Review: Planet Of Slums By Mike Davis
Based on his investigation of slums on planet earth led to his pessimistic views on the inevitable occurrence of slums. Pessimism is the belief that something bad will happen with completely no hope of stopping its occurrence. Davis has lost all hope in humans to turn around and help prevent another city from becoming a slum and according to this online source, “dismantling the modernist dream of architects like Le Corbusier, who envisioned a future of clean and efficient ‘towers in the park’ instead of the existing dingy and overcrowded cities, Davis claims that the result of neoliberal policies are cities ‘constructed out of crude brick, straw, recycled plastic, cement blocks, and scrap wood.’ According to Davis, we are steadily moving towards a planet of slums built from detritus.” It was the neoliberal policies that called for the government to hand off with economics (laissez-faire) that is lending to people in cities having to use only the available materials or private sectors for constructing their homes which will essentially expand city slums. Mike Davis refers to the southern hemisphere as the ‘urban south’ which is referred to the developing countries in the southern hemisphere such as Venezuela, Bangladesh, South Africa, Haiti, Egypt, Mexico, India, China, and others, that have populations in some cities that exceed one million people. Due to rise in population in the cities in the southern part of the world, it has led to overcrowding which resulted in major problems in housing and jobs, inadequate supply of basic foods, drinking water and other social services such as electricity. The overall quality of life is questioned by these many factors affecting the people living in slums.
Focusing on how Mike Davis sees the urban conditions of the third world we can conclude that he thinks a planet of slums is inevitable. Housing is extremely important to a person’s quality of life, it is the one place where a person should be able to rest their head at night amongst other things and find the necessary things for survival which are food and clothing. Housing in the urban south according to Davis is a travesty, meaning people are living the worst conditions imaginable. For some people housing in any form either public or privatized is not an option so they end up living in the gutters of the streets. Typical housing in the urban south are huts, tipi’s and shantytowns. In Mumbai, a city in India typical housing is “horribly overcrowded, unsanitary, but highly profitable tenements that still house millions of Indians.”. These tenements are run by the rich landlords and give these poor families chawls that are ruined one-room rental dwellings that will cram six people into 15 square meters and provide them with a restroom they are to share with six other families. That is certainly not enough space for six individuals to dwell and be prosperous. Rental space housing in Lima Peru in South America is similar also in that its run by slumlords also known as the Catholic church. In Lima’s callejones’ revealed “85 people sharing a water tap and 93 using the same latrine.”
In the eastern hemisphere more specifically Hong Kong, China housing for single men is the worst when it comes to their available space they are termed “caged men”, this is because of the necessary precautions they take in order to protect their processions. “The average number of residents in one of these bedspace apartments is 38.3 and the average per capita living space is 19.4 square feet.” With a living space that closes to someone else the precautions the men took were needed and showed crime between the poor and other poor people was prevalent in their way of life. Humans sleep for a 1/3rd of their lives and these folks in slums are doing it under the worst conditions. Since sleep is one of the key factors in staying healthy Davis can conclude that lack of rest is causing people to get sick and stay sick long enough to get entire areas infected.
Other than living space a home is where life occurs, therefore, people need a place to cook, eat and defecate. Sanitation is slums are horrendous but the people living here push through because they came seeking work, were refugees, or the rural area where they lived before actually has worse conditions. Cooking is a task that brings fear because the materials the homes are built out of are flammable, therefore if the fire is not put out properly people will lose their homes and lives. Davis explicitly says “Their mixture of inflammable dwellings, extraordinary density, and dependence upon open fires for heat and cooking is a superlative recipe for spontaneous combustion.” He basically says that their homes are the recipe for the best spontaneous combustion. Arson is sometimes used by the wealthy for urban renewal in Bangalore as an easy way to get rid of squatters and then develop the land.
Besides fires the other most common way for people to die in slums is flooded, this is due to the fact that the houses are just not strong enough for this natural disaster so they essentially just get washed away. Sanitation is in a large crisis in relation to toilet availability and cleanliness. Most toilets are shared by many families so we conclude that Mike Davis thinks they smell bad, aren’t clean, and no one washes their hands when they are finished. Toilets are not located inside people’s spaces because in most cases they are shared with multiple people. Like in China “squeezed into shacks in Beijing, where one toilet served more than six thousand people; of a shantytown in Shenzhen housing fifty shelters, in which hundreds subsisted without running water.” This shows the extreme a person has to go through while I live in a home with four toilets and indoor plumbing.
Women have it the worst because they face a Catch-22 situation where they must maintain a high level of modesty while still only having available the same restrooms as everyone else. Women then are forced to go in groups at night for safety from sexual assaults, very early in the morning, or plain starving themselves so they won’t even have to go. In Africa’s Nairobi “the Laini Saba slum in Kibera in 1998 had exactly ten working pit latrines for 40,000 people, while in Mathare 4A there were two public toilets for 28,000 people.”
We can conclude that Davis thought sanitation in the urban south was a nightmare that will reoccur with no end. With horrid sanitation on land and in the water came many diseases like diarrhea, enteritis, colitis, typhoid, hepatitis, cholera, various cancers, whipworm, roundworm, hookworm, and paratyphoid fevers. In African cities such as Antananarivo, Maputo, and Lusaka “Cholera, the scourge of the Victorian city, also continues to thrive off the fecal contamination of urban water supplies.” Davis thinks most of the diseases are spread and originated from the polluted water made available to slum dwellers. When excrement’s by the human body are made they tend to be done in outside latrine pits that overflow and can get washed up and mixed into the water set aside for washing their bodies, clothes, and utensils.
Again the contaminated water usually ends with death by disease, mostly affecting infants and small children. In South America, “Mexico City residents, for example, inhale shit: fecal dust blowing off Lake Texcoco during the hot, dry season causes typhoid and hepatitis. Air pollution on land literally have human beings breathing in dried feces that became dust and is circulating in Mexico City for all of its populations can take it in. Polluted air and water is unsanitary for all but going back to what Davis says about infants and small children it is one of their largest causes of death. The infant mortality rates in the urban south are at extremes many children are not living past their first birthday. In Luanda “child mortality (under five) was a horrifying 320 per thousand in 1993- the highest in the world.” In Quito, Ecuador “infant mortality is 30 times higher in the slums than in wealthier neighborhoods”. The death of a child puts a strain on any household because a parent can spiral into depression leaving if they have other children to fend for themselves or work even harder than they already do to support the family. These housing conditions in the urban south are resulting in the death of children from unsanitary conditions, a strain on households for personal space, also disease spreading rapidly through villages.
Jobs are the backbone for a quality lifestyle and for the most part I have noticed folks will take any job necessary to support themselves and their household. When my parents came from Guyana to America in two weeks my father took a job in a warehouse and held onto it until this day because it was necessary to have an income to feed his wife and children. Mike Davis mentions there are two forms of economics which are informal and formal that take place in the urban south. Formal economics in the urban south is reserved primarily for the middle class, wealthy individuals who have mainly government jobs. Examples of a formal job in the urban south are commanders, dictators, presidents, also company owners. Unfortunately, most jobs in the urban south are informal which is best defined as “the absence of formal contracts, right, regulations, and bargaining power”. Examples of informal jobs are organ selling, surrogate pregnancies, the Rickshaw driver, prostitution, workshop employee, rag picker and reselling cigarette butts. Informal economics stay precedent in the urban south countries because of the government of the state. Rickshaws are a mode of transportation used mostly in Asia. Davis says “Pulling a rickshaw was reckoned the harshest form of urban labor, and, in at least, most pullers (lucky to earn the equivalent of ten cents a day) perished of heart attacks or tuberculosis within a few years”. This shows that earnings are low and even if it were possible to save a penny, it would take more years than the person has to live to consider even moving out of the slums. This job is taken mostly by the men in the family so if they are dying off early then that puts strain onto the wife and children just to stay afloat Davis says “the ILO has estimated that there are more than 3 million rickshaw-pullers on the streets of Asia. The ILO is the International Labor Organization and their estimation shows many people licensed and unlicensed bound to conflicts between each other and other modes of transport, therefore making it a dangerous job.
Women according to Davis toke many jobs even Prostitution which is the exchange of sex for money to earn money for her family seeing that it is hard for her husband to find work with all the jobs not being available. In Latin America and Africa “the decimation of male formal-sector jobs, often followed by male emigration, compelled women to improvise new livelihoods as piece-workers, liquor sellers, street vendors, lottery ticket sellers, hairdressers, sewing operators, cleaners, washers, ragpickers, nannies, and prostitutes”. Labor put in by parents wasn’t enough for the urban south governments because the next victims were children. Child labor has the most variety of jobs the first is a rag picker for a garbage company. In Surat “the sight of the ‘gentlemanly’ owner of a garage shop, sitting in his well-ironed clothes by his gleaming motorcycle, amidst the piles of waste that the rag-pickers have painfully sorted out for him to profit from”. The second is the reselling of cigarette butts in Cairo “children under twelve are perhaps 7 percent of the workforce; this includes the thousands of street children who gather and resell cigarette butts (a pack a day otherwise costs half of what a poor man’s salary)”. Thirdly is jobs in various workshops saris, glass, weaving, and embroidery. These jobs are the most dangerous and labor intensive.
Researcher discovered children’s state of well-being in an Indian silk sari industry to be horrendous “a 9-year-old chained to is loom; everywhere they saw young boys covered with burn scars from the dangerous work of boiling silkworm cocoons, as well as little girls with damaged eyesight from endless hours of embroidering in poor lighting”. Children are the next generation and working these jobs is hindering their ability to go to school, therefore, they are not able to progress upwards and may themselves one less slum dweller. Then there is the most gruesome of jobs and that is the selling of organs in India “500 people, or one per family, had sold their kidneys…majority of the donors were women …forced to sell their kidneys to raise money to support themselves and their children. People are willing to work themselves towards a heart attack, sell their bodies, allow their children to work under life threating conditions just to have the necessary money to maintain a house and home. “The informal sector is potentially the urban Third World’s dues ex machina”. The meaning of dues ex machina is an unexpected power that will save a hopeless situation. Jobs in the urban south bring in most of the urban souths money but Davis has proven that the poor stay within the slums because no adjustments have been made for future generations, therefore, Davis sees only more slums to come.
Why does Davis describe the outcome of the urban south as going down Vietnam Street? I think Vietnam street is a metaphor for the urban south never being able to win the war against slums but because of certain factors like communal violence and the intervention of outside powers slum dwellers will lose just like how America could not win the Vietnam war because the Vietcong were for one provided weapons from China and Russia and America was on their own. Davis is trying to tell his audience that the outcome of the urban south is a planet just like them. Communal violence is targeted killing of thy neighbor because of their religion, ethnic background, language, race even eating habits. This type of violence is different than the war on the war between two countries for example in world war one it started over the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand because he was targeted for his importance to his country, this is communal violence. Noncommunal violence is the act of helicopters shooting into the streets of Iraq.
Another account is 1947-1948, this is when Pakistan separates from India and became its own country due to religion. The Hindus killed people of Muslim faith within India’s borders and the Muslims killed any Hindus in Pakistan. There is still animosity between the two faiths to this day. The intervention of outside powers can be seen in Syria today with the two branches of Islam the Sunnis and Shi’ites receiving support from different countries. The Russians support the Shi’ites and the Americans support the Sunnis. The support is in the form of the military. The reason for intervening is because of their interests in the middle east for something like oil. Between the intervention of outside powers and communal violence, progress towards bettering slum cities is not a priority, therefore, it moves in the opposite direction which is a planet of slums in the eyes of Mike Davis.
A planet completely full of slums is the vision of Mike Davis and I agree with him because of the housing and job conditions he talks about in his book. The statistical facts also make it hard to deny. Between the housing, jobs, outside intervention, and communal violence the urban south won’t ever have the correct support to move in a positive direction. Davis thinks that this situation is irreversible so with the information provided I’m able to conclude he thinks that a planet of slums is inevitable.
