Mike Davis's searing account of the squalor billions of people are condemned to reveals the definitive result of the neoliberal experiment: effulence, not affulence.

Due to the decisions made by corrupt local politicians, NGOs, and international financial organisations, vast swathes of the world have regressed to Victorian standards of urban living. With millions crammed into slum housing, terrorised by clientelist police forces and surrounded by human sewage - the world is slowly turning into a giant Romford.

Chilling.

Read it for a class 11 years ago and am still thinking about it

I’m going to include some quotes at the end of this review from the book itself - I’ve added page numbers, but since I’ve the e-book version I’m not sure how they relate to the page numbers in the print book. I found this book utterly fascinating. If you can get your hands on it, I would highly recommend it.

One of the ideas that particularly interested me was the reason given for why the growth of slums occurred when it did, rather than earlier in the twentieth century say. In large part this was due to the continuing influence of colonialism in many parts of the world. Colonial powers sought to ensure that native populations remained tied to the countryside, but as the author says at one point in this, that meant that many of the national liberation struggles were effectively peasant revolts. When these were successful, there was often a rush to the cities.

I would have thought before reading this that one of the forces pushing people towards cities (and therefore into slums) was the increasing industrialisation of the cities and the agricultural revolution removing land from subsistence farmers. That is, ‘progress’ is what has forced people into slums, but this is seen as being a temporary and a necessary step towards the better life that economic development will ultimately bring. Except that often none of these conditions exist, the cities have no jobs and the countryside is not becoming more productive either. At one point the author talks of the UN referring to African cities having a poverty paradox, where it isn’t at all clear how people are able to go on living despite getting increasingly poor. In fact, the author points out that one of the things neoliberal policies have imposed on the poor in slums is a Hobbesian war of all on all, with the subsequent smashing of community solidarity and even extended family support. And that this too often then manifests in either religious or racist conflict.

Inhumanity is a near constant theme here - often dressed as either ‘for their own good’ or the need to be ‘tough on crime’. The worst of it is the fact that slums are built in areas that are generally ‘not being used’ for other purposes - and there are often good reasons for that. And slum necessarily are built using what is to hand, rather than necessarily from what is appropriate given local conditions. So, the fact that Manila is on a flood plain or that many slums are in earthquake prone areas isn’t something that those using these building materials can take into consideration. Slums are often likely to be built on land that is contaminated with industrial waste, and if not before being set up, then the high concentrations of humans that live in slums with no sewers provide their own contaminants.

I’m also one of those who just assumed that most people who live in slums are squatters - and apparently that simply isn’t the case. That is, most people who live in slums pay some form or rent. This goes a long way to undermine the neoliberal solution to slums - that is, to give slum-dwellers title to their property. The assumption that property ownership will fix all social evils runs deep in capitalism mythology. As is made clear here, even when this has been tried, it often just means that the poorest people in the slums get moved into even more precarious housing and slum landlords reap the benefits.

In large part, the problem with slums is the growth in inequity that we have witnessed at all levels of society internationally since the 1970s. The estimate given here is that we have a ‘reserve army of unemployed’ that amounts to about a third of the working population of the planet. And no one, not even the most Pollyanna apologist for capitalism, is suggesting that we are going to witness a fifty percent increase in employment anytime soon. That means that crushing poverty or debilitating ‘non-standard’ employment will remain key features of life for large numbers of people living in cities. And so slums are going to remain a constant feature of cities, particularly in the developing world.

Much of this book is a catalogue of horrors. The worst are connected with fire - large numbers of people living in basically cardboard and cooking with kerosene are going to make fire a terrifying and nearly daily reality. And it will be made all the worse by the fact that even if the local fire brigade wanted to come into the slum to put the fire out, they might not be able to given the maze of ‘streets’ slums consist of - you don’t have town planners in slums. But slum land might also go from being worthless to becoming potentially very valuable indeed - particularly those in the centre of cities, but as cities grow anywhere can become potentially more valuable. And so those who would like to see poor people moved on sometimes use ‘hot eviction’ techniques - the most disgusting being pouring kero onto a rat or cat and then setting it alight and letting it run into the slum to set houses on fire. It is hard to imagine people could think of such a thing, but money makes innovators of us all, it seems.

We are living in a world where over half of all people now live in cities. In many of those cities the majority of these people also live in slums. It should come as no surprise that eventually some of those people might look around and wonder why the hell they scrap and suffer when just over there, there are people living in what would have to look like obscene luxury. Inevitably, those in power see slums as potential hotbeds of rebellion. We could, I suppose, try to alleviate the suffering of these people as a way to reduce the threat they might pose - but in the zero sum game we prefer to play, whatever they get just means less for us. So, instead, we are preparing for wars that will be fought in slums and learning to consider the logistic challenges such wars will impose. As he quotes right at the end of this: “‘The future of warfare’, the journal of the Army War College declared, ‘lies in the streets, sewers, high rise buildings, and sprawl of houses that form the broken cities of the world’” (p.258).

I can’t pretend this is an amusing read, but it pulls together threads I hadn’t really seen as being in anyway connected before. Here are some quotes:


Since the market reforms of the late 1970s it is estimated that more than 200 million Chinese have moved from rural areas to cities. 17

80 percent of Marx’s industrial proletariat now lives in China or somewhere outside Western Europe and the United States. 18

Elsewhere, urbanisation has been more radically decoupled from industrialisation, even from development per se and, in Sub-Saharan Africa, from the supposed sine qua non of urbanisation, rising agricultural productivity. 18

‘Over urbanisation’, in other words, is driven by the reproduction of poverty, not by the supply of jobs. 21

The formal housing markets of the Third World rarely supply more than 20 percent of new housing stock. 22

In the Amazon, one of the world’s fastest-growing urban frontiers, 80 percent of city growth has been in shantytowns largely unserved by established utilities and municipal transport, thus making ‘urbanisation’ and ‘favelization’ synonymous. 23

Of the 500,000 people who migrate to Delhi each year, it is estimated that fully 400,000 end up in slums. 23

Residents of slums, while only 6 percent of the city population of the developed countries, constitute a staggering 78.2 percent of urbanites in the least developed countries; this equals fully a third of the global urban population. 33

‘Housing is a verb’ 38

The American poor live on Mercury, the European poor, on Neptune or Pluto. 41

Lima’s Callejones were built specifically to be rented to the poor: many by the city’s leading slumlord, the Catholic Church. 45

Los Angeles is the First World capital of homelessness, with an estimated 100,000 homeless people. 47

Both the popular and scholarly literatures on informal housing tend to romanticise squatters while ignoring renters. 53

Thus Gaza - considered by some to be the world’s largest slum - is essentially an urbanised agglomeration of refugee camps (750,000 refugees) with two-thirds of the population subsisting on less than $2 per day. 59

Caracas and other Venezuelan cities consequently grew at African velocity during the 1960s, the country went from being 30 percent urban to 30 percent rural. 78

Praising the praxis of the poor became a smokescreen for reneging upon historic state commitments to relieve poverty and homelessness. 95

Titling, in other words, accelerates social differentiation in the slum and does nothing to aid renters, the actual majority of the poor in many cities. 104

In India, meanwhile, an estimated three-quarters of urban space is owned by 6 percent of urban households, and just 91 people control the majority of all vacant land in Mumbai. 108

There is no housing shortage per se. In fact, Cairo is filled with buildings that are half empty. 110

A slumlord who pays $160 for a 100-square-foot shack can recoup the entire investment in months 112

Since the 1970s it has become commonplace for governments everywhere to justify slum clearance as an indispensable means of fighting crime. 141

Slums, not Mediterranean brush or Australian eucalypti as claimed in some textbooks, are the world’s premier fire ecology. 163

Erhard Berner adds that a favourite method for ‘hot demolition’ is to chase a ‘kerosene-drenched burning live rat or cat - dogs die too fast - into an annoying settlement...a fire started this way is hard to fight as the unlucky animal can set plenty of shanties aflame before it dies. 164

In India, more than 50,000 hectares of valuable crop lands are lost every year to urbanisation. 171

In Mumbai, slum-dwellers have penetrated so far into the Sanjay Gandhi National Park that some are now being routinely eaten by leopards (ten in June 2004 alone) 172

The global sanitation crisis defies hyperbole 175

In Beijing, where one toilet served more than six thousand people. 177

Poor women are terrorised by the Catch-22 situation of being expected to maintain strict standards of modesty while lacking access to any private means of hygiene. 177

In Mexico, following the adoption / of a second SAP in 1986 the percentage of births attended by medical personnel fell from 94 percent in 1983 to 45 percent in 1988, while maternal mortality soared from 82 per 100,000 to 150 in 1988. 184-5

Uganda spends twelve times as much per capita on debt relief each year as on healthcare in the midst of the HIV/AIDS crisis. 196

Global inequality, as measured by World Bank economists across the entire world population, reached an incredible GINI coefficient of 0.67 by the end of the century 209

The biggest event of the 1990s, however, was the conversion of much of the former ‘Second World’ - European and Asia state socialism - into a new Third World. In the early 1990s those considered to be living in extreme poverty in the former ‘transitional countries’, as the UN calls them, rocketed from 14 million to 168 million: an almost instantaneous mass pauperisation withou precedent in history. Poverty, of course, did exist in the former USSR in an unacknowledged form, but according to World Bank researchers the rate did not exceed 6 to 10 percent. Now, according to Alexey Krasheninnokov, in his report to UN-Habitat, 60 percent of Russian families live in poverty, and the rest ‘can only be categorised as middle-class by a considerable stretch’ 210

India gained 56 million paupers in the course of the boom 215

Upward mobility in the informal economy is largely a ‘myth inspired by wishful thinking 227

Religious devotion revolves around attempts to influence fortune or importune good luck 232

By the late 1990s, a staggering one billion workers representing one-third of the world’s labour force, most of them in the South, were either unemployed or under employed. 254

There is no official scenario for the reincorporation of this vast mass of surplus labour into the mainstream of the world economy 254

If the empire can deploy Orwellian technologies of repression, its outcasts have the gods of chaos on their side 262.

A very disturbing book well written with alot of footnotes and statistics. No solutions were put forth.

Kent kuramcısı, tarihçi ve aktivist kimlikleriyle bilinen yazar Mike Davis’in nitelikli araştırmaları ile oluşturulmuş, Üçüncü dünya ülkelerinin hızlı kentleşmesi sonucu meydana gelen megakentlerin, bu megakentler içinde gittikçe büyüyen gecekondu bölgelerinin, kent yoksullarının incelendiği kitap çokça istatistiki veri içeriyor ve bu verilerle gerçekleri bir bir ortaya çıkarıyor.
Yazar, tüm bu gecekondu yaşamını düzeltmek için verilen ekonomik ve sosyal uğraşların aslında orta sınıfın işine yaradığı, IMF, Dünya Bankası ve Stk’ların gecekondular üzerindeki etkilerini, yerinden edilen yoksulların durumlarını, yaşama koşullarını, gecekondu bölgelerinde suç unsurlarının varlığını, neoliberal kapitalist etkinin sonuçlarını ülkelerden örneklerle tek tek anlatılıyor. Hükümetlerin ve uluslararası örgütlerin gerçeklere yönelik acımasız eleştirilerini kağıda döküyor.
Sağlık konusunda en aşırı farkların kent-köy arasında değil, kentli orta sınıf ve kentli yoksul sınıf arasında olduğu gerçeği aslında kentleşmenin her zaman kentlileşme getirmediğini açığa çıkarıyor. Nüfusun yarısından fazlasının gecekondu bölgelerinde yaşadığı kentler gün geçtikçe daha karmaşık bir hal alıyor. Yazar öyle örnekler kaleme almış ki okurken insanın inanası gelmiyor. Örneğin;
•tNüfusu 10 milyonu aşma yolunda hızlıca ilerleyen Kinşasa megakentinde atıkların suyla taşındığı kanalizasyon sisteminin bulunmaması dolayısıyla dünyanın en sağlıksız kentleri arasında yer alması
•tNairobi’de 1998’de Kibera semtindeki Laini Saba gecekondu bölgesinde 40.000 kişiye 10 tane tuvalet çukuru düşmesi, Mathare’de 28.000 kişiye 2 umumi tuvalet düşmesi nedeniyle insanların tuvaletlerini torbalara yapıp sokaklara atması olayının suç unsuru haline gelmesi: arabaların önünü kesip para isteyen çocukların bu torbaları arabalara fırlatmakla şoförleri tehdit etmesi
•tBangalore kentinde gecekonduda yaşayan kadınların tuvalet ve banyo ihtiyaçlarını ortalık yere gündüz vakti yapamadıkları için gündoğumu öncesini ya da gündoğumu sonrasını beklemeleri ve bu yüzden gündüzleri pek bir şey yememeleri…
Bu kitap bilmediğimiz yaşamlar üzerine çokça şok edici bilgi içerir. Kente iç yüzüyle beraber bakmak isteyenler mutlaka okumalı.

Ugh. Now that wasn’t exactly uplifting. Mike Davis’ (2006) ‘Planet of Slums’ looks at the more than 1 billion people living in slums, expected to reach 2 billion people within the next 10 years. Yes, within a few years, like one in 5 or so people will live this semi-death of urban slum hell, thanks to the triage of humanity under global capitalism. In Sub-Saharan Africa, about 2 in 3 of the urban peeps live in slums. This is what urbanization without industrialization looks like. This is also what urbanization looks like in the developing world which mostly implemented the usual set of Washington Consensus policies, where everything inclyuding f drinking water is privatized, the state’s only role seems to be that of security and oppressing its own people and where the 3rd world middle class is walled in its Southern California inspired gated communities and needs nothing from the state with its private schools, hospitals, a bit of Starbucks and English cinema in air-conditioned malls.

Fund fact: a third or so of the world’s labour force is pure surplus labour and will be warehoused in these slums as there is no official scenario for re-incorporation of these people into the world economy. And it’s not like paradise for those two actually have ‘jobs’, today two-thirds of workers in sub-Saharan Africa are living in extreme or moderate working poverty, i.e. living on less than US$3.10 per day. Just learned last week of a Chinese leather factory here around Addis, paying workers $36 a month. And this is the usual success story of foreign investment, industrial parks, job creation and tax holidays for pioneering investors. Labour in Asia has become too expensive, it seems, Bangladeshi garment workers now making more than $60 bucks a month so a good time to relocate to Africa where there are more than a billion hungry devils and authoritarian enough governments to make sure that workers will not make any demands. Let alone organize (lol).

But great bottom line of the book: this planet of slums we’re living at was not an inevitable outcome of world population growth. This is the result of political choices, as much as by corrupt elites and by the IMF and World Bank.

This book is quite overwhelming.
"Urban theorist Davis takes a global approach to documenting the astonishing depth of squalid poverty that dominates the lives of the planet's increasingly urban population, detailing poor urban communities from Cape Town and Caracas to Casablanca and Khartoum." (publisher's weekly via amazon)

Want to read it again...

Everyone who is interested in cities should read this book. It is both an excellent dissection of the challenges of Third World urbanization and a powerful response to the neoliberal economists of the World Bank, etc. Once you've read your Hernando da Soto, this is what comes next.

Yeah, I mean this wasn't exactly a cheery read. It's a pretty harrowing description of the global scale of slums, favelas, barrios, whatever you call them. Most of this book is plain statistics and it uses them to criticise the neoliberal consensus on how to 'fix' urban poverty - especially the misguided view of slums as hubs of informal, capitalistic entrepreneurism. It demonstrates how urban poverty and informal inhabitation are multifaceted issues that current national and international policies are unable to fully grasp. The book does fairly little to get into the headspace of living in the slums, but the descriptions paint a grim enough picture.

This book's been criticised by some for being too nihilistic. And sure, it dwells among the negative statistics and doesn't present its own solutions to the issues (Mike Davis is a Marxist, so you can probably figure them out). But as a critical analysis, the book's well-supported and draws on several disciplinary lines of inquiry. You don't need to know the answers to point out the issues. And looking at more up-to-date statistics, it seems that many of Davis' predictions and analyses hold up well in 2023.

reading some of the reviews on here, i realize just how deeply this book disturbs and even angers first world readers. i am brazilian, reading this from rio de janeiro, and this book just chills me to the core. i dont live in a slum. but the favelas are ever-present to anyone outside the massive gated communities in barra or recreio. but the violence FROM the favela is vastly outshadowed and barely stands in comparison to the violence of the state, ever-present in brazilian society.

the clearances of favelas are now done by militias, an issue that is too complex to delve into here. this month, may 2021, the military police of rio de janeiro slaughtered 29 people in jacarézinho under the excuse of fighting drug dealing gangs. this is rio de janeiro in 2021, where at least two thousand people are dying every day from the already out of control pandemic.

no, davis does not 'offer solutions' to make some intrepid white reader, sitting comfortably in their brooklyn apartment paid for by their fucking parents, feel better about themselves. what an unbelievably selfish sentiment. youre reading a book about the horrors of capitalism inflicted onto BILLIONS of people and your first thought is 'this makes me feel sad ):' and your second is 'its not MY fault!'

indeed, white brooklynite crying to themselves, there is no solution under capitalism. this book does not exist to make you feel good about yourself. im actually shocked at how many of the reviews were negative because the book was 'too sad' and somehow hurt their feelings. why does it hurt your feelings to know that the third world is a gigantic slum, created in your own image, to provide you with cheap fuel and iphones and avocados? why are you so attacked by this?

i later read some of the other criticisms around this book about how it's 'anti-urban' and 'city-hating' and i think its actually fucking laughable how drastically people miss the point. its not cities themselves that inherently produce poverty; davis at several points discusses rural proletarianization, which destroys existing ways of life to create jobless, floating proletariats who must sell their labor power rather than live off the land but are unable to do either because there is no work and there is no land. to come away thinking that davis 'hates cities' is, i think, one of the stupidest fucking things you could do. i figured id address this because there seems to be a fundamental unwillingness to engage with the core argument of the book, which is how imperialism shapes the very geography of the third world.

another thing i saw was how davis was 'apocalyptic' in this book. and that, again, is something that you, the white first world reader, must sit with. yes, most of the world is actually in dire straights and has been for centuries. yes, most of this is a direct result of the way the global economy is structured to favor the first world over the third. no, you have no right to feel attacked over this simple statement. if you believe planet of slums is 'apocalyptic' then i beg you to live in the conditions that some of these people live in, near open sewage drains, without toilets, on hills threatening to give way at every thunderstorm, huddling in terror of police 'operations' (the only time the state recognizes the slums). the way most of humanity lives IS apocalyptic.

i think people dont seem to understand just how serious the crisis of capitalism is, how even when the economy is good for the first world, life is an endless hell for 2/3s of the planet. from experience and just from casual observation, first world people inherently lack complete empathy for third world people living in horrendous levels of poverty. but davis' epilogue discusses the possibility of eventual overthrow of the system. and i think you will have to accept that perhaps you are not the only human beings on the planet, that there is another 2/3s of the world who, one day, will not accept being treated as subhuman sewage.

I just love and miss Mike Davis.
This book is a very necessary supplement for understanding how the "Washington Consensus" is playing out in the Third World (and the West) today, particularly from an urban planning lens.

One may know the world is f***ed up, but sometimes it's good to read something that details many of the large vast awful ways it is so -- and best to get that with some structural analysis that situates the problems well. Thanks Mike.