A shanty town, also known as a squatter area or settlement, is characterized by improvised buildings or shacks. These are typically constructed from readily available materials like mud, wood, or inexpensive building materials such as corrugated iron sheets. These settlements often lack essential infrastructure, including proper sanitation, safe water, electricity, and street drainage.
Shanty towns are mostly found in developing nations, but also in the cities of developed nations, such as Athens and Madrid. Cañada Real is considered the largest informal settlement in Europe.
A typical shanty town in South Africa. Source: Wikipedia
The Nature of Squatter Camps in South Africa
In South Africa, squatter camps, often referred to as "plakkerskampe" (directly translated from Afrikaans), frequently emerge and expand rapidly on vacant land or public spaces near cities and towns. This proximity offers access to work opportunities without incurring high transportation costs.
Shanty towns tend to begin as improvised shelters on squatted land. People build shacks from whatever materials are easy to acquire, for example wood or mud. There are no facilities such as electricity, gas, sewerage or running water.
Read also: Property Practitioners Regulatory Authority
Globally, some of the largest shanty towns are Ciudad Neza in Mexico, Orangi in Pakistan and Dharavi in India. They are known by various names in different places, such as favela in Brazil, villa miseria in Argentina and gecekondu in Turkey.
Squatter camps in South Africa typically use cheap, and easily acquired building materials such as corrugated tin sheets to build shacks. Offering very little protection against extreme weather conditions, these squatter camps, often built near streams or rivers due to the steady water supply, are often subjected to flash floods. They are also prone to runaway fires due to the close proximity they are built in. They often cause a great deal of damage to naturally occurring ecosystems, both directly, and indirectly.
Due to the lack of infrastructure, and the cost of basic services, such as water and electricity, the overall squatted area is often barren, with the ground sweeped and stamped to minimise dust, and where gardening is simply impossible and unaffordable.
Development and Challenges
While most shanty towns begin as precarious establishments haphazardly thrown together without basic social and civil services, over time, some have undergone a certain amount of development. Often the residents themselves are responsible for the major improvements. Community organizations sometimes working alongside NGOs, private companies, and the government, set up connections to the municipal water supply, pave roads, and build local schools.
Some shanty towns have an informal economy, such as garbage scavenging, pottery-making, textiles, or leather works, providing some income.
Read also: Discover Thula Thula
Development occurs over a long period of time, and newer towns-and many older ones-still lack basic services. Some of these shanties have become middle class suburbs. Some Brazilian favelas have also seen improvements in the 21st century, and can even attract tourists. Other African shanty towns have even become popular tourist attractions.
Dharavi in Mumbai is one of the largest slums in the world. Source: Wikipedia
Global Examples
Shanty towns are present in a number of developing countries.
- In Nairobi, the capital of Kenya, Kibera has between 200,000 and 1 million residents.
- The largest shanty town in Asia is Orangi in Karachi, Pakistan, which had an estimated 1.5 million inhabitants in 2011. The Orangi Pilot Project aims to lift local people out of poverty.
- In Hong Kong, the Kowloon Walled City housed up to 50,000 people, with rooftop slums currently providing some additional housing.
- The world's largest shanty town is Ciudad Neza or Neza-Chalco-Itza, which is part of the city of Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl, next to Mexico City.
- Brazil has many favelas. In Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, it was calculated in 2000 that over 20% of its 6.5 million inhabitants were living in more than 600 favelas. For example, Rocinha is home to an estimated 80,000 inhabitants. It has developed into a densely populated neighbourhood with some buildings reaching six storeys high.
- In Argentina, shanty towns are known as villas miseria. As of 2011, there were 500,000 people living in 864 informal settlements in the metropolitan Buenos Aires area.
Historical Context and Modern Challenges
During the 1930s Great Depression, shanty towns nicknamed Hoovervilles sprang up across the United States. Following the Great Depression, squatters lived in shacks on landfill sites beside the Martin Pena canal in Puerto Rico and were still there in 2010. More recently, cities such as Newark and Oakland have witnessed the creation of tent cities.
Although shanty towns are now generally less common in developed countries in Europe, they still exist. The growing influx of migrants has fuelled shantytowns in cities commonly used as a point of entry into the European Union, including Athens and Patras in Greece. The Calais Jungle in France had grown to over 8,000 people by the time of its clearance in October 2016. Bidonvilles exist in the peripheries of some French cities. The state authorities recorded 16,399 people living in 391 slums across the country in 2012. In Madrid, Spain, a shanty town named Cañada Real is considered the largest informal settlement in Europe. There have been cardboard cities in London and Belgrade.
Read also: Traditional South African Bread
Addressing South Africa's Housing Crisis
Born from a historic pledge by the ANC in 1994, the scheme to provide brick houses to all those in need is too costly and too slow. The backlog hit 2.1m units in 2013 and at least 1.9 million people (more than 10% of all households) live in shacks or other makeshift dwellings.
Throughout the country, hundreds of thousands of shacks make dense townships which grapple with fires, floods and sanitation problems. To bring relief from these everyday dangers, designers are proposing intermediate steps between shacks and brick houses - quick, low-cost, temporary solutions - until the state housing programme catches up on its backlog. Yet political and financial hurdles have so far stood in the way of building modern shacks on a large scale.
One such project is the e-khaya, designed as a safe sandbag-house for informal settlements. However, building code approvals and land ownership issues present significant challenges.
The Empower Shack Project
The Empower Shack Project
Another project, the two-storey 'empower shack' addresses all major dangers of township life - plus saves a lot of space in townships. They collaborated with the local community and Switzerland-based Brillembourg and Klumpner to build the prototype.
The empower shack is part of a broader township design project called 'blocking-out'. This spatial design concept combines innovative, low-cost shacks with new township layouts. Blocking-out involves the local people who demolish the old clutter of shacks and rebuild them. With professional guidance, they plant their new shacks around open courtyards in order to create safe community spaces and free up gaps for utilities.
Since 2009, iKhayalami has built around 1,500 shacks in blocking-out projects in Cape Town - mostly from its own funds.
Such precedents have slowly convinced the government and local communities of the transformative effect of blocking-out. In April 2012, the city signed a partnership agreement with the Community Organisation Resource Centre and the Informal Settlement Network, two other organisations pushing for change. Then, it got involved in the blocking-out of Mtshini Wam township in 2012-2013, a project now labelled as a great success. On 30 October 2013, Cape Town city council approved a new policy on blocking-out.
According to the policy, the government would fund starter kits for shacks (10 wooden poles and 5 zinc sheets, 3 metres each), as well as preparatory and municipal engineering works. The NGOs and future owners will continue to fund the structural elements of the shacks.
| Project | Description | Key Features |
|---|---|---|
| E-khaya | Safe sandbag-house for informal settlements | Low-cost, quick to build, faces legal and approval hurdles |
| Empower Shack | Two-story shack design | Saves space, addresses township dangers, part of the 'blocking-out' project |
| Blocking-Out | Township spatial design project | Combines low-cost shacks with new layouts, community involvement, creates safe spaces |
Cape Town's example shows that South Africa could rely more on the innovation it celebrates. This design is short of fancy - but nothing short of transformative.
