Planet of Slums

Davis explores the gulf between urban poverty and urban wealth. One marker of this is population density. In Nairobi, for example, the suburb of Karen has 360 inhabitants per square kilometer, whereas in parts of Kibera the same area has more than 80,000 people. Similar density disparities occur in Santo Domingo, Bombay, Dhaka, and other cities around the world.

The rich, who see poor people as an obstacle to spatial freedom and profit, often redraw city boundaries in the name of progress or social justice. This type of maneuvering has its roots in the work of French urban developer Baron Haussmann, who used urban redevelopment to maximize profit and social control in Paris during the 1860s. The contemporary equivalent is grim: Thousands of squatters and poor legal tenants are removed every year to streamline urban renewal. Some cities (Cairo, Mumbai, Mexico City) build satellite cities to house the newly evicted poor, but most of the time the displaced are forced into smaller areas because of proximity of work. Governments across the spectrum of political beliefs rarely bat an eye at dislodging poor people. In China, for example, the forced relocation of more than 1.5 million people from 1991 to 1997 paved the way for new malls, luxury apartments, infrastructure, and skyscrapers in Shanghai.

High-profile international events like conferences, sporting events, and festivals provide another excuse for governments to uproot the urban poor. During campaigns to clean up or beautify the city to impress foreign visitors, unhoused people are removed from their normal locations or hidden away; worse, often entire slums are razed and their residents driven from the city. When the Philippines hosted the IMF-World Bank meeting in 1976, the Marcos regime removed more than 160,000 squatters from the media’s field of vision. Many were dropped off in the outskirts of Manila, nearly 30 kilometers from their homes. Similarly, the Olympics have been a constant reason for brutality towards unhoused populations. In 1936, the Nazis purged poor people out of areas of Berlin that would be frequented by visitors. In Seoul, for the 1988 games, as many as 720,000 people were relocated. For Beijing’s 2008 Olympics, constructing the famous Bird’s Nest stadium meant evicting nearly 350,000.

Slum clearance also comes under the guise of fighting crime, as governments use paralegal or violent methods for urban protection. In Jakarta, for example, General Sutiyoso’s policy of public safety cleared the streets of pedicab drivers, demolished street vendor stalls, evicted residents of slums, and arrested street musicians.

Mostly damningly, policies of slum clearance, renewal, and beautification reclaim city centers for a middle and upper class that has little interest in being there. Instead, these citizens prefer closed-off affluent suburbs on the edges of cities. In Brazil, for example, the Americanized edge city Alphaville, oddly named after a dystopian Jean-Luc Godard film, has luxury stores and homes protected by a wall and 800 private guards.

Slums are often built on dangerous geology. Johannesburg’s shantytowns, for example, contain “informal settlements in areas of toxic waste and chronic ground collapse” (122). In Caracas, most slum housing is located on unstable hillsides or in deep gorges within a seismically active valley that suffers from flash floods. These examples, “illustrate how poverty magnifies local geological and climatic hazards” (124). Of course, many developed world cities (like Tokyo or Los Angeles) are built on geologically or meteorologically risky land, but expensive urban planning or engineering can reduce risk. In the developing world, however, there are few such expensive public works projects.

Another extreme danger for slums is fire. Slum dwellings tend to be highly flammable, while population density and the need for open cooking flames leads to a high rate of accidental fires. Arson is also commonplace, the resort of slumlords and landowners tired of waiting for the bureaucratic machines to okay demolition orders.

Unnatural disasters created by industry are a constant concern as well. In 1989, in Bangkok’s port slum Klong Toey, a chemical explosion poisoned hundreds of residents and left over 5,000 people without homes. Many were likely living in this dangerous area to be near port jobs. When a gas pipeline blew up in Cubatão, São Paulo’s “Pollution Valley,” more than 500 people were burned alive. In Bhopal, a cloud of deadly methyl isocyanate killed 7,000–10,000 instantly, with another 15,000 dying in the years after due to illness. Most of the victims were the poorest people in the region.

The rapid increase in car ownership has been detrimental to poor city inhabitants: “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” (133). Moreover, their harmful exhaust chokes the city air: Breathing in Mumbai is equivalent to smoking 2.5 packs of cigarettes per day.

Underserving infrastructure is a rampant issue as well. Unsurprisingly, sanitation issues affect poor people more than other classes. Because of subpar city planning and poor sewage systems, slum residents are exposed to a lot of human waste and do not have enough toilets. The absence of toilets, it should be noted, is particularly devastating for women as it “severely affects their dignity, health, safety and sense of privacy, and indirectly their literacy and productivity” (140-41). Most slums also have poor access to healthy drinking water; polluted drinking water carries the risk of diarrhea, enteritis, colitis, typhoid, and paratyphoid fevers—leading causes of death in the developing world, particularly for children.

All of these dangers are compounded by the neoliberal debt restructuring policies of the World Bank and the IMF, which mandate cutting spending on public health initiatives in poor areas. Davis cites Fantu Cheru, a UN expert on debt: “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).