Criticism Volume 50 Article 10 Issue 1 Disco

2008 The esirD e Called Dystopia Lisa Brawley Vassar College

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Recommended Citation Brawley, Lisa (2008) "The eD sire Called Dystopia," Criticism: Vol. 50: Iss. 1, Article 10. Available at: http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/criticism/vol50/iss1/10 THE DESIRE “The slums have a brilliant future” CALLED DYSTOPIA (151). This is the stark assessment of Lisa Brawley Mike Davis’s most recent book, an account of the “worldwide catastro- phe of urban poverty” (21) that cata- logs with impressive concision the Planet of Slums by Mike Davis. brutal disparities of contemporary London: Verso, 2006. Pp. 228. urbanization at a time of the world- $24.00 cloth, $16.25 paper. historic shift from a majority rural planet to a majority urban one. Yet, as Davis notes, this emerging urban world is not what an earlier genera- tion of urbanists imagined it would be: “Instead of cities of light soaring toward heaven, much of the twenty- fi rst-century urban world squats in squalor, surrounded by pollution, excrement and decay” (19). As a por- trait of the urban present, Davis’s account is bleak—one out of every three people who live in cities lives in poverty—but the book is driven by a vision of an even more forbid- ding crisis looming on the near ho- rizon. “Slum populations are grow- ing by a staggering 25 million people each year, yet the frontier of squat- table land has closed, replaced by squalor for rent at rising prices, and the informal economy, which pro- vides poor people their limited live- lihood, is becoming as densely over- crowded as the slums themselves.” What are the geopolitical implica- tions of vast, unprecedented concen- trations of poor people living in deplorable and deteriorating condi- tions in sprawling impoverished “cities without jobs”? This is the animating question of Davis’s book, the question that gives his book its

Criticism, Winter 2008, Vol. 50, No. 1, pp. 153–159. ©2008 Wayne State University 153 Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309. ISSN: 0011-1589 154 LISA BRAWLEY palpable urgency and drives its pac- process of slum urbanization in ing and prose. the “exploding cities of the develop- The impetus for Planet of Slums ing world” (5). All across the Global was a 2003 United Nations report South, slums are growing faster that Davis identifi es as the “fi rst than cities, and cities are growing truly global audit of urban poverty” faster than the population itself. (20). The landmark report coordi- Mumbai is predicted to have 10 mil- nated the work of more than 100 re- lion slum dwellers by 2015. And by searchers, synthesizing statistical data that same year, Africa is expected to from more than 231 cities and incor- have 332 million slum dwellers, “a porating that with household-level number that will continue to double survey data. Davis fi rst drew atten- every fi fteen years” (19). More than tion to the UN report in an essay he 78 percent of the developing world wrote for the New Left Review, and lives in slums. The starkly uneven that 2003 essay contains in miniature process is amplifi ed by the unprece- the arc and argument of the present dented pace of urbanization itself: in book. Davis nods to the fraught the single decade of the 1980s, China heritage of his book’s key term, but urbanized more rapidly “than did he largely sidesteps the analytic all of Europe (including Russia) in problem of defi ning “the slum” by the entire nineteenth century!” (2). adopting the operational defi nition Davis describes both the sprawl- that guided the UN study. The ing urban agglomerations that are UN study, he suggests, discards the engulfi ng their regional peripheries “Victorian calumnies” that attended at unprecedented rates and the nineteenth-century studies of urban new modalities of urbanization— poverty but preserves the “classical “dramatic new species of urbanism” defi nition of a slum, characterized (10), the “pathologies of urban form” by overcrowding, poor or informal (128)—that such rapid urban expan- housing, inadequate access to safe sion has spawned. He cites the ex- water and sanitation, and insecurity ample of the “the giant amoeba of of tenure” (23). Mexico City,” which is extending With the UN study as a starting “pseudopods that will eventually in- point, Davis has scanned and syn- corporate much of central Mexico . . . thesized a truly astonishing array into a single megalopolis with a mid- of the available scholarly literature twenty-fi rst-century population of on global urban poverty; he has con- approximately 50 million people— densed this research into a stark and about 40 percent of the national at times breathless account of just total” (5). Throughout the world’s over two hundred pages. His pages fastest-growing cities, a diffuse and brim with foreboding statistics and expanding urban substrate erodes charts as he recounts the uneven the distinction between “rural” and ON MIKE DAVIS’S PLANET OF SLUMS 155

“urban” as urbanization “collides” founds classical social theorists “from against countryside, creating a “her- Karl Marx to Max Weber” who un- maphroditic landscape” that is “nei- derstood urbanization as a result ther rural nor urban but a blending of industrialization and thus also of the two” (9). Davis cites the as a component of economic growth example of southern China, where and capitalist modernization. De- many of the planet’s most rapidly coupled from economic expansion, expanding cities are located and however, current breakneck rates of where the “countryside is urbaniz- urban growth do not signal a com- ing in situ.” Cities in this part of ing metropolis, but the opposite: in China are sprawling outward at such many of the fastest-growing cities of a rate that “rural people no longer the planet, this mode of urbaniza- have to migrate to the city; it mi- tion has meant “the death of the for- grates to them” (9). mal city and its institutions” (194). Davis draws particular attention “The slum was not the inevitable to a facet of contemporary urbaniza- urban future” (61), Davis insists, but tion that is especially disturbing: the is rather the direct result of specifi c “radical decoupling” of urbanization initiatives and contingent alignments from industrialization—megacities that took shape during the second without jobs. The vast, sprawling half of the twentieth century. As Da- cities of the Global South present vis chronicles the mass production very few opportunities for formal of global urban poverty, two inter- employment for the streams of linked moments stand out as deci- people fl owing into them. Thus, sive: the failure of postcolonial states Davis argues, the slums of today are to provide housing and jobs for their importantly unlike those of nine- poorest citizens, and the fi nancial teenth-century industrial cities in instruments and policy directives Europe and North America de- emerging from the “Washington scribed by Friedrich Engels, Charles Consensus.” Davis argues that “with Booth, and Jacob Riis. The nine- a handful of exceptions the postco- teenth-century slum housed new lonial state has comprehensively wage laborers, the emergent prole- betrayed its promises to the urban tariat of the industrial revolution; poor” (69). He cites examples drawn by contrast, the “postmodern slums” from three continents in which state- (19) serve to “warehous[e] this cen- funded housing initiatives benefi ted tury’s surplus humanity,” housing middle classes rather than the poor, those for whom there is no formal and in which “slum improvement” work, and form a “vast mass of programs provided the excuse for surplus labor” (201). Davis suggests evicting poor people and bulldozing that this phenomena of urbaniza- their neighborhoods. He quotes a tion without industrialization con- Nairobi slum dweller who describes 156 LISA BRAWLEY the extent of the abdication of the Bank’s own subsequent studies to state from social provision: “The conclude that the so-called struc- state does nothing here. It provides tural adjustment programs of the no water, no schools, no sanitation, 1980s and 1990s not only made many no roads, no hospitals” (62). Davis’s poor countries poorer, but also erod- chapters are punctuated by account ed the fragile social networks upon after account of missing, crumbling, which the urban poor depend to or privatized urban infrastructure: survive in conditions of extreme and of private roadways for the wealthy increasing poverty. in Buenos Aires, of a single toilet Davis is at his most emphatic serving more than six thousand peo- when he refutes the ideas of neolib- ple in a shantytown in Beijing, of eral modernizers such as Ferdinand vendors in Mumbai who rebottle de Sota who champion the “infor- municipal tap water and sell it to mal sector” as offering solutions slum dwellers without access to wa- to urban poverty. Davis refutes as ter systems at unthinkable profi ts, “myth” the idea that the informal at up to 4,000 percent of cost (145). sector is composed of “heroic self- Davis cites a 1996 World Health employed workers” who lift them- Organization study that reports that selves out of poverty by transform- at any given time more than half of ing refuse into trinkets or hawking the Global South’s urban population products on crowded streets. In truth, is suffering from diseases associated argues Davis, the majority of the with the lack of the most basic provi- people who scrape by in the infor- sions for safe water and adequate mal sector work for other people, sanitation (144). forming a scattered proletariat, one While Davis identifi es one key deprived of a factory fl oor as a base source of slum urbanization in the of potential political solidarity. “broken promises and stolen dreams” Moreover, Davis argues, the very of the postcolonial state, he directs his informality of labor in the informal most strident critique at the ideolo- sector—the absence of contracts, gies and institutions that emerged structures of accountability, or regu- in the late 1970s as part of the “Wash- lations—often exacerbates exploita- ington Consensus.” Davis describes tion, increases inequality, and ex- the role played by institutions such poses the most vulnerable of poor as the World Bank and the Interna- people to even greater levels of vul- tional Monetary Fund that, under nerability. Women and children are the mantle of laissez-faire deregula- especially subject to the informal tion and in the name of poverty re- sector’s hyper-exploitation, and Da- duction, forced open newly national vis does not shy away from invoking Third World economies to global the more macabre industries that fi nance. Davis draws on the World such sub-subsistence urbanism has ON MIKE DAVIS’S PLANET OF SLUMS 157 spawned, such as parents who sell houses, shacks, and shelters that their children into slavery and the form the broken cities of our world” traffi c in human organs (187, 190). (203). Armed with dark visions and Davis also argues that the sheer a developing set of military training number of new migrants to the protocols—Military Operations on world’s poorest cities threatens to Urban Terrain—U.S. soldiers have swamp whatever capacity the infor- actively begun to train for the com- mal sector might once have had as a ing war in and for the planet’s grow- route out of poverty. Davis cites the ing slums. In the book’s fi nal sen- example of Kinsasha, where fewer tences, Davis sketches a nightmare than 5 percent of the population vision of the planet as it is being earn a regular wage, and where the shaped by the conjoined practices informal sector will have to absorb a of neoliberalization and the global full 95 percent of the people looking war on terror: “Night after night, for work (191). hornetlike helicopter gunships stalk In the fi nal pages of his globe- enigmatic enemies in the narrow spanning survey, Davis arrives at the streets of slum districts, pouring stark conclusion: “The late-capitalist hellfi re into shanties or fl eeing cars. triage of humanity, then, has already Every morning the slums reply with taken place” (199). “Apart from suicide bombers and eloquent ex- the de Sotan cargo cult of infi nitely plosions. If the empire can deploy fl exible informalism,” Davis argues, Orwellian technologies of repres- “there is no offi cial scenario for the sion, its outcasts have the gods of reincorporation of this vast mass of chaos on their side” (206). surplus labor into the mainstream Planet of Slums, in short, depicts of the world economy” (199). Davis a darkly dystopic picture of a planet argues that while neoliberalizers brutally divided into warring zones: pursue the pipe dream of an infi - securitized enclaves for the few, and nitely elastic informal economy, sprawling, impoverished zones of military strategists are studying the disease and despair for the many. global slums with “coldblooded lu- Over the course of his numerous cidity” (205). Davis cites war plan- books, Davis has fi ne-tuned the ners who see the “‘feral, failed cities’ urban apocalyptic as a genre of of the Third World” as the breeding critique. But it would be a mistake grounds of terrorist insurgencies to conclude that the dystopia that and who predict the slums will Davis develops in Planet of Slums is be “the distinctive battlespace of precisely a diagnostic one—or even the twenty-fi rst century” (205). “The that it is Davis’s own. For all of future of warfare . . . lies in the its impressive amassing of statistics streets, sewers, high-rise buildings, and synthesis of others’ research, industrial parks, and the sprawl of the dystopia that unfolds here is a 158 LISA BRAWLEY borrowed one: plucked from the global ambitions. (This is also pages of UN studies, development the critical force of Davis’s more re- agency reports, World Bank policy cent edited volume, Evil Paradises: papers, and fi nally U.S. Army War Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism, also College propaganda. In Planet of from Verso.) In this way, Davis can Slums, Davis ratifi es—and often be seen to offer a counter-apocalyp- explicitly quotes—these agencies’ tic to visions of planetary meltdown own most dire warnings: that urban that mobilize the emerging politi- poverty will become the “most sig- cal movement to address climate nifi cant, politically explosive, prob- change. Davis’s dark portrait of the lem of the next century” (20). Yet it ongoing political catastrophe of is precisely this dystopic image and global poverty intervenes to insist the conceptual terrain it captures— that the planetary threat posed by of a fl at planet, of incomplete or global warming is less an ecological failed development, of corrupt or problematic than a political ecologi- missing democratic regimes—that cal one. Finally, Davis’s account of launched and sustains the develop- the mass production of slum urban- ment and military training protocols ization very powerfully serves to against which Davis so rightly aims reorder the priorities of those who his invective. If dire images of “feral study the forces and trajectories of cities” presently animate the train- contemporary urbanization, inter- ing manuals and ignite the imagina- rupting discussions of “iconic archi- tions of soldiers in the mounting tecture” and “smart growth,” and global war on terror, what do these placing cities of the Global South at same bleak images inaugurate when the center rather than the periphery uttered by Davis? If it is this of the study of the city. borrowed dystopia that saturates Davis’s vivid critical appraisal Davis’s text with a palpable sense stops short of grasping the world as of urgency, what does Davis urge, anything other than a closed system, precisely? careening inexorably toward violent At its best, the secondhand dysto- collapse. And thus, at its worst, pia of Planet of Slums aims to reca- the secondhand dystopia of Planet librate the political agendas of a of Slums can be seen to confi rm fl oundering left project and to place the modernizer’s lament: to urge a the “global catastrophe of urban more thoroughgoing development, poverty” at the center of left strug- to corroborate the premises of those gles against the devastations of glob- who would wage war on global al capitalism. It insists that a central poverty, to advocate a more effi cient tactic of that struggle must be to incorporation of the world’s poor as de-legitimate and decenter neolib- the solution to their marginalization eralism as a political project with within global capitalism, and to ON MIKE DAVIS’S PLANET OF SLUMS 159

(tacitly) ratify the conception of acknowledges in the end. We learn historical transformation embedded in the epilogue that Davis is work- within a modernizing trajectory. ing on another book, which will ad- One could invoke Fredric Jameson dress the “history and future of to diagnose the closed circle of Da- slum-based resistance to global cap- vis’s critique: “radical alternatives, italism” (207). This book will not be systemic transformations, cannot be crafted as a synthetic account of theorized or even imagined within studies and surveys, but will be based the conceptual fi eld governed by the on “concrete, comparative case stud- word ‘modern.’” Jameson continues: ies,” and grounded in “real political “What we really need is a wholesale sociology” (201). For this sequel, displacement of thematics of mo- Davis plans to enlist the help of dernity by the desire called Utopia.”1 activist-scholar and political anthro- What, then, is one to make of the pologist Forrest Hylton, whose un- desire called Dystopia? derstanding of slum urbanization The chief failing of Planet of has been shaped by time spent Slums is that in it Davis occludes “behind a barricade in the Andes” from view—his as well as ours—the (207). Thus we must wait for this world as it is made by the people next book to discover with Davis the who live in the conditions he cata- forms of historical agency that his logs with such impressive concision. globe-spanning survey of slum ur- The question of the historical agen- banism elides. One wonders wheth- cy of the growing mass of people er Davis will allow the concrete who live in unlivable conditions experience of slum-based resistance makes only a few brief, late appear- to retroactively revise the conceptual ances in this book, even while Davis framework of the present book and insists that there are no doubt “myr- crack open the closed circuit of its iad acts of resistance” and that “the despair. Is another world still possi- future of human solidarity depends ble? Davis can only reply, for now, upon the militant refusal of the new another book is coming. urban poor to accept their terminal marginality within global capital- —Vassar College ism” (202). Indeed, the freight of his examples works against Davis’s own assertion, made late in the book’s NOTES 206 pages, that there “is no mono- lithic subject or unilateral trend in 1. Fredric Jameson, A Singular the global slum” (202). In a funda- Modernity (London: Verso, 2002), 215. mental sense, Planet of Slums is an incomplete undertaking—half of a book—which Davis in fact