Mike Davis: Planet of Slums

Mike Davis's Planet of Slums is a fairly compact survey of the growth of urban conglomerations in the Third World. While most of the growth occurs in slums, generally around the periphery of cities, we also see extensive class stratification, much as we see in First World countries. The book is sort of a comparative study organized by thematic slices, each illustrated by jumping around from city to city to city -- the implication is that the dynamics have been globalized into rough equivalence, so the differences between Asia, Africa, and Latin America are negligible. This approach makes for rather dull reading, especially in the early going.

Although there is a lot of useful data in the book, I only marked a few quotes.

Population growth is primarily urban, rapidly approaching an urban majority (p. 1-2):

The earth has urbanized even faster than originally predicted by the Club of Rome in its notoriously Malthusian 1972 report Limits of Growth. In 1950 there were 86 cities int he world with a population of more than one million; today there are 400, and by 2015 there will be at least 550. Cities, indeed, have absorbed nearly two-thirds of the global population explosion since 1950, and are currently growing by a million babies and migrants each week. The world's urban labour force has more than doubled since 1980, and the present urban population -- 3.2 billion -- is larger thant he total population of the world when John F. Kennedy was inaugurated. The global countryside, meanwhile, has reached its maximum population and will begin to shrink after 2020. As a result, cities will account for virtually all future world population growth, which is expected to peak at about 10 billion in 2050.

During the colonial period urbanization was often suppressed for reasons of control (p. 51):

A principal barrier, of course, was European colonialism which, in its most extreme form in the British colonial cities of eastern and southern Africa, denied native populations the rights of urban land ownership and permanent residence. The British, always the ideologues of divide and rule, feared that city life would "detribalize" Africans and foster anticolonial solidarities. Urban migration was controlled by pass laws, while vagrancy ordinances penalized informal labor. Until 1954, for instance, Africans were considered only temporary sojourners in racially zoned Nairobi and were unable to own leasehold property. Likewise Africans in Dar-es-Salaam, according to researcher Karin Nuru, "were only tolerated as a temporary labour force and had to return to the countryside." In Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) Africans had to wait until the eve of independence to acquir ethe legal right to own urban homes, while in Lusaka -- designed as "a highly ordered city segmented by race, class and gender" -- African residents were considered to be "more or less temporary urbanites whose only purpose in town was service to the administration's personnel."

(pp. 97-98):

In India independence did little to alter the exclusionary geography of the Raj. Kalpana Sharma, in her book about Asia's largest slum, Rediscovering Dharavi, emphasizes that "the inequalities that defined Bombaby as a colonial port town have continued. . . . Investment is always available to beautify the already well-endowed parts of the city. But there is no money to provide even basic services to the poorer areas." For urban India as a whole, Nandini Gooptu has shown how the "socialist" Congress Party middle classes -- who during the 1930s and 1940s extolled the garib janata (the poor common people) in the abstract -- ended up after independence as enthuasiastic custodians of the colonial design of urban exclusion and social separation. Gooptu writes, "Implicitly or explicitly, the poor were denied a place in civic life and urban culture, and were seen as an impediment to progress and betterment of society."

Slums can get redeveloped when their land is desired by the elites (p. 101):

Urban Africa, of course, has been the scene of repeated forced exoduses to clear the way for highways and luxury compounds. One of the most notorious and heartbreaking -- rivaling Apartheid's demolitions of Sofiatown and Crossroads -- was the destruction of Maroko in Lagos in 1990. A former fishing village at the wampy end of Lekki Peninsula, Maroko was colonized by poor people displaced in the late 1950s "so that Victoria Island and Ikoyi could be drained and developed for Europeans and wealthy Africans." Although improverished, Maroko became famous for its populist joie de vivre, dark humor and spectacular music. By the early 1980s, the once marginal Lekki Peninsula itself was considered a prime site for the extension of high-income residences. The 1990 bulldozing of Maroko left 300,000 homeless.

Stratification produces rich suburbs as well (p. 115):

These "off worlds" -- to use the terminology of Blade Runner -- are often imagineered as replica Southern Californias. Thus, "Beverly Hills" does not exist only in the 90210 zip code; it is also, with Utopia and Dreamland, a suburb of Cairo, an affluent private city "whose inhabitants can keep their distance from the sight and severity of poverty and the violence and political Islam which is seemingly permeating the localities." Likewise, "Orange County" is a gated estate of sprawling million-dollar California-style homes, designed by a Newport Beach architect and with Martha Stewart decor, on the northern outskirts of Beijing. (As the suburb's developer explained to an American reporter: "People in the United States may think of Orange County as a place, but in China, people feel Orange County is a brand name, something like Giorgio Armani.") Long Beach -- which the New York Times designated as "the epicenter of faux L.A. in China" -- is also north of Beijing, astride a new six-lane super-highway. Palm Springs, meanwhile, is a heavily guarded enclave in Hong Kong where affluent residents can "play tennis and stroll through the theme park, where Disney comic strip characters are surrounded by mock Greek columns and neo-classical pavilions." Urban theorist Laura Ruggeri contrasts the expansive imported California lifestles of residents in their large semi-detached homes with the living conditions of thei rFilipino maids, who sleep in chicken-coop-like sheds on the rooftops.

More (pp. 116-117):

This "architecture of fear," as Tunde Agbola describes fortified lifestyles in Lagos, is commonplace in the Third World and some parts of the First, but it reaches a global extreme in large urban societies with the greatest socio-economic inequalities: South Africa, Brazil, Venezuela, and the United States. In Johannesburg, even before the election of Nelson Mandela, big downtown businesses and affluent whit eresidents fled the urban core for northern suburbs (Sandton, Randburg, Rosebank, and so on) which were transformed into high-security analogues of American "edge cities." Within these sprawling suburban laagers with their ubiquitous gates, housing clusters, and barricaded public streets, anthropologist Andre Czegledy finds that security has become a culture of the absurd.

And more (p. 120)

Fortified, fantasy-themed enclaves and edge cities, disembedded from their own social landscapes but integrated into globalization's cyber-California floating in the digital ether -- this brings us full circle to Philip K. Dick. In this "gilded captivity," Jeremy Seabrook adds, the Third World urban bourgeoisie "cease to be citizens of their own country and become nomads belonging to, and owing allegiance to, a superterrestrial topography of money; they become patriots of wealth, nationalists of an elusive and golden nowhere."

The IMF Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) attack government spending on social services (pp. 192-193):

Kinshasa, like the rest of Congo-Zaire, has been wrecked by a perfect storm of kleptocracy, Cold War geopolitics, structural adjustment, and chronic civil war. The Mobutu dictatorship, which for 32 years systematically plundered the Congo, was the Frankenstein monster created and sustained by Washington, the IMF, and the World Bank, with the Quai d'Orsay in a supporting role. The World Bank -- nudged when needed by the State Department -- encouraged Mobutu to use the collateral of his nation's mineral industries to borrow vast sums from foreign banks, knowing full well that most of the loans werer going straight to private Swiss bank accounts. Then the IMF, starting with the first SAP in 1977, stepped in to make sure that ordinary Congolese paid off the debt with interest. The early conditionalities (enforced by an IMF team at Banque du Zaire and French personnel at the Ministry of Finance) decimated the civil service: a quarter-million public employees -- the largest formal occupational group in the economy -- were laid off without benefits. Those who remained punctually turned to embezzlement and graft ("Article 15") on an epic scale, with Mobutu's public endorsement.

A decade later, with the Congo's once-impressive infrastructure rusted or looted, the IMF imposed a new SAP. Tshikala Biaya describes how the 1987 agreement "sought to give 'legal power' to the informal sector and make it a new milch cow which would replace the welfare state that the IMF and the World Bank had just destroyed." The Club of Paris rolled over Mobutu's debt in exchange for further retrenchment in the publi csector, more market openness, privatization of state companies, removal of exchange controls, and increased export of diamonds. Foreign imports flooded Zaire, home industries closed down, and another 100,000 jobs were lost in Kinshasa. Hyperinflation promptly destroyed the monetary system and any semblance of economic rationality.

On politics (p. 202)

The demonizing rhetorics of the various international "wars" on terrorism, drugs, and crime are so much semantic apartheid: they construct epistemological walls around gecekondus, favelas, and chawls that disable any honest debate about the daily violence of economic exclusion. And, as in Victorian times, the categorical criminalization of the urban poor is a self-fulfilling prophecy, guaranteeing to shape a future of endless war in the streets. As the Third World middle classes increasingly bunker themselves in their suburban themeparks and electrified "security villages," they lose moral and cultural insight into the urban badlands they have left behind.

While the chapters on slum ecology are particularly harrowing, I couldn't help but think that many of these Third World slums are, at least superficially, much like First World slums of the 19th century -- the sort of thing Charles Dickens wrote about. As such, I wonder to what extent they are simply transitional effects of primitive capitalist development that are likely to be ameliorated in the future as living standards improve and workers gain broader access to political power. Over the last 50 years we've seen that happen in some cities -- Singapore is the prime example -- but not in others. The outcome depends on many factors, most basically the resource base to support so many people -- a level which, one may note, has never been tried before.

Needless to say, failure to integrate and stabilize the world's growing urban population will lead to struggle and fortification, basically a war between rich and poor, which will take a tragic toll on both. We appear to be headed in just that direction. Any downturn in essential resources -- oil is the most obvious one -- will only exacerbate the problem. It's possible to view the rise of the right in the US since 1980 as a response to the economic downturn of the 1970s -- the rich, not satisfied with their share of growth, started to turn against the rest. That has yet to blow back severely, although it has resulted in the US having the world's highest incarceration rate. Also, the US situation has been mitigated by transfers from the rest of the world, including access to foreign oil as US supplies lagged, trade deficits, loans, and sale of assets. But the situation in the Third World is far more volatile, borders that baffle crises are becoming less effective, and there's nothing outside the earth's boundaries that we can fall back on when we've used up everything here. So slums that in the past may have been a troubling transitional phenomenon may in the future be something altogether different.

posted 2007-06-26