Mike Davis: Planet of Slums.

Mike Davis Planet of Slums Verso, 2006, 240 pp. ISBN: 1-844-67022-8 (pbk) 16 [pounds sterling]

In the production of human misery, capitalism has historically proven itself to be a vital force. Engels memorably described the urban poverty, squalor and harsh labour conditions of early nineteenth-century Britain as results of the linked processes of urbanisation and industrialisation unleashed by the first capitalist transformation; Mike Davis's Planet of Slums offers USA global catalogue of contemporary urban poverty that stands as a worthy successor to this.

Drawing on pioneering UN reports and a substantial body of literature comprising case studies from across three continents (Africa, Asia and Latin America), Davis vividly lays bare the dimensions of a looming global catastrophe. In statistical terms, the urban poor number around 3.2 billion people, with upwards of I billion living in slum dwellings. Current and accelerating growth rates suggest that this mass will expand further as the world's population becomes predominantly urban.

This is a relatively recent phenomenon, says Davis, and one that has been powered by a range of factors and forces over the last three decades--in contrast to Engels's singular vision of capitalism as the motor of rural migration, growing manufacture and urban dwelling. In Davis's analysis, complex dynamics of international capitalist policy (the notorious 'structural adjustment programmes'), processes of decolonisation and national independence, civil and international wars, and drought and famine act as the mass producers of ThirdWorld slums. Furthermore, there is no established (or emerging) base of formal employment available in most Third World cities to offer the migrants a foothold, since mass urbanisation is now decoupled from industrialisation, and is creating a surplus population far beyond Engels's expectations. The characteristics of urban living resulting from this complex process are stark indeed--some echoing Engels's descriptions of Victorian Manchester, while others are more novel, but equally dis-turbing.

In the arena of public health, Davis describes familiar problems of overcrowding and lack of sanitation, with their consequent health risks from polluted water diseases (cholera, typhus, diarrhoea). Access to clean water, the most important medicine in the world, is scandalously absent--a legacy that post-colonial governments have been unable to redress. Public provision of effective sanitation and safe water is now further threatened by the imposition of neoliberal policies of privatisation, which, incredibly, impose 'user fees' for access to public toilets and to water supplies that slum dwellers can ill afford.

And these are not the only health risks facing the urban poor. In their struggle to find a piece of land, modern slum dwellers are forced to occupy increasingly precarious locations--on swampland, flood plains, volcano slopes, rubbish dumps and contaminated sites. Here, they confront both natural hazards--landslides or collapse, flooding and earthquakes--and unnatural threats posed by toxic industrial activities, or waste dumping carried on too close to residential areas. Perhaps worst of all is the ever-present danger of brutal eviction or death by fire--started accidentally amongst dwellings that easily burn, or deliberately in order to gain quick access to desired land on the part of property developers. As Davis points out, the very scale of urban growth in the Third World and its chaotic spatial arrangements transgress the classic principles of urban planning and environmental efficiencies that the city needs in order to be sustainable.

As for the housing itself, the historical lack of large volumes of public housing stock in ThirdWorld cities has prompted a variety of solutions on the part of the arriving masses. The archetypal figure of the squatter, recycling waste materials in order to make a fragile dwelling on the city's edge, is only part of the story. Davis draws our attention to the substantial rented-property sector and to practices of 'pirate urbanisation' (i.e. the illegal subdivision of titled land), which have introduced formal and informal real-estate markets into the slums. These trends are exacerbating already chronic shortfalls of habitable housing, and encouraging more cramped 'infill developments' and multi-family constructions.

Increasing social divisions are another consequence, since these markets are worked to advantage by both urban landowners and those poor people who already have some titled property, who may engage in forms of petty exploitation (subletting) at the expense of the very poorest. This individualising dynamic then inhibits the development of collective struggles over housing provision from within the slum communities themselves. As the influx of migrants to the cities continues, Davis points out that 'the periphery' is now actually housing the majority of city dwellers, and expanding ever further onto unsafe lands.

Reviewing the historical record, Davis argues that the post-colonial state has clearly failed to provide satisfactory urban housing. Since the era of state intervention has now given way to that of neoliberalism in international policy-making, it has been the private sector that has more recently offered its own 'pseudo solutions' to persisting urban squalor. Neither the upgrading of slums nor the conferring of property rights on slum dwellings have been adequate responses. Furthermore, these schemes have been entirely dwarfed by the massive trend of land speculation and urban property development sweeping Third World cities, which has worsened the situation of the urban poor. Vast profiteering by landowners (who enjoy far higher concentrations of ownership than in Western cities) and soaring land values have seen once-empty urban fringes targeted by developers, excluding the poor from access and leaving them the only option of settling on unsafe lands. In sum, it is the commodification of housing that is powering the Third World housing crisis, rather than being its salvation.

The urban dwellings of the poor come under further threat from the ongoing practices of urban renewal and segregation that Third World states repeatedly engage in. At perpetual war with their slum communities, these states redraw spatial boundaries for the advantage of social elites and themselves, maximising private profit and social control over political opponents. The scale of population removal is immense, with hundreds of thousands being evicted and resettled each year. In contrast with this state of perpetual insecurity, Davis describes the recent development of gated communities at the cities' edges, in which Third World bourgeoisies attempt to physically separate themselves from the surrounding squalor, relying on excessive security measures and on-site infrastructures as their 'disembedding' mechanisms.

For the urban poor, city life has now become a desperate scramble for survival. Davis recounts the drastic impact of Western-imposed debt-repayment and structural-adjustment programmes on Third-world economies, with neoliberal policies of privatisation, slashed public welfare and the removal of all economic controls and subsidies taking the place of state-led development strategies. This economic shock therapy--prompting rural migration, underemployment and diminished social safety nets--has forcibly taught the expanding urban poor new survival strategies. Households have regrouped around the abilities of their women to combine economic activities with expanded domestic labour; around family structures altered to save on living costs (with children forced into work); and around self-help networks elaborated to breaking point. The urbanisation of poverty powered by these forces has been ah explosive feature of even those Third World societies considered to be the success stories of neoliberal restructuring (India and China). Parallel developments in the old 'second world' have reinforced this dynamic of mass pauperisation.

There is now, Davis concludes, a surplus humanity of epic proportions 'warehoused' in the slums of this expanded Third World, dwarfing any seen during the industrialisation of the West. An informal workforce one-billion strong constitutes the majority of economically active populations in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa and many South Asian cities. Its survival depends on precarious efforts at economic improvisation and the relentless subdivision of subsistence niches in ruthlessly competitive environments. Ensnared in myriad networks of petty exploitation, this wretched of the Earth have no prospect of escape through mass emigration, unlike their nineteenth-century forebears. Instead, they are trapped in a 'living museum of human exploitation', in which economic conditions dictate the selling of children as bonded labour to slum manufacturers, or organ donation for foreign harvest. The resulting tensions can and do easily erupt in futile outbursts of communalism or ethno-religious/racial violence.

As for the future of the slum masses, this is as yet unclear. Engels witnessed the dual processes of urbanisation and industrialisation forming the basis for a common political opposition centred on the industrial labour movement emerging in its factories. Davis's model of urbanisation without an industrial base or stable formal employment permits no such unilateral equation. A range of political possibilities exist--communal violence, Islamic militancy, revolutionary social movement--and many acts of urban resistance have been documented (e.g. the anti-IMF food riots of the 1980s, culminating in the Venezuelan caracazo). Could an organised opposition to global capitalism emerge from such a set of social conditions? Davis is deferring an answer pending his concrete comparative study of the politics of the poor, which is now underway. A lot will be riding on the conclusions.