Planet of Slums
by Mike Davis
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The classic, brilliant, bestselling account of the rise of the world's slums, where, according to the United Nations, one billion people now live. From the sprawling barricadas of Lima to the garbage hills of Manila, urbanization has been disconnected from industrialization, even economic growth. Davis portrays a vast humanity warehoused in shantytowns and exiled from the formal world economy. He argues that the rise of this informal urban proletariat is a wholly original development show more unforeseen by either classical Marxism or neoliberal theory. Are the great slums, as a terrified Victorian middle class once imagined, volcanoes waiting to erupt? Davis provides the first global overview of the diverse religious, ethnic, and political movements competing for the souls of the new urban poor. He surveys Hindu fundamentalism in Bombay, the Islamist resistance in Casablanca and Cairo, street gangs in Cape Town and San Salvador, Pentecostalism in Kinshasa and Rio de Janeiro, and revolutionary populism in Caracas and La Paz. Planet of Slums ends with a provocative meditation on the "war on terrorism" as an incipient world war between the American empire and the new slum poor. show lessTags
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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 show more 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:
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. show less
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. show less
A magesterial tour through the worst and (limited) best of the urbanizing third world, in all its horror and potential. The global order, and neoliberalism in particular, still hasn't managed to devise any strategy for incorporating a billion sub-subsistence laborers into formal economies, not a way to provide infrastructure or public services.
Must we doom the developing world to the Dickensian role of "surplus population"? Mike Davis takes us on a tour and demonstrates how the indomitable human spirit prevails, but barely, and with such immiseration and struggle. No slum is alike, but neither is any slum a "good" one.
Davis includes an interesting epilogue with a brief survey of the US military's efforts to consider the city in the show more context of future urban warfare, and as one of the few elements of government to do so (particularly in the contemporary timeframe of 2005-2006). It foreshadows Stephen Graham's Cities Under Siege, but in a far more intelligible, less postmodern style of prose. That holds true for the rest of the boom as well. Very much recommended. show less
Must we doom the developing world to the Dickensian role of "surplus population"? Mike Davis takes us on a tour and demonstrates how the indomitable human spirit prevails, but barely, and with such immiseration and struggle. No slum is alike, but neither is any slum a "good" one.
Davis includes an interesting epilogue with a brief survey of the US military's efforts to consider the city in the show more context of future urban warfare, and as one of the few elements of government to do so (particularly in the contemporary timeframe of 2005-2006). It foreshadows Stephen Graham's Cities Under Siege, but in a far more intelligible, less postmodern style of prose. That holds true for the rest of the boom as well. Very much recommended. show less
My sister was all "Martin, is this my kind of nonfiction or Stephen's kind of nonfiction?" but it's neither intensely theoretical and aggravating nor highly conversational and informative, at least not entirely. What it is is a fairly dense but still readable sketch of our world, our real world, that - hence the title - doesn't shirk reminding us that the "global slum" really is becoming the predominant living environment of humankind.
Davis is so good at being drily factual that it takes time for it to sneak up on you that this is actually a polemic, and an extremely invigorating one. Proposition the first: We are a species of slumdwellers. The second: Our governments have failed us (when they haven't actually been trying to wipe us show more away). The third: Healthwise they are a disaster. The fourth: Economically slumdwellers are mostly invisible, virtually unhelpable, and unanimously exploited, despite the fetishization of microcredit and informal economic activity by neoliberal dogma and the Bretton Woods institutions (how refreshing to see microcredit get a finger in the eye instead of a pious obeisance, although I wish he would have spent more time really demonstrating that the people whose tiny stake just amounts to working themselves further into slavery are more numerous than the ones who are actually building something). The fifth: More and more people are falling into direr and direr straits worldwide (viz. the former Soviet bloc). It would have been interesting to get more of a handle on exactly WHY this deluge of new urbanites (I know, I know, as if rampant lawlessness and horror in the countryside, perceived economic opportunity in the cities, and policies that squeeze the urban middle classes down and the rural peasantry sideways and then down aren't enough). But when Davis ends figuring the future as Orwellian surveillance v. chaos and rage, it's sober, not a little chilling, and a lot more convincing than the George Bush version. show less
Davis is so good at being drily factual that it takes time for it to sneak up on you that this is actually a polemic, and an extremely invigorating one. Proposition the first: We are a species of slumdwellers. The second: Our governments have failed us (when they haven't actually been trying to wipe us show more away). The third: Healthwise they are a disaster. The fourth: Economically slumdwellers are mostly invisible, virtually unhelpable, and unanimously exploited, despite the fetishization of microcredit and informal economic activity by neoliberal dogma and the Bretton Woods institutions (how refreshing to see microcredit get a finger in the eye instead of a pious obeisance, although I wish he would have spent more time really demonstrating that the people whose tiny stake just amounts to working themselves further into slavery are more numerous than the ones who are actually building something). The fifth: More and more people are falling into direr and direr straits worldwide (viz. the former Soviet bloc). It would have been interesting to get more of a handle on exactly WHY this deluge of new urbanites (I know, I know, as if rampant lawlessness and horror in the countryside, perceived economic opportunity in the cities, and policies that squeeze the urban middle classes down and the rural peasantry sideways and then down aren't enough). But when Davis ends figuring the future as Orwellian surveillance v. chaos and rage, it's sober, not a little chilling, and a lot more convincing than the George Bush version. show less
Davis has done us a great service by pulling together global data and case studies to portray a monster that threatens to be the real Terminator, bigger, more deadly and more immediate than the movie version.
Slums are as old as industrialization, which first created them by bringing (driving) people from the country to the cities for their labor, without bothering to provide housing, schooling, health care or even adequate space for them to live. Dickens and Engels, Jack London and George Orwell all wrote vividly about them. But since the 1950s, they have been growing exponentially and now have devoured whole cities -- like Kinshasa, which once was a smallish colonial capital with usable streets, breathable air and urban amenities, but show more now (according to Davis) is an immense extension of hovels with no overall order, no services or infrastructure, and barely enough food and water for its 6 million people. (The Wikipedia article paints a slightly more favorable picture but says 8 million; for confirmation of Davis's description, check out Kinshasa est devenu poubelle (a video about an attempted drive across town) or these BBC photos, Kinshasa 'The Dustbin'.)
Starting with millions of "displaced persons" following World War II, followed by other millions displaced from their small towns and villages by revolutions, civil wars, mammoth construction projects such as the Aswan dam, the partition of the Indian subcontinent, and the environmental degradation of the countryside by mining and other industries, "urban" populations have multiplied even in places without infrastructure or jobs or anything else to draw them. Or police adequate to control them. They overwhelm the urban institutions, "ruralizing" lands on the outskirts and in the interstices of the cities as they establish their own norms, systems of local exploitation, and their own improvised solutions getting food, shelter and safety to survive another day. The process is especially pronounced in Africa (Côte d'Ivoire, Tanzania, Congo-Kinshasa, Gabon, Angola), the Indian subcontinent, and everywhere in the global south, but it's happening in Los Angeles and other cities too. And in the huge colonias of Mexico City, villas miserias of Buenos Aires, and barrios of Caracas, among other places.
Davis is especially hard on the IMF and its "structural adjustment programs" (SAP's), which demanded that poor countries privatize all services in order to qualify for loans, the result being the disappearance of public services and controls. And he is scathingly critical of what he considers neoliberal pipe dreams, that (as the one-time anarchist architect John Turner put it), slums could be the solution, not the problem. That is, with proper guidance, the creative energies of the slum population (building their own housing, for example, and even micro-industries) would boost national development and economic growth, bettering lives for everybody. But no, says Davis, with example after example from case studies, slum populations are so exploited, first by richer forces outside the slum (such as all those Indians who have made themselves wealthy by charging exorbitant rents for wretched housing) and secondly by one another (early squatters charge high rents from later arrivals, for example) that they have no margin to save to improve their housing or much less to grow a stable business.
Another pipe dream that seemed to offer solution without cost has been Hernando De Soto's loudly proclaimed insistence that granting titles of ownership to squatters would release great sums of capital for entrepreneurship. Again using case studies, Davis lists what he calls the "epistemological fallacies" of such arguments. 1, "de Soto's heroic 'micro entrepreneurs' are usually displaced public-sector professionals or laid-off skilled workers," i.e., "entrepreneurs" by necessity, not choice. 2, very few of the working poor are truly self-employed, but renting space or tools -- the rickshaw that they pull, the wheelbarrow they haul, etc. -- from somebody just a little less poor, in a system of endlessly franchised petty exploitation. (Points 3, 4 & 5 are really elaborations of that same point 2.) Then 6, desperation over the real economy turns slum dwellers increasingly to seek semi-magical solutions, such as gambling and pyramid schemes, often with magical invocations to religious spirits. 7, financing by microcredits as in the Grameen Bank, important as it may be to the survival of a few, will never allow sufficient accumulation to help very many people; rather, they've become the "cargo cult" of NGO's, a seemingly low-cost solution that isn't. 8, "increasing competition with the informal sector depletes social capital and dissolves self-help networks and solidarities" -- the poor are fighting against the poor.
So what do we do? Well, according to Davis, we'll have to wait for his next book to find out. Or we can try to do something, like the Grameen Bank loans or Shakira's "Barefoot Foundation," to solve at least a small part of the problem. It may be that the efforts of people like Shakira and the Grameen Bank's Muhammad Yunus will make enough of a difference in enough people's lives in enough places in the world to change the whole slumming dynamic. But even if they don't have such a wide impact, efforts like those and the stairway a bunch of us built in a Caracas slum at least make lives easier for some people for some time. It's not enough, but it's something. show less
Slums are as old as industrialization, which first created them by bringing (driving) people from the country to the cities for their labor, without bothering to provide housing, schooling, health care or even adequate space for them to live. Dickens and Engels, Jack London and George Orwell all wrote vividly about them. But since the 1950s, they have been growing exponentially and now have devoured whole cities -- like Kinshasa, which once was a smallish colonial capital with usable streets, breathable air and urban amenities, but show more now (according to Davis) is an immense extension of hovels with no overall order, no services or infrastructure, and barely enough food and water for its 6 million people. (The Wikipedia article paints a slightly more favorable picture but says 8 million; for confirmation of Davis's description, check out Kinshasa est devenu poubelle (a video about an attempted drive across town) or these BBC photos, Kinshasa 'The Dustbin'.)
Starting with millions of "displaced persons" following World War II, followed by other millions displaced from their small towns and villages by revolutions, civil wars, mammoth construction projects such as the Aswan dam, the partition of the Indian subcontinent, and the environmental degradation of the countryside by mining and other industries, "urban" populations have multiplied even in places without infrastructure or jobs or anything else to draw them. Or police adequate to control them. They overwhelm the urban institutions, "ruralizing" lands on the outskirts and in the interstices of the cities as they establish their own norms, systems of local exploitation, and their own improvised solutions getting food, shelter and safety to survive another day. The process is especially pronounced in Africa (Côte d'Ivoire, Tanzania, Congo-Kinshasa, Gabon, Angola), the Indian subcontinent, and everywhere in the global south, but it's happening in Los Angeles and other cities too. And in the huge colonias of Mexico City, villas miserias of Buenos Aires, and barrios of Caracas, among other places.
Davis is especially hard on the IMF and its "structural adjustment programs" (SAP's), which demanded that poor countries privatize all services in order to qualify for loans, the result being the disappearance of public services and controls. And he is scathingly critical of what he considers neoliberal pipe dreams, that (as the one-time anarchist architect John Turner put it), slums could be the solution, not the problem. That is, with proper guidance, the creative energies of the slum population (building their own housing, for example, and even micro-industries) would boost national development and economic growth, bettering lives for everybody. But no, says Davis, with example after example from case studies, slum populations are so exploited, first by richer forces outside the slum (such as all those Indians who have made themselves wealthy by charging exorbitant rents for wretched housing) and secondly by one another (early squatters charge high rents from later arrivals, for example) that they have no margin to save to improve their housing or much less to grow a stable business.
Another pipe dream that seemed to offer solution without cost has been Hernando De Soto's loudly proclaimed insistence that granting titles of ownership to squatters would release great sums of capital for entrepreneurship. Again using case studies, Davis lists what he calls the "epistemological fallacies" of such arguments. 1, "de Soto's heroic 'micro entrepreneurs' are usually displaced public-sector professionals or laid-off skilled workers," i.e., "entrepreneurs" by necessity, not choice. 2, very few of the working poor are truly self-employed, but renting space or tools -- the rickshaw that they pull, the wheelbarrow they haul, etc. -- from somebody just a little less poor, in a system of endlessly franchised petty exploitation. (Points 3, 4 & 5 are really elaborations of that same point 2.) Then 6, desperation over the real economy turns slum dwellers increasingly to seek semi-magical solutions, such as gambling and pyramid schemes, often with magical invocations to religious spirits. 7, financing by microcredits as in the Grameen Bank, important as it may be to the survival of a few, will never allow sufficient accumulation to help very many people; rather, they've become the "cargo cult" of NGO's, a seemingly low-cost solution that isn't. 8, "increasing competition with the informal sector depletes social capital and dissolves self-help networks and solidarities" -- the poor are fighting against the poor.
So what do we do? Well, according to Davis, we'll have to wait for his next book to find out. Or we can try to do something, like the Grameen Bank loans or Shakira's "Barefoot Foundation," to solve at least a small part of the problem. It may be that the efforts of people like Shakira and the Grameen Bank's Muhammad Yunus will make enough of a difference in enough people's lives in enough places in the world to change the whole slumming dynamic. But even if they don't have such a wide impact, efforts like those and the stairway a bunch of us built in a Caracas slum at least make lives easier for some people for some time. It's not enough, but it's something. show less
Read for class.
This is utterly terrifying and damning. These slums are the exemplification of hell. I have seen some of these slums myself, and can confirm, if only to a minor degree, some of the horrors there. You feel oppressed and filthy and sick just seeing them. Your senses are bombarded. Davis certainly gets this depiction right.
I would have loved to have had some answers aside from finger-pointing. It is incredibly frustrating to have a truly nightmarish problem presented and no clear solution, and even being blamed for unconsciously being part of the problem - although I confess his rhetoric is very convincing. But what is to be done in these circumstances? Any caring person would feel despondent or enraged. But what can we do show more about all this?
I would recommend reading up on books on reducing consumption in order to get some last shreds of hope back from this.
Recommended for anyone who wishes to despair for the state of humanity. show less
This is utterly terrifying and damning. These slums are the exemplification of hell. I have seen some of these slums myself, and can confirm, if only to a minor degree, some of the horrors there. You feel oppressed and filthy and sick just seeing them. Your senses are bombarded. Davis certainly gets this depiction right.
I would have loved to have had some answers aside from finger-pointing. It is incredibly frustrating to have a truly nightmarish problem presented and no clear solution, and even being blamed for unconsciously being part of the problem - although I confess his rhetoric is very convincing. But what is to be done in these circumstances? Any caring person would feel despondent or enraged. But what can we do show more about all this?
I would recommend reading up on books on reducing consumption in order to get some last shreds of hope back from this.
Recommended for anyone who wishes to despair for the state of humanity. show less
Mike Davis is always someone to seize an opportunity to decry the horrible situation somewhere, but in this case, it is an exposé that cannot be made often enough. "Planet of Slums" is a catalogue of the institutional failures, the despicable destruction, the filth and pollution, the poverty, misery and want, the disease and cynicism, in short the Verelendung of the worldwide poor that is the inevitable and eternal result of the capitalist mode of production. Within three decades, a stunning two billion people will live in the slums of megacities in the Third World, where all public services are absent, there are no toilets or drinking water, and where even the poor exploit the poor.
Mike Davis, as usual, pulls no punches and takes no show more prisoners in his description of the effects of the Washington Consensus on these undeveloped nations. Refuting the ideological mythologies of self-help such as De Sotoism and microlending, he demonstrates that the situation in the Third World is bleak and will get bleaker still. The longer the current order of neoliberalism and Structural Adjustment Programmes, led by such philanthropical heros as World Bank director Paul Wolfowitz, goes on, the more the absolute poverty, immiseration and loss of dignity of the world's poor will continue, and the greater inequality will become. Already one-third of the world's workforce is unemployed or underemployed, and worldwide average income has decreased the past decades. The megacities of the global south will become centers of hyper-alienation, and the inevitable result can only be the destruction of the current order, or the destruction of the world. The world's five billion poor are at our door - hear them knock! show less
Mike Davis, as usual, pulls no punches and takes no show more prisoners in his description of the effects of the Washington Consensus on these undeveloped nations. Refuting the ideological mythologies of self-help such as De Sotoism and microlending, he demonstrates that the situation in the Third World is bleak and will get bleaker still. The longer the current order of neoliberalism and Structural Adjustment Programmes, led by such philanthropical heros as World Bank director Paul Wolfowitz, goes on, the more the absolute poverty, immiseration and loss of dignity of the world's poor will continue, and the greater inequality will become. Already one-third of the world's workforce is unemployed or underemployed, and worldwide average income has decreased the past decades. The megacities of the global south will become centers of hyper-alienation, and the inevitable result can only be the destruction of the current order, or the destruction of the world. The world's five billion poor are at our door - hear them knock! show less
I'm not going to lie: this is dry. Really, really dry. I like dry, as a general rule, or at least it doesn't bother me - but this? Man. Maybe it's because the things he covers are so wrenchingly, horribly emotional and in order to get through it with any objectivity he had to cloak himself in boringness. At any rate, the information is valuable - maybe critical - and well worth wading through the whole of the text. The glimpse of our urban future that Davis provides is one we need to look at, hard. And I tell you: you will never take your toilet for granted again.
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Author Information
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Mike Davis is the author of many books, including City of Quartz, The Monster at Our Door, Buda's Wagon, and Planet of Slums. He is the recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and the Lannan Literary Award. He lives in San Diego.
Awards and Honors
Awards
Common Knowledge
- Canonical title*
- Planet der Slums
- Original title
- Planet of Slums
- Original publication date
- 2006
- Related movies
- Slumdog Millionaire (2008 | IMDb)
- Epigraph
- Slum, semi-slum, and superslum...to this has come the evolution of cities. --Patrick Geddes
- Dedication
- for my darlin' Roisin
- First words*
- Irgendwann im nächsten oder übernächsten Jahr wird eine Frau in Ajegunle, einem Slum von Lagos, ein Kind zur Welt bringen, ein junger Mann wird in Westjava sein Dorf verlassen und zu den Lichtern der Grossstadt Jakarta auf... (show all)brechen oder ein Bauer wird mit seiner verarmten Familie in eines der zahllosen pueblos jovenes von Lima ziehen.
- Last words*
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)Während das Imperium über ein Orwell'sches Arsenal an Repressionstechnologien verfügt, haben die Geächteten die Götter des Chaos auf ihrer Seite.
- Blurbers
- Roy, Arundhati
- Original language
- English
- Canonical DDC/MDS
- 307.76
- Canonical LCC
- HV4028
*Some information comes from Common Knowledge in other languages. Click "Edit" for more information.
Classifications
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- Sociology, Economics, Nonfiction, General Nonfiction, Politics and Government, Science & Nature, History
- DDC/MDS
- 307.76 — Society, government, & culture Social sciences, sociology & anthropology Communities Specific kinds of communities Urban communities
- LCC
- HV4028 — Social sciences Social pathology. Social and public welfare. Criminology Social pathology. Social and public welfare. Protection, assistance and relief Poor in cities. Slums
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- ISBNs
- 19
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- 6