The Art of Servival

Port-au-Prince, the capital and largest city of Haiti, the dream of former President, Jean-Bertrand Aristide with a metro area greater than 2 million. Over the years its urban development and population has exploded, causing disorder. Port-au-Prince is divided into several neighborhoods. There’s a ring of districts that come out from the center of Port-au-Prince, Pétionville, Delmas, Carrefour and downtown Port-au-Prince harbors include low-income slums plagued with poverty and violence in which the most notorious, Cité Soleil is situated.

The city its self is typical of a major city in a third world country, to move around the city you would see a hum of activity, most people selling goods and services right off the streets. Simon Fass's book, ref: ‘Political Economy in Haïti: The Drama of Survival’, he argues that “in fact virtually no one is unemployed in Port-au-Prince's slums, because they would be unable to survive if they were.”Haiti has remained the least-developed country in the Americas, largely due to political instability and repeated episodes of violence.

The city it’s self has incured the slum through this political unrest and want to grow to such a size. Enviromentaly damaged by soil erosion, caused by deforestation, and in 1797 Tropical storm ‘Jeanne’ hit the north of Haiti, leaving 3,006 people dead in flooding and mudslides.These additions to Haiti’s downfall, and the mess of Port-au-Prince began with receiveing an inundation of migrants from the countryside where farmland, as mentioned is eroding into desert so people come to the city to search for jobs. The government being unable to accommodate the flood of migrants into the city. Thus creating slums erected even in Pétionville, a high class of Poort-au-prince.

Ref: Simon M. Fass, POLITICAL ECONOMY IN HAITI: THE DRAMA OF SURVIVAL, New Brunswick, N.J. 1990