Are Slums Both the Problem and the Solution?

For a whole bunch of reasons—an inflated housing market, shrinking job opportunities, developers building condos instead of affordable public housing—the population of tent cities is on the rise in the U.S. with new settlements gaining attention for their size in Sacramento, Reno, Seattle and Nashville over the past year.

Taking the long-view, this may not be such a bad thing.

As urban crowding increases competition for housing and there are more people for fewer resources, urban planners and architects are turning to these shanty-towns for answers to housing problems.

Here’s Stewart Brand quoted by Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow on the subject of slums in the Boston Globe: “It’s a clear-eyed, direct view we’re calling for – neither romanticizing squatter cities or regarding them as a pestilence,” says Brand. “These things are more solution than problem.”

Some predate the recent economic downturn. Dignity Village in Portland has been slowly gaining repute for nearly a decade. It requires residents to live drug and alcohol free, limits how many people they admit and has a long waiting list of folks wanting to live in and contribute to the community. Other tent cities however, have more in common with the 1930′s style Hoovervilles—where penniless workers turned vacant lots into sprawling informal communities—than modern alternatives to street-life.

So what can we learn from slums? For one, these high density dwellings where people live in extremely close proximity creates a self-regulating sense of community. Several residents have commented that they feel safer in these temporary, informal communities than in a large city. When everybody knows everybody it’s hard to pick out a victim, and when no one has anything to steal, crime tapers off.

Then there’s the ecological impact of tent cities. When you replace concrete foundations with nylon tarps, it’s easier for the grass to grow back. And these compact cities contribute to less urban sprawl. In Mumbai, India, 60% of the population fits on 6% of the land. Reusing living space as business space for a large group of people equals greater land use efficiency and this kind of population density also creates informal micro-economies. Inside the slums, it’s possible for someone to be completely off the books for their entire career, yet filling a very large demand for a service.

That’s what architect Teddy Cruz noticed during nearly a decade of walking the slums near Tijuana, where developers would mass-construct swaths of tiny houses and residents would immediately retrofit them to suit their retail or service needs.

This is of course one of the pitfalls of slum living, that making a life in a poverty culture limits you to existing within that culture, but from an architectural point of view, these multi-functional spaces can be admired for the way they utilize living space. They are also constructed with local, recycled materials, with minimal transport or labor costs, out of necessity.

Cruz, who is in the process of developing affordable housing in New York and San Diego, also integrated half public half private spaces like porches into his designs to foster the sense of community that seems to be the greatest strength of these informal communities.

He’s not the only one looking to these communities for inspiration. Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture also studies Sustainable Living Urban Model called SLUM Lab. And although many of their observations seem to come to different conclusions, they are both studying how to alleviate the worst aspects of living in poverty and learn how a need-based lifestyle can inform larger green building projects.

Tent cities certainly have laudable qualities, but is this a step in the right direction or an excuse for concentrating poverty?

Photo by: nelsonminar