Planet of Slums | Mike Davis

Planet of Slums | Mike Davis | Depressing but true

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Planet of Slums

	Planet of Slums Mike Davis Verso, 2007 - 256 pages average customer review:based on 21 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Celebrated urban historian's bestselling account of the global explosion of slums, with a major new introduction.

According to the United Nations, more than one billion people now live in the slums of the cities of the South. In this brilliant and influential book, Mike Davis explores the future of a radically unequal and explosively unstable urban world. From the sprawling barricadas of Lima to the garbage hills of Manila, urbanization has been disconnected from industrialization, even economic growth. Davis portrays a vast humanity warehoused in shantytowns and exiled from the formal world economy. He argues that the rise of this informal urban proletariat is a wholly unforeseen development and asks whether the great slums are, as a terrified Victorian middle class once imagined, volcanoes waiting to erupt.

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All SAPed Out

What a tremendous work. I've got two chapters left to go, and thus far it's easily the most informative and scholarly book I've yet to read in 2008.

Planet of Slums is all about how the Third World's major cities are growing at what seems like an almost exponential rate. They're turning into what Davis terms megacities and even hypercities: 20,000,000+ in population! In the next few years the world will have about ten hypercities with over 20,000,000 people. In the book he poses questions about the ecological sustainability of these slums, the sewerage and waste problems, employment and wage outlook, transportation issues, and obvious social ills caused by the maldistribution of wealth and resources. Davis mentions that these megacities and hypercities do not just consist of one or two "ghettos" but often are made up of six to a dozen or so different "slum districts."

What's so key about the book is that this astonishing rush to urbanization is a relatively new phenomenon that's taken off at an extraordinary pace over just the past 20 years. Of course he touches on the structural adjustment programs that have been instituted by the global financial rackets and the export/import crop imbalance. He also addresses the fact that this major swing towards urbanization is in contradiction to standard economic theory which essentially states that folks will flee the countryside if wages are strong in the urban core. Clearly this is not what has been happening over the past few decades as Davis demonstrates in his book: wages and employment prospects in the major cities are grim at best with the vast majority of people relying on the informal sector to get by.

The chapter on 'slum ecology' should be required reading for every citizen of the world. Davis, a MacArthur Fellow, does a stupendous job laying out what in the hell's going on in the world today. All the dreadful statistics and anecdotes he brings to the table come with a pessimistic and almost misanthropic tone.

Another paradigm shifter from Verso Publishing.

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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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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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filtered

The book gave a one-sided view which blamed the IMF's structural adjustment programs for the exponential growth of slums around some of the richest cities in the world, while completely ignoring the responsibility of local leadership and corruption in national governments.

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

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