Planet of Slums [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

Planet of Slums is flambouyant, novel, and tremendously irritating. Mike Davis does a brilliant job of dramatizing conditions in the urban slums of "Third-World" cities, and makes an outstanding contribution in this respect. Predictably, he skewers the usual suspects - the IMF and the World Bank - like clockwork every 10 pages or so.

I looked in vain, however, for heroes or heroines, and for some sense of a way forward. There simply are none in this book. In the neo-Blade Runner urban universe of Planet of Slums, NGOs are agents of donor economic imperialism, the middle classes of countries enslave the poor, the poor exploit each other or are just victims, and the staff of the World Bank and IMF act like colonial bureaucrats overseeing the plantations down South. The author seems to purposely ignore the solutions and great effort of local people and their organizations, country governments, NGOs, private-sector companies, and others. As to the multi-laterals, Davis apparently does not know that many governments are repaying their loans much faster than new borrowing, and that these international organizations have largely become service providers with their clients increasingly in the driver's seat.

This extreme indifference to solutions and the agents of solutions is dangerous. Bad mouth donors and NGOs enough, and they will get gutted (as so much has), and low and middle-income countries will have to rely on capital markets or nothing.

Hopefully, Davis will use a bit of his profound creativity to investigate the way forward in the cities of the South in his next book. Even if he doesn't, I will probably read it.

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 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!

Sometime during the writing of this book - 2005 - the global urban population surpassed the global rural population. It has been estimated that both populations stand at about 3.2 billion. What is startling is that Mike Davis has calculated that the rural population has reached its peak and will begin to decline by 2020, and that all future world population growth will be in cities, primarily megacities (8 million or more) and hypercities (20 million or more). The total world population is expected to peak at 10 billion in the year 2050. If I'm still alive, I will be 95. I hope to experience peak global population, even though my actuarial tables would indicate otherwise.

This massive movement to the city has not been accompanied by industialization and development, instead there has been massive urbanization without economic growth. The future cities of glass and steel envisioned by urbanists have not materialized, instead the urban poor are squatting in crudely constructed slum dwellings on the periphery of cities. A "surplus of humanity" is accumulating on the outskirts of urban centers, an "accumulation of the wretched."

It is no surprise that Davis grew up and currently lives in the Los Angeles area. (He also wrote "City of Quartz," a book about Los Angeles.) Angelenos tend to see the world as it is seen on television or at the movies. Davis' images of Third World slums are those of "Blade Runner" or "Escape from New York". One wonders if Davis has ever visited a Third World slum or interviewed one of its denizens. By referring to them as "the wretched," he will never be accused of being too close to his subject.

Why the massive movement toward cities? And why is this dystopian urbanization occurring on this scale? Davis puts the blame squarely on the neoliberal policies of the IMF. In the late 70's and early 80's, the IMF imposed its structural adjustment program (SAP). It was a one-size-fits-all program for debt burdened Third World countries to open up their economies and theoretically participate in global economy. The program (SAP) called for the deregulation of agriculture and the downsizing of the public sector. (Read also Joseph Stiglitz' "Globalization and its Discontents.") The consequences of this policy are still being debated, but Davis focuses only on the negatives. He points out that hundreds of thousands of workers - millions - worldwide are being pushed from the countryside without the pull of jobs in the cities. The results are masses of humanity in shantytowns on the periphery of urban centers.

If this book sounds extremely negative, it's because it is. Davis criticizes governments for not building enough public housing, and when they do, it's not in the right place and it lacks community. He complains when squatters do not have title to their land or cannot formally rent their shanties, but he also criticizes Hernando De Soto's campaign to do just that. He claims it would lead to further stratification and exploitation of the poor.

Davis sees no solutions to the current trends. He ends the book with the following image: "Night after night, hornetlike helicopter gunships stalk enigmatic enemies in the narrow streets of the slum districts, pouring hellfire into the shanties or fleeing cars. Every morning the slums reply with suicide bombers and eloquent explosions. If the empire can deploy Orwellian technologies of repression, its outcasts have the gods of chaos on their side."

I thought immediately of that scene in the last "Terminator" movie. Davis displays some eloquent prose and solid research, but he may have lost sight of the surplus of humanity living in slums.