creation of walls around cities to keep rural people at bay. These barriers mostly fell or loosened up by the second half of the twentieth century. The ideologies of colonialism, communism and military dictatorships in different ways restricted the internal movement of people, including movement to cities. The case of Nairobi illustrates this well. Nairobi was originally a tiny Masai tribal village prior to 1899,107 before it was built up by the British to serve as a base for construction and servicing of a railroad. It was conceived as a European city to serve only the white settlers. In fact, the only Africans allowed to walk the streets there were those who had labour skills needed by the colonial class. Nairobi was systematically racially zoned in the plans of 1905, 1927 and 1948.108 It was also an odd location for a city to be developed, as Neuwirth explains. Its ‗terrible drainage and water shortages plague it to this day‘ he wrote, ‗and the early administrators actually considered knocking it down and moving the entire city to a more favourable location, but the idea was simply too costly. Warts and all, Nairobi would remain Kenya‘s number one city‘.109
The local African population was still required for labour, and by the 1930s they had rough homes just outside of the downtown area and down by the Mathare River. These areas had none of the infrastructure of the settler neighbourhoods. Even so, at times even these settlements were considered a threat, as demonstrated by the 1953 demolition of 7,000 homes in the Mathare River area by British police in search of Mau Mau rebels.110
With the fall of British colonial rule in 1964 racial access restrictions to Nairobi were lifted. While colonial-style bureaucracy remained (just taken over by locals), a principal barrier to moving to Nairobi was gone. Its dire location and planning, however, already a problem in the time of colonial rule, would cripple its ability to cope with more than six million people who, now free to move, flooded into Nairobi in search for work, including nearly two million into slum and squatter neighbourhoods.111 UN-Habitat reports that in 1971 there were fifty such neighbourhoods with 167,000 residents, but by 1995 there were 134 with some 1.8 million
107 Neuwirth, Shadow Cities, 91. 108
Hardoy and Satterthwaite, Squatter Citizen, 21.
109 Neuwirth, Shadow Cities, 92. 110 Neuwirth, Shadow Cities, 92.
residents and that ‗the share of informal-settlement village inhabitants rose from one third to an estimated 60 per cent‘ of Nairobi as a city.112 Some of these slum and squatter settlements are the world‘s largest, including Kibera, which has over 800,000 residents and was made famous around the world after being the setting for the Hollywood film, The Constant Gardener.113 Not only did the fall or partial fall of the ideologies of colonialism, communism and militarism lead to the easing of restrictions concerning where people could live, it opened up access to cities for the growing numbers of rural poor. Chart 3 below shows the dramatic increase in size of Africa‘s cities since the 1950s and 1960s when many African countries won independence.
Chart 3: Population growth for African’s largest cities in 2000 over two centuries
Source: Satterthwaite, 2007114
3.2 Urbanization’s link with globalization’s rise
Ideas of democracy, globalization and free-market economies filled the ideological gap left by colonialism, communism and militarism for much of the developing world. Helped by the UN and World Bank economists, much of the Two-thirds World has moved to some form of free- market economy over the last fifty years. Even those considered Communist, such as China or Vietnam, have liberalized their economies. Yet during the same period of time improved technologies and agricultural practices have meant that the world does not need as many rural people producing food as in the past. For example, in the US, the number of people engaged in
112 UN-Habitat, Challenge of Slums, 219. 113 Brand, ‘City Planet‘, 5.
farming dropped from seventeen per cent of the total workforce in 1940 to six per cent by 1960.115 The lowering of barriers and freedom of movement to chase employment, coupled with the smaller percentage of the population required to produce food has a logical conclusion for millions of rural people: go to cities in the hope of better jobs, education for children and housing. The influential economist Jeffrey Sachs explains the link between economic growth and urbanization in two ways.
The first is that agricultural practices improve so that ‗As food production per farmer rises, an economy needs fewer and fewer farmers to feed the overall population‘.116 This cheapens food and raises the income of farmers—then fewer farmers are required.
The second is the advantages urban areas have for finding non-agricultural-based jobs. ‗Once the labor force is no longer engaged mainly in food production, it is natural that the bulk of the population will relocate to cities, drawn by higher wages that in turn reflect the higher productivity of work in densely settled urban areas.‘117 For Sachs the pull and the push of the city is a natural and expected consequence of a growing free-market, global economy. The question of why this same free-market cannot provide adequate neighbourhoods and affordable housing for these people to live in is an important, but often overlooked discussion. It is at the heart of Davis‘ thesis that the failure of global capitalism and the intentional withdrawal of the State is the primary cause of the lack of affordable urban housing that produces urban slum growth.118 To be fair to Sachs he sees the connection and has personally been involved in the Millennium Development Goals taskforce monitoring the progress toward slum changes. In the foreword to a recent report Sachs writes that it identified ‗strategies needed to meet one of the most important challenges of our time. Cities in developing countries need to improve the lives of slum dwellers and manage a projected near doubling of the urban population over the next three decades‘.119
Here it suffices to say that rapid urbanization is a natural consequence of the ideology of globalization and free-market economies, in a way that was not true in the age of colonialism,
115 United States Senate, ‗S. Doc. 105-24: The United States Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and
Forestry 1825-1998‘, http://www.access.gpo.gov/congress/senate/sen_agriculture/ch5.html (accessed January 13, 2007).
116 Jeffrey Sachs, The End of Poverty: How can we make it happen in our lifetime (London: Penguin, 2005), 36. 117
Sachs, The End of Poverty, 36.
118 Davis, Planet of Slums, 70-94.
119 Jeffrey Sachs, ‗Foreword‘, UN Millennium Project Taskforce on Improving the Lives of Slum Dwellers, A
communism and militarism before the second half of the twentieth century. This can especially be seen in fast-growing Asian cities, shown in chart 4 below, where cities like Tokyo literally grow off the chart to reach over 34 million residents.
Chart 4: Population growth over two centuries for Asia’s largest cities in 2000
Source: Satterthwaite, 2007120
3.3 Numbers of people able to flee, or return from, persecution since World War II have