Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [27]
Her determination will serve her well. But in a hostile city in a world that does not really understand the arrival city, her challenges have just begun.
Arrival cities are built on the logic of the bootstrap: as a rural outsider without a real urban income, you cannot possibly afford to live in the city, but in order to escape being a rural outsider, you must first have a place to live in the city. This paradox has two solutions. First, you rely on your network of fellow villagers to find you a temporary berth in the city. Then, you organize and find a way to set up a house at a fraction of urban cost, by seeking out the property that is least desired or largely abandoned by urbanites, places that are too remote or inaccessible or ill-served by transport and utilities, or those that are, for geographic or climatic or health reasons, considered uninhabitable: the cliffsides of Rio de Janeiro and Caracas, the sewage-filled lagoons of east Asia, the verges of garbage dumps and railway tracks and international airports, the fetid riverside floodplains of many, many cities.
In the earliest decades of the great arrival-city boom, from the 1940s to the 1970s, the predominant way to acquire land was by squatting. Rural migrants, usually in organized groups that had met in inner-city flophouse enclaves, would simply take over a plot of unoccupied land, cut roadways and build houses there, and hope for the best. The land was usually government-owned or held by unknown or poorly registered parties. By the end of this period, the “land invasion” had become a well-organized institution in Latin America, and the practice had spread across the Middle East and Africa and into some parts of Asia. Land invasions were seen as transitory, temporary phenomena. By the 1980s, many of these “invaded” enclaves, even those that had been repeatedly bulldozed, had evolved into full-fledged cities, with hundreds of thousands of inhabitants, legitimate governments of their own, and influential middle classes and internal economies. The Dharavi slum of Mumbai (800,000 people), Orangi in Karachi (500,000), Ashaiman in Ghana (100,000), Villa el Salvador in Peru (300,000), and the self-built Asian outskirts of Istanbul (over 1,000,000) all began as rudimentary squatter enclaves but are now successful, full-scale urban economies, each containing hundreds of migrant-owned factories and producing sizable economic output.
But the land invasion has become a much rarer activity, for good reasons. First, land nowadays tends to be private, with clear owners, as opposed to the socialized ownership or ambiguous land titles that blanketed the developing world in the early days. Second, rural migrants, almost universally, do not want ambiguity in their possession of the land beneath their feet: They want clear ownership, or at least secure and guaranteed tenure, as much as middle-class homeowners do. As a result, the majority of slum huts in places like Kamrangirchar are subject to ownership and often to mortgage competition, speculation on their future value, and all the other financial trappings of home ownership It may not be formal or registered ownership, or have legal weight, but it is central to the lives of arrival-city residents. “Regardless of the type of land use or the quality of homes produced, irregular housing is advertised, sold and rented in an operating market,” one group of scholars concluded in a survey of slum housing. “Access to land in urban peripheries, and even in the more consolidated informal settlements, is nowadays obtained predominantly through market transactions.” Despite its image, arrival-city housing is never free