Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Moonlight City area of West Kingston, Jamaica,
by Clarke (1975). More typically, recycled scraps
of wood and corrugated iron may be employed
together with printers' drums for both outside
walls and roofs. Other materials that are frequently
employed in construction include flattened tin
cans, straw matting and sacking.
Such settlements may also be makeshift in the
sense that they have none of the basic urban
services such as water, electricity and sewerage
when they are initially developed. But even here
caution must be exercised, for with time such
services are often acquired, and brick-built houses
may come to predominate in a formerly makeshift
area. Certainly, the basic but frequently overlooked
distinction between squatter settlements
characterised by their illegality on the one hand,
and shanties identified by virtue of their poor
physical fabric on the other, must be fully
appreciated and borne in mind.
Yet other settlements are characterised by their
unplanned, irregular and informal nature, or by
their origin in mass land invasions. Such haphazard
or speedy development is epitomised by the
description 'spontaneous'. All of these terms are
highly appropriate in certain situations but are
potentially misleading in others. Thus, while many
low-income settlements are unplanned in the
professional planning and architectural senses,
many are the outcome of much careful
forethought on the part of their residents,
especially those involving organised land invasions,
which may occur at the suggestion of opposition
politicians (see Gilbert 1981; Potter 1994).
However, in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, the
development of low-income housing is typically a
much more gradual process, being based on slow
infiltration and individual initiative. Such
developments are, therefore, based on the very
antithesis of spontaneity.
Similar concern may be expressed concerning
the lack of universal applicability of descriptions
such as peripheral and marginal settlements,
whether used in a strictly geographical or an
economic sense. Finally, although the terms self-
help and autoconstruction are useful in signifying
that the building of such dwellings is not normally
undertaken by professionals, it would be highly
erroneous if the impression were to be given that
such houses are built entirely by their present or
previous occupants. Indeed, often the assistance of
friends and family is enlisted, supplemented by
artisans, as in the
coup d'main
system of St Lucia
(Potter 1994).
In the 1950s and 1960s, self-help housing was
generally viewed with alarm and pessimism,
representing a problem that had to be cleared and
replaced by regular housing (see Lloyd 1979: 53-
7; Conway 1982; 1985). Such negative views were
reflected in the writings of the American
anthropologist Oscar Lewis. Lewis worked in
Mexico, India and Puerto Rico, and he argued
that the poor were locked into an inescapable
'culture of poverty' (Lewis 1959; 1966). Lewis
maintained that wherever poor groups are found
they show traits such as apathy, fatalism, tendencies
towards immediate gratification and social
disorganisation.
These simple deterministic ideas came to be
attacked from a number of quarters (see Lloyd
1979: Drakakis-Smith 1981; Gilbert and Gugler
1992; Potter and Lloyd-Evans 1998). In particular,
it was suggested that the culture of poverty is
convenient for the wealthy and the powerful in so
far as it suggests that 'poverty is the poor's own
fault' (Gilbert and Gugler 1982: 84). It is views
such as these that are reflected in popular
descriptions of squatter settlements and shanty
towns as 'urban cancers', 'festering sores', 'urban
fungi' and the like. During the period when top-
down modernisation was unquestioningly
accepted as the route to development, it was
almost inevitable that poor housing would be
viewed erroneously as the problem, and not the
direct outcome and reflection of poverty.
Most authors and governments now agree that
third world governments cannot afford high-
technology, high-rise monumental responses to
their housing problems. In a paper presenting an
overall theory of slums, Stokes (1962) drew a clear
distinction between what he regarded as successful
and unsuccessful poor communities, referring to
these as
slums of hope
and
slums of despair,
respectively, a terminology that has stuck (but see
