A political theory on the development of slums
Politicians encourage squatting over initial opposition by city bureaucracies. Slums improve when slums and bureaucracies reconcile.
I was in Nairobi a few weeks ago, doing fieldwork in the city’s informal settlements. This is part of a long-term ethnographic project (with Adam Chilton) to understand the economics of slums, initially in India, and now around the world. We have established field sites in roughly 30 slums across 11 cities in India and are now beginning fieldwork in Kenya, Malawi, Chile, Argentina and a few other countries. In Nairobi itself, I spent time in 6 slums. Our research is trying to answer three questions. First, why do slums emerge? Second, how do they function? Third, what is the future of slums and their residents?
Before I present any answers, let me explain what I mean by slums. They are communities of people living as squatters on land they do not own or have any formal right to occupy. I do not define slums as low-quality housing, because I view that as a consequence of lacking formally protected rights to land. You can find a longer explanation in an early Substack post here.
My high-level theory of slums has several layers. One is a 30,000-foot economic view that explains why some countries have more urban squatters than others. In this post, I present a 10,000-foot political theory that explains how slums — not slum dwellers — improve in quality over time.
My 10,000 foot view of slums asks why they emerge, especially in democratic countries. While the 30,000 foot theory draws on data across nearly all countries in the world, this theory is really based on multiple slums in India and Kenya, which decide leaders via elections. (It may apply in non-democracies, but I am not confident about that.)
My theory is a 4 part play with 3 actors. The 3 actors are: (a) the bureaucracy that manages a city, (b) politicians that compete for elections, and (c) residents of urban slums in the city
In the first part of the play, city bureaucracies make master plans for a city that guides their investments in infrastructure. This plan imagines residential and commercial parts of the city. Often these bureaucracies intentionally or unintentionally plan a smaller city than will actually exist, intentionally if they prefer a low-density city and unintentionally if they simply underestimate the extent of future urbanization. This part is surprising because the bureaucracy actually wants a productive city that generates high income, but that success attracts more density than the bureaucracy wants or expects. Success creates conditions for the plan’s failure.
The second part of the play is that rural residents come to the city because it offers higher wages than rural areas. Moreover, the pressure to come is greater the better the master plan is at attracting business. After the city reaches the bureaucracy’s desired density, the bureaucracy does not want the poorer residents. So these individuals have to illegally squat on someone else’s land to stay. The bureaucracy, on its own, does not make any accommodations in the master plan for the unwanted or unplanned rural migrants.
Ordinarily, the bureaucracy would simply demolish slums, but in part three politicians protect these poor rural migrants in exchange for these new slum dwellers voting for the politicians. That protection sometimes even includes partial access to services such as water and electricity for their dwellings. These patron saints could be politicians competing in local city elections, or politicians in the national legislature in a capital city. The former are often content merely to cultivate vote banks in slums after migrants have arrived. Because slums are so dense, they are an efficient place to campaign. But in capital cities, politicians in the national assembly are often more pro-active. They actually encourage people from their rural jurisdictions to come from the city in return for voting for them. (These migrants, precisely because they cannot officially relocate, often retain voting rights in their rural jurisdictions.) Either way, part three is fight between politicians as champions of slums, and city bureaucracies as their antagonists.
The final part of the play has a plot-twist: slums are betrayed by politicians, and bureaucracies become their savior. Elections are periodic. So politicians have to get votes from slums over and over again. If a politician gave a beholden slum legal rights to stay in the city, e.g., public housing or land rights, or even provided slums a legal and permanent right to services such as water and electricity, the slums would not need to vote for that politician. So the politician gives slums only temporary benefits so that he can bargain for votes in return for a renewal of those benefits. Slum residents recognize this: they will tell you plainly that a politician only provides short-term services and only around election time. But residents need those benefits, so they reluctantly vote for the politician.
In due time, however, bureaucracies accept that slums will persist and their initial low-density city plan is unattainable. Some combination of self-organizing by slums and intervention of NGOs hastens this process. One of these two groups see that politicians do not want the slum to develop further, but that getting the bureaucracy to accept them is the only hope for sustained development. In this process, slums are recognized and residents are either given public housing or land rights. The time between the third and fourth parts may be decades. In the interim, initial residents of slums may earn enough money to move out of the slums, but they are replaced by new migrants who buy or rent their old homes, even though neither owns the land under the structures. But the physical structures in slums only disappear when the bureaucracy reconciles with squatters, and the country is rich enough either to provide public housing or land rights to encourage residents to invest in upgrading their homes to brick and concrete.
In short, this second theory posits that the emergence and development of slums is the product of a battle between bureaucracies and politicians, where informal settlements only become formal when alliances shift. This theory connects to the first in the sense that the early stages of urbanization are associated with opposition to slums from bureaucracies and the later stages are associated with upliftment of slums through provision of services.