Shantytowns

The Nature of Shantytowns

The distinguishing feature of shantytowns is that they involve the illegal occupation of land. Thus, residents cannot depend on government institutions to provide support for the development and maintenance of the settlement at a level taken for granted in other areas. Instead, they must rely on their own initiative and collaborative efforts with their neighbors and larger networks of friends and relatives to create a functioning settlement.

Community solidarity, however, is often difficult to achieve in shantytowns, because such settlements tend to be socially heterogeneous and may include diverse subgroups with conflicting values, habits, and goals. In contrast to formal settlements where one or more gate-keeping conditions, such as household income, serve to filter out prospective residents without sufficient revenue to buy or rent, newcomers to shantytowns tend to come from many different places, and they have diverse histories and reasons for choosing to locate in a shantytown.

Some squatters are illegal immigrants from neighboring countries, who come in hope of finding work, superior education, and health services. Others are rural migrants who establish what is initially thought of as a temporary dwelling on the urban fringe, while they work in the urban economy. Still others are urban residents who cannot afford a house in the formal sector, due to insufficient social housing, a lack of land designated [Page 1227]for market-based affordable housing, inflation of housing prices, or economic recession. While the majority of residents are relatively poor, a minority choose to locate in these settlements to be free of the myriad constraints imposed by government, constraints that range from building codes to work-safety and trade regulations and conventions of social behavior. For example, some people, often called “squat-lords,” build illegal apartments, either in their house or in separate structures, that do not meet building codes and that they rent on the black market. More seriously, shantytowns are sometimes used as a base by criminals, as the police often do not consider that an informal settlement merits full protection and thus do not patrol these settlements on a regular basis.

...