Planet of Slums. Mike Davis

where the centrifugal forces of the city collide with the implosion of the countryside. Thus Dakar’s huge impoverished suburb, Pikine, according to researcher Mohamadou Abdoul, is the product of the convergence of “two large-scale demographic influxes beginning in the 1970s: the arrival of populations that had been forced out – often by the military – of Dakar’s working-class neighborhoods and shantytowns, and the arrival of people caught up in the rural exodus.”⁹⁴ Likewise, the two million poor people in Bangalore’s rapidly growing slum periphery include both slum-dwellers expelled from the center and farm laborers driven off the land. On the edges of Mexico City, Buenos Aires, and other Latin American cities, it is common to find shantytowns of new rural migrants next to walled suburbs of middle-class commuters fleeing crime and insecurity in the city center.⁹⁵

      A migrant stream of polluting, toxic and often illegal industries also seeks the permissive obscurity of the periphery. Geographer Hans Schenk observes that the urban fringe in Asia is a regulatory vacuum, a true frontier where “Darwin beats Keynes” and piratical entrepreneurs and corrupt politicians are largely unfettered by law or public scrutiny. Most of Beijing’s small garment sweatshops, for example, are hidden away in an archipelago of still partly agricultural villages and shantytowns on the city’s southern edge. Likewise in Bangalore, the urban fringe is where entrepreneurs can most profitably mine cheap labor with minimal oversight by the state.⁹⁶ Millions of temporary workers and desperate peasants also hover around the edges of such world capitals of super-exploitation as Surat and Shenzhen. These labor nomads lack secure footing in either city or countryside, and often spend their lifetimes in a kind of desperate Brownian motion between the two. In Latin America, meanwhile, an inverse logic operates: labor contractors increasingly hire urban shantytown-dwellers for seasonal or temporary work in the countryside.⁹⁷

      But the principal function of the Third World urban edge remains as a human dump. In some cases, urban waste and unwanted immigrants end up together, as in such infamous “garbage slums” as the aptly named Quarantina outside Beirut, Hilat Kusha outside Khartoum, Santa Cruz Meyehualco in Mexico City, the former Smoky Mountain in Manila, or the huge Dhapa dump and slum on the fringe of Kolkata. Equally common are the desolate government camps and crude site-and-service settlements that warehouse populations expelled in the course of municipal wars against slums. Outside of Penang and Kuala Lumpur, for example, slum evictees are marooned in minimalist transit camps. As housing activists explain:

      The term “long house” (rumay panjang in Bahasa Malay) conjures up comfortable images of some long-ago form of Malay vernacular housing, but the reality of these transit camps is quite different. These long houses are bleak lines of flimsy plywood and asbestos shacks, attached at the sides and facing across unpaved and treeless lanes onto more shacks opposite, with spotty basic services, if any. And these long houses have turned out to be not so temporary after all. Many evictees are still there, twenty years later, still waiting for the government to realize its promise of low-income housing….⁹⁸

Anthropologist Monique Skidmore risked arrest to visit some of the dismal peri-urban townships – so-called “New Fields” – outside Rangoon where the military dictatorship forcibly relocated hundreds of thousands of urbanites whose former slums stood in the way of the tourist-themepark rebuilding of the city center. “Residents speak of the sorrow and pain of loss of former neighborhoods … alcohol shops, rubbish piles, stagnant water, and mud infused with untreated sewage surround most homes.” On the other hand, things are even worse in Mandalay’s peripheral shantytowns. There, Skidmore explains, “township residents must walk to the foothills of the Shan mountains looking for firewood, and there are no industrial zones, garment factories, and other sweatshops to underemploy laborers as there are in some of Rangoon’s relocated townships.”⁹⁹

      International refugees and internally displaced people (IDPs) are often more harshly treated even than urban evictees – and some of the Third World’s huge refugee camps have evolved into edge cities in their own right. Thus Gaza – considered by some to be the world’s largest slum – is essentially an urbanized agglomeration of refugee camps (750,000 refugees) with two-thirds of the population subsisting on less than $2 per day.¹⁰⁰ Dadaad, just inside the Kenyan border, houses 125,000 Somalis, just as Goma in Zaire during the mid-1990s was a pitiful refuge for an estimated 700,000 Rwandans, many of whom died of cholera due to the appalling sanitation conditions. Khartoum’s desert periphery includes four huge camps (Mayo Farms, Jebel Awlia, Dar el Salaam and Wad al-Bashir) warehousing 400,000 victims of drought, famine and civil war. Another 1.5 million internally displaced people – mainly Southerners – live in scores of large squatter settlements around the Sudanese metropolis.¹⁰¹

      Likewise, hundreds of thousands of war victims and returned refugees from Iran and Pakistan squat without water or sanitation in scores of hillside slums above Kabul. “In the Karte Ariana district,” reported the Washington Post in August 2002, “hundreds of families who fled combat between Taliban and opposition forces in rural northern Afghanistan are now squeezed into a maze of vertical slums without kitchens or bathrooms, sleeping 15 and 20 to a hut.” There has been little rain for years and many wells have stopped working; children in these slums suffer from continual sore throats and various diseases from contaminated water. Life expectancy is among the lowest in the world.¹⁰²

      Two of the world’s largest populations of IDPs are in Angola and Colombia. Angola was forcibly urbanized by more than a quarter-century of civil war (1975 to 2002) – spurred on by the machinations of Pretoria and the White House – which displaced 30 percent of the population. Many refugees never returned to their former homes in the ruined and dangerous countryside, but squatted instead in the bleak musseques (shantytowns) that surround Luanda, Lobito, Cabinda, and other cities. As a result, Angola, only 14 percent urban in 1970, is now a majority urban nation. Most of its city-dwellers are both desperately poor and almost totally ignored by the state, which in 1998 was estimated to spend only 1 percent of its budget on public education and welfare.¹⁰³

      The unending civil wars in Colombia likewise have added more than 400,000 IDPs to Bogotá’s urban poverty belt, which includes the huge informal settlements of Sumapaz, Ciudad Bolívar, Usme and Soacha. “Most displaced,” explains an aid NGO, “are social outcasts, excluded from formal life and employment. Currently, 653,800 Bogotanos (2002) have no employment in the city and, even more shocking, half of them are under the age of 29.” Without urban skills and frequently without access to schools, these young peasants and their children are ideal recruits for street gangs and paramilitaries. Local businessmen vandalized by urchins, in turn, form gupos de limpieza with links to rightwing death squads, and the bodies of murdered children are dumped at the edge of town.¹⁰⁴

      The same nightmare prevails on the outskirts of Cali, where anthropologist Michael Taussig invokes Dante’s Inferno to describe the struggle for survival in two “stupendously dangerous” peripheral slums. Navarro is a notorious “garbage mountain” where hungry women and children pick through waste while youthful gunmen (malo de malo) are either hired or exterminated by local rightwing paramilitaries. The other settlement, Carlos Alfredo Díaz, is full of “kids running around with homemade shotguns and grenades.” “It dawns on me,” writes Taussig, “that just as the guerilla have their most important base in the endless forests of the Caquetá, at the end of nowhere on the edge of the Amazon basin, so the gang world of youth gone wild has its sacred grove, too, right here on the urban edge, where the slums hit the cane fields at Carlos Alfredo Díaz.”¹⁰⁵

      1 Chris Abani, Graceland, New York 2004, p. 7.

      2 Anqing Shi, How Access to Urban Potable Water and Sewage Connections Affects Child Mortality, Development Research Group working paper, World Bank, January 2000, p. 14.

      3 DPU/UCL and UN-Habitat, Understanding Slums: Case Studies for the Global Report on Human Settlements, London 2003 – available on-line at www.ucl.ac.uk/dpureports/Global_Report. Most of these studies are summarized in an appendix