Stewart Brand
The magic of squatter cities is that they are improved steadily and gradually, increment by increment by increment, by the people living there. Each home is built that way, and so is the whole community. Peasants who leave the land take rural skills and values to the city slums with them. Building their own shelter is what they’ve always done, at a minuscule fraction of the cost of city-provided housing. Collaborating with extended family and neighbours in close proximity is nothing new to them, and neither is doing without elaborate infrastructure. Those are all the abilities they need to build the most creative urban phenomenon of our time, the squatter cities – the teeming slums of the uninvited that house a billion people now, two billion soon.
London used to be a shantytown. All the world’s cities were shantytowns in their early days. The process by which they became proper cities is being recapitulated now in the world’s squatter cities, only much faster this time and on a far larger scale. What planners have to do is meet the squatters halfway – help them secure their tenure and give them time to gradually join the formal world, which will no doubt be reshaped by their joining it.
After visiting Mumbai’s Dharavi slum, Prince Charles told his audience in London, “I find an underlying, intuitive grammar of design that subconsciously produces [a place] that is walkable, mixed-use, and adapted to local climate and materials – which is totally absent from the faceless slab blocks that are still being built around the world to warehouse the poor.”
According to urban researchers, squatters are now the predominant builders of cities in the world.
The magic of squatter cities is that they are improved steadily and gradually, increment by increment by increment, by the people living there. Each home is built that way, and so is the whole community.
Peasants who leave the land take rural skills and values to the city slums with them. Building their own shelter is what they’ve always done, at a minuscule fraction of the cost of city-provided housing. Collaborating with extended family and neighbours in close proximity is nothing new to them, and neither is doing without elaborate infrastructure. Those are all the abilities they need to build the most creative urban phenomenon of our time, the squatter cities – the teeming slums of the uninvited that house a billion people now, two billion soon.
By the people, for the people
© Mark Edwards/Still Pictures
Kathmandu in 1970...
© Mark Edwards/Still Pictures
... and thirty years later
Wentworth Street, Whitechapel, by Gustave Doré, from London: a Pilgrimage (1872)
London in the 19th century…
© Mark Edwards/Still Pictures
... and Mumbai now
© Mark Edwards/Still Pictures
Buenos Aires ten years ago...
© Mark Edwards/Still Pictures
... and now
