Planet of Slums

Conurbation is when several towns merge with the suburbs of an extending city. Davis points to this recent phenomenon as a marker of increasing urban populations and positioning of slums on the periphery of cities.

One of the most inhumane terms in the book, hot demolition refers to the practice of landlords setting fire to slums they own to clear the structures in lieu of waiting for slow governmental approval for actual demolition.

The informal labor class consists of workers lacking trade skills or education. What jobs they find tend to be part of the gray economy, untaxed and unmonitored by governments, which means that these workers rarely have safety regulations or legal rights. Informal laborers are often the inhabitants of slums.

A megacity is a city with a population of over eight million people. There has been a dramatic increase in the number of megacities and hypercities (cities with population of over 20 million people) over the last 50 years. Cities of this size struggle to maintain quality of life for their inhabitants, as they often arise in regions without enough industry and employment opportunities to support the population.

Megaslums, according to Davis, “arise when shantytowns and squatter communities merge in continuous belts of informal housing and poverty, usually on the urban periphery” (26). In essence, they occur when two different types of poverty combine.

Overurbanization is when a country’s urban population is considerably larger than the capacities of economic development, creating under- and unemployment and leading to poverty and slum conditions. Overurbanization “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).Passive Proletarianization

Created by Brazilian sociologists, this term describes what happens to landless peasants forced into cities without any specific skills or trade—there, they lose "traditional forms of (re)production, which for the great majority of direct producers does not translate into a salaried position in the formal labor market" (175).

Urban pirates are privatized squatters. Unlike traditional squatters, these slum residents have obtained the legal or de facto title of the plot they inhabit. This practice is sometimes encouraged by landowners who hope to get government compensation or land-development contracts.

Peripherality is related to conurbation, defining how huge cities continue to spread outward by shunting their slums and poor inhabitants to the edges of the city. The periphery of many developing world megacities is in constant flux: Today’s city edge could be tomorrow’s center.

The UN Habitat report The Challenge of Slums, an important precursor to Davis’s book, defines a slum as habitation “characterized by overcrowding, poor or informal housing, inadequate access to safe water and sanitation, and insecurity of tenure” (22-23).