Shanty town
A typical shanty town is squatted and in the beginning lacks adequate infrastructure, including proper sanitation, safe water supply, electricity and street drainage.
Cañada Real is considered the largest informal settlement in Europe, and Skid Row is an infamous shanty town in Los Angeles.
[1] Swiss journalist Georg Gerster has noted (with specific reference to the invasões of Brasília) that "squatter settlements [as opposed to slums], despite their unattractive building materials, may also be places of hope, scenes of a counter-culture, with an encouraging potential for change and a strong upward impetus".
[2] Stewart Brand has observed that shanty towns are green, with people recycling as much as possible and tending to travel by foot, bicycle, rickshaw or shared taxi, though this is mainly due to the generally poor economic situation found.
[3] While most shanty towns begin as precarious establishments haphazardly thrown together without basic social and civil services, over time, some have undergone a certain amount of development.
[4] Community organizations sometimes working alongside NGOs, private companies, and the government, set up connections to the municipal water supply, pave roads, and build local schools.
He and the Catholic Church's Council for Justice and Peace have emphasised the need for information, involvement and choice being offered to people being moved on.
Offering very little protection against extreme weather conditions, these squatter camps, often built near streams or rivers due to the steady water supply, are often subjected to flash floods.
An example of severe indirect damage is the use of washing detergents, and refuse disposal in the nearby water source, which can often be seen for hundreds of kilometers down stream.
Due to the lack of infrastructure, and the cost of basic services, such as water and electricity, the overall squatted area is often barren, with the ground sweeped and stamped to minimise dust, and where gardening is simply impossible and unaffordable.
[14] Shack dwellers in South Africa organise themselves in groups such as Abahlali baseMjondolo and Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign.
[20] In India, an estimated one million people live in Dharavi, a shanty town built on a former mangrove swamp in Mumbai.
[26] Author Robert Neuwirth wrote that around six million people, half the population of Istanbul lived in gecekondu areas.
[29] Following the Great Depression, squatters lived in shacks on landfill sites beside the Martin Pena canal in Puerto Rico and were still there in 2010.
The growing influx of migrants has fuelled shantytowns in cities commonly used as a point of entry into the European Union, including Athens and Patras in Greece.
[35] In Madrid, Spain, a shanty town named Cañada Real is considered the largest informal settlement in Europe.
In some cases, shanty towns can persist in gentrified areas that local governments have yet to redevelop, or in regions of political dispute.
[39] In Australia and New Zealand, there were many shanty towns before World War II, some of which still exist (for example Wyee,[40] a suburb of the Central Coast).
[43] The South African film District 9 is largely set in a township called Chiawelo, from which people had been forcibly resettled.
It is a six-part series that tells the story of a ruthless leader named Scar (Chidi Mokeme) who handles a lot of dirty business and is popularly regarded as the King of Shanty Town.
