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Nicholas Birns: Review of Robert Neuwirth's Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, A New Urban World (Routledge)

Nicholas Birns teaches at the New School University in New York City.

Robert Neuwirth's new book looks at the actual conditions of today's transnational cities squarely in the face. Neuwirth is surprisingly optimistic. But his is a lived, earned optimism, one which emanates from looking at people as they are.

The stereotype of squatters is that they are social flotsam, on the margins of society and unable to fend for themselves. Neuwirth argues that, far from being drains on overburdened economies, squatters contribute to some of the most energetic economic activity in developing economies. . Neuwirth examines four very different cities, Rio de Janeiro, Istanbul, Nairobi, and Mumbai (Bombay). We have all seen many photographs of, and articles about, the favelas of Rio, but Neuwirth takes a somewhat contrarian task by lauding the 'asphaltization' of the favelas, the intrusion of outside businesses into the precincts of the urban poor. The older generation, Neuwirth claims, is disoriented by this, but the younger embraces or at least accepts it. Neuwirth segues into an a seemingly impromptu celebration of prefabricated materials and mass-produced items, as the residents of the favelas can use them in a ready-to-hand way to improve their housing and living conditions. In Nairobi, the city does not give any legal recognition to the squatters, nor are the communities where they live, such as Kibera, even on the map. Denied water by the municipal government, they have found ways, though bribery and hard labor, to procure water for themselves. Neuwirth is at his least euphoric about Nairobi, pointing out that government neglect and ethnic discrimination (many of Kibera’s residents are descendants of soldiers from other regions of Africa, or other non-dominant peoples in Kenya) have made its squatter communities stagnant, But he is hopeful that the Kibaki government will improve conditions.

In Sanjay Gandhi Nagar, in Mumbai, Neuwirth finds an “upper-class squatter community” The community was destroyed by government action in the mid-1980s, but as a result of political pressure was relocated to a new area where, despite very challenging and often unsanitary conditions, it has achieved legal recognition and a modicum of facilities and services. Mumbai has a large and vocal squatters’ movement. But the prominence of this movement is a double-edged sword, as it has raised up a leadership class that is more responsive to other elites than to its own people, Neuwirth gives a vivid portrait of Jockin Arputham, whose “top-down style of organizing” has given him leverage with the authorities, but an overly authoritarian relation to those whom he is supposed to lead.

We hear much of Turkey these days, but nearly always in a macro-political or strategic context. Neuwirth describes the gecekondus, the squatter huts in the Sultanbeyli neighborhood of Istanbul, inhabited by poor Turks and, often, Kurds both of whom have created an intimate atmosphere within urban sprawl. Despite being in opposition to all stereotypes of prosperity, the people of Sultanbeyli are really, according to Neuwirth, not that badly off, and what they mainly need is recognition and encouragement by the government. Neuwirth then provides a long chapter on squatters in New York, and how their nearly complete suppression has led to a gentrified city which, had the squatter alternative been exploded, could have turmed out differently.

Neuwirth writes exceptionally well, and, though he makes concrete recommendations in broad areas of public policy, he has the novelist's attention to nuance and circumstance. After the close examination of the four cities, his book becomes an urban kaleidoscope. Neuwirth provides historical perspective, referring to the attempts of Agis IV of Sparta and Tiberius Gracchus of Rome to distribute property more equally in the ancient world. A late Byzantine example, the commune of Thessalonica in the mid-fourteenth century, also could have been mentioned.

Neuwirth is critical of our capitulation to narrow ideas of private property, and he seeks to show that this current climate of opinion is not historically inevitable. Still, if he takes up themes of themes of popular enfranchisement that are traditionally leftist, he also takes up the banner of privatization and entrepreneurship in a right-libertarian way.

Most lay people’s idea of urban planning is something done from the top down by empanelled bureaucrats, as if the only way to build cities is to start from scratch. Neuwirth suggests that recognizing not only the rights but the potential contributions of squatter communities is sensible because it recognizes the position on the ground. He briefly refers to the Roman legal principle of usucapio, which he defines as "a recognition that longstanding possession gives a person a claim to land."

This certainly evoked images of American pioneer homesteaders but also of the nineteenth-century Australian settlers who called themselves 'squatters'. The only caveat to Neuwirth's position might be in terms of the applicability of usucapio with respect to international law. When the population demographics of a country changes because of squatters, what of these de facto property rights when they can potentially cause not only a readjustment of local property rights but also of national identity? For instance, Kosovo, once “Old Serbia,” became, through demographic change, largely Albanian; yet, even now, the international community still can do nothing but recognize Kosovo as part of Serbia. This potential issue with the extrapolation of the squatters' rights principle, though, does little to affect Neuwirth's clear and convincing argument that the principle should be given more scope on today's urban scene.

“Shadow Cities” does much to disperse the pall of smugness that has constrained the way we talk about wealth and poverty in the world today. No matter how beneficial they may be, the processes of globalization must not be exalted over the lives of vulnerable individuals. And these individuals, when properly empowered, can bring about change in their own lives. Neuwirth concludes Chapter 9 of his book eloquently: "The squatters, by building their on homes, are creating their own world".