MAN AND HIS CITIES—I The Growth Of Shanty Towns And Suburbs

Press, Volume CV, Issue 31029, 7 April 1966, Page 7

MAN AND HIS CITIES—I The Growth Of Shanty Towns And Suburbs

To mark World Health Day, April 7. the World Health Organisation of the United Nations has declared “Man and his Cities” to be the theme on which world attention should be focused this year. Three articles, supplied by the organisation’s Division of Public Information, discuss four main points: Cities are growing at an even faster rate than the so-called world population explosion. The impact of the city on man is both negative and positive. By reducing the aggressive impact of the city on the individual the essentially positive aspects of city life could be greatly intensified. Far-reaching environmental improvements will make it easier for man to adapt to his cities and in the urbanised world of tomorrow, city health must have priority. The city of tomorrow is not far off. Men may be about to conquer outer space but they do not have the right to neglect the search for the habitat appropriate to the twenty-first century.

About the year 1800, not more than 50 cities in the world had more than 100,000 inhabitants concentrating a mere 2 per cent of the world population. Today, shanty towns of more than 100,000 inhabitants on the fringes of our modern cities concentrate 12 per cent of the world population, more than one-third of the world’s city population. By the end of this century, city population is forecast to exceed 60 per cent of an estimated world population of 6.000,000,000 people.

Urbanisation is the twin sister of industrialisation. Consequently, Europe, the first continent to go through with this process, is more highly urbanised than the world as a whole. According to United Nations estimates, 30,000,000 dwellings will have to be built to ease the housing crisis in developed countries; no fewer than 150,000,000 human beings need rehousing forthwith in the developing world.

The “callampas” and 5 “favelas”—the shanty towns I of Latin America—have popu- I lations running into hundreds c of thousands. Indeed, the in- I crease of town populations is i amazing in this area, witness f the following figures: from < 1940 to 1960. population in 1 Sao Paulo (Brazil) trebled * in size: in Santiago de Chile 1 it almost doubled: in Caracas 1 (Venezuela) it increased five < times: in Bogota (Colombia) it * more than doubled: in Lima s (Peru) it more than trebled, ] and in Mexico City it almost ' trebled. In Asia, the popu- ' lation of Bombay has trebled 1 during the last 20 years; that ' of New Delhi has doubled, ' and the same is true of Peking and Karachi. In India, in order decently ' to house the additional population of towns of more than 100.000 inhabitants during the 25 years ending 1975, no less than 22,000 million dollars would be necessary. In the United States the National Planning Association estimates that the funds required to do away with slums, build economic dwellings and cater for the corresponding increase in rail-and-road requirements during the next five years, would require to 10 per cent of the national income.

Birth Rales There is, however, a reassuring fact; in countries where industrialisation began more than a century ago— Belgium, France. Great Britain and Germany—the rate of urbanisation has been slowing down since 1930. Urbanisation seems to be linked with decreasing fecundity. Thus, in urban areas, where children are no longer useful producers but costly consumers. the lack of dwelling space has a restrictive effect on the birth rate. In Europe, where urbanisation is higher than elsewhere, the birth rate is the lowest observed— 19 a 1000 compared with 42 a 1000 in Asia and 46 a 1000 in Africa. African urbanisation was the outcome of European settlement and the result is not unlike the state of European cities in the nineteenth century. The sight of the shanty towns in Africa is reminiscent of Roubaix and

Manchester as described by Friedrich Engels and Adolphe Blanqui: non-existent hygiene, open-air sewers, and children playing in filth and refuse that is never taken away. Water fetched from the local pump or wells is polluted as often as not Climate may mitigate an existence devoid of comfort but it offers an excellent breeding ground for dangerous flies and mosquitos. Immigrants are shockingly housed, ill fed and reft of drinking-water; they are uprooted from traditional ways of life without any notion of hygiene. Over-rapid urbanisation in Africa, Asia and Latin America is prejudicial to both town and country; venereal and mental diseases are common; infection is rampant and the deathrate is high. Urbanisation in Africa has a very special character because of its transitory nature. Certain migrants leave the countryside to escape from the tradition and servitudes of tribal life with the intention of returning later; more often than not their families stay behind. The relationship between town and country is thus a mobile one with continual population exchanges; however, with all this coming and going, the town wins every time. Thus Yaounde

(Cameroon) has more than doubled its population during the last seven years; Conakry (Guinea) has grown four-fold during the last five years; Dar-es-Salaam (Tanganyika) has doubled its population over the last decade; Accra (Ghana) and Luanda (Angola) have trebled their populations. While the shanty town is the makeshift and chaotic response of migrants to a situation that calls for industrial planning beyond the reach of local authorities, the suburbs . growing around towns and cities since the industrial revolution began are themselves little better than glorified shanty towns. Suburbs which offer all the drawbacks and none of the advantages of either town or country, which nullify the reduction of working hours by adding to the time required to travel between home and work are the dismal legacy of industrial civilisation in the nineteenth century. Efforts have been made to discipline suburban growth by means of garden cities and, more recently, by housing and shopping centres forming little towns of their own. Unfortunately the latter, like garden cities, often do not differ from dormitory towns. Thus new town-planning conceptions are needed to meet living conditions quite different from those of the past: they will have to be thought out carefully by specialist teams from many disciplines: geography, sociology. architecture, public health, psychiatry and economics, to mention a few. Effects On Mind It is a trite accusation that the modern city—and especially its embryo: the new 1

neighbourhood unit with its large blocks of flats —gives rise to psychological disturbances that may lead to suicide. W.H.O. experts agree on this point: there is no form of mental disease peculiar to the neighbourhood unit. What has been called “housewife’s neurosis” is just as frequent in detached suburban villas and garden cities as it is in the new neighbourhood. Although the scientific cause of the complaint has yet to be ascertained, it does not seem to lie in urbanisation but rather in the wrench of migration which tends to break up the family nucleus, separate married women from their parents, and children from their grandparents; it also isolates individuals in a new environment which may easily appear to be hostile. The change from the life of the farmer or craftsman to that of the modern factory worker causes just as much mental unrest as the transition to urban from rural dwellings. Many people have the impression that mental disease is comparatively more frequent in urban than in rural areas. Yet there is good reason to believe that in proportion to the population, these disorders are equally prevalent in non-industrialised ' countries. . Some factors in city life i no doubt tend to bring out , mental defect. The abundance , of complex mechanical , devices such as semi-sophisti- . cated traffic lights, compli- . cated regulations governing

some public transport systems, and the need from time to time to do things quickly may make life difficult for the person of limited intelligence. Some of these persons would no doubt be happier in a smaller community where everybody would know them and where they could fill a modest but useful role. The city may tend to turn them into social misfits. However, the advantages of the city is that it can and often does offer good educational facilities for the mentally handicapped child. The most urgent problems concern environment. United Nations surveys show that they have to do with inadequate water and sewerage installations, unhealthy dwellings in unsanitary residential zones, ill-chosen sites for factories or housing developments, and the pollution of air and water by chemical wastes. (To be continued)