I want you to close your eyes for a second, unless
you're driving, obviously, and just try to visualize
a number. One billion. It's one of those numbers
that's so big it almost stops meaning anything.
It just turns into static. It does. It becomes
completely abstract, just data. Yeah. But we
really have to try to tune into that static today.
One billion human beings. As of... What, 2006?
That was the number of people on this planet
living in slums? And I was looking at the projections
in the deep dive stack you sent over. Yeah, they're
not great. Not great is an understatement. If
we just keep going business as usual, if we don't
change the formula, that number isn't shrinking,
it's doubling. Doubling. Two billion people by
2030. And that is the cliff edge we are walking
toward. I mean, to put that two billion in perspective,
because like you said, big numbers just numb
us. We're talking about a future, a very near
future, where one out of every four human beings
on Earth is living in an informal settlement.
One in four. That just stops being a marginal
issue. Oh, absolutely. It becomes the main story
of humanity. Precisely. And I think the reason
this deep dive is so necessary right now is that
most of us, especially here in the West, we have
this massive cognitive dissonance about it. I
mean, when I say the word slum, be honest. What's
the first image that pops into your head? Honestly.
Yeah. I picture the aftermath of a disaster,
you know, like a hurricane. Or maybe a refugee
camp. Yeah. Something temporary. Temporary. Yeah.
A glitch in the matrix. A chaotic mess that just
happened and will, you know, get cleaned up in
a year or two. A glitch. Exactly. That is the
standard narrative. A temporary anomaly. Oh.
But the mission of this deep dive today is to
completely invert that thinking. Okay. The research,
all of it is screaming at us that slums aren't
accidents. They aren't temporary. They are established.
They are complex. And in many ways, they are
permanent features of how the human species build
cities. That's that city within a city concept
I saw on the note. It is. I mean, look, we are
witnessing the urbanization of the human species.
That is the headline story of the 21st century.
Right. And for a massive chunk of the population,
a growing chunk, the slum isn't a glitch. It
is the vehicle. for that urbanization. It is
the waiting room, the bedroom, and the factory
floor for a quarter of the world. So if this
is the vehicle, we need to understand how the
engine works. But before we get into the economics
and the tragedy of it all, I want to pause on
the word itself, slum. It feels heavy. It feels
judgmental. When we use it, are we already biasing
the conversation? We are. And I think that's
unavoidable, but really important to acknowledge.
The word is incredibly loaded and it's actually
a relic. It's thought to be old British slang
popping up in London's East End around, what,
1845? I saw that note. It originally just meant
room, right? Something that simple. Roughly,
yes. It seems to have evolved from meaning a
room to a back slum, which was, you know, basically
a back alley. So it was a spatial description.
Just a spatial description, that back alley over
there. But very, very quickly. It morphed from
describing the place to judging the people in
the place. It became a synonym for moral decay,
for crime, for filth. Which is a pattern we see
a lot in language, isn't it? You label the geography
first, then you stigmatize the population. And
that stigma is dangerous because if you label
an area a slum, it's often a prelude to clearing
it. Right. It delegitimizes the fact that people
have built lives there. It makes it sound like
trash to be swept away. But for us to have this
conversation today, we can't just rely on vibes
or, you know, insults. We need a hard definition.
The United Nations actually has a checklist for
this. I have the checklist here. And it's fascinating
because it's not just about, are you poor? It's
very structural, very specific. The UN says a
household is a slum if it fails on just one of
five conditions. Just one. That's the key. And
these five conditions, they really are the blueprint
of the struggle. Why don't you walk us through
them? Because each one represents a specific
failure of planning. OK, so number one. Access
to improved water. Which means water that is
safe, affordable, and actually accessible without,
you know, walking three miles or queuing for
four hours every morning. Right. Number two,
access to improved sanitation. So, toilets, sewage,
the basic hygiene infrastructure that stops a
city from becoming a massive disease vector.
Number three is overcrowding, so not having sufficient
living area. And this one is brutal. If you have
five people sleeping in a room that was designed
for one, you are technically in a slum condition,
regardless of how nice the building is on the
outside. It's about the density and the stress
that puts on a human being. Yeah. Okay, number
four, housing durability. You know, is the roof
going to fly off in a storm? Is the wall made
of cardboard? Basic structural integrity. And
number five, this is the one that really stood
out to me, security of tenure. Ah, that is the
invisible one. It's the right to stay, basically.
Is that what it means? It's the protection against
forced eviction. I mean, just imagine living
in a house where, you know, deep down that at
any moment a bulldozer could show up and you
would have zero legal recourse. None. That psychological
weight, that is a defining feature of a slum.
If you don't have the legal right to exist there,
why would you ever invest in fixing the roof?
Why would you build a better toilet? Because
it could all be gone tomorrow. It creates this
trap of short -termism. You're forced to live
day to day. That's the tragedy. The insecurity
breeds the physical decay. And while slum is
the English label we're using, I love looking
at the global vocabulary for this because it
just proves how universal the experience is.
Right. The words themselves tell the story of
how these places are built. Oh, the list of names
is poetic. In a really dark way. You have the
favela in Brazil, of course, the barrio in Venezuela.
In Turkey, they call it Gizikandu. And this is
one of my favorites for what it reveals about
the legal loopholes. What does that mean? It
literally translates to built overnight. That
is such a vivid image. It captures the speed
of it, but also the, you know, the stealth. It
captures the desperation and the loophole in
Ottoman law and later in... Turkish tradition,
if you could build a structure between sunset
and sunrise and get a roof on it. A roof on it
by morning. The authorities couldn't just tear
it down immediately. They needed a court order.
So entire neighborhoods were literally second
due built overnight by communities racing to
beat the sun. That is incredible human ingenuity.
It's like hacking the legal code with carpentry.
It is. And then in France and Francophone Africa,
you have the bidon bill. bidon means a tin can
or a metal drum so tin can town a town of tin
cans it tells you exactly what the architecture
is made of flattened oil drums scrap metal it
highlights the recycling the resourcefulness
of it it really drives home that this isn't a
local issue it's a human issue it's what humans
do when they need shelter and the system offers
them absolutely nothing and actually that segues
perfectly into the history because i think we
have this bias where We assume slums are something
that happens over there, you know, in the global
south. Yeah. But if we rewind the clock. If you
rewind to the 19th century, the global south
conditions were right here in the west. I mean,
London, New York, Paris, they were the original
mega slums. We tend to forget that the whole
Dickensian world wasn't fiction. It was reporting.
I was reading the descriptions of Victorian London
in the source material. And honestly, they make
Oliver Twist look like a sanitized documentary.
Oh, it was horrific. You have to remember. This
was the Industrial Revolution. The engines of
industry were turning and they needed bodies.
People were pouring into London from the countryside,
but the housing just wasn't there. So what happened?
The wealthy fled the center. This is the beginning
of suburban flight. And the poor crammed into
these rotting post -medieval streetscapes. There
was this quote from Friedrich Engels. He called
them cattle sheds for human beings. Angles did
not mince words. He was walking these streets.
He was seeing the degradation firsthand. But
the description that always, always sticks with
me is from Cardinal Wiseman. He wrote about an
area in Westminster, right near the Abbey, the
seat of religious power, and he called it the
Devil's Acre. The Devil's Acre. That sounds like
something out of a horror movie. It was a horror
movie. He described it as a labyrinth of lanes.
He talked about nests of ignorance and vice where
the atmosphere was typhus and the ventilation
was cholera. Wow. And this wasn't on the outskirts
of town where nobody looked. This was the heart
of the empire. You could probably smell the Devil's
Acre from the houses of parliament. And across
the Atlantic, New York wasn't doing any better.
In fact, in some ways, it was even wilder. New
York was the frontier of the slum. If you've
seen the movie Gangs of New York, you know about
the five points. Right. That was the first true
American slum popping up around 1825. And the
geography of it, it tells you everything about
why slums form, where they form. Do you know
where it was built? It was built on a lake, wasn't
it? Or a pond? The Collect Pond. But not just,
you know, a nice pond. It was a body of water
where slaughterhouses and tanneries had been
dumping their awful chemicals and blood for decades.
Lovely. So a toxic swamp. A toxic swamp right
in the middle of Manhattan. So the city decides
to fill in this toxic soup with landfill to create
real estate. But they do a rush job. The drainage
is broken. Of course. So they build houses on
top of it. And immediately the houses start sinking.
They start shifting. The basements fill with
this toxic sludge oozing up from below. And that's
where the poorest people, the freed slaves, the
Irish immigrants fling the famine. That's where
they ended up. Exactly. It became this dense,
sinking, chaotic melting pot. It was bad land.
And that is a rule of real estate that holds
true to this day. The poor end up on the land
that nobody else wants. If the land is sinking,
if it smells, if it's dangerous, that's where
the slum takes root. So here is the million dollar
question. If London and New York were absolute
hellscapes in 1850, why aren't they now? I mean,
we still have poverty in New York, sure, and
we have homelessness, but we don't have gissacondas
made of tin cans sinking into toxic sludge in
the middle of Manhattan. What changed? Well,
we tend to think they just got rich over time,
but it wasn't that simple. It was actually very
deliberate, very aggressive policy. Between,
say, the 1960s and 70s, the West essentially
engineered the slum out of existence. What were
the levers they pulled? Two main levers. First,
massive investment in public transit. The London
Underground, the New York subway, this was revolutionary.
How does a train fix a slum? It allowed people
to live further out where land was cheaper and
commute in for work. You didn't have to sleep
next to the factory anymore. You could live in
a burrow and take a train. So the subway effectively
expanded the available land for the poor. It
democratized geography. And the second lever
was public housing. The government finally stepped
in in a huge way. They cleared the slums, often
brutally, we have to admit. But they replaced
them with council housing, with projects, with
subsidized apartments. They changed the supply
equation. So they literally built their way out
of it with concrete and rails. They did. But
here is the tragic irony. Just as the West was
solving its slum problem using these tools, the
phenomenon was migrating. It was exploding in
the global South Sub -Saharan Africa, South Asia,
East Asia, and the scale there... It makes Five
Points look like a quaint little village. I read
about places in the Central African Republic
where the statistic is 95 .9%. 95 .9 % of the
urban population living in slum conditions. At
that point, the slum isn't a neighborhood in
the city. No. The slum is the city. That is the
terrifying distinction. In those contexts, formal
housing is the anomaly. The slum is the standard.
So we've established what they are and where
they came from historically. But we need to get
to the why. Why are millions and millions of
people leaving the countryside to move into a
sinking house on a toxic landfill? What is the
engine driving this massive migration? Well,
it's the classic economic push and pull. But
the push has changed dramatically. Historically,
people left farms because they wanted to. Now
they leave because they have to. Right. Mechanization
of agriculture. Exactly. A single tractor can
do the work of 100 men. So agriculture produces
more food but far, far fewer jobs. At the same
time, rural populations are still growing. So
you have this huge surplus of people with absolutely
no way to survive in the village. So the village
is effectively evicting them. The economy of
the village is evicting them. to the city. And
the city, it promises jobs. It promises better
schools. And interestingly, even a slum school
is often perceived as better than what's available
in a remote forgotten village. I saw a stat from
Surabaya, Indonesia that really backed this up.
Something like 95 .8 % of migrants said they
moved specifically for jobs. It's not about lifestyle.
It's about survival. Pure economics. It is. But
here's the thing that's so important to understand.
They don't just move to the city as an abstract
idea. They move to people. Migration always follows
social networks. The chain migration concept.
Right. You go where your cousin is. You go where
your uncle is. And if your uncle lives in a slum
because that's all he can afford, well, that's
where you land. You sleep on his floor until
you can build your own shack next door. It creates
this chain reaction that concentrates poverty
in very specific areas. And while all this is
happening, there's also this issue of the government
just... not seeing it coming or maybe choosing
not to see it. That is the massive gap between
urbanization and planning. Urbanization is this
powerful bottom -up force people flood in. But
local governments often lack the funds or the
expertise or, frankly, the political will to
manage it. Or worse, they choose blindness. You
mean the concept of invisible land? It's a willful
delusion. There are documented cases where governments
have official maps where a sprawling slum is
labeled as undeveloped or empty or forest. They
just pretend it's not there. And if it's not
on the official map, they don't have to provide
services. They don't have to pick up the trash.
They don't have to provide water. It's a way
of abdicating all responsibility. But there was
one point in the research that really stood out
to me. And I think this is the key to understanding
why slums look the way they do. It was this idea
that labor is the primary architect. of the slum
this is a crucial insight and it's largely coming
from more recent ethnographic research particularly
a study from 2017. we have this image of slums
as chaotic and random you know oh they just built
a shack wherever right disorganized but this
research suggests that form follows function
in a very deliberate way the houses the alleys
the whole layout is self -constructed specifically
to facilitate work Can you give us an example?
Because that sounds a little abstract. Okay,
let's look at a specific story. Take the case
of a favela in Machio, Brazil called Favela Suru
da Capote. It was started by dismissed sugarcane
workers who migrated to the city. They were desperate
for work. Okay, so they need an income first
and foremost. Right. And they chose a very specific
terrain, the banks of a lagoon. Now, a city planner
would look at that and say, that's flood prone,
that's unstable, that's dangerous. But the workers
looked at it and saw gold. Or rather, they saw
mussels. Mussels. The lagoon was full of saru
mussels. And it turned out that 80 % of the residents
ended up making their living from mussel fishing.
So they built their homes right on the banks
to be close to the boats. They built the alleys
just wide enough to carry baskets of shells.
The slum was actually a perfectly adapted factory
for their specific livelihood. So it wasn't just
housing. It was an industrial complex. Exactly.
Now, here is where the story gets tragic. The
government comes in and says, these poor people
are living in squalor. We must save them. So
they initiated a resettlement program. They moved
the entire community to formal housing. Nice,
clean, concrete blocks. That's good on paper.
But it was miles away from the lagoon. Oh no.
What happened? The community's economy collapsed.
They couldn't fish anymore. The architecture
of the new apartment blocks didn't allow for
shucking muscles in the living room. It smells.
It's messy. It clogs the plumbing. The solution
completely destroyed their economy. They solved
the housing problem, but they created a livelihood
problem. They destroyed it. And that is such
a powerful example of how top -down planning
completely misses the point. They saw poor people.
But they didn't see workers. They didn't understand
that the slum was a tool for survival. And we
can't ignore the historical roots of this, particularly
colonialism. Many of the biggest slums in the
global south aren't accidental. They are the
direct legacy of segregation. Absolutely. Nairobi
is a prime example. It was created by Europeans
essentially as a depot for the railroad. They
viewed Africans as temporary migrants. So they
needed their labor, but they didn't want them
as neighbors. Exactly. So they didn't build neighborhoods
for them. They provided beds. spaces. That was
the official term. Just a place for a single
man to sleep before going back to work. But people
have families. People have lives. They don't
want to be temporary. Of course not. So they
built their own homes on the margins illegally.
And that was the start of places like Kibera.
And Mumbai. Yeah. The story of Dharavi is similar,
isn't it? Dharavi, which is now one of the most
famous slums in the world, you probably know
it from the movie Slumdog Millionaire, has an
almost identical origin story. In 1887, the British
colonial government expelled all the tanneries
and other noxious industries from the city center.
The classic NMB approach. Not in my backyard.
Exactly. They said, go do your smelly leather
work on the northern fringe of the city. That
fringe was Dharavi. They provided no infrastructure,
no water, no sewers. They just said, go. So the
workers moved there, built shacks around the
tanneries, and a century later, it's a mega slum
of a million people. It's just amazing and depressing
how a decision made 150 years ago by a colonial
officer can dictate where millions of people
live today. It creates a path dependency. Once
a settlement is established, even on bad land,
it has a gravity of its own that's very hard
to reverse. So let's pivot to the anatomy of
a slum today. If you're flying over a city or
looking at a satellite map, how do you spot them?
Where do they actually form? Well, the first
rule of slum formation is... Find the land nobody
else wants. The leftover. The dangerous leftovers.
You're looking for steep slopes that are prone
to landslides, like in Rio. You're looking for
flood -prone valleys and marshlands, riverbanks,
right next to trash dumps or railway tracks.
We talked about the Cleck Pond in New York being
a toxic swamp. It seems that rule hasn't changed
in two centuries. But why there? Is it just because
it's free? It's because it's free, yes, but it's
also to avoid detection. This is what you could
call the natural camouflage strategy. Okay. When
a settlement is young, the biggest threat is
the government coming in and bulldozing it. If
you build on a steep slope or deep in a marsh,
the officials are less likely to notice you or,
frankly, less likely to care enough to come in
and kick you out immediately. It buys you time.
It buys you time to establish that possession
is nine -tenths of the law. Exactly. And then
the evolution begins. It starts with tents, maybe
some plastic sheeting, very temporary materials.
But as the settlement survives, as the threat
of immediate eviction fades, people start investing.
They switch to wood, then to brick, then to concrete
blocks. It solidifies. It does. And contrary
to the chaos theory, it becomes highly organized.
An informal association or, let's be honest,
often a local gang or a warlord will take charge.
They might charge fees to newcomers for the right
to build a shack. They manage disputes. It becomes
a parallel state. And with that comes a parallel
economy. I think this is another thing people
really miss. We think of slums as places of mass
unemployment. But they're buzzing with work.
They are massive economic engines, but it's all
off the books. We call it the informal economy.
And to give you an idea of the scale, in a country
like Benin, slum dwellers make up 75 % of all
informal workers. In Kenya, the informal sector
is estimated to be 42 % of the entire GDP. 42%.
That's nearly half the economy running without
contracts, without taxes, without any regulation.
Correct. And the work varies wildly. You have
the illicit informal work. So the legal stuff
just done illegally. Right. Street vending, domestic
work, and crucially, recycling. Slums are often
the recycling plants of the entire city. People
collecting plastic, sorting metal. It's dirty,
dangerous work, but it keeps the city clean.
You also have things like product assembly, embroidery.
And then there's the illicit side. The shadow
markets. Drug trafficking, brewing moonshine
like Changa in Kenya, which is incredibly potent
and very dangerous producing fake goods. The
knockoff designer bags you see in markets. Exactly.
But whether it's illicit or illicit, the trap
is the same. There are no contracts, no labor
rights, no safety goggles. And often you have
to pay bribes to the police or local officials
just to keep working. It's a very, very vulnerable
existence. That vulnerability leads us right
into the day to day human experience. We can
talk about economics and systems all day, but
what is it actually like to wake up there? We
mentioned lack of infrastructure, but there was
one concept in the notes called the water paradox
that I need you to explain, because the math
just doesn't seem to make sense. It is deeply,
deeply unfair, and it defies all standard market
logic. The paradox is that the poor often pay
far more for water per liter than the rich. How
is that even possible? Usually, if you're rich,
you buy the premium stuff and it costs more.
Think about the delivery mechanism. If you are
in a formal, wealthy neighborhood, you have a
pipe connected directly to your house. You turn
a tap, water comes out. You pay the municipal
rate, which is usually subsidized by the state
to keep voters happy. It's cheap. OK, that makes
sense. Now, if you live in a slum, there are
no pipes. The utility company doesn't serve you.
So how do you get water? You have to buy it from
a private vendor, someone who trucks it in or
carries it in jerry cans on a handcart. So you're
paying for the manual labor of delivery. You're
paying for the labor, you're paying for the transport,
and you're paying for the profit margin of the
middleman. Plus, you can't buy in bulk because
you have nowhere to store it, so you buy small
amounts daily. The markup can be astronomical,
sometimes 10 to 20 times what a wealthy person
pays for their tap water. You are paying a premium
for poverty. That is infuriating. It's literally
a tax on being poor. And there's a sanitation
issue. We mentioned overcrowding, but let's really
paint that picture. It's a crisis of density.
In a slum in Kolkata, India, you might have 10
people sharing a single room of 45 square meters.
Now imagine the bathroom situation for that building.
In Hibera, in Nairobi, the population density
is roughly 2 ,000 people per hectare. 2 ,000
people per hectare. That's like a permanently
packed rock concert. It is. And when you have
that many people sharing that few pit latrines,
disease isn't a risk. It's an absolute certainty.
Cholera, typhoid, malaria, they spread like wildfire.
And children are the ones who take the biggest
hit. Child malnutrition is just widespread. In
slums in Mumbai and New Delhi, nearly 50 percent
of children under the age of five are stunted.
That means their bodies and their brains aren't
developing properly. And it's not just about
not having enough food. It's about something
called environmental enteropathy. The constant
assault of fecal bacteria from the environment
prevents their guts from absorbing nutrients.
So even if they eat, they effectively starve.
And if you get sick, I mean, can you call an
ambulance? This brings us back to that. non -notified
problem we touched on. Many slums are not officially
recognized by the government. They don't exist
on the map. And if you aren't notified, you don't
get a clinic. You don't get your health data
collected. And crucially, emergency services
often refuse to enter. They just won't go. Ambulances
won't go there. The roads are too narrow or they
fear for their safety or simply because the address
doesn't exist. Third shack past the blue tarp
on the left isn't on the GPS. Yeah. You are completely
and utterly on your own. It's terrifying. And
on top of all the health risks, you have the
physical risks. We mentioned the landslides earlier.
Yes. Because slums are built on that undesirable
land, when natural disasters hit, they are always
the first to suffer, and they suffer the worst.
Landslides in Rio, floods in Dhaka. And often,
disaster creates slums. Think of the earthquake
in Haiti in 2010. The so -called temporary tent
cities set up for survivors. Many of them just
solidified. They became permanent slums. And
then there's the human -made risk. the violence,
we have to talk about safety. It is a very complex
picture. We shouldn't demonize all slums as war
zones. Many are incredibly tight knit communities
where people look out for each other. But yes,
high crime rates exist in some slums and they're
often driven by those illicit economies we talked
about. The drugs, the gambling and the gang wars
that come with controlling that territory. And
specifically the risk to women. Gender based
violence is a massive and I would say structural
risk. I mean, imagine if you don't have a toilet
in your home. You have to use a shared public
toilet down a dark, unlit... alley 200 meters
away. And you have to go in the middle of the
night. Exactly. Women are at an extremely high
risk of assault just trying to use the bathroom
at night. It's a spatial design that enables
violence. And because of the immense economic
stress men unable to find work, everyone living
in cramped conditions, domestic violence is often
exacerbated. And going to the police isn't really
a viable option, is it? Often, no. The police
are viewed with deep, deep distrust. Residents
fear that if they call the police, it will just
lead to harassment, demands for bribes, or even
worse, it could trigger an eviction. So crimes
go unreported and the cycle of violence just
continues. It feels like such an intractable
problem. Every single layer we peel back just
reveals another layer of difficulty. But we have
to talk about solutions. Governments have been
trying to fix slums for over a century. What
have they tried and what actually works? Because
surely we've learned something since Victorian
London. We have certainly learned a lot about
what doesn't work. Let's look at the four main
strategies that have been deployed globally over
the years. Strategy A is the brute force method.
Slum removal or demolition. The bulldozer approach.
This is illegal. Knock it down. That's it exactly.
Governments declare the slum a hazard. They send
in the police and the dozers and they flatten
the entire neighborhood. Does it work? In terms
of getting rid of the buildings? Yes, for a time.
In terms of solving the problem? Absolutely not.
It is a spectacular and cruel failure. It destroys
homes. It destroys billions of dollars in informal
assets capital that poor people have scraped
together over decades. But it doesn't solve poverty.
And crucially, the city still needs the workers.
Right. The city still needs the maids, the recyclers,
the construction workers, so the people don't
disappear. They just move five miles down the
road and start a new slum. It's a vicious, cruel
game of whack -a -mole. Okay, so that's a bust.
What about strategy B, relocation? This is the
nicer version where they build new housing, but
usually far away, right? Right. The pitch is
they're going to build you a nice, clean apartment,
but land is expensive in the center, so we built
it 20 kilometers out on the periphery. We saw
this with the Sabarmati Riverfront project in
India. They moved 19 ,000 families, but they
moved them to housing nine kilometers away. Which,
in a city with bad traffic, is basically a lifetime
away. It disconnects people from their jobs and
their social safety networks. If you are a maid
working in the city center and you're suddenly
moved nine kilometers away, you can't afford
the bus fare. You lose your job. Eventually,
what we see is that many people abandon the new,
nice housing and move back to a slum closer to
work. They vote with their feet. So that brings
us to strategy C. This one has a specific name,
right? The Turner method. Yes. Named after an
architect and theorist named John Turner, who
was writing in the 1970s. His idea was really
radical at the time. He essentially said, government,
stop building houses. You're bad at it. The poor
are actually great at building their own houses.
They just lack rights and services. So it's almost
a libertarian approach to urban planning. In
a way, yes. He argued that slums were a solution
to the housing shortage, not the problem itself.
He said governments should just give residents
security of tenure, a legal promise not to evict
them, and then provide basic services like sewers
and streetlights. If you do that, the residents
will use their own money and their own labor
to upgrade their homes over time. The site and
service model. Give them the plot and the pipe
and let them build the walls. Exactly. And it
has had some successes. Mexico City in the 70s
and 80s successfully urbanized many of its periphery
slums this way. Medellin in Colombia is another
famous example where they used those cable cars,
the metro cable, to connect hillside slums to
the city's job market, integrating them. But,
I sense a but coming. But the results are very
mixed. In Jakarta, they tried this, and the conditions
deteriorated back to slum status after just a
few years. It turns out upgrading is really expensive
for people living on the edge. And more importantly,
it doesn't address the root cause of the problem.
Low wages. You can give someone a sewer connection,
but if they still only earn a dollar a day, they
can't maintain the house. They can't pay the
new water bill. So is there a strategy D? Is
there anything that actually has a track record
of lasting success? There is, but it's the hardest
one because it requires massive political will
and huge investment. It's the historical success
story of the West. a combination of infrastructure
plus public housing. So we're going back to the
Victorian London example. We are. There was a
man named Charles Pearson. He was in the UK Parliament
in the mid -19th century. And he argued that
the problem wasn't just the housing, it was the
transport. He pushed relentlessly for mass transit,
what became the London Underground. The tube
saved London from its slums. In a very big way.
It allowed the working poor to live in decent,
affordable areas with lower rent and still commute
to the docks and factories for work. It broke
the terrible stranglehold of proximity. But it
wasn't just the subway. The governments of the
UK and France also engaged in massive state -led
public housing programs. Post -1955, the UK demolished
1 .5 million slum properties and resettled the
residents in subsized council housing. So it
requires big government spending. You can't just
hack your way out of it with a clever low -cost
trick. Huge sustained spending. It requires combining
citywide infrastructure transport that actually
works for the poor with affordable subsidized
public housing. You need to tackle both the connectivity
and the shelter itself. You have to treat housing
as a basic human right, not just a market asset.
It seems like we've come full circle. We started
with the sheer scale of the problem, the billion
people. We've looked at the history, the economic
engines, the daily struggle, and all the failed
attempts to fix it. So let's try to wrap this
up. What is the big overarching takeaway here?
I think the summary is that slums are not an
accident. They are not a glitch in the system.
They are the predictable result of rapid urbanization
colliding with a lack of planning and a global
labor market that relies on cheap, informal workers.
They are places of immense struggle, disease,
hazard, violence, but they are also places of
incredible resilience and frantic economic activity.
And the so what for the listener. Why should
someone listening in a comfortable apartment,
maybe thousands of miles away, truly care about
this because the informal is becoming the new
normal for a huge chunk of humanity we cannot
pretend the western model of the 20th century
city is the only reality and addressing this
isn't just about charity it's about global health
epidemics don't respect slum borders a virus
bred in overcrowding can travel first class eventually
it's about economic stability and fundamentally
it's about human rights it's about the future
of our species really If we are now an urban
species and the slum is the main form that the
city is taking for billions, then the slum is
the future of humanity unless we actively change
course. It is. And I want to leave you and everyone
listening with a final provocative thought, something
to really wrestle with. Lay it on us. There is
an argument famously made by publications like
The Economist that goes something like this.
Good housing is obviously better than a slum,
but a slum is better than none. That's a tough
one to swallow. It feels almost like an apology
for the situation. It creates a real tension.
As cities continue to explode in size, are slums
a temporary waiting room that we will eventually
upgrade? Or are they the actual future of how
the majority of the human species will live?
And here is the real question I want the listener
to ponder. We established that labor creates
the slum people move for work. Can we ever fix
the housing without fixing the economy first?
Can we fix the roof? without fixing the wage.
If the global economy relies on this massive
pool of informal cheap labor, will it always,
by necessity, produce informal cheap housing?
Are the slums a bug in capitalism or are they
a feature? That is a heavy, heavy question to
end on. But that's why we do this. A huge thank
you to everyone for listening to this deep dive.
It's a complex and difficult topic, but hopefully
we've peeled back a few layers today. Indeed.
It's a conversation that needs to continue long
after this. Keep thinking. Keep questioning.
We'll see you on the next deep dive.