Squatter Settlements

Squatter settlements, widespread in urban Africa, Latin America, and South and Southeast Asia, are a characteristic feature of contemporary urbanization. Also known as shantytowns, slums, favelas in Brazil, and bustees in South Asia, they involve the extralegal occupation and settlement of public or private land, often by migrants from rural areas. Unplanned and typically located on peripheral or marginal land, squatter settlements have poor infrastructure and inadequate public services, including water, health, and sanitation. Houses tend to be auto-constructed and built incrementally. Residents of squatter settlements generally lack legally recognized rights to the land they occupy, and may lead precarious lives. The majority work in the informal economy, in insecure, low-wage jobs or are self-employed. State policies in many countries, seeking to curb a migrant influx to big cities, criminalize land encroachment but fail to address the housing needs of the urban poor. Squatter settlements may be demolished in slum clearance programs. Nonetheless, many such settlements endure and grow, over time acquiring public services and rights. Well-known slums like Mumbai’s Dharavi, Rocinha in Rio de Janeiro, and Nairobi’s Kibera are populous, established, and diverse cities within cities. They are both celebrated and deplored in popular and academic accounts, as symbols of human resilience and entrepreneurship, or products of uneven development and global and national inequities. Early literature on squatter settlements located their growth in the distorted urbanization of what was known as the Third World, divorced from industrial modernization. Squatters were considered economically marginal, akin to peasants rather than “modern” urban citizens. Ethnographic and empirical research complicated these perspectives, providing insight into the lived experience and social, economic, and political organization of squatter settlements. Slums began to be viewed as solutions to challenges of housing, livelihoods, and economic growth. “Self-build” housing was celebrated, as was small-scale entrepreneurship. In-situ improvement and tenure legalization became preferred policy approaches. Later, critical urban theorists rejected notions of “underdevelopment” and development and argued that informal processes such as squatting were integral to urbanization in the Global South. As the world urbanizes, with population growth concentrated in developing world cities, slums have reemerged as sites for social-scientific inquiry. Debates about their relationship to growth and development, their viability as communities and living environments, and about policy approaches and outcomes continue to animate the literature. These debates reflect the fact that squatter settlements across the world, and even within cities, are heterogeneous and dynamic, within varied histories and trajectories.