Planet Of Slums [ハードカバー]

This is a bold, visionary work with many merits. It also has one major flaw which makes it infuriating. First, the merits. Davis highlights the way contemporary urbanization has become largely detached from such processes as 'modernization' and 'industrialization'. Instead, rural residents have simply been pushed off their land by neoliberal policies, civil wars and such to the point where urban residents may constitute a majority of humanity (he does not consider at all the possibility that anyone may have chosen to move to the cities, either to escape constrictions on their choices of sexual partners, to exit family feuds, to seek opportunities, to party all night, etc). Cities in the global south are now mega-holding pens for the poor, sometimes, as in some Sub-Saharan African cities, without even a modest-sized middle class. The most rudimentary sanitation and health care is non-existent (Davis notes, early on, that some of the aspects of the city--pollution, industry, consumption--have migrated to the countryside as well, but he doesn't come back to this point). Slums are constantly being demolished and people are being uprooted as governments make way for permanent (shopping malls, condominiums) or temporary (Olympic games) encampments of wealthier people. He effectively debunks a number of romantic myths about slums--that they are self-organizing communities (they use subcontractors to construct their housing), that they are hotbeds of militant squatter movements (such movements are often coopted, creating a new strata of slightly privileged landowners), that they are filled with micro-capitalists (more slum dwellers work for petty capitalists than control their own enterprises). Instead, he produces the much less gratifying picture of myriad levels of petty exploitation, for example, by owners of slum housing of a renting population. It is a sober and disturbing picture, all the more so because he argues that previous beneficiaries of various nationalist and social democratic programs have become part of a privileged strata--which, at least in my mind, raised questions about whether programs can possibly be crafted that would not fall into this trap (there are other themes in the book--the limits of NGOs, the problems with IMF austerity measures--that are likely to be highly familiar to people who've read the radical literature on the global south of the last fifteen years).

Now for the infuriating part. The book is strictly a review of the literature produced by anthropologists, geographers, sociologists, novelists, etc writing about slums. There is virtually no firsthand observation in the entire text. I have no idea why this is. Surely as part of the research he visited some slums? As a result, slum dwellers almost never speak in the course of the book (I can think of two exceptions, one actually being a fictional character, the other drawn from someone else's ethnographic research). The book as a result lacks the humanistic grit that characterizes Davis' earlier work on LA and his more recent reporting on New Orleans.

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!