Of all the slums in the world, none is beneath hope or beyond care and optimism. Except those aesthetic and intellectual shanties that money buys.
Last year, somewhere on a street that probably doesn’t have a name at a door without a number on the outskirts of a hot, dirty city in a suburb that’s been called something collective and unlikely, a tired man with a fearful family finally put down his meagre but heavy enough collection of plastic bags and worn buckets and sticks and tarpaulins, sunk to an earth floor, looked at a tin roof and said, we’re home. His wife would’ve sent a child to get some water while she lit a fire. They weren’t to know this, this frail, delicate family, but they were a tipping point. As they stepped over this particular threshold, they marked an astonishing and memorable moment in the march of mankind. They will never know it, and we will never know who they were; all we do know is that somewhere, out there, someone moved into some city and turned the world urban.
For the first time in all of history, indeed in all the history of all the species that came before our species, more humans live in the city than in the country. We are now more metropolitan than rural, and that has taken 10,000-odd years to come about. From the first settled agrarian communities in the fertile crescent between the Tigris and the Euphrates till now, there has been a steady drift towards pavement and brick. We are civic hominids, collective folk. We may not like or trust each other’s company. We may need to make elaborate rules and etiquettes just to hang out together, but it does seem to be our preferred habitat. We are street-corner creatures rather than the denizens of hedge and copse.
The most common address in the world, the place you’re most likely to find most of us, is a slum. I’m fascinated by slums. I’m fascinated mostly because I don’t have to live in one. Very few people visit slums. I’ve only ever come across two cities where they do tourist trips to their slums: Rio and Johannesburg. In Rio, you can go to a favela on a safari in a Land Rover driven by a guide dressed up like Sanders of the River in an African white hunter’s hat. You’re told to keep your hands inside the vehicle and not to antagonise the wildlife; if confronted, don’t make any sudden moves. The favelas in Rio are integral parts of the city. They climb up hills and have famously the best views.
All slums are places that exist outside of control, without regulation or plan. They are amateur and desperate and extreme. They have an energy and an ingenuity that is inspiring and depressing. Like the ‘flying toilets’ of Kibera. Kibera is a huge slum outside Nairobi, possibly the biggest in Africa. There is precious little water and absolutely no sanitation for one million people, so they defecate into the thin ubiquitous plastic bags of Africa and then fling them with abandon, possibly with joy, into ditches, onto roofs, at passers-by. The bags collect in great stinking heaps and wait for the rains to wash them into the water table, through people’s bedrooms and kitchens and across the slimy roads.
Slums are always temporary. No one moves into one or builds one and thinks, this is me, this is forever, this is Dunroamin. But they remain, calloused and crumbling, always evolving, growing like human aviaries. Slums are at once disheartening and a terrible indictment, an accusation, but they are also a marvel, a hope, an ambition. And they have the intrinsic beauty, the majesty even, of the human will. Like the packing-case-and-plastic shanties that crawl up the motorways and roundabouts and the corners of Bombay, a city that is such a magnet to the subcontinent that it’s considering locking itself away behind a wall like a vast gated community, insisting on invitations to get in. It is a great economic nightclub.
My top six slums are: the Mercato, the rambling warren of a market in Addis Ababa, where khat is sold. The shantytowns of Antananarivo, the capital of Madagascar, that look quaintly like huts in Dutch paintings, in this, one of Africa’s most beautiful cities. Glasgow East: tough and gritty, an ancient enclave of hardened arteries and attitudes, but with an indomitable grim humour. The Afghan refugee camps in Peshawar: this was the most beguiling and is now possibly the most hideously dangerous city in the North-West Frontier Province. Kaliningrad, a Russian enclave on the Baltic between Lithuania and Poland: utterly forgotten, once a closed military city, now a festering pocket of organised crime, pollution and decay. And by far and away the worst slum in the entire world, the City of the Sun in Port-au-Prince, sprawling along the shore, bisected by sluggish rivers of sewerage, this great shadow Hades of greed, black magic and fear is the most mesmerising place I’ve ever been. A silent set-aside of depravation and terror where, conversely, I met some of the kindest and warmest people in all of the West Indies. The City of the Sun is the bottom of the bottom of the pile, the end beneath which it is difficult to fall. But still here you see children carrying satchels going to school, nurses in uniform going to comfort richer sick people, workmen carrying bags of tools to make nicer cities more habitable.
Nowhere is beneath hope, beyond care and optimism or do-it-yourself miracles. Except the slums that money buys. I’m writing this in New York, and New Yorkers spend a lot of time complaining about the gentrification of Manhattan. The city has grown monstrously expensive; money has seeped into every poor corner and knocked it through and exposed its brickwork and put renewable hardwood floors over it. Money has bought order and quiet and civic responsibility and health and safety and an early bed. It’s improved the coffee and the sushi, but it’s also driven out the things people move to cities to get. The enthusiasm, the naughtiness, the young, the pretty, the unpublished poets, the unhung painters.
All cities move up and down an organic scale, from the flying toilet to the dog-walkers. All cities are making a slow progress from bottom-rung to we’ve-arrived. There is a point in the middle where they are for a moment, for a decade, so marvellous a cosmopolitan mix of grit and ambition, of anger and laughter. Of all the slums I’ve been to, the two very, very worst, by a long street, were Monte Carlo and Las Vegas. Nothing is as filthy and dispiriting as the places money made for its own edification and greed. Aesthetic and intellectual shanties, moral flying shit-bags.