Planet of Slums | Mike Davis | Stunning and eye-opening

Planet of Slums | Mike Davis | The Future of the World?

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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

Stunning and eye-opening

What then must we do?

Planet of Slums is an eminently readable book; well-documented by footnotes, but in no way a dry academic treatise.

I'm not an expert in this field, only an average person who knows in his heart that if there is any justice in this world then something must be done to correct these inequalities.

It is true that the book offers little in the way of solutions. But until these problems rise to the forefront of world consciousness it is unlikely that any attempted solutions will be even marginally effective.

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The Future of the World?

Mike Davis has certainly hit the nail on the head when reffering to the greatest crisis of recent times. He has of course done it in a way that if one can get past the first sixty pages or so of statistics highlighting the crisis, the reader finds that the developing world has good reason to despise the G-8 and the United States in particullar. Through the painstaking research of Mike Davis, one finds it easy to accept that the entire world is in big trouble, due to the short-term moneitary gains sought by the IMF and the World Bank. In addition, the U.N. is shown as an orgainzation that obiviously cannot meet this crisis head on and will ultimately fail in it's attempts to relieve the suffering of 2.5 billion people. This text has helped sharpen my resolve in being prepared for the comming clamity that will beseach us all in the comming years.

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A Vision of Malthusian Dystopias

Sometime during the writing of this book - 2005 - the global urban population surpassed the global rural population. It has been estimated that both populations stand at about 3.2 billion. What is startling is that Mike Davis has calculated that the rural population has reached its peak and will begin to decline by 2020, and that all future world population growth will be in cities, primarily megacities (8 million or more) and hypercities (20 million or more). The total world population is expected to peak at 10 billion in the year 2050. If I'm still alive, I will be 95. I hope to experience peak global population, even though my actuarial tables would indicate otherwise.

This massive movement to the city has not been accompanied by industialization and development, instead there has been massive urbanization without economic growth. The future cities of glass and steel envisioned by urbanists have not materialized, instead the urban poor are squatting in crudely constructed slum dwellings on the periphery of cities. A "surplus of humanity" is accumulating on the outskirts of urban centers, an "accumulation of the wretched."

It is no surprise that Davis grew up and currently lives in the Los Angeles area. (He also wrote "City of Quartz," a book about Los Angeles.) Angelenos tend to see the world as it is seen on television or at the movies. Davis' images of Third World slums are those of "Blade Runner" or "Escape from New York". One wonders if Davis has ever visited a Third World slum or interviewed one of its denizens. By referring to them as "the wretched," he will never be accused of being too close to his subject.

Why the massive movement toward cities? And why is this dystopian urbanization occurring on this scale? Davis puts the blame squarely on the neoliberal policies of the IMF. In the late 70's and early 80's, the IMF imposed its structural adjustment program (SAP). It was a one-size-fits-all program for debt burdened Third World countries to open up their economies and theoretically participate in global economy. The program (SAP) called for the deregulation of agriculture and the downsizing of the public sector. (Read also Joseph Stiglitz' "Globalization and its Discontents.") The consequences of this policy are still being debated, but Davis focuses only on the negatives. He points out that hundreds of thousands of workers - millions - worldwide are being pushed from the countryside without the pull of jobs in the cities. The results are masses of humanity in shantytowns on the periphery of urban centers.

If this book sounds extremely negative, it's because it is. Davis criticizes governments for not building enough public housing, and when they do, it's not in the right place and it lacks community. He complains when squatters do not have title to their land or cannot formally rent their shanties, but he also criticizes Hernando De Soto's campaign to do just that. He claims it would lead to further stratification and exploitation of the poor.

Davis sees no solutions to the current trends. He ends the book with the following image: "Night after night, hornetlike helicopter gunships stalk enigmatic enemies in the narrow streets of the slum districts, pouring hellfire into the shanties or fleeing cars. Every morning the slums reply with suicide bombers and eloquent explosions. If the empire can deploy Orwellian technologies of repression, its outcasts have the gods of chaos on their side."

I thought immediately of that scene in the last "Terminator" movie. Davis displays some eloquent prose and solid research, but he may have lost sight of the surplus of humanity living in slums.

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Or Does it Explode?

Everyone should have the privilege of reading a Mike Davis book. His wide-ranging interests and his aggressive writing style more than make up for his tiresome Marxist politics. In fact, Planet of Slums retains less class-struggle than his usual work, in favor of basic humane appeal and outrage.

So the slums are inhuman and unlivable. Why should the world care? As a matter of fact, Davis says, much of the world doesn't care--at least those parts of the world focused exclusively on commercial profit. But where the World Bank looks the other way, the Pentagon--entrusted with the security of the United States--has been forced to pay attention. Slums are the seedbeds of wild armies. It's no longer the jungles and high deserts: some of today's most dangerous places are those slums led by charismatic leaders. People like Muqtada al-Sadr in Iraq, virtual king of the gargantuan Sadr City slum in Bagdad, wield more power than entire nation-states.

Since 2003, a series of showdowns with the Shi'ite clergy in Iraq have highlighted Muqtada's power, and analysts have wracked their heads trying to figure him out. Mike Davis points out that Sadr City, and its 2 million impoverished residents, must be understood in the context of global slums, more than as a feature of terrorist movements. The slums of the world are the places of misery, and the places of revolt. Langston Hughes once discussed what happens when a dream is deferred. "Does it explode?" he asked.

As the slums of the world get bigger and poorer with each passing year, security becomes more costly for the middle class neighborhoods. Gated communities in Cairo, modeled after those found in Southern California, and named for "Beverly Hills" and "Orange County," increasingly resemble fortresses in fields of misery and violence.

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Troubling!

"Slum:" over-crowding, poor housing, inadequate access to safe water and sanitation, air pollution, inadequate trash collection (and thereby high rat populations), insecurity of tenure. Davis begins by informing readers that within a year or two the earth's urban population will outnumber the rural. In 1950 there were 86 cities with a population greater than a million; now there are 400, and by 2015 there will be at least 550.

Forces pushing people to the cities include mechanization of agriculture, food imports, civil (and other) wars, renewal projects (eg. the 1936 Berlin Olympics, and many subsequent - 350,000 for the 2008 Beijing Olympic stadium), drought, and consolidation of small land holdings. The IMF and World Bank have also been negative forces via regressive taxation, devaluation, privatization, removal of import controls and food subsidies, enforced cost recovery in health and education - measures required to attain/renew loans for economic projects that are often bled by [...] or poor planning.

Mexico's population in extreme poverty went from 16% in 1992 to 28% in 1999 - despite, or because of, NAFTA. India and China are globalization "success" stories, but both also harbor growing income inequality, and very difficult times for those formerly in state-operated industries. One estimate is that over 1 billion worldwide live in slums.

The only jobs created in Mexico between 2000 and 2004 were in the informal sector - so-called "entrepreneurs" in the street vending, home craft, self-made preachers, etc. business. This sector hides a great deal of un- and underemployment (eg. few sales/day/vendor) and child labor, and tends to be a slowly declining (per-capita) zero-sum economic arena.

Clearly this is a troubling topic. I was particularly surprised by the growth in some poorer cities - Mexico City from 2.9 million in 1950 to 22.1 million in 2004. Also the allegations that the IMF/World Bank are major culprits - I've read compelling accounts of this several times before, and have yet to learn of any impressive benefits of such efforts.

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

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