Shanty Town - Features

Features

Since construction is informal and unguided by urban planning, there is a near total absence of formal street grids, numbered streets, sewage network, electricity, or telephones. Even if these resources are present, they are likely to be disorganized, old or inferior. Shanty towns also tend to lack basic services present in more formally organized settlements, including policing, medical services and fire fighting. Fires are a particular danger for shanty towns not only for the lack of fire fighting stations and the difficulty fire trucks have traversing the absence of formal street grids, but also because of the high density of buildings and flammability of materials used in construction A sweeping fire on the hills of Shek Kip Mei, Hong Kong, in late 1953 left 53,000 squatter dwellers homeless, prompting the colonial government to institute a resettlement estate system.

Shanty towns have high rates of crime, suicide, drug use and disease. However the observer Georg Gerster has noted (with specific reference to the invasões of Brasilia), "squatter settlements, despite their unattractive building materials, may also be places of hope, scenes of a counter-culture, with an encouraging potential for change and a strong upward impetus." (1978) Stewart Brand has also written, more recently, that "squatter cities are Green. They have maximum density—­a million people per square mile in Mumbai—­and minimum energy and mate­rial use. People get around by foot, bicycle, rickshaw, or the universal shared taxi ... Not everything is efficient in the slums, though. In the Brazilian favelas where electricity is stolen and therefore free, Jan Chipchase from Nokia found that people leave their lights on all day. In most slums recycling is literally a way of life." (2010)