Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [159]
Often, the size of the building makes the difference, and there is a reason why poor neighborhoods in the developing world, when they turn into more prosperous neighborhoods, so often evolve into long rows of five-story buildings with shops on the ground floor. This is an almost ideal arrangement for self-managed neighborhoods. Aprodicio Laquian, the Filipino-Canadian scholar who has advised governments of most major developing countries on slum improvement, says the five-story walk-up apartment is the ideal design to increase density and maintain a tightly networked community. “You are going to reach a point where you will need to provide acceptable housing, not just services, and the solution to that is the five-story walk-up,” he says. “The moment you go above five stories, you need elevators, electricity, sanitation, which is beyond your reach. But with five stories, you end up with 80 percent more land you can use for economic development.”
Nevertheless, many of the most successful slum-improvement projects today are based on the expensive but reliable combination of rebuilding, legalizing, and adding services to existing slum housing. This can be done in an incremental fashion, adding sewage in one project, street lights in another, bolstered foundations in a third, and so on—this is how the more successful Brazilian favelas and Turkish gecekondus have improved, as subsequent governments found small amounts of money for specific projects. But there is a case to be made for the approach we saw in the Santa Marta neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro, in which President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva launched fast, expensive, total interventions in which several branches of government, led by security forces, come in and remake the entire slum. The changes are mutually supporting, and doing them all at once allows ownership to be secured among the existing residents, without wealthier outside intervenors buying up property between improvements.
It should be apparent that property value alone is not enough to make a rural–urban migration work. Unless the rural migrant has large pools of savings from a successful agricultural business (which is sometimes the case, and should be encouraged through rural development), people who arrive in cities need the help of the state. And what arrival cities need most—and what the market will almost never provide—are the tools to become normal urban communities.
Sewage, garbage collection, and paved roads are, for obvious reasons, vital, and can be provided only from outside. But even more important, in the well-informed view of slum-dwellers, are buses: affordable and regular bus service into the neighborhood is often the key difference between a thriving enclave and a destitute ghetto. One might think that the next priority would be electricity and running water, but, in fact, these are often not considered priorities at all by slum-dwellers. They have typically arranged their own utilities, and full-price utility bills can be debilitating for poor households. Equally important, and far too often neglected, is street lighting. This makes a tangible difference in both security and property value, at a low operating cost. The experience of entering a favela in the evening in São Paulo, which has fully street-lit its informal communities, is far more inviting, for visitor and resident alike, than the dark, menacing spaces of so many other slums.
Smart municipalities employ cost-recovery mechanisms to finance these improvements, developing a small part of the now-valuable land into commercial, retail, or middle-class properties to finance the new services. Still, up-front investments are required to turn slums into healthy arrival cities. As a means to bringing a permanent end to world poverty, there is perhaps nothing better and