Book Review 2: Planet of Slums

Martin K. Thomen

In his recent book, Planet of Slums, Mike Davis takes the reader into a place where no human should ever have to venture, but one that is home to many: the slums of the world. Unfortunately, slum life is the daily reality for millions around the world, and the numbers are growing.

Davis, a professor of history at UC-Irvine and an editor of New Left Review, introduces the reader to the prevalence and growth of slums in the first two chapters. Taking the reader on what sometimes seems like a worldwide tour from hell to places like Ajegunle, Dadaad, and Campos Eliseos, Davis stuns the reader with a roll call of growth and demographic facts. He seeks to establish the fact that slums are widespread, growing rapidly, and expected to grow more.

In the following chapters the author seeks to delve deeper into the issue by debunking widely held myths about slum proliferation. His third chapter, “Treason of the State,” focuses on his contention that the rally cry of capitalism around the globe to ease restrictions and create an environment acutely attuned to business growth has served to undermine state structures that formerly mitigated the worst causes and effects of slums. For instance, the housing crisis in inner cities fueled by migration or population growth was formerly absorbed by public housing, but today public housing is the exception rather than the rule in most countries.

Davis later outlines the fact that squatters’ settlements originally occupied lands at no financial cost, but that this is not the case in slums today. Today, slum housing is a very highly controlled sector and is usually a profi t-making venture for many upper-class citizens who own the land, gangs who control it, or corrupt officials who illegally rent out public land. Instead of romanticized “built from the ground up” or “community building” ideas of slum construction, traditional landlord/lessee relationships are the norm. Far from freeloading off the land, slum dwellers pay a relatively high price for their housing, in addition to high transportation costs because of the peripheral location of many slums. Davis punctuates these disgraceful facts by describing the horrible conditions in which the residents must live.

Chapter 6, “Slum Ecology,” describes how slum dwellers face floods, gas explosions, raw sewage, and air pollution in addition to poor housing conditions. Davis explores transportation issues much more deeply in this chapter. The vicious cycle of less government funding for public transportation, poorer transportation service, and increased congestion caused by more private cars does not only mean a longer commute and higher prices for slum dwellers; for many, it is a deadly situation. Because these settlements are not “developed areas” in a legal sense, they are frequently the first to experience public transit service cuts and are seen by many in power as ideal sites to build new superhighways to whisk the car owners from the suburbs into the city center. This creates a dangerous situation where pedestrians seeking to board transit or walk to their destination must cross multilane superhighways and other infrastructure which, while benefiting the wealthier classes, is a lethal obstacle course for those who will never benefit from them. The author cites high-profile incidents to underscore his point like a gas explosion in Mexico City that killed over two thousand people and the infamous Union Carbide poisoning an estimated twenty-five thousand people in Bhopal.

In the following chapter, smartly called “SAPing the Third World,” Davis returns to myth-busting mode and studies the role that international organizations and the Washington Consensus play in slum growth. SAP is the International Monetary Fund’s acronym for its Structural Adjustment Programs. Using debt and political pressure from Washington and its allies, the IMF and World Bank have used SAPs to restructure the economies of debtowing countries. This restructuring usually comes in the form of deregulation, selling off of valuable state assets, and an unweaving of the social safety net in the name of government efficiency. While SAPs may benefit wealthier countries that wish to collect debt, they spell doom for debtor countries and especially slum dwellers, who rely on the social safety net and state help that are undermined by “structural adjustment.” Davis points out that those areas where slum growth is fastest are also where SAPs have had the most devastating effects. He writes that urban Africa and Latin America have been hit with artifi cial depression, characterized by falling wages, increased unemployment, regressive taxation, and collapsing public health structures caused by SAPs. Furthermore, many autocrats supported by the West, like General Pinochet of Chile, not only commit egregious human rights abuses against their political enemies, but also promote neoliberal policies favored by Washington that leave millions of citizens resorting to slum living.

Davis’s last chapter, which asks the question, “A Surplus of Humanity?,” does not leave the reader with a rosy picture of a happily ending story. He uses these pages to denounce the rise of the informal work sector, which provides grim jobs for slum dwellers. This work—which includes rag picking, petty labor, and scavenging—never creates opportunities for the “up-by-the-bootstrap promotion” embraced by neoliberal theorists. Davis also explores the sociocultural effects of slum life as he enumerates mental and spiritual survival tactics such as sorcery, witchcraft, and evangelism that have spread throughout slum areas, sometimes with negative consequences.

As he does throughout the book, Davis ends the chapter with a blunt truth-and-consequences commentary aimed squarely at the neoliberal capitalism that has defined world politics and urban policies for the past fi fty years. His epilogue, “Down Vietnam Street,” quotes Western sources such as the CIA and RAND Corporation as proof that even Western institutions are aware of the pending crisis caused by the broken promises to the slum dwellers and lower classes of the world. He points out that the “homeland versus evildoers” paradigm is ill-equipped to handle the demographic and ecological realities that must be faced in the decades to come as millions who have been handed a raw deal by neoliberal capitalism may overwhelm those who choose to defend the Orwellian status quo.

Overall, Planet of Slums is an embracing, if at times dispiriting, and truthful exposé of the urban world today and emerging trends for the future. The author does not seek to paint an optimistic view of the future, but he surely presents a wicked challenge and some paths to solutions for those who seek to create a more promising future for all humans, especially those millions who are crowded together and living in terrible conditions.

MARTIN THOMEN is a recent CRP graduate (May 2008). He earned a master’s degree in CRP with a transportation planning specialization and also has a BA and BS from UT Austin. He currently works as a transportation planner.