Since the middle of last century, mass of immigrants have been attracted to cities in developing countries by the explosive working opportunities created under the neoliberal structural adjustment policies in these countries. The informal sector of economy consisted of these new urban immigrants becomes more and more important in countries’ development. However, the surge of immigration’s settlements also brings huge pressure to the urban land, especially when these settlements are mostly illegal or “extra-legal”, “built without conformance to zoning or service regulations and enabled by bribes, populist governments, or property speculators who hope for eventual regularization and compensation for their investment.”[3] This situation brings problems both to city planning and the migrants themselves.

Mike Davis takes a more broad view looking at current slum conditions and the informal sector of economy supporting behind it in his book Planet of Slums. In one of the chapters “ a surplus humanity”, Davis mentioned the competition between informal sector and some small-scale formal enterprises, which reveals some part of hard life for informal employees, especially with the pressure of exorbitant rent fees when more urban land becomes private. The increasing strain in work and the hazard in illegal slum settlement form a potential political problem for the governors. A narrative non-fiction by Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful, rises up this question during the narration of author’s four-year living experience in a slum called Annawadi in India.

（http://www.amazon.com/Behind-Beautiful-Forevers-Mumbai-Undercity/dp/1400067553 )

Compared to Davis, Robert Neuwirth provides us with more optimistic vision through his experience in four different slums. He raises up a new point that “people are adapting: they are demonstrating survival strategies that make life not only bearable but in some places and in some respects quite manageable.” [3] While, the adaption not only occurs in migrants’ life, but also in original urban inhabitants’. They already get used to a certain life style with the informal economy.

As John Beardsley mentioned in his essay “ A Billion Slum Dwellers and Counting”, both Davis and Neuwirth didn’t provide solution for improving slum dwellers’ life. I think this is what we, as architects should consider in the city planning, as the importance of these informal economy supporters.

work cited

1.. Planet of Slums, Mike Davis

2.Shadow Cities, Robert Neuwirth

3.A Billion Slum Dwellers and Counting, John Beardsley

In their book Empire, Hardt and Negri offer a fresh understanding of the proletariat, “as a broad category that includes all those whose labor is directly or indirectly exploited by and subjected to capitalist norms of production and reproduction,” (Hardt and Negri 52).  This understanding is important to keep in mind when considering the population of over one billion living in informal communities operating in globalized capitalism.  While some suggest that many of the jobs that make up the informal community are entrepreneurial in nature, limited access to resources and capital render these “entrepreneurs” as proletarians involved with the exchange of the scraps of bourgeois productive forces.

Mike Davis correctly notes that the explosion of informal settlemtns is part of a semi-proletarianization process that continues in the tradition of 19^th century Naples (Davis 174).  Instead of reflecting an explosion of micro-capitalism, the trend represents the inadequacy of non-urban economic forms in the rush of 21^st century capitalism.  Informal settlements become hyper-saturated markets for the consumption of developed capitalism’s waste and contrived levels of unemployment.  Just as the unemployed masses of the 19^th century were a byproduct of capitalism itself, informal communities and the informal economies that sustain them are not accidents of postindustrial capitalism.  Rather, they serve to continue the expansion of capital relatively.  The mangnitude of unemployment cheapened the cost of labor because any efforts at collective bargaining could be made null by the rapid replacement of an organized workforce with scores of unemployed masses.

In a similar trick of the market, the electronics market in Lagos (perhaps the most efficient and highprofile example) recycles the detritus and obsolescence of capitalism by exploiting previously-excluded markets (Koolhaas 702).  Antiquated electronics of the late 20^th century become the epitome of 21^st century technology for a market that is constantly expanding in a strikingly dense manner.

Beyond the more “formal,” informal political structures described in the report on Lagos, the development of informal settlements on the scale witnessed thus far suggests that there is the potential for a new political/spatial logic that exists outside of capitalist globalization.  If Haussmanization processess in the 19^th century brought urban space under the control of the bourgeois state, the scope of informal settlements in the 21^st century generate possibilities of extra-state resistance and alternative forms of social organization.  Neuwirth, in contrast to Mike Davis, commented on conditions in informal settlements somewhat positively.  Some residents remarked that the communities within informal settlements often allowed for a sense of freedom and human solidarity that were otherwise unavaiable in the formal city (Neuwirth 5).  Beyond this sense of community, one can speculate the ability to radically critique the global capitalist system.  Without fetishizing underdevelopment or caricaturing “the natives’ creativity,” informal settlements are sites of constant growth, dynamic change and close contact between previously-unrelated masses of people.  The potential for this in shaping consciousness in gigantic; modern processes of urbanization are transforming into processes of hyperurbanization without similar levels of economic advancement.  In this sense, the new expanded proletariat is becoming a global phenomenon far surpassing the industrial proletariat of Marx’s days.

Bibliography

Davis, Mike. Planet of Slums. London: Verso, 2006.

Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2000.

Koolhaas, Rem. Lagos: How It Works. Baden: Lars Müller, 2007.

Neuwirth, Robert. Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, a New Urban World. New York: Routledge, 2005.

Definition of slum : a densely populated usually urban area marked by crowding, dirty run-down housing, poverty, and social disorganization.

Slum is also saying that densely populated area of substandard housing, usually in a city, characterized by unsanitary conditions and social disorganization. The Characteristics of slum is very associated with negative images vary place to place, which is usually characterized by high rates of poverty, illiteracy, insanity, urban decay, and unemployment of city. Many cities have these ‘Slum area’ problems.

In the article “Shadow cities”, we need a lot of money to solve the housing problem in Slum area over the world. According to the article, “the world cities should build homes for 670 million people over the coming 15 years. This, the UN estimates, would cost $ 294 billion dollars. A mammoth amount, to be sure. But some simple math brings the number down to earth. We could raise that sum by collecting $3 a year from every person on the planet.” It is almost impossible to solve by only money. The article saying is not only problem of money but also problem of organizational and administrational structure.

Also growing slum-dwellers is important issues for future. In John Beardsley’s article, “A Billion Slum Dwellers and Counting,” “The number of slum-dwellers is expected to double by 2030; slums are now the dominant form of urban land use in much of the developing world.” More and poorer people inflow to slum area these days they don’t have money to live in the expensive area and they have no idea about their living. The government around the world only thinks about solving the problems of slums by clearing away old decrepit housing and replacing it with modern housing with much better sanitation, which is just temporary and short-sight solution for slum area and there is not consideration of people who live there.

Works Cited

Shadow Cities, Robert Neuwirth, Page xiii

A Billion Slum Dwellers and Counting, John Beardsley, Page 54

Cities in the world are growing as greater percentages of populations continue the trend of massing in cities. This brings with it the inherent issue of the coexistence of various different types of people. This range of diversity exists through the various spectrum with each urban environment. One level of diversity that creates conflict is the co-existence of the wealthy and poor.This conflict creates physical implications in the form of slums. The urban populace will exist within it self as a spectrum of super rich and super poor. Both require the same necessity to survive: food, water, shelter. The accessibility of these needs is easily obtained by the wealthy with urban infrastructure and consumerist culture. But obtaining these necessities for the poor creates issues.

The search for shelter becomes more complex when the shear number of poor searching for shelter pushes the carrying capacity of an area. This is the birth of slums. A means to provide shelter for the poor of a city on a sale that can accommodate such a large number of poor. An combining factor of so many different slums is the unplanned, unregulated  ad-hoc nature of slums. But somehow slums still manage to have an implicit order. This establishes communities that do not exist within established parameters or constraints still succumb to some degree of order says something about the nature of slums. This establishes that slums may hold within their own ad-hoc, “make it up as you go” attitude an implicit order. This implicit order may maintain with-in it the capacity to establish an means to convert the slums into thriving urban communities.

More than anything the grain embedded in slums holds that unplanned growth and evolution still maintains order and thus could mean that embed within slums is the possibility of initiating a means to pulls slums out of poverty.The same way that slums have been able to create successful market for goods to be bought and sold slums could be able to create better neighborhood to increase the standard of living using the same system of natural order that develops naturally.