COMMENTATOR (COMM): Previously on Life. . .
ANNA TIBAIJUKA: It is a trend which cannot be stopped. And the old predictions now show that people are marching onto cities.
PETER MARCUSE: Part of the pressure on people to come to a big city is that bad things are happening where they come from.
DR MAISHTA GUPTA: For the poor, you don't have to explain that: "You need a change". Everybody knows they need a change, they just don't know how.
COMM: Every day they come in from the countryside. To bus stations in the more seedy parts of town. They are looking for friends and family who have come before them. They are hoping to find work, they are hoping to find better clinics and better schools for their kids. If they're lucky there's someone to meet them. But if they're not lucky, the big city can be an unwelcoming place - where the streets are not paved with gold.
LILIANA MIRANDA, Director, Eco Ciudad, Lima, Peru: They arrive here but now they don't have the opportunities that the previous migrants had. So they are not having a nice time and it's very difficult for them because they don't have a job so they have just to survive.
COMM: They have come to Lima, the capital of Peru in South America. It is a crowded city where many have set up homes before - they may not welcome newcomers.
LILIANA MIRANDA: People in Lima or in any big city in the country will say, "Oh! This is you know Serrano - this is a newcomer. What are you doing here? Come back to your place!" You know? They are going to refuse to-to talk to them to, to accept them so they are going to feel, you know like, like a marginalised person - in fact during a long time they are going to feel marginal.
COMM: José came to Lima with his wife and three children. He had a job making jewellery but was made redundant but he still believes life will be better in the city.
JOSE DIAZ GIOCOCHEA (TRANSLATION) : I left the place I was born to look for a better life and for a better future for my children. So the children could get a profession and have a better life from the one we have had ourselves. My hope is that every one of them learns a profession.
COMM: Somehow José has managed to put together a home for his family. He's convinced his children will stand a better chance in their city home - even though they haven't yet found a place in the local school. There's little left of the country but the chickens. José's sure his daughter won't regret their move.
JOSE DIAZ GIOCOCHEA (TRANSLATION) : They are better off than I was before because in my time where we lived there wasn't any television, only radio. But now through television, children - with different programmes for children, through these their thoughts become more developed.
COMM: A hundred miles outside Lima they're picking the mandarin crop. Land reform in Peru has split up some of the great old estates, giving people more of a stake in the land, but that hasn't been enough to stop jobs in agriculture vanishing. While fruit may still picked by hand, other jobs are now mechanised. There's little future on the land for the next generation.
SHEELA PATEL, Director, Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centres (SPARC): You have more and more agrarian reform which is going to make agriculture so efficient that lots of people - especially in Third World countries who lived in subsistence environments or did small farm jobs - are going to get almost expelled from that environment. So you're going to have a situation where the only place for exploring other opportunities is cities.
COMM: And so people like Maria also come to Lima. For her, every customer is now an opportunity and there are always customers. Whereas in the country there was only one harvest, assuming you were lucky with the weather.
MARIA GUILLEN PEREZ (TRANSLATION) : Well, people come here because there is drought in the countryside the same as we have here but even when the crops do grow there is nothing else there, so we come here looking for a job. When we're in the countryside we think we'll be better off in the city but when we come to Lima we find out something else: we find that there is no work, that we need to breed animals or sell something - something that will give you a secure income. There in the countryside there are only secondary schools and no colleges. For example there is no electricity there, there is no water and there is nothing there to bring us forward in life. So we tried to look for something better, and that's why we stayed here.
COMM: But it's still a struggle and Maria hasn't forgotten her country skills: with her family she's turning the empty desert land around her home into a kind of miniature farm. Her advice to newcomers: the city can be as unwelcoming as its stony landscape.
MARIA GUILLEN PEREZ (TRANSLATION) : My advice would be that one member of the family comes first, to be able to establish themselves and get a home, a house and to get used to the place so the people that follow understand where they're coming to. Unlike us. We arrived here and we just found stones, wild plants and nothing else. During the evening we use to listen to wild animals and during the day we didn't have anything else to look at, apart from the sun in the sky.
COMM: But now with their animals and their shop, Maria and her family have turned the desert into a home. Maria's entrepreneurial activities pay for all the family's food. Her husband's wages pay for their house. Living in Lima is a woman's work as well as a man's - perhaps more so: women are mothers, homemakers and must often earn a living too. Many women do fine in the city but others don't.
ANNA TIBAIJUKA, Executive Director, UN Centre for Human Settlements (Habitat): You see, in most of the developing countries normally of course women - you find that these are people who have moved from the countryside. They don't have requisite education, they don't have skills, they're not able to find a job. They don't have necessarily the social networks which normally you know keep rural communities together. You know, solidarity, helping each other - traditional safety nets break down when you reach the cities. So that women and children find themselves on their own. So these women earn livelihoods in very menial activities, you know grinding stone, begging, you know. So you find that in the pockets of poverty these are the poor of the poor.
COMM: In Lima being among the poorest of the poor can be a rough fate but many women have little choice - whether they come from the fields or from the more remote forests of the Andes. The woman who looks after this family says they came to Lima after timber traders had cut all the trees in their neighbourhood down.
MARIA LUZ TAPIA REDONDO (TRANSLATION): Life in the forest is not what it used to be. Before it was very nice but the situation has just got worse. My father used to work in the wood trade but now there is no wood trade left, there is not even enough to eat. This is why we came to Lima - because we are better off here. Here in Lima we can work, and by working we can help the children to study and to get ahead. Back in the forest there was no money - here in Lima, it's different.
COMM: But raising a family on the desert slopes of Lima can be tough for men too. Maria Luz's husband Gregorio, who's a water engineer, wonders if the hassle of city life is worthwhile.
GREGORIO NAPO MEGO PEREZ (TRANSLATION): When I finished my secondary studies I came here to enrol in college but I didn't get in. So I looked for a job and I stay here. I've been here for 12 years, I think. It's different - it's very, very different here. Before, I thought that it would be better but now that I go back home every year I think things are better there, they're quieter there.
COMM: So who's helping families like Gregorio's? Since this is a desert, Lima lays on water for the families who come here and Peru - unusually, in the developing world - does recognise squatters' rights to land.
LILIANA MIRANDA: When they are in this, their plot, in the same place they are going to stay for a long time because that's their place, it belongs to them, then the central government - at this moment, very soon the municipality again - will give them the land title. And after that there will arrive the water connection and then - well, no, the water and the sewage connection and the electricity connection and then services like school and health services and, and then the communal kitchen and then the glass of milk and etc., you know. The social network will appear and then they will survive in that way.
COMM: But life in Lima can be a no-win game for children as well as adults. As the old family structures break down, children while away their time in cafes and bars and many end up in the street instead of the schoolroom.
LILIANA MIRANDA: There are more than one million children working in Lima - just in Lima. On the streets, mainly. Selling candies, cleaning cars, taking care of cars; carrying things. Some girl children they are working at houses. It, it's very sad - it's very sad because families are broken. Sometimes you see just one mother taking care of the children - the father is gone and the mother has to work, and the children are alone, there is nobody else there. They don't belong anymore to this community that they used to live, you know together with other families or friends they will take care anyway the children, other adults will be there. But when there are not so many adults there are many, many dangerous situations for children.
COMM: Street kids will be just one of the problems on the agenda of the UN's City Summit Review - known as Istanbul Plus Five - in New York in June 2001. The UN is already collecting disturbing evidence.
MILOON KOTHARI, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Adequate Housing: There are more and more cases of children suffering because they have to constantly live under the threat of the homes being evicted. Where there is no guarantee of having - being able to go to school. Er, where they have to live in situations where obviously there isn't enough food; and, and there is a constant threat also from the police, from landlords, from other forces in society.
COMM: As the city develops so do the rubbish mountains but even amid the garbage dumps Lima's city council is ecology-conscious and NGOs too are working to make life better for the new city migrants. Jorge works for a garbage collection project organised by the NGO, Eco-City.
JORGE GALVEZ MONTILLA: (TRANSLATION): This project has been created by the NGO, "Eco-City". The first project that Eco-City organised here in Las Brisas was rubbish collection and it's working thanks to the collaboration of the people who have responded in a very positive way. They know it will help them avoid epidemics of illnesses and disease, especially for all the children.
COMM: Help from NGOs; help from the city - but also help from each other. Both the council and organisations like Eco-City are trying to help squatters organise themselves. Making the stony ground into a park is just the beginning.
LILIANA MIRANDA: First of all they always react: "OK! Let's organise the Park Committee!" Yeah? They know, they, they - it's inside them, they know they, they want to get something they have to be organised. So its organisation is just part of the tradition in, in these settlements. And er then appears a Park Committee and this Park Committee starts working for it. And they know they representing the feelings and expectations of the whole community and they feel important because of that. It is not a matter of giving them fish but teaching them how to fish - yeah, that's, that's the, the idea. So everything we, we are doing is more or less -is the pretext to help them be themselves, to be part of a society. To support and increase their self-esteem - because without self-esteem there are no possibilities to development.
COMM: Lima is - who knows: one of the great megacities of the developing world in the future? But while everyone agrees the poor here need help there is a debate over how best to give it. And the focus of that debate is housing and land rights - are they a human right or a commodity?
PETER MARCUSE, Professor of Urban Planning, Columbia University: The idea that people can only get minimum quality housing if they can pay for it; that anyone that does not have the money to buy housing on the open market doesn't deserve housing, I think that's a-a devastating, negative, evil idea. Housing ought to be treated as something people have as a right. The question of where they live is not really under their control - they don't come voluntarily because they want to live in a favela. They're lured there in effect; sometimes they're pushed off the land because they can no longer make a living on a family farm. So they come to the city looking for a better way of life and I think it's one of the functions of government to help them achieve their goal.
COMM: On the outskirts of Lima, shantytowns spread further into the desert. Advocates of the free market solutions agree these people need help but question whether giving them subsidised housing and land rights, which the rural poor don't have, is really the right thing to do. PROFESSOR ED GLAESER, Professor of Economics, Harvard University: I certainly have nothing against giving, giving squatters more, more land - you know your heart goes out to these, these people - it would be a good thing. However, you create a policy where you have valuable land on the edge of the city: you come to the edge of the city, you get that land! You know - you squat on, you get it. This creates a perverse incentive for people to come to the edges of urban areas. You don't want those perverse incentives, you want to create a neutral - a spatially neutral policy that helps the poor everywhere. OK, so having a specific squatters' policy is clearly not the right thing to do; you want a policy that actually focuses on housing for the poor everywhere.
STEVE BRADSHAW: How do you react to the argument that it may be short-sighted to help new migrants in cities, because it only encourages more?
SHEELA PATEL: You remind me of all the people in, in the city of Bombay who say, "don't give toilets to the poor so that that'll discourage them from coming in." People don't come to the city to go to the toilet or to have a glass of water. They come out of a much more complex basket of needs and aspirations. And they're going to be there.
STEVE BRADSHAW: But the argument is that if you help them with land rights and basic services as soon as they've come to the city then more and more people will come and it gets out of control.
SHEELA PATEL: I think that is the kind of argument that comes from a mindset which assumes that, you know that, "it's my city and I have to protect its resources and rights for me and mine" - and so anybody else is "them". And I think that's the real crisis today in, in all cities - its citizenship is not universal. It's like "we" and "they".
COMM: It's election time in Peru. Time to argue over different visions of the cities of the future. In Peru, politicians have often promoted the growth of cities; they've handed out subsidies to favoured urban electors. The policy of giving squatters land rights goes back to the days when Peru was a dictatorship.
LILIANA MIRANDA: During the Seventies we had a very interesting president which used to be a dictator - military dictatorship. But he, he said, "OK, none of these lands belong to anyone - belongs to the state. Comes back to my position and it's mine - all this land is mine, so I will decide to give this land to these people who claims for it and who needs for it. The land to the people."
COMM: And so, the free marketeers claim, the often monstrous growth of the world's great cities has been the legacy - not of capitalism unchecked by regulation, but of dictatorship unchecked by democracy.
PROFESSOR ED GLAESER: Politics lies behind a lot of the cities that are, that are overly large. That they tend to show up - you know, the average largest city in a dictatorship is 50% larger than the average large city, the average largest city in a democracy, you know. So places where the political systems don't protect the rights of people in the hinterland or people in smaller cities - where if you're in the capital you get stuff and you're not in the capital you don't get stuff - this creates a massive distortion to flow to the larger cities. And yeah, we should worry about that stuff because it creates massive agglomerations that are not produced by any real economic force.
STEVE BRADSHAW: So the more democracy - the more, the fairer shares for all - the less likely, you're saying, you are to get these megacities. It's actually also true that the more openness at the economic level, the more trade you have, the smaller are the larger cities. The closed economies actually have megacities much more so than open economies do.
COMM: Still, it's not surprising there's widespread support for schemes to help people cope with the problems of city life. Problems like those faced by working mothers with kids too young to go to school. This crèche is supported by the city and was started by a worker at the charity.
EDITH LUZ DAVILA PORTILLO (TRANSLATION): There are mothers who need to work, they have children and don't have anyone to leave them with - they don't have help. And then there are the abandoned mothers who have to travel a long way to work and have nowhere to leave their children. This is why I got the idea of providing help for these working mothers and that's why I am here.
COMM: After the crèche, the city school. Those who believe the cities should have special favours say that subsidising city schools and crèches will help everyone.
SHEELA PATEL: The possibility of a young child from a slum getting an education, getting better health services in the city, is better than, say in a village, even today. So if, for instance national governments - municipalities - see this as an opportunity that you have concentrated large groups of people, you can use economies of scale to bring in new quality education or to do improved training. Then you have a whole new human resource which is trained, which then makes that city competitive to host what you call the "fruits of globalisation", which is business coming in.
COMM: And business is coming into downtown Lima. Whether they're helped or not, migrants will continue to try and seize the opportunities it offers. There is still poverty on the streets, but there was just as much poverty back in the countryside. It was simply better hidden.
PROFESSOR ED GLAESER: We should not confuse the rise of megacities with the rise of inequality and poverty, OK? It makes poverty visible but it doesn't necessarily in any sense increase poverty. You know, rural areas in less developed countries are not well off and the movement of the poor to cities makes visible to us -we see the favelas - we're troubled by them in a way that we didn't when the poor were living in rural areas - but this doesn't mean that urbanisation is the culprit.
STEVE BRADSHAW: You mean there may have been - there was poverty there before?
PROFESSOR ED GLAESER: There was poverty there before it just wasn't - it was hidden, and now it's visible.
COMM: By the end of the decade most people in the world will live in towns and cities. Most people, it seems, agree with the people of Lima, that for all the complaints it's in cities where they'll find the opportunities for a better life.
LILIANA MIRANDA: Everyone knows this is "Lima the Horrible". Every migrant will say that, "I am better, I am living better, my children are studying well - but this is horrible. I don't like it! But we have food, I have a job and they are going to school."
COMM: Ask people how to improve things in the city, Liliana's NGO has found, and they will disagree. So instead Eco City asked the people it helps to draw their hopes for the future. People like Grimalda.
GRIMALDA FLORES AROTINGO (TRANSLATION): Well, my picture includes a street - good roads. We had a little place, we also had a church - we had a church in the hill, because for us the church is very far away. I drew all of that. In reality all of this will be very difficult to get. Hopefully, we will get the church because some nuns have visited us and they will build us a church; that's what they're planning to build.
COMM: Churches, schools, better roads. When people in Lima draw what they want they discover something that's as simple as its true - which is probably true in every other city in the world.
LILIANA MIRANDA: Then they discover - which always happens, that's for sure - that most of them are dreaming more or less the same so they have common dreaming, common visions. They can share that vision and they can start to, to think that maybe what they were dreaming was not so impossible, you know? It is not just a dream.
ANNA TIBAIJUKA: It is a trend which cannot be stopped. And the old predictions now show that people are marching onto cities.
PETER MARCUSE: Part of the pressure on people to come to a big city is that bad things are happening where they come from.
DR MAISHTA GUPTA: For the poor, you don't have to explain that: "You need a change". Everybody knows they need a change, they just don't know how.
COMM: Every day they come in from the countryside. To bus stations in the more seedy parts of town. They are looking for friends and family who have come before them. They are hoping to find work, they are hoping to find better clinics and better schools for their kids. If they're lucky there's someone to meet them. But if they're not lucky, the big city can be an unwelcoming place - where the streets are not paved with gold.
LILIANA MIRANDA, Director, Eco Ciudad, Lima, Peru: They arrive here but now they don't have the opportunities that the previous migrants had. So they are not having a nice time and it's very difficult for them because they don't have a job so they have just to survive.
COMM: They have come to Lima, the capital of Peru in South America. It is a crowded city where many have set up homes before - they may not welcome newcomers.
LILIANA MIRANDA: People in Lima or in any big city in the country will say, "Oh! This is you know Serrano - this is a newcomer. What are you doing here? Come back to your place!" You know? They are going to refuse to-to talk to them to, to accept them so they are going to feel, you know like, like a marginalised person - in fact during a long time they are going to feel marginal.
COMM: José came to Lima with his wife and three children. He had a job making jewellery but was made redundant but he still believes life will be better in the city.
JOSE DIAZ GIOCOCHEA (TRANSLATION) : I left the place I was born to look for a better life and for a better future for my children. So the children could get a profession and have a better life from the one we have had ourselves. My hope is that every one of them learns a profession.
COMM: Somehow José has managed to put together a home for his family. He's convinced his children will stand a better chance in their city home - even though they haven't yet found a place in the local school. There's little left of the country but the chickens. José's sure his daughter won't regret their move.
JOSE DIAZ GIOCOCHEA (TRANSLATION) : They are better off than I was before because in my time where we lived there wasn't any television, only radio. But now through television, children - with different programmes for children, through these their thoughts become more developed.
COMM: A hundred miles outside Lima they're picking the mandarin crop. Land reform in Peru has split up some of the great old estates, giving people more of a stake in the land, but that hasn't been enough to stop jobs in agriculture vanishing. While fruit may still picked by hand, other jobs are now mechanised. There's little future on the land for the next generation.
SHEELA PATEL, Director, Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centres (SPARC): You have more and more agrarian reform which is going to make agriculture so efficient that lots of people - especially in Third World countries who lived in subsistence environments or did small farm jobs - are going to get almost expelled from that environment. So you're going to have a situation where the only place for exploring other opportunities is cities.
COMM: And so people like Maria also come to Lima. For her, every customer is now an opportunity and there are always customers. Whereas in the country there was only one harvest, assuming you were lucky with the weather.
MARIA GUILLEN PEREZ (TRANSLATION) : Well, people come here because there is drought in the countryside the same as we have here but even when the crops do grow there is nothing else there, so we come here looking for a job. When we're in the countryside we think we'll be better off in the city but when we come to Lima we find out something else: we find that there is no work, that we need to breed animals or sell something - something that will give you a secure income. There in the countryside there are only secondary schools and no colleges. For example there is no electricity there, there is no water and there is nothing there to bring us forward in life. So we tried to look for something better, and that's why we stayed here.
COMM: But it's still a struggle and Maria hasn't forgotten her country skills: with her family she's turning the empty desert land around her home into a kind of miniature farm. Her advice to newcomers: the city can be as unwelcoming as its stony landscape.
MARIA GUILLEN PEREZ (TRANSLATION) : My advice would be that one member of the family comes first, to be able to establish themselves and get a home, a house and to get used to the place so the people that follow understand where they're coming to. Unlike us. We arrived here and we just found stones, wild plants and nothing else. During the evening we use to listen to wild animals and during the day we didn't have anything else to look at, apart from the sun in the sky.
COMM: But now with their animals and their shop, Maria and her family have turned the desert into a home. Maria's entrepreneurial activities pay for all the family's food. Her husband's wages pay for their house. Living in Lima is a woman's work as well as a man's - perhaps more so: women are mothers, homemakers and must often earn a living too. Many women do fine in the city but others don't.
ANNA TIBAIJUKA, Executive Director, UN Centre for Human Settlements (Habitat): You see, in most of the developing countries normally of course women - you find that these are people who have moved from the countryside. They don't have requisite education, they don't have skills, they're not able to find a job. They don't have necessarily the social networks which normally you know keep rural communities together. You know, solidarity, helping each other - traditional safety nets break down when you reach the cities. So that women and children find themselves on their own. So these women earn livelihoods in very menial activities, you know grinding stone, begging, you know. So you find that in the pockets of poverty these are the poor of the poor.
COMM: In Lima being among the poorest of the poor can be a rough fate but many women have little choice - whether they come from the fields or from the more remote forests of the Andes. The woman who looks after this family says they came to Lima after timber traders had cut all the trees in their neighbourhood down.
MARIA LUZ TAPIA REDONDO (TRANSLATION): Life in the forest is not what it used to be. Before it was very nice but the situation has just got worse. My father used to work in the wood trade but now there is no wood trade left, there is not even enough to eat. This is why we came to Lima - because we are better off here. Here in Lima we can work, and by working we can help the children to study and to get ahead. Back in the forest there was no money - here in Lima, it's different.
COMM: But raising a family on the desert slopes of Lima can be tough for men too. Maria Luz's husband Gregorio, who's a water engineer, wonders if the hassle of city life is worthwhile.
GREGORIO NAPO MEGO PEREZ (TRANSLATION): When I finished my secondary studies I came here to enrol in college but I didn't get in. So I looked for a job and I stay here. I've been here for 12 years, I think. It's different - it's very, very different here. Before, I thought that it would be better but now that I go back home every year I think things are better there, they're quieter there.
COMM: So who's helping families like Gregorio's? Since this is a desert, Lima lays on water for the families who come here and Peru - unusually, in the developing world - does recognise squatters' rights to land.
LILIANA MIRANDA: When they are in this, their plot, in the same place they are going to stay for a long time because that's their place, it belongs to them, then the central government - at this moment, very soon the municipality again - will give them the land title. And after that there will arrive the water connection and then - well, no, the water and the sewage connection and the electricity connection and then services like school and health services and, and then the communal kitchen and then the glass of milk and etc., you know. The social network will appear and then they will survive in that way.
COMM: But life in Lima can be a no-win game for children as well as adults. As the old family structures break down, children while away their time in cafes and bars and many end up in the street instead of the schoolroom.
LILIANA MIRANDA: There are more than one million children working in Lima - just in Lima. On the streets, mainly. Selling candies, cleaning cars, taking care of cars; carrying things. Some girl children they are working at houses. It, it's very sad - it's very sad because families are broken. Sometimes you see just one mother taking care of the children - the father is gone and the mother has to work, and the children are alone, there is nobody else there. They don't belong anymore to this community that they used to live, you know together with other families or friends they will take care anyway the children, other adults will be there. But when there are not so many adults there are many, many dangerous situations for children.
COMM: Street kids will be just one of the problems on the agenda of the UN's City Summit Review - known as Istanbul Plus Five - in New York in June 2001. The UN is already collecting disturbing evidence.
MILOON KOTHARI, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Adequate Housing: There are more and more cases of children suffering because they have to constantly live under the threat of the homes being evicted. Where there is no guarantee of having - being able to go to school. Er, where they have to live in situations where obviously there isn't enough food; and, and there is a constant threat also from the police, from landlords, from other forces in society.
COMM: As the city develops so do the rubbish mountains but even amid the garbage dumps Lima's city council is ecology-conscious and NGOs too are working to make life better for the new city migrants. Jorge works for a garbage collection project organised by the NGO, Eco-City.
JORGE GALVEZ MONTILLA: (TRANSLATION): This project has been created by the NGO, "Eco-City". The first project that Eco-City organised here in Las Brisas was rubbish collection and it's working thanks to the collaboration of the people who have responded in a very positive way. They know it will help them avoid epidemics of illnesses and disease, especially for all the children.
COMM: Help from NGOs; help from the city - but also help from each other. Both the council and organisations like Eco-City are trying to help squatters organise themselves. Making the stony ground into a park is just the beginning.
LILIANA MIRANDA: First of all they always react: "OK! Let's organise the Park Committee!" Yeah? They know, they, they - it's inside them, they know they, they want to get something they have to be organised. So its organisation is just part of the tradition in, in these settlements. And er then appears a Park Committee and this Park Committee starts working for it. And they know they representing the feelings and expectations of the whole community and they feel important because of that. It is not a matter of giving them fish but teaching them how to fish - yeah, that's, that's the, the idea. So everything we, we are doing is more or less -is the pretext to help them be themselves, to be part of a society. To support and increase their self-esteem - because without self-esteem there are no possibilities to development.
COMM: Lima is - who knows: one of the great megacities of the developing world in the future? But while everyone agrees the poor here need help there is a debate over how best to give it. And the focus of that debate is housing and land rights - are they a human right or a commodity?
PETER MARCUSE, Professor of Urban Planning, Columbia University: The idea that people can only get minimum quality housing if they can pay for it; that anyone that does not have the money to buy housing on the open market doesn't deserve housing, I think that's a-a devastating, negative, evil idea. Housing ought to be treated as something people have as a right. The question of where they live is not really under their control - they don't come voluntarily because they want to live in a favela. They're lured there in effect; sometimes they're pushed off the land because they can no longer make a living on a family farm. So they come to the city looking for a better way of life and I think it's one of the functions of government to help them achieve their goal.
COMM: On the outskirts of Lima, shantytowns spread further into the desert. Advocates of the free market solutions agree these people need help but question whether giving them subsidised housing and land rights, which the rural poor don't have, is really the right thing to do. PROFESSOR ED GLAESER, Professor of Economics, Harvard University: I certainly have nothing against giving, giving squatters more, more land - you know your heart goes out to these, these people - it would be a good thing. However, you create a policy where you have valuable land on the edge of the city: you come to the edge of the city, you get that land! You know - you squat on, you get it. This creates a perverse incentive for people to come to the edges of urban areas. You don't want those perverse incentives, you want to create a neutral - a spatially neutral policy that helps the poor everywhere. OK, so having a specific squatters' policy is clearly not the right thing to do; you want a policy that actually focuses on housing for the poor everywhere.
STEVE BRADSHAW: How do you react to the argument that it may be short-sighted to help new migrants in cities, because it only encourages more?
SHEELA PATEL: You remind me of all the people in, in the city of Bombay who say, "don't give toilets to the poor so that that'll discourage them from coming in." People don't come to the city to go to the toilet or to have a glass of water. They come out of a much more complex basket of needs and aspirations. And they're going to be there.
STEVE BRADSHAW: But the argument is that if you help them with land rights and basic services as soon as they've come to the city then more and more people will come and it gets out of control.
SHEELA PATEL: I think that is the kind of argument that comes from a mindset which assumes that, you know that, "it's my city and I have to protect its resources and rights for me and mine" - and so anybody else is "them". And I think that's the real crisis today in, in all cities - its citizenship is not universal. It's like "we" and "they".
COMM: It's election time in Peru. Time to argue over different visions of the cities of the future. In Peru, politicians have often promoted the growth of cities; they've handed out subsidies to favoured urban electors. The policy of giving squatters land rights goes back to the days when Peru was a dictatorship.
LILIANA MIRANDA: During the Seventies we had a very interesting president which used to be a dictator - military dictatorship. But he, he said, "OK, none of these lands belong to anyone - belongs to the state. Comes back to my position and it's mine - all this land is mine, so I will decide to give this land to these people who claims for it and who needs for it. The land to the people."
COMM: And so, the free marketeers claim, the often monstrous growth of the world's great cities has been the legacy - not of capitalism unchecked by regulation, but of dictatorship unchecked by democracy.
PROFESSOR ED GLAESER: Politics lies behind a lot of the cities that are, that are overly large. That they tend to show up - you know, the average largest city in a dictatorship is 50% larger than the average large city, the average largest city in a democracy, you know. So places where the political systems don't protect the rights of people in the hinterland or people in smaller cities - where if you're in the capital you get stuff and you're not in the capital you don't get stuff - this creates a massive distortion to flow to the larger cities. And yeah, we should worry about that stuff because it creates massive agglomerations that are not produced by any real economic force.
STEVE BRADSHAW: So the more democracy - the more, the fairer shares for all - the less likely, you're saying, you are to get these megacities. It's actually also true that the more openness at the economic level, the more trade you have, the smaller are the larger cities. The closed economies actually have megacities much more so than open economies do.
COMM: Still, it's not surprising there's widespread support for schemes to help people cope with the problems of city life. Problems like those faced by working mothers with kids too young to go to school. This crèche is supported by the city and was started by a worker at the charity.
EDITH LUZ DAVILA PORTILLO (TRANSLATION): There are mothers who need to work, they have children and don't have anyone to leave them with - they don't have help. And then there are the abandoned mothers who have to travel a long way to work and have nowhere to leave their children. This is why I got the idea of providing help for these working mothers and that's why I am here.
COMM: After the crèche, the city school. Those who believe the cities should have special favours say that subsidising city schools and crèches will help everyone.
SHEELA PATEL: The possibility of a young child from a slum getting an education, getting better health services in the city, is better than, say in a village, even today. So if, for instance national governments - municipalities - see this as an opportunity that you have concentrated large groups of people, you can use economies of scale to bring in new quality education or to do improved training. Then you have a whole new human resource which is trained, which then makes that city competitive to host what you call the "fruits of globalisation", which is business coming in.
COMM: And business is coming into downtown Lima. Whether they're helped or not, migrants will continue to try and seize the opportunities it offers. There is still poverty on the streets, but there was just as much poverty back in the countryside. It was simply better hidden.
PROFESSOR ED GLAESER: We should not confuse the rise of megacities with the rise of inequality and poverty, OK? It makes poverty visible but it doesn't necessarily in any sense increase poverty. You know, rural areas in less developed countries are not well off and the movement of the poor to cities makes visible to us -we see the favelas - we're troubled by them in a way that we didn't when the poor were living in rural areas - but this doesn't mean that urbanisation is the culprit.
STEVE BRADSHAW: You mean there may have been - there was poverty there before?
PROFESSOR ED GLAESER: There was poverty there before it just wasn't - it was hidden, and now it's visible.
COMM: By the end of the decade most people in the world will live in towns and cities. Most people, it seems, agree with the people of Lima, that for all the complaints it's in cities where they'll find the opportunities for a better life.
LILIANA MIRANDA: Everyone knows this is "Lima the Horrible". Every migrant will say that, "I am better, I am living better, my children are studying well - but this is horrible. I don't like it! But we have food, I have a job and they are going to school."
COMM: Ask people how to improve things in the city, Liliana's NGO has found, and they will disagree. So instead Eco City asked the people it helps to draw their hopes for the future. People like Grimalda.
GRIMALDA FLORES AROTINGO (TRANSLATION): Well, my picture includes a street - good roads. We had a little place, we also had a church - we had a church in the hill, because for us the church is very far away. I drew all of that. In reality all of this will be very difficult to get. Hopefully, we will get the church because some nuns have visited us and they will build us a church; that's what they're planning to build.
COMM: Churches, schools, better roads. When people in Lima draw what they want they discover something that's as simple as its true - which is probably true in every other city in the world.
LILIANA MIRANDA: Then they discover - which always happens, that's for sure - that most of them are dreaming more or less the same so they have common dreaming, common visions. They can share that vision and they can start to, to think that maybe what they were dreaming was not so impossible, you know? It is not just a dream.