Cities 07

This article brings up the question of definitions regarding the slum and the way in which this skews the perception and referents of a term like ‘slum’. Davis remarks that the definition of slum offered by the authors of The Challenge of Slums is – although it is still revealing of a large number of people living in such conditions – too exclusive. This definition follows “overcrowding, poor or informal housing, inadequate access to safe water and sanitation and insecurity of tenure.” This is worth mentioning because definitions over slums (or anything for that matter) are sometimes formulated and used to serve a purpose of some kind – e.g. political, social, dialectic… It can be deceiving to clump all things within a particular definition of a word such as ‘slum.’ This is due to the fact that things to which such a word is intended to refer can be so diverse in character that the kinds of interactions, problems, causes, and effects can not be encompassed by some single principle regarding economic social or other factors. I say this mostly to offer a less clean cut view of such a word as ‘slum’ and in order to suggest that the practice of framing the necessary and sufficient conditions for something is not necessarily a fruitful means at discovering something about that thing for which one has tried to define without being to inclusive or exclusive with respect to a particular set of referents.
I would be interested in knowing in what way Davis would distinguish the terms ‘slum’ and ‘ghetto.’ Do these terms have any overlap at all? This is too say: are all or only some ghettos slums? Or are all or some slums ghettos? Or are no slums ghettos?
Overcrowding, poor or informal housing, inadequate access to safe water and sanitation, and insecurity of tenure. Davis alludes to the complexity of such a term when he refers to the differ to the ‘calculus of housing’ by showing that for all slum dwellers there is no one and only one particular way to subsist in an environment. This may in turn allude to the ‘causes’ and to the separate cures of and for the slum. This part of the essay follows “For some people, including many pavement dwellers, a location near a job – say, in a produce market or train station – is even more important than a roof. For others, free or nearly free land is worth epic commutes from the edge to the center. And for everyone the worst situation is a bad, expensive location without municipal services or security of tenure.” It seems possible that Wilson would disagree with this if he maintains that proximity to jobs is the necessary and sufficient condition with respect to the ghetto. Although he also might disagree with ever equating any slum with any ghetto.
The subject of definitions and the like aside I would like to discuss one slum population with which I am familiar, although it is most through testimony and only partly through interaction, of which this reading reminded me. These are the homeless of Tokyo who fit into many of the particulars regarding slums that Davis mentions. There are often large groups of homeless people found in the parks of Tokyo and they are in one sense authorized to be there while in another sense they are not. They would thusly fit into to the diagram, which Davis lays out, as being informal squatters that are authorized and unauthorized. This is because they are squatting – which they are not theoretically supposed to do – but the police don’t really do anything about it. From time to time they are obliged to uproot for a day or so from the parks they occupy while the police come along to do inspections. Somehow – I’m not sure how – they know when the police are going to inspect that particular park and that day they leave. They might have some kind of deal formal or informal / said or unsaid with the authorities that prevents any conflict. In any case, whatever this deal is seems to function fairly well. Apparently, a good proportion of these individuals are homeless because they were once in construction but got injured on the job and are no longer able to work. A lot of the contstruction workers in Tokyo work on farms during the summer in the north of Japan and during the off season go to the city to do construction. Their working conditions seem somewhat precarious being that they walk around on bamboo scaffolding in sock like flexible shoes many stories up. I saw some of them basically pulling a tight rope act at some distance from the ground. I realize this sounds absurd but it’s true. Another interesting fact about some of these groups is that to earn money they have created a hierarchical work system in which the older individuals find work while the younger ones do the work. The elders then take a cut of what their ‘clients’ earn. Another source of income is earned through scavenging through dumpsters for daily comic books like “Manga” and reselling them on the street.
Perhaps one cause of homelessness and thus these kinds of communities in Tokyo is the fact that it is incredibly expensive to get an apartment in Tokyo. That is to say not just pay the monthly rent but to actually get the apartment. One generally pays around 3 to 4 times their monthly rent as a gift to their landlord when one moves into an apartment. This is not a damage deposit but a gift that you do not get back. My brother, for example, who lived in Tokyo for several years, paid his landlord 2,000 dollars as his moving fee for his apartment. This means one has to have that amount of money in the bank and be able to be fine with not getting it back if he or she wants to get a place to live.