**3. Canaan: a shanty town built in a drought-stricken area**

### **3.1 Canaan: a new human settlement in the environmental and urban context of Haiti**

The Republic of Haiti occupies the western part of the island of Hispaniola, the eastern part of which constitutes the Dominican Republic (**Figure 6**). It is located at the border of two tectonic plates, the North American plate and the Caribbean plate (**Figure 7**). The country is also on the path of tropical cyclones that originate in the Atlantic Ocean. Like the other territories of the Caribbean, the country is exposed to natural hazards and its history bears witness to these events. Between 1986 and 2016, Haiti recorded several major environmental events (floods, droughts, cyclones and the magnitude 7.2 earthquake on the Richter scale of January 2010).

The environmental and human damage generated by its natural disasters, more particularly that of the earthquake of January 12, 2010, has been the subject of several studies reported in the literature. Indeed, "in the history of urban disasters, the earthquake of January 12, 2010 occupies a special place. Not only in view of the

#### **Figure 6.**

*Topographic map of the island of Hispaniola (Haiti and Dominican Republic). https://simple.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Hispaniola.*

#### **Figure 7.**

*Map of the north American - Caribbean tectonic plate boundary. https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/ map-north-american-caribbean-tectonic-plate-boundary.*

extent of the losses and damage caused, but also of the lessons that can be drawn from them in terms of spatial diagnosis and land use planning. Understanding what happened to guard against a bereavement as immense as that caused by the 300,000 deaths in 2010 is a civic duty and an obligation of the state" [65]. Ribordy et al. [66] argue, "the risks engendered by nature and by human activity have accompanied humanity since its origins. In addition to the direct impact of these events on the life of the population, it seems appropriate to retain the intangible impacts (which, in the current state of knowledge, are not translated into monetary terms) such as the degradation of natural environments. and the loss of irreplaceable goods such as heritage", but also the displacement and relocation of inhabitants as well as the increase in the process of urban sprawl [15]. Caught in the paradox of urbanization, the earthquake of January 12, 2010 raises many questions in the scientific community. Why are urban environments the most exposed today to the consequences of natural disasters? How can we understand that contemporary urbanization is intensifying despite the multiplication of disasters and the limits of management efforts [67]? How and why does the disaster produce new urban areas at risk or new vulnerable urban areas likely to contribute to new crises [68]? […].

Answering these questions requires returning to the very concepts of urbanization, of the rural exodus which is one of the factors of slum development, as well as the function of land use planning in the structuring of human population in Haitian cities. Among the multiple causes of the rural exodus, the migrant's search for a better standard of living should be put in the forefront [69]. The absence of an urban planning and viable housing policy, as well as the non-implementation of land use plans, when they exist, gives free rein to the anarchic development of cities. In fact, in the growth of Haitian cities, precarious slum-type housing has always prevailed. For 11,700 hectares urbanized at the end of the 20th century, Port-au-Prince had 1,802 shanty-town hectares [70]. In Port-au-Prince, "uncontrolled urban sprawl is, along with population growth, a powerful factor of vulnerability to so-called natural hazards. He played a major role in the process of producing vulnerabilities that contributed to the transformation of the hazards of the 2000s in Haiti into real crises linked to major disasters. These catastrophes were crises within the crisis" [68].

#### *The Challenge of Water in the Sanitary Conditions of the Populations Living in the Slums… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.96321*

According to Gubry [69], "urbanization is in a way a culmination of ongoing economic processes, both those which are part of a development logic, and those which result from the destructuring of rural societies. In addition, urbanization often causes an exacerbation of conflicts between the population and its environment. The importance of the subject will be noted, insofar as the strongest urban growth is to be expected in the countries which are probably the most deprived of the means to cope with it. The urban environment often deteriorates in developing countries as a result of the low standard of living of the population, itself linked to unemployment. Municipal resources are very insufficient to maintain the quality of life: lack of sewerage system, inadequate water supply and garbage collection system, resulting in groundwater pollution; proliferation of pests (rodents, insects, bacteria, etc.)" [69].

In the cities of the South, demographic growth causes heterogeneity of poor households to various forms of lumpenproletariat in addition to socioeconomic inequalities and increased social polarization [30]. Beyond these anthropogenic phenomena and their socioeconomic consequences, it seems appropriate, in the specific case of Haitian cities, to take into account the marked mode of disaster management, according to Desse et al. [68] by "the absence of good coordination between numerous actors within the framework of what we will call humanitarian supervision. Popular strategies of rehousing or access to housing then developed after the catastrophes, hence the pressure on the peri-urban belts. Indeed, all the imbalances suffered by Haitian cities come from their risky growth. The poor occupation of space and the environmental degradation it induces are at the basis of the production of vulnerabilities that have contributed to disasters".

It is in this environmental context characterized, among other things, by an absence of an urban development policy exposed by the earthquake of January 12, 2010 that the human settlement Canaan was founded. The first CANAAN occupants occupied the premises during the first months following the earthquake, ie February/March 2010 [70]. As of April 2010, Canaan lacked basic urban infrastructure such as water, sanitation, and electricity [15]. The situation of Canaan is, however, particularly critical because of the characteristics of the site and the circumstances which led to its rapid settlement.
