Mike Davis - Planet of Slums

Planet of Slums

MIKE DAVIS

First published by Verso 2006
Mike Davis 2006
All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

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Verso
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Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-485-5 (ebook)
ISBN-10: 1-84467-022-8 (pbk)

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

Typeset in Garamond by Andrea Stimpson
Printed in the USA

for my darlin Roisin

Slum, semi-slum, and superslum ...
to this has come the evolution of cities.

Patrick Geddes

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

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

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 Limas 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.

The earth has urbanized even faster than originally predicted by the Club of Rome in its notoriously Malthusian 1972 report Limits of Growth. In 1950 there were 86 cities in the world with a population of more than one million; today there are 400, and by 2015 there will be at least 550.

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.

Figure 1.
World Population Growth

Third World Megacities

(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/So Paulo Extended Metropolitan Region (RSPER) which includes the medium-sized cities on the 500-kilometer-long transport axis between Brazils 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 larger than Tokyo Yokohama.

Even more surprising is the vast West African conurbation rapidly coalescing along the Gulf of Guinea with Lagos (23 million people by Tragically, it probably will also be the biggest single footprint of urban poverty on earth.

Figure 3.
Urbanization of the Gulf of Guinea

The largest-scale posturban structures, however, are emerging in East Asia. The Pearl River (Hong KongGuangzhou)

These new Chinese megalopolises, according to two leading researchers, may be only the first stage in the emergence of a As it takes shape over the next century, this great dragon-like sprawl of cities will constitute the physical and demographic culmination of millennia of urban evolution. The ascendency of coastal East Asia, in turn, will surely promote a TokyoShanghai world city dipole to equality with the New YorkLondon axis in the control of global flows of capital and information.

The price of this new urban order, however, will be increasing inequality within and between cities of different sizes and economic specializations. Chinese experts, indeed, are currently debating whether the ancient income-and-development chasm between city and countryside is now being replaced by an equally fundamental gap between small, particularly inland cities and the giant coastal metropolises.

In Africa, the supernova growth of a few cities like Lagos (from 300,000 in 1950 to 13.5 million today) has been matched by the transformation of several dozen small towns and oases like Ouagadougou, Nouakchott, Douala, Kampala, Tanta, Conakry, Ndjamena, Lumumbashi, Mogadishu, Antananarivo and Bamako into sprawling cities larger than San Francisco or Manchester. (Most spectacular, perhaps, has been the transformation of the bleak Congolese diamond-trading center of Mbuji-Mayi from a small town of 25,000 in 1960 into a contemporary metropolis of 2 million, with growth occurring mostly in the last decade.

Moreover, as anthropologist Gregory Guldin has emphasized, urbanization must be conceptualized as structural transformation along, and intensified interaction between, every point of an urbanrural continuum.

This is also true in Malaysia, where journalist Jeremy Seabrook describes the fate of Penang fishermen engulfed by urbanization without migrating, their lives overturned, even while remaining on the spot where they were born. After the fishermens homes were cut off from the sea by a new highway, their fishing grounds polluted by urban waste, and neighboring hillsides deforested to build apartment blocks, they had little choice but to send their daughters into nearby Japanese-owned sweatshop factories. It was the destruction, Seabrook emphasizes, not only of the livelihood of people who had always lived symbiotically with the sea, but also of the psyche and spirit of the fishing people.

The result of this collision between the rural and the urban in China, much of Southeast Asia, India, Egypt, and perhaps West Africa is a hermaphroditic landscape, a partially urbanized countryside that Guldin argues may be a significant new path of human settlement and development a form neither rural nor urban but a blending of the two wherein a dense web of transactions ties large urban cores to their surrounding regions. German architect and urban theorist Thomas Sieverts proposes that this diffuse urbanism, which he calls Zwischenstadt (in-between city), is rapidly becoming the defining landscape of the twenty-first century in rich as well as poor countries, regardless of earlier urban histories. Unlike Guldin, however, Sieverts conceptualizes these new conurbations as polycentric webs with neither traditional cores nor recognizable peripheries.

Such extended metropolitan regions, writes geographer David Drakakis-Smith, referring specifically to Delhi, represent a fusion of urban and regional development in which the distinction between what is urban and rural has become blurred as cities expand along corridors of communication, by-passing or surrounding small towns and villages which subsequently experience