Reviewed by Jeff Shantz
The Rain 4:2 (Summer-Autumn 2006): 8
“The value of my house—26 years struggle.”
These are the powerful words of a squatter in the settlement of Brasilia Teimosa (Stubborn Brazil) quoted in Squatter Citizen. This is a wide-ranging work that addresses vast, rapid and complex processes of urban change in poorer countries. Drawing on research and participation in a variety of squats and popular settlements in numerous countries including India, Nigeria, Sudan and Argentina, Hardoy and Satterthwaite provide a powerful denunciation of the paternalistic or patronizing approaches taken by most governments towards poor people. The book provides many compelling accounts of how poor people in different cities have organized and developed their own houses and neighbourhoods. In Brasilia Teimora, a squatter settlement in Recife, Brazil, residents struggled against eviction for almost forty years. Finally the public authorities claimed to have a dramatic change of heart and decided they wanted to provide basic services. The squatters remained skeptical. As one put it, rather than thank the government for their newfound largesse: “We decided to create our own laws—our own urban plans” (32). In Ganeshnagar, Pune, the authors relate an example in which tenants formed a group to resist landlords who were harassing people for higher rents and charging protection money. “Eventually, the tenants gained control of the settlement, forced the landlords to sell them the houses and organized an upgrading programme” (124). The growing power of civil society and social movements in São Paolo has played a crucial role in limiting and challenging the power of the state to control squatter settlements since 1974.
As economics and government policies leave people poor and homeless, without affordable housing, acceptable shelters or basic infrastructure and services, the necessity of self-made “popular settlements” becomes inescapable. In cities across the globe people meet basic needs and organize their own urban development plans in the face of intransigent governments and landowners. They build autonomous networks of mutual aid and solidarity outside of—and in opposition to—local governments. Squatters manage and coordinate new developments, contribute to safe and healthy built environments, reserve space for recreation and leisure, defend people against landowners and provide checks on dumping and pollution.
Rather than looking to governments for solutions, Hardoy and Satterthwaite insist that we recognize that governments “themselves have been instrumental in creating the problem” (137). Government rules and regulations ensure that the most basic aspects of poor people’s lives, including the means by which we earn a living, are illegal. This general criminalization makes people vulnerable to further exploitation from landowners, businesses and police. Of course, as the authors note, much of supposedly legal low-income housing is actually illegal in terms of codes, standards, zoning (for garage apartments for example) and so on. Yet landlords are rarely treated as guilty parties (even at tribunals when tenants bring complaints). As one example from my own experience which highlights this hypocrisy, when the Pope Squat in Toronto was shut down on code and safety violations, most apartment buildings in its surrounding Parkdale neighbourhood would have failed inspections (if they ever happened).
Even government programs that are supposedly designed to improve the living conditions of poor people are constrained by “a legislative structure designed to serve the interests of middle and upper income groups” (24). Most of what we need to do to develop more egalitarian cities will be difficult to incorporate into government programs because it will contravene the principle underpinnings of legislation: the ownership of land and inheritance of privileges (31). Capitalist concepts of land ownership and transfer of land, including the right to sell it, are at odds with noncapitalist patterns of land use and control, as well as customs and beliefs developed by working class communities or colonized societies.
Real housing solutions require a fundamental “redistribution of power and resources in favour of poorer groups” (136). This will not be granted (or even assisted) by government organizations (which might assist the effort but, even then, are unlikely to). Rather, as Hardoy and Satterthwaite illustrate, it must be won by the self-activity of poor people and their own organizations. Squatters’ networks and autonomous do-it-yourself politics are part of building the forces necessary to effect a shift in relations of power and domination such that subordinate groups might resist exploitation and end their domination by more powerful groups. Indeed, Hardoy and Satterthwaite note that, for the most part, rather than government assistance, “grassroots or neighbourhood groups want more open, wide ranging participation in the development of their own housing and neighbourhoods without hindrance from government” (306). The accounts inSquatter Citizen show over and over again the tremendous sense of community and household responsibility in squats, certainly more than can develop in bureaucratically run social housing projects. In squats, participants define priorities collectively and participate directly to meet them. Squats also provide necessary watchdog networks to prevent poor people from being exploited by landlords, landowners and businesses. As Hardoy and Satterthwaite note, “one can hardly expect the private sector to police itself ” (135) .
The basis for developing autonomous communities is to be found in examples of “work undertaken by informal community or neighbourhood organizations in providing basic services and site improvements for themselves” (305). In fact, the efforts of poor citizens and the organizations they form are the major influence on how many cities actually develop. Poor people are in many cases the most active and effective city builders (304).
Globally, autonomous squatters’ movements have made some real gains which are instructive for poor people in Canada. Hardoy and Satterthwaite conclude that over the past twenty years (up to 1989) many governments in poorer countries “began to recognize that illegal settlements were simply logical responses by city dwellers solving their own accommodation needs” (118). As the authors suggest: “The dynamism shown by those who organize the construction of their own housing in illegal settlements, began to be better appreciated—with illegal housing developments viewed less as a problem and more as a solution” (118). These changing attitudes have included recognition of the legal right of those living in illegal settlements to be there and the recognition of the right of people living in what were previously considered illegal settlements to basic infrastructure and services. Elsewhere building codes have been changed to reflect what poor people can attain safely rather than standards assumed for more expensive housing (given that codes for poor legal housing are usually ignored altogether).
Of course, such sentiments are always subject to change as governments and conditions change, so squatters must always build networks for mutual support, sustenance and defense. Government resources will not be enough to maintain a continuous subsidy for low-income housing and governments, of all types, lack the will to acquire land through expropriations. Thus squatting networks will necessarily have to do this work ourselves. Only squatters will be prepared, out of necessity, or able, to challenge the power of private landowners (129). Certainly if most of Tenochtitlan, Delhi or Cairo “were built in defiance of official rules and practices” (25) we shouldn’t be denied a few buildings in Vancouver, Victoria, Winnipeg, Toronto, Peterborough, Montréal, Québec City, Halifax or elsewhere.