Anonymous Comrade writes:

The Geography of Disaster

Reg Johanson, Rain

Reviewing Mike Davis, Planet of Slums

(London: Verso, 2006)

In Planet of Slums geographer of disaster Mike Davis turns his attention to the human disaster of slums in order to understand the scope and the meaning of the economic disaster of neoliberalism. Arguing from research that includes UN, World Bank, IMF, CIA, and Pentagon reports as well as literature on urbanism and housing, Davis observes that cities will account for all future population growth, and that “ninety five percent of this final build-out of humanity will occur in the urban areas of developing countries” (2).


This massive transfer of population from the country to the city, Davis argues, was generated by the equally massive transfer of wealth from the Third World to the First orchestrated by North American and European states “with the IMF as bad cop and World Bank as good cop” (70), a transfer that has produced what will probably be a widely quoted statistic from Planet of Slums: “Global inequality, as measured by World Bank economists across the entire world population, reached an incredible GINI coefficient level of 0.67 by the end of the century—this is mathematically equivalent to a situation where the poorest two thirds of the world receive zero income, and the top third receives everything” (165).


But while rural populations fled for the cities because they were no longer permitted to practice the subsistence economies that had previously sustained them, Davis shows that in most of the developing world, urban growth is exploding without economic growth. In fact, just the opposite is occurring: with few exceptions, there has been a de-industrialization of the big cities of the global south. As Davis says, “the size of a city’s economy […] often bears surprisingly little relationship to its population” (13). Cities are growing with a decreasing capacity to support residents, creating a widely varying “informal economy” of subsistence, housing, and infrastructure.The outer limit of this failure of the city to provide employment, services or housing is, for Davis, represented by the city of Kinshasa in the Congo, a city in which “the formal economy and state institutions, apart from the repressive apparatus, have utterly collapsed” (191). “Average income has fallen to under a $100 per year; two-thirds of the population is malnourished; the middle-class is extinct; and one in five adults is HIV-positive. Three-quarters are likewise unable to afford formal health care and must resort instead to Pentecostal faith-healing or indigenous magic” (192). “Wrecked by a perfect storm of kleptocracy, Cold War geopolitics, structural adjustment, and chronic civil war” (192), citizens of Kinshasa (Kinois) “fought for their survival by ‘villagizing’ Kinshasa: they re-established subsistence agriculture and traditional forms of rural self-help […] They sought release from the ‘disease of the whites’: the fatal illness of money” (195).


However, Davis says, “despite heroic efforts, especially by women, traditional social structure is eroding” (195). “Unable to afford bride price or become breadwinners, young men, for example, abandon pregnant women and fathers go AWOL. Simultaneously, the AIDS holocaust leaves behind vast numbers of orphans and HIV-positive children. There are huge pressures on poor urban families […] to jettison their most dependent members” (196). This has led to large numbers of abandoned children persecuted as “witches” in the guilty Pentecostal hallucinations of adults.


This representation of Kinshasa typifies the pattern of Davis’s analysis of the prospects of the informal economy to transform capitalist social relations after the failure of the neoliberal imposition and subsequent collapse of the state. The collapse of the state means, initially, the sudden immiseration of millions of people, but also the emergence of new forms of subsistence and social organization. However, these new communities, free of the repressive state, do not become utopic but instead inherit the disasters of pollution, overpopulation, sickness and disease. The rich lock themselves up in security enclaves; the poor exploit the very poor, parents abandon children; a new order of gangs and religious and ethnic factions establishes control of the slums where almost everybody lives. “But” asks Davis, anticipating the reader’s question, “if informal urbanism becomes a dead-end street, won’t the poor revolt? […] To what extent does an informal proletariat possess that most potent of Marxist talismans, ‘historical agency’?” (201). In order to understand the weight of that question and Davis’s tentative response to it, we need to look more closely at Davis’s representation of the “planet of slums”.


The crisis of the slums—“urbanization without growth”—begins, for Davis, with “the worldwide debt crisis of the late 1970s and the subsequent IMF-led restructuring of Third World economies in the 1980s” (14). In the mid-seventies, Davis tells us, the World Bank and IMF began lending to Third World countries in response to the energy crisis. As conditions for these loans, they insisted that the countries they loaned to implement “structural adjustment programs”: the privatization of public services and infrastructure, the devaluation of currencies, the growing of export crops, and the eliminating of subsidies so that local farmers and manufacturers would be forced to compete with First World agribusiness and corporations. In this period, the World Bank and the IMF “became explicit instruments of the international capitalist revolution promoted by Reagan, Thatcher, and Kohl” (153). “Debt”, says Davis, “has been the forcing-house of an epochal transfer of power from Third World nations to the Bretton Woods institutions [World Bank and IMF] controlled by the US and other core capitalist countries […] The [World Bank’s] professional staff are the postmodern equivalent of a colonial civil service” (153-4).


  These “policies of agricultural deregulation and financial discipline [generated] an exodus of surplus rural labour to urban slums even as cities ceased to be job machines” (15). Davis argues that “the global forces ‘pushing’ people from the countryside” are “mechanization of agriculture […], food imports […], civil war and drought […] and everywhere the consolidation of small holdings into large ones and the competition of industrialscale agribusiness” (15). But it’s not only the rural poor who are forced into slums. “Ruined importsubstitution industries, shrunken public sectors, and downwardly mobile middle classes” (16), trademarks of neoliberalism, have also pushed millions of city-dwellers into poverty. As Davis says, “rapid urban growth in the context of structural adjustment, currency devaluation, and state retrenchment has been an inevitable recipe for the mass production of slums” (17). “‘Over-urbanization’ is driven by the reproduction of poverty, not by the supply of jobs. This is one of the unexpected tracks down which a neoliberal world order is shunting the future” (16).


According to Davis, SAPs deny to developing countries the same mechanisms that made many of the OECD countries rich in the first place: protectionist tariffs, subsidies, state investment in healthcare, education, power and water. “Everywhere obedience to international creditors has dictated cutbacks in medical care, the emigration of doctors and nurses, the end of food subsidies, and the switch of agricultural production from subsistence to export crops […] The coerced tribute that the Third World pays to the First World has been the literal difference between life and death for millions of poor people” (148). At the same time, “the same adjustments that crushed the poor and public sector middle class offered lucrative opportunities to privatizers, foreign importers, narcotrafficantes, military brass and political insiders. Conspicuous consumption reached hallucinatory levels in Africa and Latin America in the 1980s as noveaux riches went on spending sprees in Miami and Paris while their shantytown compatriots starved” (157).


Ultimately Davis agrees with the UN-HABITAT report Challenge of Slums, published in 2003, which claims that “the main single cause of increases in poverty and inequality during the 1980s and 1990s was the retreat of the state” (154). This situation has led to a “virtual democracy” in which the “macro-economic policies” of Third World nations “are dictated from Washington” (154). In addition, there has been a “more subtle diminution of state capacity that resulted from ‘subsidiarity’: defined as the devolution of sovereign power to lower echelons of government, and especially NGOs, linked to the major international aid agencies” (154).


The story of neoliberalism for Davis, then, is one in which the “sovereign power” of the state has been surrendered to the international banks, the Washington-controlled World Bank and IMF, and NGOs. As Davis says in chapter three, “The Treason of the State”, “the idea of an interventionist state strongly committed to social housing and job development seems either a hallucination or a bad joke” (62).

Radical readers may find Davis’s apocalyptic rendering of the condition of statelessness frustrating, but his analysis of the politics and economy of “informality” in the slum offers an understanding of the dynamics of the decomposition and recomposition of resistance to its misery.

The death of the state is a goal shared by “revolutionaries” from opposite ends of the political spectrum. As imagined by neoliberalism, however, the death of the state naturalizes competition rather than cooperation, “self-help” rather than “mutual aid”. As the World Bank and IMF began to gain more control over the economies of the Third World, “instead of the top-down structural reform of urban poverty, as undertaken by postwar social democracy in Europe and by revolutionary-nationalist leaders of the 1950s generation, the new wisdom of the late 70s and early 80s mandated that the state ally with international donors and, then, NGOs, to become an ‘enabler’ of the poor […] In its first iteration, the new World Bank philosophy, which was influenced by the ideas of the English architect [and publisher of the anarchist paper Freedom] John Turner, stressed a ‘sites-and-services’ approach (provision of basic ‘wet’ infrastructure and civil engineering) to help rationalize and upgrade self-help housing” (71). This “amalgam of anarchism and neoliberalism” (72), as Davis calls it, legitimized a “tremendous downsizing of entitlement” and privatization, and became “a smokescreen for reneging upon historic state commitments to relieve poverty and homelessness” (72).

This “enabling” and “self-help”, the “recipe” for which is “get the state (and formal-sector labour unions) out of the way, add micro-credit for micro-entrepreneurs and land-titling for squatters, then let markets take their course to produce the transubstantiation of poverty into capital” (179), creates an “informal sector” in housing and in work that offers prime opportunities for new forms of exploitation. In housing, Davis finds that most slum-dwellers are in fact renters rather than squatters, and that squatting itself has become “privatized” (40) through a system in which squatters are taken advantage of as pioneers who open up land for later development which is then sold back to the people who formerly lived on it for free. Squatters also “are coerced to pay considerable bribes to politicians, gangsters, or police to gain access to sites, and they may continue to pay such informal ‘rents’ […] for years” (38).


In terms of earning a living, “most participants in the informal economy” are not “micro-entrepreneurs” but “work directly or indirectly for someone else (via the consignment of goods or the rental of a pushcart or rickshaw, for example)” (180-181). Also, Davis argues, informality is really about “myriad invisible networks of exploitation” (181). Informal labour “ensures extreme abuse of women and children”, “[fragments] existing work and [subdivides] incomes”, drives a booming gambling and pyramid-scheme industry, “dissolves self-help networks and solidarities essential to the survivial of the very poor”, and finally, the competition for survival in the informal sector is manipulated by “godfathers and landlords” who use “ethnoreligious or racial violence” to “regulate competition and protect their investments” (181–185). The informal sector, according to Davis, “is a semi-feudal realm of kickbacks, bribes, tribal loyalties, and ethnic exclusion. Urban space is never free. A place on the pavement, the rental of a rickshaw, a day’s labour on a construction site, or a domestic’s reference to a new employer: all of these require patronage or membership in some closed network, often an ethnic militia or street gang. Whereas traditional formal industries such as textiles in India or oil in the Middle East tended to foster interethnic solidarity through unions and radical political parties, the rise of the unprotected formal sector has too frequently gone hand in hand with exacerbated ethnoreligious differentiation and sectarian violence” (185).

As Davis would acknowledge, the state hasn’t died, it has merely handed over many of its functions to the private sector. In order to counteract the autonomous, unsanctioned, or revolutionary forces that might have constructed anticapitalist and non-state alternatives amidst the social instability caused by the transfer of capital, neoliberalism found a useful ally within the enemy camp: NGOs, according to Davis, have done a superlative job of defusing, diffusing, and containing grassroots resistance. NGOs, in fact, perform what Davis calls a “soft imperialism”: “As the intermediary role of the state has declined, the big international institutions have acquired their own grassroots presence through dependent NGOs in thousands of slums and poor urban communities. Typically, an international lender-donor like the World Bank will work through a major NGO which, in turn, provides expertise to a local NGO […] This tiered system of coordination and funding is usually portrayed as the last word in ‘empowerment’ , ‘synergy’, and ‘participatory governance’” (75). World Bank president James Wolfensohn (1995-2005), says Davis, “sought to incorporate the upper levels of the NGO world into the Bank’s functional networks—and despite the emergence of an antiglobalization movement, he largely succeeded […] in ‘turning the enemies of [neoliberal globalization] into dinner companions’” (76). “Third World NGOs”, Davis goes on to say, “have proven brilliant at co-opting local leadership as well as hegemonizing the social space traditionally occupied by the left […] the broad impact of the NGO / ‘civil society revolution’, as even some World Bank researchers acknowledge, has been to bureaucratize and deradicalize urban social movements” (76).

In addition to the “ethnoreligious differentiation and sectarian violence” and the enervating effects of NGOs mentioned above, Davis notes other ways in which the slum as a terrain of struggle decomposes resistance. Against those who propose land-titling (granting squatters title to the land they live on) as a solution to the slum and its poverty, Davis shows that the landlordism that this causes “is […] a fundamental and divisive social relation in slum life world-wide. It is a principal way in which poor people can monetize their equity (formal or informal) but often in an exploitative relationship to even poorer people” (42). The variety of housing arrangements in slums in general generates competing interests that may be difficult to reconcile in a resistance movement. Davis quotes Peter Ward: “The heterogeneity of irregular settlement undermines collective response by dividing settlements on the basis of mode of land acquisition, the ‘stage’ of consolidation, the servicing priorities of residents, community leadership structures, social classes, and above all tenure relations (owners versus sharers versus renters). These tenure splits multiply still further the constituencies into which people fall or may be divided. Renters, harassed squatters, displaced downtown tenants are likely to be more radical and disposed to antigovernment demonstrations than those who have, in effect, been bought off by the government through successive housing policies” (45). Rather than landtitling, Davis suggests that “the main issue in the informal sector is the formalization of the rights and protections of labour, not property” (185).

On the other hand, Davis shows that squatters can be “surreptitiously offensive” in the struggle for their survival through the “small-scale, nonconfrontational occupation of edge or interstitial sites”, occupations which are “synchronized to a favourable opportunity for land occupation, such as a tight election, natural disaster, coup d’etat, or revolution” (39). Significantly though, Davis does not dwell on this non-hegemonic model of urban infiltration. Instead he is interested in the fact that “eighty percent of Marx’s industrial proletariat now lives in China or somewhere outside of Western Europe and the United States” (13). The structural adjustment programs that created this situation are “analogous to the catastrophic processes that shaped a ‘Third World’ in the first place, during the era of late-Victorian imperialism (1870–1900)”, in which peasants shaken loose from subsistence created a rural “semi-proletarianization”, “a huge global class of immiserated semipeasants and farm labourers” who could find no way to earn a living. “As a result, the twentieth century became an age not of urban revolutions, as classical Marxism had imagined, but of epochal rural uprisings and peasant-based wars of national liberation” (174). On the contemporary “planet of slums”, this working-class is largely informal, urban, and “one billion strong […] the fastest growing, most unprecedented, social class on earth” (178). Here, at a crucial moment, Davis does not speculate on whether or under what circumstances this “informal proletariat” is a “classfor- itself ” or has “historical agency”, promising a “sequel” to Planet of Slums on that topic.

Instead, Davis concludes with a note on the discursive construction of slums and the consequences these constructions will have for slumdwellers. “The real crisis of world capitalism”, he argues, is when “a reserve army waiting to be incorporated into the labour process becomes stigmatized as a permanently redundant mass, an excessive burden that cannot be included, now or in the future, in economy and society” (199). This stigmatization leads to the perception that “the mega-slum has become the weakest link in the new world order” (204). This perception, in turn, feeds “the demonizing rhetorics of the various international ‘wars’ on terrorism, drugs, and crime”, which “are so much semantic apartheid: they construct epistemological walls around gecekondus, favelas, and chawls that disable any honest debate about the violence of economic exclusion, and, as in Victorian times, the categorical criminalization of the urban poor is a self-fulfilling prophecy, guaranteed to shape a future of endless war in the streets” (202), a war for which the armies of the new world order are currently training (in the streets of Winnipeg, for example, where the Canadian Army was on urban warfare manoeuvres in late spring 2006).

So we will have to wait to get Davis’s take on the potential for slum-dwellers’ “historical agency”. “Ethnic” and “religious” groups, however, do seem for Davis to be part of the problem rather than the solution, agents of exploitation filling the gaps left by the withdrawal of the formal“guarantees” of the state. This is an interesting shift away from something Davis indicated in his essay in The New Left Review, where the book began: “Today […] populist Islam and Pentecostal Christianity (and in Bombay, the cult of Shivaji) occupy a social space analogous to that of early twentieth-century socialism and anarchism.” Further: “Whether […] this religion of ‘the marginalized in the shantytowns of neocolonial modernity’ is actually a ‘more radical’ resistance than ‘participation in formal politics or labour unions’, remains to be seen. But, with the Left still largely missing from the slum, the eschatology of Pentecostalism admirably refuses the inhuman destiny of the Third World city that [the UNHABITAT report] warns about. It also sanctifies those who, in every structural and existential sense, truly live in exile.”

This line of thinking, that looks for agency and resistance beyond “a reserve army waiting to be incorporated into the labour process” is what I miss in this essential book. Because, as it stands, Planet of Slums can only imagine a proletariat waiting for reincorporation into the labour process—presumably along socialist lines—rather than a transformation of it. I’m looking forward to the sequel.

[First published in The Rain 4:2 (Summer–Autumn 2006): 1–2.]