Demographers have been avidly waiting for this moment—when a majority of the human species had finally traded in its farm implements for pocket protectors, its grubby overalls for fine slacks. According to the United Nations, May 23, 2007, marked the day when the earth’s population became predominantly urban. (This is really a “polite statistical fiction” as one writer described it, based on U.N. estimates of the rate of rural to urban migration worldwide.)

Most of the developing world’s rural poor, however, are merely trading one kind of poverty for another, joining the ranks of those scratching out a living on the city’s margins. Finding shelter in the peri-urban shantytowns and labouring in its informal economies. This mass migration to the cities is dramatically transforming the planet, but it is hardly talked about enough. It’s become an old story. Rio’s favelas are now a tourist attraction.

The community that has taken root around the Guatemala City municipal dump (picture above) is but one example of this global phenomenon. For over sixty years, Central America’s largest, most toxic landfill site, has drawn a steady influx of poor, displaced families that depend on the dump’s derelict bounty for their livelihood. It’s estimated that around 2,000 families work as pickers, most of them residing in the warren of jury-rigged shanty homes across the road from the dump’s entrance. Many of them were driven here during the civil war, fleeing warfare in the highlands.

The best place to acquire a broad mise-en-scène of the dump is from the city’s oldest cemetery. Driving past grand old colonial-style tombs and the ostentatious Mayan-cum-Egyptian temple that serves as the mausoleum for the founder of the country’s largest brewery, there’s rarely-visited corner of the cemetery inhabited by swarms of turkey vultures. From here the resting places of the city’s rich are only a small ravine away from the Brueghelian madness of the landfill.

Dump trucks, shadowed by expectant gangs of pickers, pull into clearings and eject their stash. The piles are swarmed over. The guajeros, keenly aware of the economic hierarchy of trash, generally know when which trucks arrive from what part of the city. Metals are highly prized (from aluminum cans to the scrap from appliances), but almost everything can have a value, from cardboard and bottles to nylon and plastic. Pickers typically earn between $2-$6 a day.

Tractors pile the leftover leftovers into terraces of dirt and multi-coloured refuse. Smouldering fires stinking of burning plastic, randomly arranged, send dark smoke signals into the bleached noon-day sky.

Until recently many of the children worked in this swamp of detritus alongside their parents. I spoke to a bright, fourteen-year-old girl named Olivia who used to pick alongside her mother (mom still works at the dump everyday); she now attends school and is enrolled in an inspiring support program called Camino Seguro.

“Before, when they let kids inside, I had to go with my mom to help. You have to be really careful where you step and I knew that as a child maybe you were risking your life there… My mom still collects plastic, nylon, aluminum, cardboard. I’m not embarrassed to say that because she works very hard and even though she doesn’t have a degree or a regular job, she’s struggling to help us.

Nothing bad has ever happened to us but our neighbour died once because a truck collapsed into the ground (the land is highly unstable) and took her with it. She was buried. They couldn’t even find her. My mom was at the dump at the time, near there, and I heard there was an accident so I was really scared. Everybody was talking about it in the neighborhood. The police wouldn’t let me go in to find my mother so I jumped the fence to go and see if she was okay. The police saw me and took me out again. But nothing had happened to my mother.”

I later spoke with a Dutch social worker who is involved with Camino Seguro and counsels many of the neighborhood’s children.

“The problems our kids cope with, they have a lot problems with anger management, they see a lot of violence in their neighborhood, they see a lot of violence between men and women. So they copy that. Besides there’s no time or skills to talk about emotions, empathy. People are surviving, they go every single day to that garbage dump and they fight to have a good piece of garbage, that’s the reality in that neighborhood. No, you’re not going to sit down and grieve about the husband who left you or the child who died, so it just goes on and on.”

The explosion in the world’s shadow cities is no great secret. Economists, politicians and NGOs have been examining a variety of measures for decades, but each shantytown appears to work according to its own internal logic. It has been proposed that these urban poor be given title to their land, thus providing them with collateral for loans—this is what Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto means when he talks of “liberating dead capital.” But as I’m finding in my research shantytowns are now so well-established in many cities they require a raft of uniquely local solutions. Titling may work in Lima, but that doesn’t mean it will in Istanbul or Mumbai.

And neither is it the magic bullet its proponents often suggest.

Look here for a great photo essay on the Guate City dump by American photographer Misty Keasler.