For 20th anniversary issue of TEMPO -Magazine

According to EU standards any slums should not exist inside the European Union, but what if they do.
These slums have been built by minority groups, which established their own communities because the majority of the society is unable or not willing to integrate them. People live there under conditions one rather expects in Third World countries than in Europe. It is almost impossible for a resident of such a slum to find work outside his or her neighborhood. As a result, people created certain micro-economic structures in some of the slums. Some of them are trying to make some money in hairdresser salons specializing in African hair or they are working at a backyard car repair shop. For others, dealing with drugs seems to be the only profitable business.
The barrios “6 de Maio” and “Couva da Moura” are known as the most dangerous neighborhoods of Lisbon. All the buildings there have been built without permission and out of all kinds of cheap materials; the alleyways are too narrow to pass through by bicycle. Drugs and weapons are sold here – for many inhabitants the only way to survive. The first generation of migrants came in the seventies as guest workers from the former Portuguese colonies, such as the Cape Verde Islands and Angola. But for the children of the first generation there are no more jobs. In Portugal, immigrants do not live like Europeans but still under the poorest conditions. The ones who are born in “6 de Maio” or “Couva da Moura” have little chance to escape life in the slums.
A three-meter high metal fence to stop the broadening of drug dealing surrounds “La Serenissima,” the poorest district of the Italian city of Padua. The police is watching the only access way day and night and floodlights shine on the claddings and the spaces between the blocks like in a prison yard. The residents are not asylum seekers; they mainly live in Italy with valid documents for many years. Among them are many who are illegal and do not have a residence permit. The apartment buildings are former student dorms. The city of Padua sold single apartments to private investors after less and less students wanted to live in the unpopular area of “La Serenissima.” The tenants now had to pay up to 1000 Euro for apartments, which were only twenty-eight square meters big – too much for someone without a work permit. As a result, about 2000 people had to share the 280 apartments. In Padua, no private house owner would rent an apartment to a black people from “La Serenissima.” While hoping to get rid of the city’s drug problem, the city decided to create a small council estate – but only those with valid papers were allowed to move in. Thus, the apartment buildings in “La Serenissima” are the only apartments available for the ones who illegally live in Italy. Nonetheless, the city plans to clear and to destroy these apartment buildings and furthermore, intends to altogether rename the Via Anelli of “La Serenissima.” The ones who cannot leave protect their space and thus, municipal workers while clearing the apartments have to be protected by the police.
Around 500 people live in Hermanovce near Presov in Slovakia. Their houses are mainly built out of clay and waste. There is neither a canalization system nor a sewage water system or a garbage removal system, but there is electricity. In Slovakia around 150,000 Romanies live under worse conditions in approximately 300 slums, like the one in Hermanovce. Their children have to go to school with handicapped white children. Isolated and excluded from the rest of society, these EU citizens live without social security, access to education, health care and even without the right to vote.