Detailed economic policy on why global urban population’s income inequality is only growing with a focus on the slums of Latin America, Africa, and South/Southeast Asia. Excellent expose on international “relief” NGOs that only bureaucratize progress

The title is a tip-off - but before you think I’d rather not... - this is a very readable, fascinating book. Yes, it’s a tale of greed, human tragedy and depersonalization, hopelessness and death all brought to you courtesy of the neo-liberal policies that were wrought on the world via the Structural Adjustment Programs pushed onto the developing world by the IMF and the World Bank - starting in the 1970s and continuing today despite the fact that they've been a dismal failure.

The neo-liberal restructuring beginning in the 70s has devastated healthcare especially for women and children. SAPs (structural adjustment programs) - the protocols in which indebted countries surrender their economic independence to the IMF and World Bank - usually require significant cuts in public spending, including health and education spending (but not military spending, of course, as that is the only product the USA still makes). In Latin America and the Caribbean, SAP enforced austerity during the 1980s reduced public investment in sanitation and potable water, thus eliminating the infant survival advantage previously enjoyed by poor urban residents. In Mexico, after a second SAP in 1986 the percentage of live births attended by medical personnel fell from 94% in 1983 to 45% in 1988, maternal mortality soared from 82/100,000 1980, to 150/100,000 in 1988.
In Ghana “adjustment” led to an 80% decrease in education and health spending, and the departure of 50% of the nation's doctors.
In thoroughly “SAPed” Nigeria, one out of every three children die before age 5. Nigeria’s extreme urban poverty increased from 28% in 1980 to 66% in 1996.

There is much to learn about even those we might consider “the good guys”. Clarification of the role of slum oriented NGOs (often of the recipients of philanthropic and international grants) is elucidated by an activist in Mumbai, P.K. Das:
“Their constant effort is to subvert, dis-inform and de-idealize people so as to keep them away from class struggles. They adopt and propagate the practice of begging favors on sympathetic and humane grounds rather than making the oppressed conscious of their rights. As a matter of fact these agencies and organizations systematically intervene to oppose the agitational path people take to win their demands. Their effort is constantly to divert people’s attention from the larger political evils of imperialism to merely local issues and so confuse people in differentiating enemies from friends.”

Gita Verma, the author of Slumming India characterizes NGOs as the new middlemen who, with the benediction of foreign philanthropies, usurp the authentic voices of the poor.
“She rails against the World Bank paradigm of slum upgrading that accepts slums as eternal realities…”

The effects of these neo-liberal policies have devastated women and children, forcing brutal working conditions on children, and placing women in impossible situations of attempted survival: “SAPs cynically exploit the belief that women’s labor-power is almost infinitely elastic in the face of household survival needs. This is the guilty secret variable in most neoclassical equations of economic adjustment: poor women and their children are expected to lift the weight of Third World debt upon their shoulders.”

This book, now 15 years old, describes the cruel inequality then, which has become orders of magnitude worse now*:
“Global inequity, as measured by World Bank economists across the entire world population, reached an incredible GINI coefficient level of 0.67 by the end of the (last) century - this is mathematically equivalent to a situation where the poorest two-thirds of the world receive zero income, and the top third receives everything.”

Now, it seems we have reached the late-capitalist triage of humanity:
“A point of no return is reached when a reserve army waiting to be incorporated into the labour process becomes stigmatized as a permanently redundant mass, an excessive burden that cannot be included now or in the future, in economy and society.”

*https://www.theguardian.com/business/...

Most of this book is kind of a muddled, academic mess where chapters just END unexpectedly without much form or shape. That said, it does get more structured with interesting anecdotes towards the end. At its most successful, it presents slums as both a symptom of and a conduit for the elements that have driven third-world poverty and suffering: colonial neglect, neoliberal decimation of state support structures, and widespread corruption. But man, probably not the best Mike Davis work for me to start on.

EDIT: downgrading it because I completely forgot I read this and just re-read it four years later. Still didn’t enjoy it lol

I think there is far too much to say over this incredible and alarming book. If it was in any way sensible, I would simply quote out the whole thing and discuss each of its points: contrast how well it has aged against what has changed in the nearly two decades since it was published, and so on. Instead I'll settle for muttering a couple remarks and posting a few quotes.

More specifically, I'll focus here: Davis shows how slums in cities across the Third World exploded in population starting around 1980. What factors caused this? What were the underlying processes driving such a phenomenon? From separate parts of the book:

In 1974-75, the International Monetary Fund, followed by the World Bank, shifted focus from the developed industrial countries to a Third World reeling under the impact of soaring oil prices. As it increased its lending step by step, the IMF ratcheted the up Scope of the coercive "conditionalities" and "structural adjustments" it imposed on client nations. As economist Frances Stewart emphasizes in her important study, the "exogenous developments that necessitated adjustment were not tackled by these institutions – the major ones being falling commodity prices and exorbitant debt servicing," but every domestic policy and public program was fair game for retrenchment. By August 1982,when Mexico threatened to default on its loan repayments, both the IMF and the World Bank, in synchronization with the largest commercial banks, had become explicit instruments of the international capitalist revolution promoted by the Reagan, Thatcher, and Kohl regimes. The 1985 Baker Plan (named after then Secretary of Treasury James Baker but drafted by his deputy secretary, Richard Darman) bluntly required the 15 largest Third World debtors to abandon state-led development strategies in return for new loan facilities and continued membership in the world economy. The Plan also pushed the World Bank to the fore as the longterm manager of the scores of structural adjustment programs that were shaping the brave new world of the so-called "Washington Consensus."

This is, of course, a world in which the claims of foreign banks and creditors always take precedence over the survival needs of the urban and rural poor; it is a world in which it is taken as "normal" that a poor country like Uganda spends twelve times as much per capita on debt relief each year as on healthcare in the midst of the HIV/AIDS crisis.

Furthermore:

According to [William] Tabb, the Bank's professional staff are the postmodern equivalent of a colonial civil service, and "like the colonial administrators they never seem to go away except to be replaced by a fresh adviser team with the same outlook and powers over the local economy and society."

Although the debt-collectors claim to be in the business of economic development, they seldom allow poor nations to play by the same rules that richer countries used to promote growth in the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries. Structural adjustment, as economist Ha-Joon Chang points out in a valuable article, hypocritically "kicked away the ladder" of protectionist tariffs and subsidies that the OECD nations had historically employed in their own climb from economies based on agriculture to those based on urban high-value goods and services. Stefan Andreasson, looking at the grim results of SAPs in Zimbabwe and self-imposed neoliberal policies in South Africa, wonders if the Third World can hope for anything more than "virtual democracy" as long as its macro-economic policies are dictated from Washington: "Virtual democracy comes at the expense of inclusive, participatory democracy and of any possibility of the extension of public welfare provision that social democratic projects elsewhere have entailed."

The Challenge of Slums makes the same point when it argues that the "main single cause of increases in poverty and inequality during the 1980s and 1990s was the retreat of the state."

And to summarize Davis's research on this point:

The brutal tectonics of neoliberal globalization since 1978 are analogous to the catastrophic processes that shaped a "Third World" in the first place, during the era of late-Victorian imperialism (1870-1900). At the end of the nineteenth century, the forcible incorporation into the world market of the great subsistence peasantries of Asia and Africa entailed the famine deaths of millions and the uprooting of tens of millions more from traditional tenures. The end result (in Latin America as well) was rural "semi-proletarianization," the creation of a huge global class of immiserated semi-peasants and farm laborers lacking existential security of subsistence. As a result, the twentieth century became an age not of urban revolutions, as classical Marxism had imagined, but of epochal rural uprisings and peasant-based wars of national liberation.

Structural adjustment, it would appear, has recently worked an equally fundamental reshaping of human futures. As the authors of The Challenge of Slums conclude: "Instead of being a focus for growth and prosperity, the cities have become a dumping ground for a surplus population working in unskilled, unprotected and low-wage informal service industries and trade." "The rise of [this] informal sector," they declare bluntly, "is ... a direct result of liberalization." Some Brazilian sociologists call this process – analogous to the semi-proletarianization of landless peasants – passive proletarianization, involving the "dissolving of traditional forms of (re)production, which for the great majority of direct producers does not translate into a salaried position in the formal labor market."

This informal working class, without legal recognition or rights, has important historical antecedents. In modern European history, Naples, even more than Dublin or London's East End, was the exemplar of an urban informal economy. In this "most shocking city of the nineteenth century," as Frank Snowden calls it in his brilliant study, a "chronic super-abundance of labour" survived by miracles of economic improvisation and the constant subdivision of subsistence niches.

If there is a 'A Marx for Our Times' then Mike Davis is certainly a reflection of such a thing, and this is one of his works I give as proof. And please, do not let this historical account of global urbanization lead you to despair, let it instead lead you to finding effective action.

This book is great, it outlines in a rather simple yet academic style, the reality of neo-liberal policies. This book offers amazing insights into slum life, informal employment and the trajectory of the modern urban environment. It is stark and scary. However, my one beef with this book is that does not elaborate on the resistance and social movements within urban slums.

Urbanization was once an indicator of development, economically and socially. The growth of cities since the Industrial Revolution has put the city at the crux of the matter as a node that connects social and economic networks. However, the linear and evolutionary understanding of history and modernity was disproved by the dysfunctional operation of city structures and the social problems embedded in it. Modern is not necessarily a positive attribute. The city as such has been the most visual example of this. Mike Davis provides a detailed, descriptive yet shocking account of the impact of neoliberal political economy on housing policies, the making of the cities in different parts of the world and the survival of weaker social segments in the concrete jungle.

I'm a huge fan of Mike Davis, starting with the first book of his I read, Magical Urbanism. He's a great writer who just gets your heart beating and your energy focused. I have to say that it did take awhile for this book to get moving. The first 80 or so pages were just a nonstop recitation of facts that sought more to demoralize/depress me than actually motivate me to action. But, after this plethora of facts, he turns to analysis and that's where his writing skills shine.

There's items in here for anyone interested in poverty, slums, capitalism and global economic/social policy. He touches on 1st & 3rd world areas. He reaches back in time, thoroughly explores the present and turns to the future. He excels when talking about privatization efforts under SAP and neoliberalism's push in the late 70s and onward. Focusing on land titling and privatization, he raises the accurate, but sometimes overlooked fact, that when the state withdraws from its duty to its citizens, and then the citizen loses access to the private title to the land (through lack of money, jobs to get money, etc.), they're effectively without hope and removed from any sort of access to land. The state abrogated its responsibility and the capitalists see only profit, not the greater good.

Sadder, and sicker, topics are also covered. Things like urban planning in order to provide options for urban control (nice grids to direct troops/gear), arson to "speed up" evictions in slum housing, lack of clean water, privatized pay toilets to finance national debt, greed that erodes geography that leads to greater poor deaths, etc. Plus, one of my own personal pet peeves it touched upon, when Davis talks about the so-called panacea of microcredit. "While helpful to those informal enterprises managing to tread water, [microcredit and cooperative lending] have had little macro impact on the reduction of poverty" (p. 183).

The final thought I have is that even in the 21st Century, Marx is still ESSENTIAL reading.

Informative, eye-opening, scary, apocalyptic - minus Davis' usual magic with words. Reads like he rushed to get it to print (doesn't make the content any less valid - just a little less enjoyable to read).

Awe-inspiring and horrifying. It's difficult to fathom how so many people survive in such absolute desolation. The apocalypse and dystopia have already occurred in much of the global south. The slums and more are then perhaps in our future - a future ravaged by mass displacement, segregation, famine, and war driven on by global catastrophe and, for a lucky few, apartheid luxury in high-tech islands of wealth.

A total triumph- cannot believe that this was written in 2006. The foresight and incision from Davis (RIP) is spectacular.

Perhaps the best nonfiction development/economics/sociology writing I've personally come across- genuinely inspiring stuff. I will go my whole life trying to write something 10% as good as this.

We need a modern reexamination of this work and where we are globally today.

--

Not the author's fault, but the audiobook narrator was distractingly awful at pronouncing anything related to India. He did pretty well with basically everything else, but the India stuff was disastrous.

Une bonne recherche globale se heurtant à un discours encore une fois ignorant la question de la surpopulation mondiale depuis les années 1970 sinon plus tôt encore. Le FMI et la Banque Mondiale sont décrits tels des super-vilains tout-puissant, alors que ce n'est absoluement pas les cas. Étant donné que je suis antistaliniste et ansiislamiste je suis tout de même d'accord avec les dires avec Stalin et Mohamed - premièrement "Il n'y a pas des personnes irremplaçables" si les banques ou les institutions ne font pas satisfaction , alors il faut simplement les remplaces, même en créant un régime fasciste,autoritaire et refermé sur soi-même, si nécessaire, deuxièmement - "tout le monde est fait des viandes et des os", c'est à dire que tout "puissant" est tout de même humain, donc lui et sa famille peuvent être tuées, si nécessaire.

Sur ce - je dirais que ce livre prend un peut trop parti d'un certain type de discours alarmiste qui était populaire, sans vraiment analyser les effets d'une dérésponsabilisation et une infantilisation générale - autant dans la production que dans la reproduction brute et massive de l'humain en tant qu'éspèce animale, laquelle est devenue possible pour les (super)"riches" autant que pour les (super)"pauvres", grâce aux technologies, grâce aux techniciens, ingénieurs, médecins et scientifiques, sans parler des professeurs - brefs - grâce à tous ceux sur qui le monde repose vraiment.

Eye opener to the condition of the majority of world cities today. Tons of up to date stats on the squatter and slum areas in the largest magacities on the planet.