Planet of Slums

“The price of this new urban order, however, will be increasing inequality within and between cities of different sizes and economic specializations.”

With the rise of globalization, cities do business not only locally, but all over the world. The new urban order has brought about increased inequality between the rich and the urban poor. As Davis shows, governments often care more about appeasing powerful institutions abroad than caring for the poor in their cities.

“In most of the developing world, however, city growth lacks the powerful manufacturing export engines of China, Korea, and Taiwan, as well as China's vast inflow of foreign capital (currently equal to half of total foreign investment in the entire developing world).”

Here, Davis illustrates why the shift from rural to urban poverty is unique. Most major cities with huge numbers of unemployed inhabitants do not have the industrial base to support the job growth needed to contend with growing populations.

“Thus, the cities of the future, rather than being made out of glass and steel as envisioned by earlier generations of urbanists, are instead largely constructed out of crude brick, straw, recycled plastic, cement blocks, and scrap wood.”

We often imagine modern cities as collections of glass and metal skyscrapers with thriving populations. However, the harsh reality is that many people in the developing world live close to the ground in slums built from borrowed wood and recycled materials, in conditions of poverty and precarity.

“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.”

While climate change is not the immediate focus of the book, Davis points out how it both exacerbates and is exacerbated by the catastrophic rise of urban poverty.

“The urban poor have to solve a complex equation as they try to optimize housing cost, tenure security, quality of shelter, journey to work, and sometimes, personal safety. For some people, including many pavement-dwellers, a location near a job—say, in a produce market or train station—is even more important than a roof.”

Despite Davis’s attention to global politics, he never loses sights of the lives of people in the slums he describes. Many neoliberal strategies aimed at helping the urban poor place the burden on those living in slums, making them responsible for their own safety, employment, and shelter, and leading to tremendous human suffering.

“Renters, indeed, are usually the most invisible and powerless of slum-dwellers.”

Renters often don’t have the legal resources or rights of other tenement residents. Many lack the ability to organize tenants’ organizations or mount rent strikes.

“If unmitigated capitalism has a mainly unacceptable face, a corrupt state acting on behalf of the rich is still worse. In such circumstances, little is to be gained by even trying to improve the system.”

Davis uses this passage by Alan Gilbert and Peter Ward as the epigraph to Chapter 3. The excerpt shows how intertwined the forces of state greed and capitalism are in a system that continually subjects its poorest to misery, neglect, and precarity.

“Despite their antipathy to large native urban settlements, the British were arguably the greatest slum-builders of all time.”

Davis points out that the conditions that led to mass slum living are historically rooted in imperial rule. England, which had the greatest imperial empire, built slums in many of its colonized countries—a precedent that newly independent government could never fully overcome.

“Driven toward the cities by brutal and irresistible forces, the poor eagerly asserted their ‘right to the city,’ even if that meant only a hovel on its periphery.”

After being forced to move from city centers by developers colluding with the money-hungry state, poor people will go anywhere they are given some rights to the city—anywhere they can have agency. This is a good illustration of “peripherality”—the fact that slums tend to exist at the edges of an ever-expanding cityscape.

“The slum was not the inevitable urban future.”

Davis brings up an important point: Slums were never a foregone conclusion of urban development, but any alternatives that would have provided a safer, healthier life for many people did not maximize profits for the developed world.

“For all the glowing rhetoric about democratization, self-help, social capital, and the strengthening of civil society, the actual power relations in this new NGO universe resemble nothing so much as traditional clientelism.”

This passage is a great encapsulation of Davis’s thesis that empty rhetoric is the guiding logic of supposedly community-driven institutions like NGOs. Instead, these groups treat helping communities like businesses looking for clients—putting the search for profit above their aid missions.

“Syrupy official assurances about ‘enablement’ and ‘good governance’ sidestep core issues of global inequality and debt, and ultimately, they are just language games that cloak the absence of any macro-strategy for alleviating urban poverty.”

Davis highlights the gulf between official institutions’ rhetoric and actions. These organizations spend their energy on rhetoric aimed at optics, while the “macro-strategy” of alleviating urban poverty is absent.

“Overcrowded, poorly maintained slum dwellings, meanwhile, are often more profitable per square foot than other types of real-estate investment.”

Davis repeatedly stresses the counterintuitive truth that poverty is profitable for landowners, corporations, and sometimes middle-class landlords. This means that while for poor people, slums are a harsh fact of life, for the rich, they are an avenue of income—making the powerful unlikely to work to get rid of slums.

“These polarized patterns of land use and population density recapitulate older logics of imperial control and racial dominance.”

After describing the disparity between population densities in wealthy city regions versus poor ones, Davis argues that this unequal distribution of residents replicates the way imperial governments isolated minority racial groups into small, densely packed areas, while those in power lived on sparsely populated, open land.

“Urban segregation is not a frozen status quo, but rather a ceaseless social war in which the state intervenes regularly in the name of ‘progress,’ ’beautification,’ and even ‘social justice for the poor’ to redraw spatial boundaries to the advantage of landowners, foreign investors, elite homeowners, and middle-class commuters.”

Obfuscating rhetoric can sometimes be used as politically expedient euphemism, a smokescreen for the rapacious and dehumanizing actions of organizations and groups increasing their social or financial power by brutalizing slum residents through eviction or eradication campaigns.

“The modern Olympics have an especially dark but little-known history. In preparation for the 1936 Olympics, the Nazis ruthlessly purged homeless people and slum-dwellers from areas of Berlin likely to be seen by international visitors.”

Davis provides some historical precedence for the slum clearances that occur in modern cities, which occur more frequently for global public events like the Olympics.

“Erhard Berner adds that a favorite method for what Filipino landlords prefer to call ‘hot demolition’ is to chase a " kerosene-drenched burning live rat or cat—dogs die too fast—into an annoying settlement […] a fire started this way is hard to fight as the unlucky animal can set plenty of shanties aflame before it dies.”

Davis’s overall point that the rich wage war on the poor is at its most literal here, as slumlords think nothing of burning down their own buildings—with little concern for residents, whom they seem to view as less than human—instead of waiting for government demolition clearance.

“The WHO, indeed, considers traffic to be one of the worst health hazards facing the urban poor, and predicts that road accidents by 2020 will be the third leading cause of death.”

Davis cites the WHO as evidence for his point that everyday things the rich view as inconveniences—traffic—hurt poorest individuals profoundly; moreover, increasing traffic’s effects on global warming will harm the health of the global urban poor more than any other group.

“This is, of course, a world in which the claims of foreign banks and creditors always take precedence over the survival needs of the urban and rural poor.”

The IMF’s debt restricting policies for sovereign debt force developing countries to abandon state-led development strategies in favor of appeasing foreign creditors through fast debt repayment. A region’s leadership, eager to maintain Western support, will often seek to please lenders over providing social safety nets for their poor citizens.

“This is the guilty secret variable in most neoclassical equations of economic adjustment: poor women and their children are expected to lift the weight of Third World debt upon their shoulders.”

While the developing world’s men lose jobs, women must use their ingenuity to ensure the survival of their households—a gender imbalance that adds to the struggle of families.

“‘Informal employment’ by its very definition, as Jan Breman reminds us, is the absence of formal contracts, rights, regulations, and bargaining power.”

One of the fallacies about informal labor is that it mirrors regular employment in access to workers’ rights. However, in reality, many of these jobs are outside legal jurisdictions, offering laborers little agency or recourse for mistreatment.

“Politically, the informal sector, in the absence of enforced labor rights, is a semifeudal realm of kickbacks, bribes, tribal loyalties, and ethnic exclusion. Urban space is never free.”

Davis is reminding readers that it is extremely expensive (financially, emotionally, morally) to be a member of the informal labor sector. Often the gray economy within the greater economy has a variety of expenditures (bribes, kickbacks, ethnic considerations, etc.) that reflect the absence of regulation.

“If the informal sector, then, is not the brave new world envisioned by its neoliberal enthusiasts, it is most certainly a living museum of human exploitation.”

Neoliberals contend that the informal sector is a new shore where capital and entrepreneurship can reign. Davis, however, shows through countless examples and statistics that this sector—people who live in slums—are subject to endless misery and exploitation.