Planet of Slums

Planet of Slums is a non-fiction book published in 2006 by American author and urban theorist Mike Davis. It chronicles the spread of poverty in cities around the world at a time when more than a billion people live in what the United Nations (UN) classifies as "slums."

Summary

In 1950, only 86 cities around the world had populations of one million people or more. When Davis wrote this book in 2005, he predicted that by 2015 there would be 550 such cities—a very close estimate, since according to the United Nations' last report, in 2016 there were just over 600 cities that met this threshold. Meanwhile, world population is expected to reach 10 billion by 2050. Virtually all of this growth will occur in urban areas, and 95% of it will occur in developing countries. For instance, the combined urban population of China, India, and Brazil equals that of Europe and North America.

But these cities aren't urban Edens; they are deeply impoverished neighborhoods of makeshift dwellings—areas such as Beirut's Quarantina, Mexico City's Santa Cruz Meyehualco, Rio de Janeiro's favelas, and Cairo's City of the Dead, where up to one million people live in homes made out of actual tombs.

Davis addresses the issue’s root cause: postcolonial neoliberal policies largely driven by free-market capitalist principles. As cities modernized in the wake of the colonial era, most of the same zoning boundaries enforced by imperial powers across racial and socioeconomic lines were continued. Ending imperial rule didn't lead to an increase in equality or egalitarianism. Rather, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) replaced imperial powers, stepping in on behalf of elites who wanted to hold onto power. Pushing the poorest citizens into thickly-concentrated slums, made it easier for the ruling classes in these cities to abandon them while prioritizing the urban needs of more affluent, and now segregated, neighborhoods. As a result, resource allocation benefited the most affluent citizens while leaving those in poverty in degrading neighborhoods.

Much of this occurred because of the IMF's debt-restructuring policies of the 1980s: When the IMF restructured developing countries’ staggering amounts of sovereign debt, it required these countries to invest less in public health, education, and investment so that they could more rapidly repay their lenders.

Though much of his focus is on Asia, Davis also writes at length about increasing hardships in African cities. Depressingly, goals that were once viewed as attainable have been pushed back generations:

At the annual joint meeting of the IMF and World Bank in October 2004, Gordon Brown, UK Chancellor of the Exchequer and heir apparent to Tony Blair, observed that the UN's Millennium Development Goals for Africa, originally projected to be achieved by 2015, would not be attained for generations: 'Sub-Saharan Africa will not achieve universal primary education until 2130, a 50 percent reduction in poverty in 2150. and the elimination of avoidable infant deaths until 2165.' By 2015 Black Africa will have 332 million slum-dwellers, a number that will continue to double every fifteen years. (18-19)

Davis doesn't offer many solutions, arguing that the massive growth of unemployed or underemployed world citizens and no plan to integrate these individuals into the global economy in a meaningful way marks a point of no return.

The following summary is based on Verso’s 2006 edition. It should also be noted that all the statistics are from this period; updated current statistics can likely be found online.