A planet of slums

10 July 2006

Planet of Slums, Mike Davis Verso, 2006, ISBN 1844670228, RRP $38.00 Consider this: World urban populations will soon exceed rural populations for the first time in human civilisation; most of this growth is occurring in Third World cities that are overcrowded, insecure, impoverished and without sanitation or safe water. There are currently one billion people living in a Third World slum; there will be two billion sometime between 2030 and 2040. In his new book, Planet of Slums, Mike Davis attends to the vast inequalities and social dislocations this entails. There is a long tradition of studies of the urban poor – Friedrich Engels’s examination of Victorian Manchester in The Condition of the Working Class in England is a well-known example. Davis updates this genre for a period of globalisation, investigating the causes and constructions of the emerging 'urban climeractic.' As with his famous predecessor, Davis intends not just to document but also to shift understanding. We see how the Third World confirms and confounds our understanding of urban development. While industrialisation is meant to be the driver of urban growth, debt crisis and structural adjustment have meant that cities like Johannesburg and São Paulo have undergone exponential population increases while experiencing a kind of de-industrialisation. It is sobering to read that the cities of the future will be mostly made of crude brick and scrap wood rather than glass and steel. 'Instead of cities of light, soaring toward heaven,' writes Davis, 'much of the twenty-first-century urban world squats in squalor, surrounded by pollution, excrement and decay.' The challenges facing a study like this are that the scale of the problem is so large and the dimensions of the problem are so various. Davis ranges from shantytowns in Lusaka to squatter communities in Buenos Aires to a vast “megaslum” in Mexico City. Importantly, he recognises that the particular form a slum takes arises from the common misery involved in negotiating factors such as cost, security, shelter quality, location and safety. If geographical range is important to Davis so is historical perspective. The post-independence programs of Castro, Nasser, Nehru and Sukarno failed to consider pre-existing social and community structures. The lost opportunity Davis identifies here allowed neoliberalism to engineer the withdrawal of the state and a drastic diminution of horizons. Self-help and incremental change might now pass for progressive reform but they have amounted to little more than slum upgrading. For Davis,

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A planet of slums

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