects tend to operate and
consider cities in similar ways as those at the beginning of the 20th
century, considering informal settlements as a pathology or disease to be
eradicated. This old-fashioned way of looking at such urban areas forces the
use of obsolete strategies, and as a result, slum eradication programmes have
left millions homeless and only served to display the problem to other, distant
places. In unbelievable contrast, informal dwellers find solutions to these
same problems in unconventional ways, and as a result their solutions are less
environmentally impactful and rely less on the need for extensive
infrastructure improvements. Moreover, these solutions could be as physical
as creating pedestrian-friendly compact neighbourhoods or as strategic
as forming community-based banking systems. These solutions could work for
informal settlements with fewer resources, or cities searching for more
sustainable development.
Making these places
and solutions visible is essential to helping impoverished communities, but also
vital for the rest of us. Informal communities thrive and find new
opportunities out of necessity.The aforementioned approach of informal
settlement residents renting rooms inside homes to pay for housing expansions
in informal areas (Leite et al. 2019; Sheuya 2007) is a radical approach—instead of getting a
loan to fund improvements, the home is the business paying for its own work. All
these appear simple but are transformative ideas resulting from innovative
processes, though it is important not to romanticise such solutions. These are
innovations born from dramatic suffering.
However, there is much
we can learn from them, and I many are already learning. I suggest that some of
the more celebrated digital-urban projects can be traced to informal solutions
developed decades ago. Approaches such as ride apps such as Uber borrow from
the transportation systems operating in most of the developing world, including
the unofficial Motorcycle-taxis mentioned earlier. Another example is the now
pervasive home-sharing economy illustrated by Airbnb, similar to the
self-financing urban model of informal settlements. All can be traced to the
confines of informal settlements and I argue that if we pay more attention to making
visible such invisible populations, we will not only have the
opportunity to support the effort of billions, but we could learn from them with
ideas to change the planet.
We continue, however,
to follow Malthusian western apocalyptic perspectives seeding fear of poor
population densities. This perspective leads to a misunderstanding of the
efforts of billions to improve their lives. By following such a perspective, we
also lose the opportunity to discover and test technologies that might move us
away from wasteful and unsustainable approaches we have adopted in city-making.
I propose we turn our gaze to informal areas with a curiosity rather than
disdain, and in doing so I suggest that there are three things we need to focus
on now.
The first: we need to
make these communities visible, they are part of our cities and planet, and
deserve to be respected and recognised. Second: we need to pay more attention
to the creativity and innovation that happens in such places, the next
billion-dollar business or urban sustainable solution has already been
invented an informal settlement somewhere. Finally: we need to apply our learnings
for the future of us all, when one-third of the planet lives in informal
settlements they could be the saviour of the rest of us.
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[WJ1]Similar to other comments - I am not sure what the book series
styleguide is for in-text citations/footnotes. I will leave as is for now and
in second parse can tidy so all match.
[WJ2]I am not 100% sure what this sentence means - does it mean that the
rate of growth is the same percentile as global urban growth generally? As it
is it reads that ALL global urban growth is in informal settlements...
[WJ3]I am unclear what this means. As it is written, it suggests that the
less housing there is the better the quality of life, which makes no sense. But
I don't know what the author is suggesting.
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