And If Mexico City Seems Bad...

By Otto Friedrich

A trio of Third World megacities face similar problems

"Hell is a city much like London," Shelley once wrote. "A populous and smoky city. . ./Small justice shown, and still less pity." The London that impressed him in 1819 as a metropolitan inferno had just over 1 million inhabitants, hardly more than today's Bronx. Yet though London has swollen tenfold since then, it has been overtaken by still faster-growing hells: not only Mexico City but Cairo, Calcutta, Shanghai and others. By the end of the century, according to the U.N., at least 22 cities will have populations of more than 10 million, and 60 will have more than 5 million.

Though the megacities all share the same crises, each has a character of its own, and thus a special way of struggling for survival.

Cairo: Life in the City of the Dead

On the eastern edge of Cairo (pop. 12 million), a city in which the population density of some areas runs as high as 300,000 per sq. mi. (more than four times the density of Manhattan), there is a huge graveyard known as the City of the Dead. It is dead no longer: several hundred thousand Cairenes have established homes among and even inside the tombs. "It is not like everyone thinks," says Abdullah Mahmoud, 65, who has been living in one of these vaults for 30 years. His wife and six children live there too. "These tombs are bigger than apartments that people would find in the city, if they could find any. Many people here have telephones, cars, even video machines."

Mahmoud's tomb is indeed spacious, largely a ceremonial room built by a 19th century nobleman named Khanzouri. In a smaller side room, which contains Khanzouri's marble cenotaph, Mahmoud's wife hangs the laundry. "The children were born here," Mahmoud adds, "so they are not afraid."

In most ways, Cairo's life is about what could be expected in a 1,000-year-old city that had only half a million people at the turn of the century. Bursting water pipes sometimes cause daylong shortages. One-third of Cairo's residents live in buildings that are not connected to any sewage system, and the system that exists was designed for only 2 million people. When it overflowed into homes in Old Cairo two years ago, the breakdown led to serious rioting.

The prevailing winds in Cairo blow north or south. One brings toxic fumes from the lead and zinc smelters in Shubra El Kheima just north of the city. When the wind shifts, it brings poisons from the steel and cement factories in the south, in Helwan. President Gamal Abdel Nasser converted the health resort of Helwan into an industrial showpiece in the late 1950s and 1960s. Today it is notable for its myriad dead trees.

The main cause of Cairo's air pollution, though, is its traffic jams, which are caused not only by swarms of cars, increasing by 15% a year, but also by the 80,000 animal carts that clog the narrow streets and create their own fumes. Carbon monoxide levels in some areas are three to four times what U.S. experts consider dangerous.

When the authorities decided to build a subway, it turned out to be about as simple as building the Great Pyramids. The first contract was signed in 1981 with a Franco-Egyptian consortium. The French government put up some $200 million to start the digging on a 2.7-mile tunnel from the main railroad station to the Sayeda Zeinab mosque. Unfortunately, the diggers needed permits not only from the Cairo government but from the traffic authority, transit authority, water authority, electric authority, sewage authority and gas authority.

When the Prime Minister finally intervened after nine months of negotiation to get some of the permits issued, the subway builders found that they had no accurate maps of what lay beneath the streets. "We had to make our own drawings," says Charles Carlier, the project's French director. "When we find a utility line, we have to dig a trench to divert it. Then in digging the trench we find more utilities that are not on any map. We never imagined there could be so many utility lines in Cairo."

Naturally, accidents happen. On one occasion, the diggers broke a water main and flooded the city's main square. Several times they have accidentally sheared through telephone lines. Once, after a city official granted permission to cut an unidentifiable cable, an army officer angrily denounced the diggers for having severed a secret military intelligence line. The project was supposed to be finished next year but nobody expects that. Carlier's conclusion: "Now we are where we should have been when the project began."

Calcutta: Statistics of Ruin

Founded by the English East India Co. in 1690, Calcutta (pop. 10.2 million) was once the capital of British India, a financial center of Asia, richly landscaped with Victorian parks and monuments. Today it has perhaps the lowest urban living standards in the world. The statistics tell a story of ruin. More than 70% of the city's people live at or below the poverty line, calculated as an income of less than $8 a month. The average earnings of a family of five are $34 a month. For at least 200,000 people the only source of income is begging.

Calcutta began to fail when the British moved their capital to Delhi in 1911. The last big water works in Calcutta were built by the British in 1864. Today there is only one water faucet for each 25 slum dwellings. The last main sewer was built in 1896; about half of Calcutta's houses have no indoor toilets. The city's only garbage incinerator has broken down almost daily for 40 years, and roughly 2,000 tons of garbage and trash litter the streets on any given day.

Every week or so, a decrepit house noisily collapses in ruins. Forty percent of Calcutta's buildings are more than 75 years old, and 20% of them are classified as unsafe. Parts of the Calcutta Medical College, built 100 years ago, are on the verge of falling apart. So is the Mayo Hospital, built in 1972, its paint now peeling, its drains leaking. About 70% of Calcutta's inhabitants live in one-room houses; 600,000 of them have no real homes at all but live and die on the streets.

Efforts at improvement regularly turn sour. Calcutta began in 1972 to build a subway that was supposed to open its first 2.5 miles this year and eventually carry 2 million people over ten miles of track. So far, costs have soared from $140 million to $700 million. Though many streets have been dug up and mountains of dirt piled in the Maidan Park, only half a mile of track was scheduled to become operational this summer. Then a June storm flooded the whole system and postponed its opening to the public. "When the thing is completed, it will not solve anything," says Calcutta's Chief Minister Jyoti Basu, who wants to build an auxiliary railway system to carry people from the subway to their work. Says he: "Without such a railway, there will be pandemonium."

Basu, a democratically elected Marxist, remains remarkably optimistic. He has started building a modern port at Haldia, 45 miles south of Calcutta, which will also include an oil refinery and fertilizer factory. He hopes to build a ring of 17 small satellite cities outside Calcutta, each with self-supporting industry. But perhaps his greatest ground for optimism is that central Calcutta has finally stopped growing.

Shanghai: Standing Room Only

Shanghai (pop. 11.9 million) was once the wildest seaport in the world, but the Communists outlawed all its traditional sins when they captured it in 1949. About 30,000 prostitutes were shipped off to rehabilitation centers to learn another profession, and thousands of opium addicts were detoxified and put to work. At the same time, however, much of the reformed city's commercial life also withered. Only in the past few years has Shanghai regained the right to launch private busi nesses, attract foreign investments and keep some of the profits. The physical city is much the same as it was in 1949, but 35 years older, grayer and more than twice as crowded.

Huang Hunian, 56, is a reasonably typical office worker. His three children, who are in their 20s, all have jobs, and the extra incomes have enabled the Huangs to buy a 14-in. black-and-white TV set, a radio-cassette player and a few other luxury goods. But all five family members have to live in one room. Their 150 sq. ft. of floor space does not provide enough for five beds; they solved that problem by raising the ceiling enough to create a small loft. Together with two other families, who also live in one room each, they cook in a communal kitchen downstairs. The three families share a public toilet about 80 ft. from the home.

"The housing shortage has become the main problem that hinders development in Shanghai," says the city's Communist Party chief, Chen Guodong. The authorities say that they built 4.2 million sq. yds. of new housing last year and moved 68,000 families into new homes.

But the city keeps growing by nearly 150,000 inhabitants a year. "Officially, they speak of 30 to 40 sq. ft. of housing per capita," says one foreign expert, "but at the core it's more like 20 sq. ft. and in some sections only 16 sq. ft. That's barely standing room."

The authorities have announced a variety of antipollution programs, but they have had only limited success. "The public sewage system is badly clogged," says Marwyn S. Samuels, a visiting professor of geography from the University of British Columbia. "Dumping of raw sewage goes on, as well as dumping of industrial wastes into the Huangpu River. If you fly here during the daytime you see three levels of the color of the water. The closer you get to Shanghai, the blacker the water gets."

Jobs are scarce, partly because of the slow return of thousands of people who were shipped off to work in the countryside during the rule of Mao Tse-tung. City officials admit to only 20,000 unemployed, but the real figure is believed to be two to three times higher. Unemployment has led to a wave of petty thefts and burglaries, and the scarcity of many consumer goods has fostered various kinds of corruption, bribery, smuggling, fraud.

Despite its woes, and its authoritarian government, Shanghai still has more style than any other city in China, and most of the basic needs are filled. Buses run, water and electricity are ample, and there is plenty of food on sale.

Equally important, there are no great gaps between rich and poor.

"Unlike Mexico City," says Samuels, "Shanghai has no 'Pink Zone' for the wealthy and no squatters living in shacks." -- By Otto Friedrich.

Reported by Dean Brelis /Calcutta, Philip Finnegan/ Cairo and Jaime A. FlorCruz/ Shanghai

With reporting by Dean Brelis; Philip Finnegan; Jaime A. FlorCruz