David Axe, on urban life in Mogadishu
David Axe, a good friend and fellow blogger, recently sent me the following guest post from Mogadishu [map, wiki].
Imagine a city with all the usual gripes: a growing population, ethnic tension, strained utilities, crime. Now cut off essentially all spending for 17 years. That’s right: no meaningful investment of any kind. No road repair. No new power plants. No sewerage. No garbage collection. Oh – and fire off a couple million bullets and shells, too.
You’d think such a place would be unlivable, but you’d be wrong.
Welcome to Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia, still teeming with people despite being the main battleground in a string of conflicts stretching back to 1990. It’s a ghost town that just happens to have a lot of people in it.
There’s no glass in the windows. There are potholes in the roads the depth of moon craters. There are mountainous heaps of garbage where goats and children scavenge for food. And in every former house, apartment, shop and government building, there are squatters that, over time, have more or less become legitimate tenants.
Who’s going to argue with them, anyways? All those buildings’ former owners are dead or living abroad. Beginning in 1990, everyone with money or a marketable skill who could get out of the country left. Meanwhile, drought and economic collapse hit rural communities hard, driving former farmers into a city that, despite being this close to Hellish, is still better than the countryside.
The old Mogadishu was a fairly cosmopolitan place, with hotels and restaurants, industry and nightlife and foreign embassies with their diverse staffs. The new Mogadishu is a sprawling farming village dropped atop a couple hundred square miles of rubble.
There are islands of order and relative luxury: a handful of hotels cowering near the headquarters of an African Union peacekeeping force. They provide most of their own services: generators, cars, heavily armed security guards. All the food is flown in from Ethiopia. One night on a king-size bed, plus three meals and laundry will set you back $100. At night the hotels seal their gates and post the night watch. And that’s when the shooting starts, gunshots echoing off the ruined walls of a city that looks like it’s ten thousand years old, but isn’t.
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The two Cairos
In a pattern that is repeated in megacities–and not so megacities–everywhere, Cairo’s rich are opting “for the private gated enclaves, while the poor live in illegally built suburbs reclaimed from the surrounding countryside.”
What are the growth patterns within the city?
“It is only a slight exaggeration to say that informality is the defining characteristic of the modern Egyptian built landscape,” says David Sims, an American housing expert who worked extensively in Egypt. He cites studies which found that the population of the informal areas of Cairo has been growing at more than three times the rate of the formal districts of the city. The city is now ringed by vast areas of informal housing. These are overcrowded forests of unrendered blocks crammed so close together that their balconies almost touch above streets that are too narrow for cars to pass.
Experts estimate that well over half of Cairo’s 16m people live in unplanned districts that have sprouted in breach of laws banning construction on farm land.