As the world rapidly urbanizes, millions of people flock to informal and unplanned settlements, often located on the urban periphery, without access to services such as water and sanitation. These settlements are home to a quarter of the world`s urban population and absorb most of the urban growth in developing regions. Caracas is a showcase of all kinds of informalities that we can imagine: regular (traditional?) Slums, street vendors and various informal economic activities in every way, rich areas built very nicely but according to the same principles of a slum, new vertical slums in occupied buildings, unregulated buildings in “formal” areas and new slums protected and promoted by governments. In fact, the formal and informal realms are so interconnected these days that I began to believe that we should stop worrying about their limitations or differences. Will Jason: The terms “slum” and “informal settlement” are often used interchangeably. Could you clarify the terminology first? Of the subjects included in this analysis in 2041, 45.8% lived in informal environments, 23% came from Ouagadougou, 64% came from outside Ouagadougou, of which 90% came from rural areas. Table 1 shows the gender characteristics of the participants. Men and women, subjects in the informal environment, were younger, tended to live in marriage more often and were less able to read and write than the formal environment. The informal sector has more migrants under the age of 10 than the formal sector. Depending on each sex, the presence of chronic diseases did not differ between formal and informal areas, while overweight and obesity were more common in formal than informal settings. Subjects in informal areas were more likely to be smokers than formal attitudes (11.7% versus 6.8%; P < 0.001).
Among men, those who lived in formal settings consumed more alcohol and had less physical activity than those who lived in informal settings. [4] Also called triplex. They use a difference in height between the floors of the opposite facades. As long as we accept informal settlement not as a strange object, but simply as part of the city, our solutions and projects will be better, and the pendulum between simple and “bad” solutions and speculation and experimentation with poverty will reach a certain balance. Now legal or illegal, formal or informal, do not depend on the conditions of the land or the configuration of the colony, but on the society that builds. In participants with high blood pressure readings indicating high blood pressure, the prevalence of detection was 27.4% (95% CI 22.9-31.9). The proportion of these hypertensive participants who were aware of their condition was higher in the formal environment than in the informal environment (31.2% versus 21.0%; P = 0.03), but no differences by sex were observed. Migration from sub-Saharan Africa to Western countries has been identified as a risk factor for high blood pressure [22]. Our study shows that migration from the countryside to the city is positively associated with high blood pressure. Comparing the results of this study with our previous study in rural and semi-urban areas of the Kaya region (Burkina Faso) and for the same age group, the prevalence of hypertension among migrants in Ouagadougou is higher than in rural areas [11].
The explanatory factors for this positive association could be the same as for international migration: first anxiety and stress, then dietary changes and physical inactivity [23]. Unwin also showed that after 12 months of migration from rural to urban areas, physical activity was significantly reduced and fat consumption increased among migrants in Tanzania [24] and that after the first twelve months of migration, blood pressure decreased in migrants in both men and women [24]. This drop in blood pressure could later be followed by its height sequence of unhealthy behaviors, which are gradually acquired. Our finding that migrants under the age of 10 are more likely to have high blood pressure even after extensive covariates contrasts with those found in Dakar, Senegal, where a lower prevalence of hypertension was found among recent migrants [25]. This difference could be due to the origin of migrants, who in our study were almost rural, while in Dakar they come mainly from other cities in Senegal [25]. The contrast in urbanization between the areas from which they come and the host areas could explain this difference. ES: Slums are often portrayed as these black holes of social, economic and cultural pathologies – places of violence, insecurity, etc. And there is another end to the specter that it shows as these places of heroic realization in the face of terrible living conditions. Overall, the media reinforces that these places are different from everything else – that they are separate. We need to take a more critical look at this effect.
Visual media, in particular, is a kind of language in images that influences public debate. We need to find ways to shape influence constructively. ES: Informal settlements provide a large number of people with housing and work opportunities that are not available in the formal sector. But from a moral point of view, slums represent a system that creates and reinforces human and environmental vulnerabilities to unemployment, homelessness, violence and disasters. For example, if you don`t have the right to prove ownership of a house, you usually have no legal recourse if that house is taken away from you. What are your ways to claim the theft or destruction of this asset? And then there is the question of whether informal settlements are good for the city as a whole. Unregulated and precariously built settlements can be places of pollution and contamination that are dangerous to the places where toxins are produced, as well as to everything associated with them – water sources, canyons, etc. The overall prevalence found in this study (18.6%) is slightly lower than the prevalence of previous studies conducted in the same population: for the same age group (18 years and older), an earlier study reported 23% [13]. For participants aged 35 years and older, our results show a prevalence of 30.1% (95% CI 27.5-32.8) below 40% in 2007 [14]. This does not mean that high blood pressure is decreasing in Ouagadougou.
One of the reasons for these conflicting results could be that no information on hypertensive drugs was available in the present study. Despite our lower estimate, this study confirms that the prevalence of hypertension in urban areas is even higher than in semi-urban and rural areas of Burkina Faso [11]. However, the prevalence of high blood pressure in the present study was lower than the prevalence in another African urban population aged 16 years and older, which showed a prevalence between 30 and 41% [8, 18-20]. The Prenda case shows us that informal processes have shaped not only self-built areas, but also so-called formal areas. Over time, the distinction between formal and informal has become increasingly blurred. The distinction that can be made is between acceptable and uncertain living conditions, and both can occur in all typologies. Therefore, standards draw the line that separates the two realities. But who draws the standards? Much of the legislation in African countries dates back to colonial times. The principles for defining planning legislation come from northern societies and do not always take into account ecological, cultural and sociological particularities. In addition, the Un is trying to set global standards, but the results are not contextualized. The peculiarities that characterize the so-called informal city are precisely the values that are ignored in the definition of the line of norms. .
