Mike Davis

Planet of Slums


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      Planet of Slums

      Planet of Slums

      MIKE DAVIS

      This paperback edition published by Verso 2017

      First published by Verso 2006

      © Mike Davis 2006, 2007, 2017

      All rights reserved

      The moral rights of the author have been asserted

      1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

      Verso UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201 www.versobooks.com

      Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

      ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-661-8

      ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-485-5 (US EBK)

      ISBN-13: 978-1-78168-368-2 (UK EBK)

      British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

      Printed in the UK by CPI Mackays

       for my darlin’ Roisin

      Slum, semi-slum, and superslum ...

      to this has come the evolution of cities.

       Patrick Geddes 1

      1 Quoted in Lewis Mumford, The City in History, New York 1968, p. 464.

      Contents

       1. The Urban Climacteric

       2. The Prevalence of Slums

       3. The Treason of the State

       4. Illusions of Self-Help

       5. Haussmann in the Tropics

       6. Slum Ecology

       7. SAPing the Third World

       8. A Surplus Humanity?

       Epilogue: Down Vietnam Street

       Acknowledgements

       Index

      One

      The Urban Climacteric

      We live in the age of the city. The city is everything to us – it consumes us, and for that reason we glorify it.

       Onookome Okome 1

      Sometime in the next year or two, a woman will give birth in the Lagos slum of Ajegunle, a young man will flee his village in west Java for the bright lights of Jakarta, or a farmer will move his impoverished family into one of Lima’s innumerable pueblos jovenes. The exact event is unimportant and it will pass entirely unnoticed. Nonetheless it will constitute a watershed in human history, comparable to the Neolithic or Industrial revolutions. For the first time the urban population of the earth will outnumber the rural. Indeed, given the imprecisions of Third World censuses, this epochal transition has probably already occurred.

      Megacities and Desokotas

      Ninety-five percent of this final buildout of humanity will occur in the urban areas of developing countries, whose populations will double to nearly 4 billion over the next generation.6 Indeed, the combined urban population of China, India, and Brazil already roughly equals that of Europe and North America. The scale and velocity of Third World urbanization, moreover, utterly dwarfs that of Victorian Europe. London in 1910 was seven times larger than it had been in 1800, but Dhaka, Kinshasa, and Lagos today are each approximately forty times larger than they were in 1950. China – urbanizing “at a speed unprecedented in human history” – added more city-dwellers in the 1980s than did all of Europe (including Russia) in the entire nineteenth century!7

      (population in millions)

      The exploding cities of the developing world are also weaving extraordinary new urban networks, corridors, and hierarchies. In the Americas, geographers already talk about a leviathan known as the Rio/São Paulo Extended Metropolitan Region (RSPER) which includes the medium-sized cities on the 500-kilometer-long transport axis between Brazil’s two largest metropolises, as well as the important industrial area dominated by Campinas; with a current population of 37 million, this embryonic megalopolis is already