To find out, I spent the night in Cuatro, a shanty town in Manila.
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Roughly 30, 000 poor families agreed to move from shanty towns to medium-rise apartment buildings.
Soon it sounded like a bawdy shanty, accompanied by cheeky laughs from the men.
Yachts, power boats, historic ships, a regatta and sea shanty festival were among the billed attractions.
Mr Sadr's followers, by contrast, are shanty-town Shias who have never enjoyed any kind of power.
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Many people must migrate for jobs, mostly from rural areas to the margins of cities and shanty towns.
Last month soldiers handed three young men from one shanty town to a gang in a neighbouring area.
Until the countryside offers a decent living, the lure of the city will remain, however awful the shanty-towns.
In the great shanty towns of the Third World most residents are squatting.
My husband now runs a small kiosk in a shanty area in Istanbul.
Brazilian police backed by troops, helicopters and armoured vehicles have moved into shanty-towns near Rio de Janeiro's international airport.
As unsurprisingly, the shanty towns that surround most cities have multiplied and swollen.
Most live in poor black townships or shanty towns, ineligible for state welfare.
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Many of the best officers are assigned to desk jobs, or to bloated riot squads, while violent shanty-towns are under-policed.
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Around 80% of all violent crime here occurs in the favelas (shanty towns), fuelled by drug dealing, drinking and poverty.
He lives in a squalid two-room house in the heart of the old shanty town with his wife and small child.
To help get people out of the sprawling, squalid shanty towns it has built 2.7m low-cost homes, housing around 10m people.
He reached the shanty towns of cardboard, sticks and cloth that bake in the desert around Khartoum, crammed with more than 2m displaced people.
She moved to Khayelitsha Township, a sprawling shanty town near Cape Town, Africa's "gay capital" where she hoped to find tolerance.
He had been living in an illegal shanty town at Tor di Quinto on the edge of Rome, inhabited mainly by Roma.
Modern offices, hotels and apartment blocks are sprouting up behind, replacing the pretty pink-and-white colonial buildings, drab crumbling flats and teeming shanty-towns.
The occupation of the shanty towns or favelas is part of a plan to secure access to and from Rio's international airport.
Wander into Mtandire, a shanty town near Lilongwe, the capital of Malawi.
So their Africa has wonderful architecture but no roadside rubbish dumps, lively streets but no beggars, plush New York-style apartments but no shanty towns.
Many Brazilians who once inhabited the gang-ridden shanty towns, known as favelas, now have the disposable income to shop for aspirational products, from cars to DVD players.
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The parking lot of Granny's Ice Cream Shanty, which is less than a mile from the crash site, was filled with emergency vehicles Saturday morning.
Currently known as Peru 2000, this machine has been set up on corporatist lines, working in shanty towns, and among peasant farmers and small business.
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Without mortgage lending, there are never enough houses in shanty towns.
That has helped drive a great exodus of traditional nomads from the countryside and the growth of the most extraordinary shanty town I have ever seen.
Two thousand dollars plus the promise of a small house or apartment is a powerful inducement if you live in a shanty with an open fire.
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