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Nature and Society August-September 2006 edition Book review: Planet of Slums By Mike Davis. Verso, London and New York, 2006. 228pp. $35.00 If ever there was a manifestation of overpopulation, it is the slum. Today, one billion people live in the world’s slums, surrounded by excrement and pollution, often on precarious hillsides or floodplains. They squat in structures made of crude brick, recycled plastic or scrap wood, often without electricity, clean water or even rudimentary sanitation. One slum had only ten working pit latrines available for 40 000 people. The scale of Third World urbanisation is now so rapid that some cities like Dhaka are 40 times bigger than they were in 1950. Yet since 1970, slum growth has outpaced urbanisation per se. Sao Paulo’s favelas, for instance, housed a mere eightieth of the city’s population back in 1973 but, within 20 years, a fifth of the city’s residents lived there. And the situation is getting worse. Every year, the global slum population grows by another 25 million. This is a powerful book by Mike Davis, described by one reviewer as a ‘brilliant maverick scholar’. Indeed, every page has up to six or seven footnote references, an indication of his extraordinary breadth of researching about slums from Kinshasa to Lagos, from Karachi to Lima, from Kolkata to Luanda. Slums are also characterised by overcrowding. Davis provides shocking statistics of human congestion. In Kolkata’s bustees, for example, an average 13.4 people are crammed into each occupied room. These 10 by 15-foot rooms stacked on top of one another house 18 000 people per acre. And in Manshiyet Nasr in Egypt, more than a half a million share 350 acres. While the poor live in ‘slums of anthill-like density’, the wealthy enjoy their gardens and open space. Even when land is set aside for low-income housing, the middle classes often subvert it. Governments are constantly seeking to relocate the poor, yet they cling to neighbourhoods close to services and jobs. Squatters and renters are routinely evicted and, when relocated away from city centres, may lose up to half their income in transport getting back daily to where the jobs are. In an aptly named chapter A surplus humanity?, Davis describes slums as ‘living museums of human exploitation’. The most shockingly exploited are children who work rather than go to school. A mere seven per cent of slum-children aged between 5 and 16 in Dhaka, for instance, attend school. In Varanasi (Benares), famous for its temples and holy men, 200 000 bonded child labourers under 14 weave carpets and embroider saris. Most of the children have been ‘kidnapped or lured away or pledged by their parents for paltry sums of money’. These children may work up to 20 hours a day without a break and under conditions of physical and verbal abuse. Slums are often swelled by the ranks of people displaced by civil war, notably in Angola and Colombia. Most displaced people are excluded from formal life and employment. Nearly two thirds of a million slum dwellers of Bogota, for example, have no employment and half are under 29. Such young people are, unsurprisingly, ‘ideal recruits for street gangs and paramilitaries’. Globally, one billion workers, or a third of the world’s labour force, are unemployed or underemployed. Davis notes bleakly that ‘there is no official scenario for the reincorporation of this vast surplus of labour into the mainstream of the world economy’. Davis is scathing in his criticism of structural adjustment programs (SAPs) imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on its client nations. As it increased its lending step by step, it ratcheted up the structural adjustments – a ‘poisoned chalice’ of devaluation, privatisation, removal of import controls and food subsidies, enforced cost recovery in health and education, and ruthless downsizing of the public sector. And yet, as the United Nations Settlement Program (UN-HABITAT) pointed out in its groundbreaking 2003 report Challenge of the Slums, the biggest cause of poverty and inequality during the 1980s and 1990s was ‘the retreat of the state’. This book pulls no punches. It is exhausting to read but only because of the subject matter. It is essential reading for anyone interested in development issues. Highly recommended. Jenny Goldie August-September 2006 edition accessible here
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