Slum Politics

In the last three months, the Bombay Municipal Corporation has demolished 80,000 shanties in a city where 3 million people are slum dwellers. The local government recently granted legal status to homes built before 1995, and bulldozed everything else. The devastation is "tsunami-like," according to the Indian Inter Press news agency. Three hundred and fifty thousand people have been made homeless but only 50,000 new apartments have been provided. The program is part of Bombay's plan to re-model itself on the ruthlessly prosperous Shanghai, which has tried to eradicate its slums.

But Shanghai's slums remain, as they do in other cities, as part of an inexorable global trend: 200,000 people a day are carrot-and-sticked from the countryside to cities that then refuse to accommodate them. In Bombay they end up in shacks by the road, on railway tracks and next to the airport – embarrassingly visible from landing planes. In Lagos, two-thirds of which is made up of slums, a shanty town has sprouted up on an enormous, slowly burning garbage dump. In Kibera, the slum surrounding Nairobi, raw sewage flows over the few water pipes, and latrines are so scarce that people simply defecate in plastic bags and then throw them as far away from their dwelling as possible – a phenomenon called "flying toilets."

Eighty-five percent of the developing world's urban population now lives in slums, and 40 percent of slum dwellers in Africa live in what the UN calls "life-threatening" poverty.

Elsewhere though, squatter communities are so well developed that they can't properly be called slums. With multi-story buildings, shops, businesses and offices – even a squatter town hall – Sultanbeyli in Istanbul is now almost indistinguishable from the adjacent "legal" city. Despite the varying conditions, the world's squatters hold certain things in common: they live in semi-sovereign, if squalid, mini-city states, paying no taxes and leaching services like water and electricity and, occasionally, some rights, from the legit world. They operate in an illegal or informal economy, and have only the most tenuous relationship with the state. According to the UN, by 2030 a quarter of the world's population will be living like this. In the midst of the unfolding humanitarian catastrophe of slum-growth, we could be in for some major social, political and economic consequences that are only just starting to be discussed.

The rock star philosopher Slavoj Zizek has called the growth of slums the "crucial geopolitical event of our time," and an "opportunity" for a truly "'free' world." Slum dwellers, though in sore need of health care and minimal means of self-organization, are free in the double sense of the word, says Zizek, writing in the London Review of Books: "'free' from all substantial ties; dwelling in a free space, outside the regulation of the state." Zizek warns against idealizing squatters as a new "revolutionary class" – their freedom really is another word for nothing left to lose – but in the next breath he marvels at how beautifully squatters seem to fit into Marx's definition of a proletarian revolutionary subject.

With the apparent collapse of the anti-globalization carnival and the impotence of the anti-war movement, could the left be on to something, at last, with squatters – not the anarchists in developed cities who do it as a lifestyle choice, but the billion ex-peasants, entrepreneurs and derelicts who are starting to numerically dominate every city in the world outside of the northern and western hemispheres?

Two new books touch tentatively – inadvertently even – on this possibility, without endorsing it. It might seem pretty callous to speculate from the comfort of the West about political "opportunity" in third world slums when people don't have clean drinking water or flush toilets. Or is it utterly necessary to move beyond the standard pity and fear of slum-dwellers and start recognizing them as political agents, not just victims?