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The Desire Called Dystopia Criticism Volume 50 Article 10 Issue 1 Disco 2008 The esirD e Called Dystopia Lisa Brawley Vassar College Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/criticism 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.
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