Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [35]
This problem is compounded by another. The arrival city is far more than a pile of housing. Its residents are connected in complex networks and use the space as a source of upward mobility by operating businesses and informal enterprises there. “The slums are commonly referred to as large open-air markets,” writes the South African urban planner Marie Huchzermeyer in her study of the Kibera project. “One cannot accurately foresee from outside how an intervention will impact on communities, households and individuals, their income generation and their access to basic services.”21 Projects like KENSUP are generally housing-only facilities: they do not typically provide any space in or near the house to operate a shop, a workshop, or a small factory; there are no physical opportunities to expand the residence or to convert part of it to commercial use; and, crucially, there is no access to the street and to passing pedestrians, who might be able to do business with the tenant. As with the U.S. public-housing “projects” or the banlieue towers of France, housing without business space can lock tenants into permanent dependency.
Eunice Orembo has no faith in this housing project. She doesn’t believe she will ever have the power to get an “upgraded” apartment, and she believes the upgrading process would ruin the small gains she has made since 2001. “Neighbors are important,” she says. “When you have a good understanding and relationship with them, they can keep you alive. Building that connection is very important, friends are very important here.” Shunning efforts to improve her housing immediately, she is instead putting all her extra money into getting her sons educated. Emmanuel, 21, is studying dressmaking, and 19-year-old John is training in hairdressing; even now, both young men have ambitions to earn their family’s way out of the slum. “The children see things differently from me because they see that their house is not like the other homes in the city,” Eunice says. “It may be possible to move into better housing someday because my kids are in college and will make us enough money to buy a decent house someday—I’m counting on them.”
REFORM: TEETERING ON THE PRECIPICE
Santa Marta, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Devanil de Souza, Jr., a lanky young man with a short-cropped afro and a shy smile, has spent all 12 years of his life looking straight down upon the bustling streets of Rio de Janeiro’s Copacabana neighborhood from a great height. The sole window of his family’s tiny wood-and-tin house peers over a sheer cliff to the prosperous commercial district below, only a few hundred meters from the bottom of his cliffside community. But Devanil can count the number of times he has set foot there, in the asfalto, the proper “asphalt” city of Rio. As soon as he could walk, he learned the rules for leaving the Santa Marta favela, a tight-packed accumulation of 10,000 people covering a steep hillside. First, he had to walk down the 788 steps and across countless precarious pathways, a 55-story descent that took him past piles of garbage, grotto shrines, cliff-face bars, and hundreds of ramshackle houses cantilevered over the steep cliff. He would then encounter the traficantes, young members of the Comando Vermelho (Red Command) drug army that controlled every aspect of life in the favela and tell them that he intended to go into town; they would inform the teenagers who stood guard at the favela’s street entrance, with 9-mm pistols pressed against their legs, to let the child pass without being shot. On the way out, he would run the gauntlet of the “crack line,” a stretch of street lined with tables covered in bricks of cocaine, sold wholesale to dealers, guarded by 15-year-old boys with assault rifles. On the way back in, the armed teenagers would inspect his bags, to make sure he hadn’t bought cylinders of cooking gas or other crucial supplies in the city, rather than paying the gang a 30 percent markup. After