But before considering why Third World cities and their slums grew so fast in the second half of the twentieth century, it is first necessary to understand why they grew so slowlY in the first half. Although there are some exceptions, most of today's megacities of the South share a common trajectory: a regime of relatively slow, even retarded growth, then abrupt acceleration to fast growth in the 1950s and 1960s, with rural in-migrants increasingly sheltered in peripheral slums. Earlier in the twentieth century, the massive transfer of rural poverty to cities was pre vented by the economic and political equivalents of city walls - both urban entry and, even more importantly, substantive urban citizenship were systematically withheld from large parts of the agrarian population.
A principal barrier, of course, was European colonialism which, in its most extreme form in the British colonial cities of eastern and southern Mrica, denied native populations the rights of urban land ownership and permanent residence. The British, always the ideologues of divide and rule, feared that city life would "detribalize" Africans and foster anticolonial solidarities. Urban migration was controlled by pass laws, while vagrancy ordinances penalized informal labor. Until 1954, for instance, Mricans were considered only temporary sojourners in racially zoned Nairobi and were unable to own leasehold property. Likewise Mricans in Dar-es-Salaam, according to researcher Karin Nuru, "were only tolerated as a temporary labour force and had to return to the countryside." In Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) Mricans had to wait until the eve of independence to acquire the legal right to own urban homes, while in Lusaka - designed as "a highly ordered city seg mented by race, class and gender" - Mrican residents were considered to be "more or less temporary urbanites whose only purpose in town was service to the administration's personnel".
Apartheid, of course, took this system to its dystopian extreme. Building on a foundation of colonial racism, postwar South African legislation not only criminalized urban migration, but also provided for the uprooting, with enormous brutality, of historical inner-city communities of color. Almost one million people of color were evicted from supposed "white" areas, and as a result, net urbanization hardly increased between 1950 (43 percent) and 1990 (48 percent); indeed, in the 1960s there was a net outflow of Africans from urban areas. Ultimately, however, this ideal of "white cities, black home lands" collided with the labor-market needs of big capital as well as the heroic resistance of its victims.
In the subcontinent, the British also segregated and policed the influx from the countryside. In her brilliant study of the cities of Uttar Pradesh during the interwar years, Nandini Gooptu chronicles the unceasing efforts of colonial officials and newly enfranchised native elites to push the poor to the cities' edges and beyond. The new fangled Town Improvement Trusts, in particular, were highly effective in clearing slums and removing so-called "plague spots" from the inter stices of better residential and commercial areas, and preserving spatial zoning around colonial and native middle-class areas. Vigorously enforced "encroachment laws," meanwhile, outlawed both squatting and street vending. At the same time, urban economic growth under the prewar Raj was fitful at best - even Bombay, with its famed entre preneurial elites and textile factories, grew slowly, not even doubling its population in the half-century from 1891 to 1941.
Despite their antipathy to large native urban settlements, the British were arguably the greatest slum-builders of all time. Their policies in Africa forced the local labor force to live in precarious shantytowns on the fringes of segregated and restricted cities. In India, Burma, and Ceylon, their refusal to improve sanitation or provide even the most minimal infrastructure to native neighbourhoods ensured huge death tolls from early-twentieth-century epidemics (plague, cholera, influenza) and created immnse problems of urban squalor that were inherited by national elites after independence.
~~Planet of Slums -by- Mike Davis
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