Planet of Slums
By Mike Davis
Verso, 2006
228 pages, $35 (pb)
Planet of Slums is Mike Davis's scholarly effort to combine a vast collection of research on global urban poverty into one document. The writer of several prize-winning books on urbanism, Davis lends this mass of statistics a vital graphic quality that keeps the book readable and fast-paced where it might otherwise get lost in the numbers.
He even at times manages to lend a kind of morbid humour to his subject. Chapter six begins, "A villa miseria outside Buenos Aires may have the world's worst feng shui: it is built over a former lake, a toxic dump, and a cemetery and in a flood zone." Humour aside, the information collected from a wide range of sources like the UN, various NGOs, academic researchers, not to mention the CIA, provides an ample base for this broad survey of the growth of slums and the social, economic and environmental aspects of the lives of over a billion of the world's poorest people. For Davis, the experience of slum life is "the radical new face of inequality".
The central theme of the book is the dovetailing of two historic events — on the one hand for the first time in human history the urban population of the world outnumbers the rural, and on the other, the fact that most of this huge population live in some of the most miserable conditions ever known.
In 1950, there were 86 cities worldwide with a population over a million. Today there are 400, and by 2015 it is estimated there will be 550. This massive growth has led to the phenomenon of the megacity of 20-million-plus inhabitants, and consequently the opening up of huge urban corridors hundreds of kilometres long that swallow up what used to be distant towns and cities.
The infamous structural adjustment programs of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank imposed on Third World nations, has made millions of peasant farmers defenceless against the external downturns and crises of the global market, such as falling commodity prices and inflation as well as local droughts and floods. At the same time, governments move money away from welfare and infrastructure budgets to repay loans. Meanwhile industrial agriculture, and in some areas civil wars made worse by these economic factors, add to this mix by "uprooting whole countrysides". The combination is devastating; millions of these peasants turned economic refugees are forced to move to cities without adequate housing and are forced to "turn to self-built shanties, informal rentals, pirate subdivisions, or the sidewalks".
But even in the slums you still have to pay. Davis notes that, "Squatters very often are coerced to pay considerable bribes to politicians, gangsters, or police to gain access to sites, and they continue to pay informal 'rents' in money and/or votes for years". Slums can be so crowded in contrast to the rest of the city that we can literally see the urban inequality from space: "satellite reconnaissance of Nairobi reveals that more than half of the population lives on just 18 percent of the city area".
Typically, squatters must also trade physical safety and health for a few metres of land and some security against eviction by slumlords or repressive police forces. Squatters are by necessity the "pioneer settlers of swamps, floodplains, volcano slopes, unstable hillsides, rubbish mountains, chemical dumps, railroad sidings, and desert fringes". Where the disasters like landslides might be bad enough in such a situation, the threats of unnatural hazards can be equally if not more deadly.
On the issue of sewage, Davis is particularly blunt. "Today's poor megacities … are stinking mountains of shit that would appal even the most hardened Victorians." British Victorians, that is, who confronted the problem of rampant cholera and typhoid from the next to nonexistent sanitation in the slums of cities like Manchester nearly 200 years ago. Today these same diseases of the digestive tract that arise from poor sanitation and polluted drinking water are globally the leading cause of death bar none.
If health, environment and housing weren't bad enough, thanks to chronic underemployment and unemployment in slums they are perhaps the place where human life is at its cheapest. Millions of people have become a surplus labour force, often scraping together a living from the vast informal sectors of the economy. In the book's final chapter, Davis suggests that this massive population living outside the formal global economy — a third of the world's workers in total — represents an unprecedented crisis for capitalism. He says "the future of human solidarity depends upon the militant refusal of the new urban poor to accept their terminal marginality within global capitalism". Davis's sequel to Planet of Slums, being written with Forrest Hylton, will chronicle the history of slum politics.
Given the scope of the subject, a relatively short book like this one could only ever cover so much, and while at times a good quote seems to suffice for a more detailed explanation of a topic, it is understandable given that the data itself is, as Davis admits, often incomplete. But as a clear, readable introduction, Planet of Slums is an essential document.