Dry, statistical -- familiar ground, and a bit out of date (published 2006 and based on projections going back to 2004).

Davis blames IMF shock policies over the internally driven tendency of modern "silicon" capitalism to decouple production growth from employment -- which is not fully persuasive. Still, a frightening portrait.

Seismic hazard is the fine print in the devil's bargain of informal housing..

Planet of Slums begins as a torrent of statistics. One is easily lost in the scale of such misery. Debt management is the devil, even if we have to invent one. The restructuring of such debt has human consequences. Our feel good antidote is the micro-credits of Herman DeSoto. Despite our own fortune, we like those stories of empowerment, however unlikely such remain. This is the majority narrative of what it means to be alive in 2020 and yet it remains hidden, obscured by the need to avert our eyes from injustice. I spoke at length with Joel last night about this time as well as the other works of Davis I’ve encountered as of late. Joel met Davis back in the 90s when the latter arrived at SUNY Stony Brook. Joel suggested that Davis always wanted to be Lewis Mumford and if incapable of such aimed to be Bill Vollmann.

Reading this book gave me an intense and depressing sense of deja vu. It was published in 2006, the year I finished my undergrad degree. I remember writing various essays about the problems of informal urban settlements in the developing world, in other words slums. Davis’ book is a devastating indictment of how neoliberal capitalism and the Washington Consensus created unimaginable levels of urban poverty in the developing world. (He calls it the Third World, but that term has since gone out of fashion. Too deterministic, presumably.) I can’t say that ‘Planet of Slums’ told me much that I didn’t already know, however it reminded me of many things I hadn’t thought about for a while. In these current times of schism in Europe and America, we in the West have become even more self-obsessed and less interested in the plight of the world's poorest people. I have no doubt that the problems of slums described by Davis twelve years ago continue, and in many cases have probably got worse. I just haven’t kept track, being distracted by other depressing things: climate change, neo-fascism, financial crisis, disaster capitalism, etc, etc.

Of particular note in the succinct and relentless narrative are the condemnation of ineffective NGOs, the explanation of how true squatting has become impossible due to rising land values, and the shocking final chapter on informal labour. Davis is rightly enraged by the appalling effects of Structural Adjustment Programmes and the total decoupling of urbanisation and poverty alleviation. He places this in historical context neatly:

From Karl Marx to Max Weber, classical social theory believed that the great cities of the future would follow in the industrialising footsteps of Manchester, Berlin, and Chicago - and indeed Los Angeles, Sao Paulo, Pusan, and today, Ciudad Juarez, Bangalore, and Guangzhou have roughly approximated this canonical trajectory. Most cities of the South, however, more closely Victorian Dublin, which, as historian Emmet Larkin stressed, was unique amongst ‘all the slumdoms produced in the western world in the nineteenth century… [because] its slums were not a product of the industrial revolution. Dublin, in fact, suffered more from the problems of de-industrialisation than industrialisation between 1800 and 1850.’

Likewise, Kinshasa, Luanda, Khartoum, Sar-es-Salaam, Guayaquil, and Lima continue to grow prodigiously despite ruined import substitution industries, shrunken public sectors, and downwardly mobile middle classes. The global forces ‘pushing’ people from the countryside - mechanisation of agriculture in Java and India, food imports in Mexico, Haiti, and Kenya, civil war and drought throughout Africa, and everywhere the consolidation of small holdings into large ones and the competition of industrial scale agribusiness - seem to sustain urbanisation even when the ‘pull’ of the city is drastically weakened by debt and economic depression. As a result, rapid urban growth in the context of structural adjustment, currency devaluation, and state retrenchment has been an inevitable recipe for the mass production of slums.

The horrible irony of the subsequent twelve years has been the western world’s imposition of failed structural adjustment programmes on ourselves. Austerity in the UK has caused a pervasive urban housing crisis; informal underemployment has been re-branded as ‘the gig economy’; the growth of the unregulated private rented sector is a slide towards slums. I can only hope that while the international neoliberal institutions have been preoccupied with destroying Greece and other feats of anti-development, the cities of the developing world have been able to improve their situations without so much outside interference. Given the forces arrayed against them, though, I'm not terribly hopeful.

Adeus Mike ✊

It really is all a single catastrophe piling wreckage upon wreckage…..actually so much wreckage it’s hard to even wrap your mind around it, this is one of the most depressing books I’ve ever read and made me feel literal hopelessness. But I did learn a ton and now have a better understanding of the IMF’s Structural Adjustment Programs & how the after effects of colonialism & neoliberal policies keep the global south so poor.

Davis traces the history of slums, which are a relatively recent phenomenon all things considered. During industrialization cities, particularly London of course, experienced rapid population growth and the city’s infrastructure had no hope of increasing capacity at the same rate. As a result, people were crammed like sardines into areas like Whitechapel, living in abject conditions. However, the settler colonies of the US and Australia were a sort of population “release valve” preventing the cities from being as overcrowded as they could’ve been.

In recent years there’s been a MASSIVE amount of urbanization and urban population growth has EXPLODED. Lagos had 300k people in 1950, and today it is a megacity of about 20 million. London’s population went from about 1 million to 3 million between 1800 and 1860, and the influx strained the city’s resources and was unlike anything in human history. China added more urban residents in the 80s than All of europe;s cities in all of the 19th century. Davis shows that most urban population growth is actually just growth in slums.This is completely untenable. And it’s not the fault of “poor people have too many babies”, it’s because of neoliberal policies that are literally squeezing people from rural areas due to agricultural deregulation, causing a surplus of labor who end up languishing in slums. Additionally, many people flee the countryside because of conflict or unrest. Angola was almost totally rural before the civil war, and is now almost totally urban.

The IMF makes countries cut agricultural subsidies, small farmers cannot compete with Big Ag, so they migrate to the city to try their luck. But despite big numbers, the city doesn’t have nearly enough jobs for the rush of people coming. There “overurbanization is driven by the reproduction of poverty, not the supply of jobs” 16. People find a place to survive wherever and however they can, and the spatial terrain of each city creates slightly different conditions. In Cairo there is a slum located in an old cemetery with families living in mausoleums. In Hong Kong, which has extremely limited space, people cram into nooks and crannies of existing buildings and even in between buildings.

In some cities the slums are on the outskirts and ever expanding outward, creating peri-urban areas in which some farmers aren't going to the city, the city is coming to them and they have to figure out what to do. Davis demonstrates that these peripheral areas are “out of sight out of mind” for the state, and are the perfect spot for someone to build a sweatshop to employ (exploit) all the people who are there, which is a mix of people who have been pushed out of the city center and rural residents on their way into the city.

I thought that people lived in slums because it’s free, but Davis explains that it’s not at all. There is this “heroic image of the squatter”, this idea that slum dwellers are ingenious self sufficient scrappy builders who have managed to make something out of nothing. And it’s not like there isn’t a little truth to that; the methods of survival people have come up with are pretty amazing. But Davis showed that most slum dwellers are actually paying rent to live there. There has been a privatization of squatting that Davis terms “pirate urbanization”. Slumlords will extralegally build a subdivision, and not provide services like running water. The slumlord gambles on the fact that once enough people move in, the state will be obligated to provide services and then the value of the area goes up and the Slumlords can profit! If you’re not paying (way overpriced) rent to a slumlord or a squatter above you, you’re probably paying some official/cop to look the other way and ignore your illegal dwelling. Basically it costs money even to live in the worst possible condition.

Davis explains types of slums that differ from our typical image of squatter communities. There is Hand Me Down housing, which is when you have a formerly fancy neighborhood that has fallen into disrepair and has many people crammed into the dilapidated old quarter. Then you have housing that was explicitly built for the poor, like tenement buildings or projects, that have fallen into abject conditions as no money is spent to maintain them. Additionally, you have people living wherever they can find a spot– on roofs, underground, any nook or cranny.

A huge percentage of people simply cannot participate in the formal economy. It doesn’t matter how hard they work or how smart they are, it’s a numbers game that cannot be won. In the 90s, Zimbabwe added 10k jobs per year but 300k people entered the workforce every year. (177). That leaves 290k people with no chance of entering the formal economy. That’s a 3% chance, more difficult than getting into Harvard. There’s simply no fucking way. So you have all these people who cannot enter the formal economy, how will they survive? Of course there are the obvious effects to this surplus of labor like joining the black market or predatory quasi magical financial solutions like pyramid schemes. But many turn to the informal economy– setting up a food stall on the street, shining shoes, driving a rickshaw. There are so many people doing this in the informal economy that it “generates jobs not by elaborating new divisions of labor, but by fragmenting existing work and thus subdividing incomes 181.” If you’ve been to a megacity you have seen this, people selling individual pieces of candy or roses or so many people selling lottery tickets, there are only so many pieces of candy someone will buy in a day, the supply/demand economics do not work out. There is ruthless competition, which prevents solidarity. Also, there’s this romantic idea that these people are plucky mini entrepreneurs when often they are PAYING to work, like a rickshaw wallah has to RENT THE BIKE FOR THE DAY and then there are so many people doing the same thing that they must pedal all day to break even!

As if all this isn’t bad enough, Davis spends a chapter outlining the ecology of slums and the actual conditions within them. Slums are often located in sites where no one else wanted to build anything, usually because of how undesirable the site is. They are near sewers, garbage pits, chemical waste dumps, easily flooded areas, basically anywhere that a middle class and up person would not want to live. Of course, this means any disaster either natural or man made, is going to affect the poor manifold. I was reminded of the scene in the movie Parasite, where the rain storm flooded the Park’s home and destroyed all the possessions of everyone in their low-lying neighborhood. The next day, the rich wife in the car blathers on the phone about how the storm was so refreshing because the garden really needed it :). Living near chemical waste sites or among garbage causes severe health problems. Lack of infrastructure for sanitation, traffic, water, healthcare etc which is encouraged by the IMF who makes countries cut “unnecessary” social spending, causes untold suffering and death.

A whole section is devoted to shit. The lack of sanitation and access to toilets or running water leads to god awful health problems that beget more health problems, poisoning the water, killing millions of children. Crucially, Davis points out how the lack of sanitation facilities is a feminist issue. Women in many cultures are expected to maintain modesty, and therefore must wait to use the bathroom in the cover of darkness, where they are vulnerable. One solution has been PRIVATIZING TOILETS! THE WORLD BANK MAKES COUNTRIES PRIVATIZE WATER! In Kumasi, a city in Ghana, toilet use would be 10% of a family’s income (142). Not feasible! You’re not gonna pay that, you’ll just continue going wherever you can. This is another egregious example of neoliberal policies eking out as much money from the poor as possible while never taxing the wealthy.

Next Davis outlines some solutions that cities have attempted. Often cities will build barracks style houses and try to move all the residents there. This nearly always fails because the buildings do not take into account the needs of the residents at all. Slums spring up where they do for a reason– often because they are physically near to where people make their living and if someone is living in a slum it is not likely that they can afford transportation. Placing residents in a building across town is not going to help them and many would rather stay put. So, in a pattern that reoccurs throughout the book, the apartments end up being occupied by middle class/ civil servants and those people reap the benefits that were supposed to be for the very poor. Another proposed solution is the most idiotic thing I’ve ever heard: Hernando De Soto is a guy who thinks that all of the people in slums are actually mini entrepreneurs and sitting on a lot of capital, they just need to be made legit and then suddenly they’ll be rich. This is literally so stupid I can’t even believe it. One, this ignores the “renters all the way down” internal structure within slums. If a land title for a slum plot was made legit, it would only benefit the top squatter who could now be an official slumlord, leaving all those paying rent to him in the lurch. Two, as outlined in the previous paragraph, most people are not plucky entrepreneurs who can be folded into the formal economy, they are doing 1/5th of a job that 4 other people are also doing and they are working underneath some other guy. Ultimately, the typical solution, which we also see in my hometown of Minneapolis albeit on a much smaller scale, is to just bulldoze the fuck out of slums because of “hygeine” and “crime”, destroying what meager things people have, and then doing absolutely nothing for them but hoping they just die off. This especially happens when the city needs to look “presentable” for a big royal visit or the Olympics are happening etc. I do feel this latter point is getting more recognition.

This book was extremely clear and well-organized. I love to look at population charts and stats. My household’s favorite evening activity is to play geography guessing games with population charts so if that type of thing isn’t for you then maybe it would not be so great to read. Davis is covering the entire global south here and he does outline the nuances with each different city/country. It is not easy to encompass the entire world because many books have been written on every single case. I’m embarrassed to bring up Bong Joon Ho/Parasite again bc like Idk American girly reading about third world and quoting an 424 movie this is just ugh eye roll etc, but again I thought about his quote “we all live in the same country called capitalism”. Because even though all these countries have unique histories and circumstances, they’re all facing similar problems because the same neoliberal World Bank IMF Washington Bretton-Woods institutions have had largely similar effects. Therefore Davis is able to make a cogent analysis of places as different as Lagos and Karachi. Davis regularly refers back to the Victorian era, and this is also silly but when I was reading From Hell I felt like something clicked in my brain and I felt that understanding this was key to understanding the world today and so I appreciated this constant referral and connection/comparison.

One chapter after another is the most hopeless thing you’ve ever read, thinking about the fact that almost a billion people live in literal hells on earth, and I understand the critique of being paternalistic toward the poor and acting like everyone’s always miserable all the time it’s poverty porn to even think about it etc. But there is really just no excuse for the abjection of the situation, no one is glad to be living in garbage and shit, it is unconscionable. Also, this book is like 15 years old and I can’t imagine things have gotten any better considering we still have the same neolib solutions to problems created by neolib policies. I could understand the lack of solutions presented as a critique of this book, in fact Davis tears down attempted/suggested solutions. But everything is bad! It’s just the facts! The literal only silver lining at the very end, I guess because he didn’t want to end on such a horrible note, is that militaries are not accustomed to urban warfare and that the spatial chaos of slums could be a tactical advantage considering most governments rely on order, bloated bureaucracy etc. I’m reading a book right now that is making a similar argument about the geography of urban warfare and I guess that’s a little bit of hope, but then the previous 20 pages just explained all the reasons solidarity within the slums have been eroded by competition and so it seems hopeless again. Wreckage upon wreckage!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Actually, infodumping is an ART!

Mike Davis apparently took those complaints about his slippery relationship to the truth to heart, because this slim book is loaded down with footnotes. Unfortunately most of those cite just a select handful of left-wing texts, and even they often disagree with each other as to the reality of slum life in the Third World. Davis does nothing to reconcile them.

As far as I can tell from the book Davis never visited one of the slums he writes about, he never did any independent primary source research on any of them, and apparently he didn't even bother to coordinate or fact-check many of the figures he tries to swamp the reader with.

At the very least there is an interesting section about the 1950s and 1960s colonial fight to keep Third World cities white and rich and to resign poverty to the farms. Davis shows how after the Europeans left (and the after the early dictatorships fell and civil wars broke out) there was an absolute explosion of unprecedented urbanization. After the fall of the Jimenz dictatorship in Venezuela, Caracas saw 400,000 (!) migrants flood into the city in just one year (1958). Angola, only 14% urban in 1970, now has a majority of its citizens in cities due to the millions displaced by a 25 year communist-led civil war. The "urban bias" of African leaders who under-paid farmers for their crops also led to massive urban migration that the continent was ill-prepared for.

Of course, Davis blames everything on the IMF and the World Bank (and global capitalism more broadly), but he fully admits that almost every government solution to the slums so far has only made things worse (especially in those nominally socialist countries he discusses at length). So his solutions, if he has any, are obscure.

Mainly, the book is an apocalyptic screed attempting to rouse general indignation against amorphous capitalist overlords. If there was any real research backing this extended rant it might have been more convincing.

kept using the word neoliberalism. whose gonna tell my soc prof that i️ don’t know what that means

probably the most important thing you can read.

“Planet of Slums” is a pretty depressing book. Davis’s goal is to demolish standard theories about how slums aren’t necessarily such bad places after all, and he does this by simply describing vast quantities of human misery. The romance of the squatter, the idea of the slum as a site of vast creativity, the proposal that slums contain an entrepreneurial energy that only needs to be released by the use of microcredit or by giving slum-dwellers their own land titles to create (relative) prosperity: all of these theories melt away before Davis’s blowtorch of despair. (The last chapter’s section on the child witches of Kinshasa is one of the most bleakly depressing things I’ve read in quite a while.) There are a couple of interesting insights amid the endless catalogue of horrors: in particular, I appreciate the way that Davis emphasizes how, whenever you find many desperately poor people packed into a relatively tiny area, you can be sure that a handful of rich people are making out like bandits. In many Third World cities, renting in the slums is more profitable per square foot than it is in better-off neighborhoods: sure, slum dwellers are dirt-poor, but if you take a house, subdivide each room into four, and rent out each quarter-room for all the market can bear, you can make quite a lot of money, and in the mega-slums of the Third World you can be quite confident that as soon as you kick out one tenant for non-payment another one will immediately be clamoring to pay as much or more. (Anyone who’s read Beryl Satter’s “Family Properties” will immediately recognize the similarities to the mid-century ghettos of America’s Northern cities.) Davis also discusses the ways in which what used to be called “the Washington consensus” created the conditions for these slums, driving peasants from their homes to the cities even though there are no jobs for them there. In the great slums of the 19th-century West, the slum-dwellers at least had factory jobs, no matter how terrible or poorly paying, but today’s slums are generally filled with people working in the informal sector: i.e., surviving by the skin of their teeth. Davis has, in the end, no positive prescriptions, aside from a vague idea that governments need to step up and do something, though he also points out that when governments do step and do something, that something — decent public housing, say — is almost invariably captured by the relatively better off. In the end, this book is mainly just a salutary reminder of how the other half (soon to be more, doubtless, thanks to the exponentially increasing pace of third-world urbanization) lives.

I read this a few years back and am rereading it now. It's a bit of a downer, i must warn you. It turns out slums are not as fun as they seem.

Seriously, because once you read this, the Olympics looks even worse. Davis' book is very readable and wonderfully cited information about slums. It looks at the development and how various governments respond to it. If you have read Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, this is a good companion to that book for it focuses on more global facts than individual stories.