The Informal City Reader the Informal City Reader
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The Informal City Reader The Informal City Reader Introduction 4 Accra, Ghana 6 Bangkok, Thailand 60 Chennai, India 108 The Informal City Reader Lima, Peru 152 © 2013 NEXT CITY Created with support from the Rockefeller Foundaton Manila, Philippines 192 Next City. 1315 Walnut St. Nairobi, Kenya 232 Philadelphia, PA 19107 Scenario Summaries 278 For additional information, please visit www.nextcity.org. Commentary 292 Design: Paperwhite, NY Illustrations: Daniel Horowitz Credits 318 Informal City Dialogues Reader 4 Informal City Dialogues Reader 5 Introduction Let’s not romanticize poverty. We live in an unprecedented accounts for up to 40 percent of GDP. the informal city will mean finding ways age of urbanization that has consigned large segments of Informal settlements are home to as much to support the informal street vendor so as 25 percent of the urban population, and her table of wares on the sidewalk can the population to slums that have no water or electricity or informal transport provides mobility for become a stall in the market, which can then sanitation. Life in these places is hard. Health is precarious, upwards of 60 percent of the populace. The grow into a network of stores. It will mean children are at risk and violence is a daily event. Gangs rule OECD estimates that half the workers in the understanding that the roadside vulcanizing world—close to 1.8 billion people—hail from operation is the stepping stone to the auto many of these neighborhoods, with the authorities and the the informal sector, making and selling and repair shop, and that pulling a pedicab could police entering only when armed to the teeth. trading off the books. To paraphrase the late be the prelude to owning a small fleet of C.K. Prahalad, the informal city is the bottom of vans. It will mean seeing the shack in the These slums are a stark reminder to many unrealistic. They imagine that the current the pyramid that holds up the formal city. The slum not as simply sub-standard housing, cities that, despite their booming economies, disorder will be swept away, forgetting that Foundation believes that the informal city but as a means of production and an asset economic and social inequality seems while the top of the pyramid may be gilded, will play an essential role in transforming our for investment to someone who owns endemic and intractable. It’s no wonder, then, the bottom bears its weight. cities into engines of opportunity and social little else. It will mean recognizing that that many cities want to wish away these What these visions overlook is that, and economic mobility. the poor are attracted to cities because of places, move their populations back to the despite their disorder, slums are also places By participating in the Dialogues, the six opportunity, and that the city is the most countryside in a vain attempt to quickly clear of entrepreneurship and human energy— cities involved—Accra, Bangkok, Chennai, efficient way to provide that opportunity away the poverty and move forward toward neighborhoods that, with proper support, Lima, Nairobi and Metro Manila—took steps that the world has today. It will mean a more appealing future. A plan for such a could one day become the vision. Walk into toward acknowledging this. In each of these embracing the informal city, and all it has to future exists in every mayor’s office in every any slum and look past the open sewers and cities, various stakeholders—from street offer. city with rising ambitions—a vision that looks corrugated-iron shacks. Look instead to the vendors and slum dwellers to urban planners 10, 20, even 30 years on. And in every city that stores and tool houses. There are restaurants, and government officials—came together to Benjamin De La Pena vision contains the same basic elements: repair shops, barbers, tailors, hairdressers, try to imagine what their cities might look like The Rockefeller Foundation Shiny buildings and broad, sweeping avenues. schools and hotels. Often there are massive in the year 2040. They then used these visions Big green parks and smoothly flowing traffic. markets, where residents from the city’s more of possible futures to devise innovations Waterfront high-rises. Glittering malls. “respectable” districts come to haggle with that would make their cities more inclusive Uniformly absent from these plans are the vendors in their stalls. This is capital, and resilient in the decades to come. But the the districts where the poor now live, the human and economic, actively pursuing process, facilitated by Forum for the Future informal markets, the tianguis and the souks opportunity. The slums and the wet markets and documented by Next City, wasn’t just where vendors congregate to sell their wares host a population that is trying to lift itself about generating an end product. It was about to the public. High-end shops and gleaming out of poverty. In doing so, they lift the city a form of collaboration in which everyone has corporate towers have replaced wet markets as well. a seat at the table. and slums; subways and light rail and elevated This is the side of the city that The We hope that the Dialogues are just the start highways have overtaken matatus and trotros. Rockefeller Foundation’s Informal City of a larger conversation about how cities are These visions of a well-scrubbed future are Dialogues set out to explore. In cities of not only the engines of the global economy, seductive. But they are also exclusionary and the Global South, the informal economy but accelerators of opportunity. Leveraging Informal City Dialogues Reader 6 Informal City Dialogues Reader 7 Accra, Ghana Gutter Credit Gutter Credit Informal City Dialogues Reader 8 ACCRA, GHANA Informal City Dialogues Reader 9 ACCRA GHANA As the capital of a country where 43 percent of the urban population lives in slums and 90 percent of non- agricultural employment is informal, Accra epitomizes the informal city. From public transport to domestic labor to fresh produce, the vast majority of goods and services in this city of 2.3 million are procured informally. Gutter Credit Gutter Credit PLAY VIDEO Informal markets are often the target of eviction efforts and government crackdowns, but their traders prove remarkably resilient. Amid crushing congestion, motorcycle taxis and informal traffic cops — who work for tips — help keep things moving. Accra is one of the world’s leading destinations for electronic waste, where cell phones and old TVs are processed in slums like Agogbloshie. An unreliable municipal water supply means many people are forced to search for — and purchase — water informally. Informal City Dialogues Reader 24 ACCRA, GHANA Informal City Dialogues Reader 25 ACCRA, GHANA “Busy busy!” always under threat. Fires and How a Savings Bank floods regularly ravage the wooden “For something something!” houses and poorly drained land. Became One Slum’s As if these environmental threats “Busy busy busy busy!” weren’t enough, the land itself is Line in the Sand government-owned, and the city “For something something faces constant public pressure to Sharon Benzoni something something!” destroy the settlement, thanks to its stigma as a hotbed of prostitution Salifu leads the chant: Welcome to Old Fadama, a slum and crime, from which it earned its “Information!” with influence. This is the weekly biblical nickname. Furthermore, meeting of one of its informal it is situated on land set aside for “Power!” the group responds, about credit and savings associations. an ecological preserve designed to 40 men and women seated in plastic The call-and-response is part of restore and protect the polluted chairs under a canopy to shade their weekly ritual, to be followed Korle Lagoon. Several times, them from the searing late-morning by the collection of savings from its the government has threatened sunlight. A few cement buildings members. Salifu Abdul-Mujeed, an eviction, but so far Old Fadama has between the rows of shacks are exuberant social worker from the managed to resist. adorned with drying clothes, and Ghana Federation for the Urban The savings and credit association a small minaret from the local Poor, speaks to the assembled is part of that resistance. It has been mosque is just visible behind a row group in Dagbani, occasionally around for a decade, and members woman in red lace points over her Savings from the of tiny wooden houses. mixing in some Twi. He then are expected to save at least 2 cedis shoulder, vaguely north. “Kumasi,” association in Old Fadama have allowed translates into English, which ($1 USD) each week. Mohammed she says, indicating that Naa is in residents to upgrade “Information!” Salifu calls again. another man translates into French Alhassan is the collector, taking Ghana’s northern region today. their homes from for a delegation of visitors from this money from each member and On any given week, a fair number wood to concrete. “Power!” they respond. Burkina Faso. noting down their contributions in of the association’s members will The credit association is a small the collection books. He’s been part not attend the meeting; many are “Information!” but important organizational of the association for four years. traders who make long journeys facet of the sprawling 77-acre slum Orphaned the age of fifteen, he had to buy stock to sell in the city. “Power!” known variously as Agogbloshie, completed junior high school but The particulars of Old Fadama’s Old Fadama and “Sodom and was unable to afford the fees that economy reflect, in part, the fact “Busy!” Gomorrah.” The settlement had would have allowed him to attend that most of its residents are an estimated 79,000 residents senior high school.