Poor rural migrants have become like characters in the folk-tales they no longer tell their children: fleeing the countryside to escape the evil spirits of want and poverty, they find the old enemies lying in wait for them in the urban slums that are their destination.
Global poverty is in flight; it has been evicted from an exhausted, transformed hinterland. The United Nations estimates rural populations have reached their peak, but there will be a further two billion urban settlers in the next 30 years.
About 70% of these will live in slums, adding to the 920-million already there.
The poor have taken their bundles to the unwelcoming cities of Asia, Africa and Latin America. Few go in search of bright lights. Most depart in sorrowful resignation, because they have dependants to sustain and insufficient means to do so.
The earth they farmed no longer yields a surplus to sell in the market. Water is contaminated, well water polluted, irrigation channels silted up.
In any case, the land was sold for a dowry, or to finance a family member in the Gulf, from where she sent her domestic servant’s wages each month until the contract expired. Land was taken by the government for a coastal resort, a golf course, or under the pressure of structural adjustment plans to export more agricultural products.
Other aspects of rural life had also decayed. There had been no repairs to the school building. The health centre had closed. Forests, where people had always gathered fuel, fruit and bamboo for house repairs, had become forbidden zones, guarded by men in the livery of some private semi-military company.
Poverty itself mutates during the journey to the cities. People leave places where food is produced, paradoxically, to escape hunger. When they see city markets, it seems they have indeed arrived at a place of plenty. But the cash required for food always outruns the day’s labour. Vegetables dug freely out of a patch of earth now cost half a day’s income.
Neighbours and relatives in the city find a precarious site where a shelter can be built out of industrial detritus — close to the bubbling black water of a stagnant canal, on the dangerous scree of a stony slope.
In some cities, factory work is available; others have urbanised without becoming industrial; and from some, industry has already departed. The poorest areas evoke images of flimsy makeshift settlements: cities have become refugee camps for the evictees of rural life.
No one gives work. People turn themselves into rickshaw drivers or domestic servants; buy a handful of bananas and spread them for sale on the pavement; offer themselves as porters and labourers. This is the informal sector. In India, less than 10% of people are employed in the formal economy, and this is being reduced by the privatisation of state enterprises.
In the slums, latrines surrounding polluted ponds are shared by 50 families. The nearest tap is a 15-minute walk away, and water flows only in the early hours. Money for illegal electricity connections must be paid to the prosperous family in a house on the main road. Children suffer from strange fevers. Money set aside for food must be spent on medicine.
Security comes to mean a padlock on the door, rather than the vigilant eyes of neighbours. Uncertainty redefines itself as insecurity of tenure, the illegality of what were to have been sanctuaries from eviction. Insufficiency is structured into the very wages that were to have been the means of deliverance, but which prove unable to procure the necessities of life.
In 1950, 18% of people in developing countries lived in cities. This rose to 40% in 2000. By 2030 it will reach 56%. More than 40% of these are already living in slums. The urban poor are emblematic of the 21st century.
Neo-liberal policies have quickened the growth of slums, as subsidies for agriculture and nutrition have been withdrawn, effective health and education have become marketed commodities, water has been privatised and sanitation all but abandoned.
The world must learn once more that the minimal state leads to maximum disturbance. If rural poverty is relatively dispersed and powerless, global laissez-faire towards an urbanisation without livelihood sets up pathologies of violence, the consequences of which are not difficult to foresee. — Â