There are now something like 1000 cities with over a million population. Urbanization has occurred with astonishing speed in the past 30 years, and around the world the majority of that growth has been in the form of urban slums. This growth has been driven by a number of factors, including overall population growth, forced relocations, IMF and World Bank policies that have driven peasants off their land, refugee flight, and so on. The old, pre-1970, drivers of urban growth have largely disappeared. People no longer move from the countryside to major cities in order to find good employment: good employment is simply not to be had in many countries. The new migration is a response to desperate or impossible circumstances.

So now we are faced with a situation in which over 1 billion potential workers are without steady, or any, employment. They make do, if at all, only through a shadow economy including street peddling, sporadic and inefficient menial labor, and criminal activity.

Cities provide little or no services to the new slums, the peri-urban slums of the 21st century. Infrastructure is non-existent, so disease is rampant.

Davis offers no solutions. The situation seems hopeless, frankly, because the depth of poverty, and the variety of ways that people have found with coping with it, itself causes divisions among the poor that prevent them from taking effective collective action on their own behalf. And certainly there is no prospect that the elites or middle-class will see deeply enough into their own eventual self-interest to take effective steps to end this situation, or even to ameliorate the worst of it.

A chilling and enraging indictment of the effects of colonialism, neo-colonialism, and neoliberalism upon the urban areas of the Global South, in particular the Structural Adjustment Programs imposed by the World Bank and IMF which have brought the underdeveloped nations to their knees. Even more important today as the chickens are coming home to roost in form of the similar austerity regimes being imposed in most nations of the developed West. An absolutely vital book for all progressives, 5 stars and a must read. Check out this detailed review:

https://www.dwrl.utexas.edu/orgs/e3w/...

This is one long howl of rage, interspersed with shockingly brief lucid sections, followed by another info dump of ineffable horror. You know how in The Dark Knight there's that line, "Some men just want to watch the world burn"? Mike Davis would like to inform you that the world is burning, that it is your fault, and that there is nothing that you can do to stop it. If this were the Middle Ages, Davis would have made a fine living as a fire and brimstone preacher, leading rows of self-flagellating monks through the streets and warning you that Judgment Day is coming. Except in this version, hell is not a pit of fire. Instead, it is most probably a pit of human excrement.

Davis takes us on a tour of "megacities" throughout the world- though, mostly they are located in the Third World South, let's be honest. He has eight different chapters describing a different aspect of why these slums are horrible beyond imagining, plus subdivisions into different shades of horrible so we don't confuse each source of awful with another. It's everything from the incredible density of people to the shoddy, amazingly small housing, the system of "slumlordism" that develops even with "petty" landlords with a few 10 sq ft clapboard rooms to sell (which means an amazing labyrinth of levels of desperately poor within the category of poor), the awful ecological conditions the slums are founded on, the terrible diseases, the toxic wastes and the daily body counts of people dropping in the streets because of this. And as if this weren't enough, he goes on to tell you why even the most selfish of first worlders should care- because the Pentagon is already preparing for slum warfare, because of course the oppressed of the earth will rise up one day. If their daily horror doesn't arrive in the form of pollution, overwhelming tides of migration or diseases that do not recognize borders, it will arrive through uncontrollable conflicts that spread, or through increased terrorism as more and more people give up on a system that they have never been inside to begin with.

That's one of his more fascinating ideas- that the capitalist world system has deemed these tens of millions of people "surplus" population, and never changed their status. They have always been outside. Slums have sprung up all over the world in an "illegal" way and cities have never given these areas even basic infrastructure- roads, sewers, electricity, you name it. State and local authorities routinely bulldoze the areas to try to "clean up the slums" and millions of people just end up moving somewhere with worse conditions that will involve even more deaths. If the state admitted them as a part of the "legal" system, they would have to do something about them, and quite frankly no one knows what to do about 20 million people in Kinshasa, a city that essentially has no industry at all, and no hope of providing for a tenth that many people. Europe got to offload its "surplus" to the New World. There is no New World anymore- these slums are hundreds of times the size of Victorian London, and ten times worse than the worse parts of seedy, colonial Dublin.

I thought that this was a good point to make, because I think when a lot of Euro-American people hear "slums" they think of the projects of Detroit or the soot filled back streets of Dickens. Just to give some perspective on this book... "projects" are actually considered a dream in many of these places. The state sometimes builds "low income housing" and the middle class usurps it, partially because "low" is still not low enough. The slums of the First World imagination are the middle class of certain areas of the Third World. This was one of the more affecting points of the book. Though the most affecting is an entire section entitled "Shit" where Davis describes in excruciating detail the "toilet" industry of the slums, where people actually pay to have access to a latrine, as public ones are about 1 per 1000 people in some areas. To get into some latrines you have to wade through rivers of urine and crap, as you do to get across the streets near them. Since the pay latrines are often too expensive and the public ones buried under piles of excrement, many people simply go anywhere- in the streets, in the parks. There are actually wars over "defecation rights" in certain cities (I am not making this up) between the middle and lower classes. Women can't go to the bathroom during the day because of societal expectations about modesty, so they try to wait to shit until nighttime (and often skip eating during the day so they don't have to until then). Except then when they go out to do it at night they get raped, beaten, and/or killed. This section I thought really got at the essence of just how horrible these lives are. I mentioned in class that it had made me physically ill to read, and everyone agreed with me. Do not approach this part with any food in your stomach, I warn you now.

However, his relentless assault of examples, numbing numbers and statistics and apocalyptic pronouncements don't really... accomplish anything. The reader is not left with a sense of wanting to do something about this... just really a sense of hopelessness. Davis tears down every attempt, native or foreign, rich or poor, to try to help slum areas as ineffective, condescending, evil, or worse. There is no way to be a person with any kind of resources and try to help the slum situation without being wrong in some way. He also emphasizes the sheer size of the problem over and over again- numbers one can't even begin to comprehend really. Any "high tech miracles" can't even begin to cover the number of people in these areas- all it does is increase inequalities. It's like facing the numbers that Stalin killed v. the numbers Hitler did. 6 million in the Holocaust, while an unbelievable existential horror is a number that pales in comparison to the 20 million plus who disappeared during Stalin's purges and because of his policies. It's much less talked about than the Nazi crimes. Because what do you do with a number like that?

I think that this translates to the slums. I've seen the slum problem acknowledged in popular culture- most recently of course in Slumdog Millionaire and all the run up/follow up to that about the actors' lives who were actually from the slum (apparently the slum that one of the child actors still lives in burned down the other week, by the way. Another pervasive hazard of slum life). There was a good deal of sanctimonious commentary about the directors' treatment of the people in this film, but I don't remember there being a lot of wider discussion about solving the problems of slum life. It was like acknowledging it was all people could do. This seems to be the case in other depictions I've seen as well- even stretching back into the 90s. I find myself doing the same thing.

I have errands to run, jobs to do-I don't even really have the time to spend writing this review about this book. What do you do with this idea when you finish this book and then need to go pick up your dry cleaning before the shop closes? It's difficult. I don't know. I'm glad I read this, but I wanted something more.

The subject of this book doesn't get very much mainstream media attention, other than the occasional tangential mention. It is sort of overwhelming when one reads chapter after chapter on the enormous (and growing) slums of the world.





The author, Mike Davis (almost as old as I am), writer, political activist, urban theorist, historian. One time member of CORE, SDS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Da...



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Deeply depressing, but very informative.

Bit too much of an infodump for my liking. Wish there was more political-economic analysis of why slums have arisen at this stage of capitalism. Found the last two chapters to be great tho.

Sad, depressing, horrifying, mind-boggling . . . all words that came to mind as I read this book.

Printed in 2006, many of the population milestones forecast in the book are now past.

I have heard about those milestone population numbers over the years but never considered the details of what these people have to endure in order to live. The horror of daily living in a situation where you can be 'relocated' at any moment just because the government wants to make a point or a variety of reasons. There is likely no potable water anywhere within miles; no sanitation, no garbage collection, public transportation is the only way you can get to your job if you are luckily to have one although it is a major expense. Flooding of water and sewage, landslides, monsoons, excessive rainfall are just some of the ways your 'home' - possibly made of mud and pieces of plastic, wood or cardboard - can be destroyed. Disease is rampant and medical services are so expensive that it isn't even worth considering looking for help. If you manage to find a small space to set up your home (a few square feet per family) it is likely on toxic land, contaminated by industrial, agricultural and human waste.

Get the picture?

Unfortunately, by the end, you have been bludgeoned with so many facts and numbers that you are simply so overwhelmed by the magnitude of the situation, you do nothing not knowing where to start.

There was little to no mention of the impact of illegal drug trade nor of the dangers involved near ancient sites targeted by poachers. Both which help drive more people from rural areas into urban ones.

Make no mistake - I am horrified by what these populations have to suffer. And equally unfortunate, I don't know of any way to alleviate the situation. I am glad I read the book because it certainly makes me value each amenity that I have available.

Good luck figuring out what to do with yourself once you've finished this book. The title might sound hyperbolic, but Davis underpins his terrifying thesis exhaustively with this tidal-wave-o'-super-scary-facts-delivered-nonchalantly prose style, which, along with the occasional offhand allusion to Bladerunner and the profligate use of the adjective "Orwellian," makes this probably the scariest thing I have ever, ever read.

Which is not to say it isn't also incredibly erudite and well researched. That is, of course, what makes it scary. It's one of those books that makes you entirely reorganize the shelves in your brain. Here's Davis's take on war, for instance: "The demonizing rhetorics of the various international 'wars' on terrorism, drugs, and crime are so much semantic apartheid: they construct epistemological walls around [slums:] that disable any honest debate about the daily violence of economic exclusion."

Here is just a smattering of the super-scary facts:

One third of the global urban population lives in slums.

Right now, almost half of the developing world's urban population is sick from a preventable disease associated with poor sanitation. There will be about 5 million preventable deaths of children under five years old in slums by 2025.

In Cairo's slum, called the City of the Dead, a million people live in homes they made out of tombs.

"In Mumbai, slum-dwellers have retreated so far into the Sanjay Gandhi National Park that some are now being routinely eaten by leopards."

Because of disinvestment in public services like heat and water and housing required by the IMF, "Millions of poor urban Russians... suffer conditions of cold, hunger, and isolation uncannily reminiscent of the siege of Leningrad."

In wealthy suburbs in Cape Town, the rich and middle class encircle their communities with ten-thousand-volt fences that were originally designed to discourage lions, so great is their fear of the poor who live in the hellish slums they build HIGHWAYS OVER to avoid seeing. Similar walled communities in China and Southeast Asia have names like "Orange County."

A slum in Nairobi has 10 working latrines (which are really just glorified pits) for 40,000 people. (This from a horrifyingly informative sub-chapter titled "Living in Shit.") In Indian slums, women can only defecate between two and five in the morning, because the only places to relieve oneself are public parks, and modesty demands that they not be seen doing this, so they don't eat during the day.

Desperately poor slum-dwellers in Kinshasa have taken to blaming their poverty on disabled children, whom Pentacostal preachers have convinced them are evil witches. The children are torturously "exorcised" and then abandoned in the streets.

And it just goes on and on. This litany of awful, awful facts.

Here's the closest thing Davis offers to a solution. It's one sentence in the last chapter, nestled into a discussion of how the Pentagon and military academies are now basically training our armies the art of fighting poor people in slums: "Indeed, the future of human solidarity depends upon the militant refusal of the new urban poor to accept their terminal marginality within global capitalism."

Oh, and here's the last sentence: "If the empire can deploy Orwellian technologies of repression, its outcasts have the gods of chaos of their side."

Sleep tight.

This is a magnificent read. "Planet of Slums" opens with Davis setting out a clear fact. The bulk of urban populations live in slums. The bulk of the world's population is now urban. Take these two facts together, and you realise that an unholy number of people are now cramped in to highly dense, deeply unstable areas and from this position must eke a living.

There are many reasons for this, and Davis explores some of the most obvious reasons very well. Indeed, the number one driving force behind slums is poverty. This no brainer actually needs a little understanding. The poorest of the poor need access to the labour market, which in turn needs them near the City Centre. Market traders, rickshaw pullers and informal labourers need access to the heart of the City, and this means that they will build slums. Fighting over ever shrinking public spaces is the result of this explosion in poverty.

The next big issue is climate change and imperialism. These two go hand in hand. On the one hand, access to capital for the global south is dependent on access to credit from the IMF and world bank. Credit is therefore given on the terms of Washington. Add to this the realisation that credit from Washington requires the paring back of the State and replacement with neoliberal markets and institutions and you see that states with large slums can never hope to invest the money in to solving this problem. Since the Washington consensus is driven by GDP which in turn is bound up in fossil fuel; the increase in factory emissions and car ownership lead to terrible pollution problems.

This pollution problem is exacerbated by the rivers of shit that slums exist in. Lack of water infrastructure ensures that people cannot use toilets properly, and so shit befouls the drinking water. American armed intervention makes things worse, as in Sadr City Baghdad. These issues are all interlinked and the toilet problem is most onerous upon women. Women will refuse to eat during the day so they only have to defecate at night or in the early hours of morning. This puts women at greater risk of sexual assault and is an attack on their dignity.

Above all, this book is a clarion call for those in the west to recognise that the solutions to slums in C19th Europe have been used by Europe and denied to the global south because of the neoliberal imperialism of the Washington consensus. This entrenched inequality and also means that the bulk of the world will soon live informally, and with dramatically shortened lifespans courtesy of free market imperialism. This book is essential reading for all people comfortably located in a city with running, potable tap water.

Notably solid overview of global urban poverty growth in the last century or so. Casts a wider net than it does a deep one, which comes with the usual tradeoffs of a Verso history book. Nice to be reminded that urbanism as a discipline isn’t exclusively populated by numtot-to-yimby-pipeline-type liberals though. Rest in peace Mr. Davis, sir.

Mike Davis is one of the angriest men on the planet-- with good reason. If you want to learn more about the horrors of modern global capitalism, and I believe you should, then look no further than this book as a little introduction to the suffering and utter destitution of the majority of the world's people in this time of unprecedented decadence in the imperial core.

This definitely did not help my pessimistic world view. But it felt like an important read about things I had no knowledge in.

"If unmitigated capitalism has a mainly unacceptable face, a corrupt state acting on behalf of the rich is still worse. In such circumstances, little is to be gained by even trying to improve the system."

"Varanasi's Silk Sari industry, investigated by Human Rights Watch, is no better: 'The children work twelve or more hours a day, six and a half or seven days a week, under conditions of physical and verbal abuse. Starting as young as age five, they earn from nothing at all to around 400 rupees (US $8.33) a month.' in one workshop, researchers discovered a 9-year-old chained to his loom; everywhere they saw young boys covered with burn scars from the dangerous work of boiling silkworm cocoons, as well as little girls with damaged eyesight from endless hours of embroidering in poor lighting."

"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 to 1900). At the end of the 19th 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-pedents and farm laborers lacking existential security of subsistence. As a result, the 20th 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."