Planet of Slums | Mike Davis | Depressing but true

Planet of Slums | Mike Davis | A Wake Up Call that will be Ignored

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Planet of Slums

	Planet of Slums Mike Davis Verso, 2007 - 256 pages average customer review:based on 23 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Depressing but true

If one just looked at the figures over the last twenty or so years there has been a lot of economic growth in Asia and Latin America. Africa is still troubled with a lot of the sub Sahara countries having negative growth. On balance though one would expect the lot of people in poor countries to be improving. Not so according to this book. What has been happening is incredible increases in urbanisation. However this urbanisation is in the form of slums.

Slums in poorer countries are portrayed as hell holes. People live in grossly overcrowded housing with no access to fresh water. In the slum cities of the third world there is no provision for removal of sewerage so that it runs into the fresh water supply (Sao Paulo) or simply is deposited on the ground. The failure to treat sewerage results in large numbers of deaths mainly to children through dysentery and cholera.

The vast majority of those who live in the slums have the most marginal of jobs. Sitting beside a road selling a few vegetables, cleaning shoes a few times a day. Driving taxis for a few dollars a day. (Apparently one in 7 cars in Lima is a taxi.) One of the tragedies of the slums is that the desperation of families leads to children below 14 being the bread winners of families. Working in Indian textile or carpet factories for minuscule wages for 12 hours a day, losing their childhood and any access to education.

The book is a sustained attack on the Peruvian economist De Soto who posited a theory that the way to overcome the problem of slums is to give title to the slum dwellers of the land they squat on and to make available small loans for "business enterprises". What the book suggests is that in the last twenty or so years since the development of free market ideologies have led to the enforced retreat of the state in poorer countries from economic life there has only been disaster. Potentially the state could do something about water provision, housing or sewerage removal but the poorer countries are at the mercy of international institutions which prevent such anti market activity by tying conditions to loans. The life of slum dwellers is so marginalised that title to slum land will achieve nothing.

The book rather resembles Engels' book on the condition of the English working class in 1844. It is full of rather depressing facts and figures with anecdotes to bring home the nature of the misery and the total degradation of life that exists in the slums. Not a pleasant read but something which is a sober reminder that growth rates alone do not translate automatically into the reduction of poverty or human misery.

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A Wake Up Call that will be Ignored

Davis has put together a thorough and damning indictment of the indifference of the human race to the plight of those who are victims of its very mixed economic success. By using mostly official and well credentialed sources, he builds up a picture of the third of humanity that must eke out its existence under conditions that those who are reading this review are unlikely to be able to even imagine. This situation, though Davis does not point the finger that sharply, is the result of both the success of modern medicine in reducing mortality (and hence increasing successful fertility) and an economic system that favors those who have already succeeded - those with education and contacts, however limited, against those without, many of whom have been kept there by the very governments purporting to be in the business of helping them. It is a terrible and tragic story, one likely to have consequences far more difficult to manage than even the daily miseries of the new urban migrants to the great slums of the third world cities. I can only hope that the world will wake up and begin to do something serious about the abuse of people that goes on daily in our midst, but after a lifetime of close personal contact with the situation in India, I am afraid that the very human tendency to look away will prevail, to our ultimate cost.

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A Devastating Deconstruction of Neo-Liberal Economics

Mike Davis' main contribution to the scholarship of urban poverty in the Third World is his point-by-point deconstruction of the failure of neo-liberal economic policies, and that when mixed with corruption, racism, and incompetence, make these massive slums the serious and festering sores that they are.

Planet of Slums is a scholarly work replete with charts, tables and footnotes, but is nevertheless very easy to read. Which probably accounts for Davis' popularity as an author. It does not have the boring ponderous qualities found in most academic writing.

I recommend it.

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Provocative and Frightening

This is an actually frightening book by the provocative Mike Davis. Well written and very well researched, this is essentially a clear summary of the large secondary literature on the emergence of enormous slums throughout the Third World (joined since the fall of the Iron Curtain by large parts of the former Soviet Union and its former satrapies). Davis describes the magnitude and progressive growth of immiserated urban communities throughout the world. Reliable estimates place the inhabitants of these frequently hopeless locales in the 100s of millions and reasonable projections suggest that a large fraction of the world's future population growth will consist of the growth of these incredibly impoverished communities.
Davis provides a series of devastating accounts of the nature of life in these communities, characterized usually by insecurity of remarkably poor housing, little or absent public services, incredibly poor public health, a lack of economic opportunity, and continuous exploitation. The huge number of desperately poor people are exploited often by people only marginally less poor than themselves, by the local middle classes and elites of their countries, and often by their own governments.
Many factors contribute to the genesis of this horrible situation. Davis describes the legacy of colonialism, the exploitation of peoples by their own governments and elites, and the actions of international institutions supposedly encouraging development. Davis provides a particularly harsh, though I think substantially correct, critique of the neoliberal approach to development. In Davis' description, neoliberal policies have been accompanied by an exacerbation and expansion of the urban slum problem. Since these slums tend to be self-perpetuating, this is a dangerous legacy.
Davis doesn't address one possible contributing factor to the relative failure of the neoliberal experiment - the remarkable industrialization of China. The enormous expansion of the Chinese industrial economy had a strong negative effect on the economies of a number of other developing economies such as that of Mexico. This can hardly be considered a success for the neoliberal program as Chinese expansion is a good example of intelligent and fairly ruthless state economic management.
Davis also doesn't address a major cause of immiseration - population growth. It appears that our present system can produce enough nutrition to maintain fairly high fertility levels and enough control of epidemics to avoid horrible pandemics but providing a reasonable standard of living for all has escaped us.

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A warning about the world's future

I guess most people never were able to read the 2004 report of the UN's Commission on Human Settlements. Slums around the world are growing ... not declining. Davis's book builds on research showing what a global horror story the current world order is creating. The book suffers from rather dull prose and could have been better organized. However, there's a chance this book might wake people up about what's really happening in the world.

reviews: 1, page 2, 3, 4, 5

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