With a third of the global urban population already living in Dickensian slums, at least half under the age of twenty, Mike Davis explores the threat of disease, of forced settlement on hazardous terrains, and of state violence on huge populations. He shows also how poverty not only grew massively in the 1990s but how the gap between rich and poor countries expanded and how women and minorities fell further behind. Surveying the new urban poor from Bombay to Cairo, Cape Town to Rio de Janeiro, Mike Davis argues that this ...
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With a third of the global urban population already living in Dickensian slums, at least half under the age of twenty, Mike Davis explores the threat of disease, of forced settlement on hazardous terrains, and of state violence on huge populations. He shows also how poverty not only grew massively in the 1990s but how the gap between rich and poor countries expanded and how women and minorities fell further behind. Surveying the new urban poor from Bombay to Cairo, Cape Town to Rio de Janeiro, Mike Davis argues that this enormous population of marginalised labourers is not an industrious beehive of ambitious entrepreneurs but a stagnant ferment of extreme Darwinian competition which threatens to overflow the shanty-towns, and swamp the homes and businesses of the urban rich.
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Davis gives us here a global catalogue of contemporary urban poverty as it affects upwards of 3 billion of the world's peoples. In an increasingly urbanising world, the mass migrations to the megacities of Africa, Asia and Latin America have overwhelmed the abilities of their nations' to provide either sufficient formal employment or necessary infrastructures of housing, public health (sanitation, clean water) and environmentally secure residential areas. Such a decoupling of urbanisation from its traditional base of industrialisation is producing a world surplus population 'warehoused' in slum areas of the cities of the South. Here they face immense problems in their struggles for daily survival. Economic activity increasingly takes the form of an improvisation, outside the formal sector to secure a subsistence niche. Housing is precariously achieved in unsafe locations - from swamplands to rubbish dumps - where fire, toxic waste and landslides are ever present threats. Tenure here is equally uncertain, slum dwellers having to settle for illegal subdivisions of existing titled lands or 'infill' developments in already cramped spaces. Public health cedes to overcrowding, polluted water, and few sanitation measures. The picture is undoubtedly bleak - and Davis leaves us in no doubt that the post-colonial state can not provide any significant solution to the range of problems facing the modern slum dweller. As for other political solutions, he is deferring any discussion of the political potential of the slum millions to a subsequent investigation.
