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Joe Slovo shanty town in Langa on the Cape Flats simmers after a fire (Cape Town, South Africa)
Shanty towns (also called squatter camps, favelas, slums or informal settlements) are often illegal or unauthorized settlements of impoverished people who live in improvised dwellings made from scrap plywood, corrugated metal, sheets of plastic and other found materials. Shanty towns, which are usually built in or close to major cities as a strategy to access urban resources, often do not have proper sanitation, electricity, or telephone services or metalled roads. States tend to try and remove shanty town dwellers to peripheral sites outside of cities.
Shanty towns are mostly found in developing nations, or partially developed nations with an unequal distribution of wealth. In extreme cases, shanty towns have populations approaching that of their host city.
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Shanty towns tend to develop on the outskirts of cities. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, shanty towns, often called "Hobo jungles", appeared in cities across North America because of massive unemployment. Some were nicknamed "Hoovervilles" because the residents blamed the economic conditions on then President Herbert Hoover, whose decisions were popularly thought to have caused the depression. Similarly in Canada, hobo jungles were dubbed "Bennettville" after Prime Minister Bennett.[citation needed]
The first recorded use of the word shanty, as meaning a crude dwelling, was in Ohio in 1820.[citation needed] It may have been derived from the French Canadian word chantier, meaning hut in a lumber camp, from the French word for timberyard. Alternatively, it could have been derived from the Irish sean tigh, meaning "old house" or from the Nahuatl word chantli "home".
Shanty town residences are almost always built without a license. Since construction is informal and unguided by urban planning, there is a near total absence of formal street grids, numbered streets, sanitation networks, 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 because of the close proximity of buildings and flammability of materials used in construction.
Shanty towns usually have a high rates of crime, suicide, drug use, and disease. On the other hand, observer Georg Gerster has noted (with specific reference to the invasões of Brasilia), "squatter settlements [as opposed to slums], 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."Georg Gerster, Flights of Discovery: The Earth from Above, 1978, London: Paddington, p. 116
Shanty towns are present in a number of countries including South Africa (where they are often called squatter camps) or imijondolo, the Philippines (often called squatter areas), Venezuela (where they are known as barrios), Brazil (favelas), West Indies such as Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago (Where they are known as shanty towns), Peru (where they are known as pueblos jóvenes), and Haiti, where they are referred to as bidonvilles.
In many countries there are now large movements of shanty town residents which often face severe state repression. For example in South Africa Abahlali baseMjondolo have become a significant political force in the cities of Durban and Pietermaritzburg and in Brazil the Movement of Workers Without a Roof (MTST) is very strong.
Many countries have a name for marginal settlements:
Korogocho (Kenya) see korogocho.org Australia
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from Wikipedia
