The unlawful requisition of housing or land. Squatter settlements are illegally occupied, which necessarily involves insecurity of tenure, irrespective of the quality of the buildings and the prevailing physical conditions. Squatter settlements are not necessarily slums because not all houses in a squatter settlement have to be substandard for it to be a classical squatter settlement (Matovu (2000) Municipal Dev. Prog., Eastern and Southern Africa). Compare with slum.

Squatter settlements grow because demand for cheap housing outstrips supply. Houses are often flimsy, and sanitation is grossly inadequate (in Indian urban areas, scarcely 20% of the population has access to water/flush toilets; see Raghunaathan (2006) Hafta Magazine), power may be unavailable, roads are not metalled, and education and medical facilities are severely limited. Brazil’s squatter settlements are characterized by a lack of access to credit and funding for urban infrastructure, and alarming levels of violence, particularly in poor areas; see the movie City of God.

It’s heartening that Klaufus (2000) J. Housing & Built Env. 15, 4 focuses on the inhabitants of squatter settlements as individuals; similarly, Datta (2007) Gender, Place & N. Cult. 14, 2 describes the way different women in a Delhi squatter settlement experience different forms of spatial control, using multiple modes of resistance to different spatial controls. Patel and Arputham (2007) Env. & Urbs. 19, 2 warn of ‘the disruptions that the slum dwellers will bring if they are not involved in the planning and implementation of such redevelopments’.