Cities 07

This article was like a godsend; this speaks directly to my final paper. I was wondering where I was going to find a theorist on this. Woohoo!

Slums can be found in every part of the world. The devastation that is found in these areas is fashioned by social immobility that leads to extreme poverty. These slums are characterized by dilapidated housing, overcrowding, unsanitary living conditions, and homelessness. Individuals are born into a life of poverty, of which they cannot escape. According to the reading, a third of people in the world live in slums. Due to inaccuracies in data collection, it is difficult to determine if this figure is accurate or not. More impoverished cities tend to lowball their population numbers in order to avoid paying higher taxes. From my experience in other countries, the slums vary in location within a city, but the most destitute areas are very similar in their arrangement and interactions with the remainder of the city, no matter what country they are in.

The reading reminded me of my experiences in Mexico. In the city that I was in, the upper classes reside in the city center. The middle class lives in the next band further out from the center. The lower class is left to occupy the city's outer limits, where they are easily neglected and overlooked by the other classes.

Outside of the slums, people keep bars on their windows and doors in order to keep the slum dwellers out of their private homes and businesses. Since the slum dwellers are in such poverty, the temptation to steal the bare necessities exists. Within the slums, there are no bars on the doors and windows. This is not only because they cannot afford to put bars on their doors and windows, but also because they have no material possessions worth stealing. Their homes aren't worth raiding for goods.

In the most destitute areas, shacks that house three generations are what many slum dwellers call home. The homes are complete with dirt floors and rusted corrugated metal for walls. Their homes are literally falling apart. The bathroom for many of the houses consists of a degrading hole in the dirt, sometimes covered by a decaying structure similar to that of the dilapidated houses. Rusted mattress springs are used for fences around the feeble land that they claim. The fences wouldn't prevent thieves from coming into the home; they are simply a representation of the small personal security that these people cling to. The corroded mattress springs also stand for the land that they have staked as their own. Land is the one thing that they can put their name on, even if it does not legally belong to them. One neighborhood that I visited was a dump. Literally. The homes were built on a former landfill. The kids played barefoot on heaps of garbage behind their houses without giving it a second thought. Broken glass, jagged tin cans, and metal scraps lined the compacted dirt floors of their homes and their dirt roads.

These living conditions are unacceptable. However, they are being ignored and swept under the rug, along with most other social problems. The people that live in these areas don't possess enough social power to make a change. If things are going to be changed, the change has to begin from outside; it has to be instigated by the middle and upper classes.

Allison