The urbanization of Sub-Saharan Africa

Another day, another diagram. This time about urbanisation in sub-saharan countries. Since I visited Dar-es-Salaam in Tanzania I am fascinated by urbanization processes in African countries. In most cases cities grow predominantly without any form of city planning and zoning regulation, the so called 'informal urbanization'. The dashed circle is the total population per country (the African countries with less than 9 million inhabitants are left out). The smaller circle inside is the urban population; people living in cities. The segment in red is the amount of people living in slums according to UN. Although statistics on urbanisation in Africa are generally rather unreliable it gives a good indication on how precarious these cities actually are. Keep in mind that the African cities are expected to mushroom over the next decades. Also important to realize is that the qualification 'slum' is somewhat relative. 

Slum proportion in Africa, Latin America and Asia

I came across these maps of Africa, Latin America and Asia in the recent UN-report State of the World's cities  2010/2011: bridging the urban divide. I don't think these maps need any explanation.

Property, scarcity and urban informality (DRAFT)

Locke’s theory of property can only fully be understood in relation to the colonization of the newly discovered American continent. His idea is that appropriation of land should take place by cultivating the land; the uncultivated land did not belong to anyone. The native Americans did not own the land because they were only hunter gatherers. The more one cultivates the more one legally owns.

According to Hans Achterhuis in his study on scarcity the influence of Locke’s theories of property can be considered as the legitemization of the capitalist concept of property. However, it also influenced early socialist and anarchist movements (Achterhuis, 1988, p. 71). One of the most influential anarchist thinkers, Peter Kropotkin, in his Anarchist Manifesto (1887) – not mentioned by Achterhuis – had a comparable concept of property: the producer of an product is automatically the legitimate owner (Kropotkin, 1970).

John Turner, who was one of the most influential figures in the debate on informal urbanization during, derived his ideas on what he called ‘squatter settlements’ for an important part from anarchist theories. Turner worked in the 1950s in Lima’s barriadas. These were settlements in the empty desserts around the capital of Peru were land was as even less uncultivated as during the colonization of North America. The concept of appropriation through cultivated, in this case urbanization was not such a bad idea.

However, this become very different in a situation of scarcity. Strangely enough this receives very little attention in Turner’s work. Achterhuis, in Het rijk van de schaarste, takes scarecty as a point of departure. Scarcity leads to conflict. (To finish later…)