Planet of Slums. Mike Davis

Bryceson, “Disappearing Peasantries? Rural Labour Redundancy in the Neo-Liberal Era and Beyond,” in Bryceson, Kay and Mooij, pp. 304–05.

      47 Sébastien de Dianous, “Les Damnés de la terre du Cambodge,”Le Monde Diplomatique, September 2004, p. 20.

      48 See Josef Gugler, “Overurbanization reconsidered,” in Gugler, Cities in the Developing World, pp. 114–23.

      49 Foreword to Jacinta Prunty, Dublin Slums, 1800–1925: A Study in Urban Geography, Dublin 1998, p. ix. Larkin, of course, forgets Dublin’s Mediterranean counterpart: Naples.

      50 Oberai, p. 13.

      51 UNCHS, An Urbanising World: Global Report on Human Settlements, Oxford 1996,p. 239.

      52 Priscilla Connolly, “Mexico City: our common future?”Environment and Urbanization 11:1 (April 1999), p. 56.

      53 Ivo Imparato and Jeff Ruster, Slum Upgrading and Participation: Lessons from Latin America, World Bank, Washington D.C. 2003, p. 333.

      54 John Browder and Brian Godfrey, Rainforest Cities: Urbanization, Development and Globalization of the Brazilian Amazon, New York 1997, p. 130.

      55 Yang Wenzhong and Wang Gongfan, “Peasant Movement: A Police Perspective,” in Michael Dutton (ed.), Streetlife China, Cambridge 1998, p. 89.

      56 Dileni Gunewardena, Urban Poverty in South Asia, working paper, Conference on Poverty Reduction and Social Progress, Rajendrapur, Bangladesh, April 1999, p. 1.

      57 Arif Hasan, “Introduction” to Akhtar Khan, Orangi Pilot Project: Reminiscences and Reflections, Karachi 1996, p. xxxiv.

      58 Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, New York 2004, p. 117.

      59 Gautam Chatterjee, “Consensus versus Confrontation,”Habitat Debate 8:2 (June 2002), p. 11. Statistic for Delhi from Rakesh Simha, “New Delhi: The World’s Shanty Capital in the Making,”OneWorld South Asia, 26 August 2003.

      60 Harvey Herr and Guenter Karl, Estimating Global Slum Dwellers, UN-Habitat working paper, Nairobi 2003, p. 19.

      61 Gordon Brown quoted in the Los Angeles Times, 4 October 2004.

      62 UN statistics quoted in John Vidal, “Cities are now the frontline of poverty,” The Guardian, 2 February 2005.

      Two

      The Prevalence of Slums

      He let his mind drift as he stared at the city, half slum, half paradise. How could a place be so ugly and violent, yet beautiful at the same time?

       Chris Abani ¹

      The astonishing prevalence of slums is the chief theme of The Challenge of Slums, a historic and somber report published in October 2003 by the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat). This first truly global audit of urban poverty, which follows in the famous footsteps of Friedrich Engels, Henry Mayhew, Charles Booth, and Jacob Riis, culminates two centuries of the scientific reconnaisance of slum life which began with James Whitelaw’s 1805 Survey of Poverty in Dublin. It is also the long-awaited empirical counterpart to the World Bank’s warnings in the 1990s that urban poverty would become the “most significant, and politically explosive, problem of the next century.”²

The Challenge of Slums, a collaboration of more than one hundred researchers, integrates three novel sources of analysis and data. First, it is based on synoptic case-studies of poverty, slum conditions, and housing policy in 34 metropolises from Abidjan to Sydney; this project was coordinated for UN-Habitat by the Development Planning Unit at University College London.³ Secondly, it utilizes a unique comparative database for 237 cities worldwide created by the UN-Habitat Urban Indicators Programme for the 2001 Istanbul Urban Summit.⁴ And thirdly, it incorporates global household survey data that breaks new ground by including China and the ex-Soviet bloc. The UN authors acknowledge a particular debt to Branko Milanovic, the World Bank economist who pioneered these surveys as a powerful microscope for studying global inequality. (In one of his papers, Milanovic explains: “For the first time in human history, researchers have reasonably accurate data on the distribution of income or welfare [expenditures or consumption] amongst more than 90 percent of the world population.”⁵) If the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change represent an unprecedented scientific consensus on the dangers of global warming, then The Challenge of Slums sounds an equally authoritative warning about the worldwide catastrophe of urban poverty.

But what is a “slum”? The first published definition reportedly occurs in the convict writer James Hardy Vaux’s 1812 Vocabulary of the Flash Language, where it is synonymous with “racket” or “criminal trade.”⁶ By the cholera years of the 1830s and 1840s, however, the poor were living in slums rather than practicing them. Cardinal Wiseman, in his writings on urban reform, is sometimes given credit for transforming “slum” (“room in which low goings-on occurred”) from street slang into a term comfortably used by genteel writers.⁷ By mid-century slums were identified in France, America and India, and were generally recognized as an international phenomenon. Connoisseurs and flâneurs debated where human degradation was most awful: Whitechapel or La Chapelle, the Gorbals or the Liberties, Pig Alley or Mulberry Bend. In an 1895 survey of the “poor in the great cities,” Scribner’s Magazine voted Naples’s fondaci as “the most ghastly human dwellings on the face of the earth,” but Gorky was certain that Moscow’s notorious Khitrov district was actually the “lower depths,” while Kipling laughed and took his readers “deeper and deeper still” to Colootollah, the “lowest sink of all” in Calcutta’s “city of dreadful night.”⁸

      These classic slums were notoriously parochial and picturesquely local places, but reformers generally agreed with Charles Booth – the Dr. Livingstone of outcast London – that all slums were characterized by an amalgam of dilapidated housing, overcrowding, disease, poverty, and vice. For nineteenth-century liberals, of course, the moral dimension was decisive, and the slum was first and above all envisioned as a place where an incorrigible and feral social “residuum” rots in immoral and often riotous splendor; indeed, a vast literature titillated the Victorian middle classes with lurid tales from the dark side of town. “Savages,” rhapsodized the Reverend Chapin in Humanity in the City (1854), “not in gloomy forests, but under the strength of gas-light, and the eyes of policemen; with war-whoops and clubs very much the same, and garments as fantastic and souls as brutal as any of their kindred at the antipodes.”⁹ Forty years later, the new US Department of Labor, in the first “scientific” survey of American tenement life (The Slums of Great Cities, 1894), still defined a slum as “an area of dirty back streets, especially when inhabited by a squalid and criminal population.”¹⁰

      A Global Slum Census

      The authors of The Challenge of Slums discard these Victorian calumnies but otherwise preserve the classical definition of a slum, characterized by overcrowding, poor or informal housing, inadequate access to safe water and sanitation, and insecurity of tenure. This operational definition, officially adopted at a UN meeting in Nairobi in October 2002, is