Planet of Slums
by Mike Davis
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Book Summary Information
Author: Mike DavisEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2007-09-17
ISBN: 1844671607
Number of pages: 228
Publisher: Verso
Book Reviews of Planet of Slums
Book Review: Important book on slums
Summary: 5 Stars
In this great book Mike Davis writes about how there are millions of people who live on fringes of major cities around the world and are exploited by entrepreneurs as cheap labour. These temporary workers are usually desperatley poor peasants. Most of these cities are in the global south, and some of these areas can better be described as "garbage slums" where unwanted waste and unwanted immigrants end up together. The sanitation conditions are often appaling . These areas have a populance whose life expectancy is amongst the lowest in the world.
In South Africa during the apartheid era almost one million people of color where uprooted from urban environments to give the land over to the white population. The same was true in communist china where the priveledged urban proletariat was priveledegd over rural peasants. In the slum areas the state usually does next to nothing. It does not provide water, schools, sanitation, roads or hospitals. Residents sometimes buy water from private dealers and rely on vigilante security forces instead of the police.
In Nigeria, the government promised to use the soaring oil revenues to rehouse the countries urban poor. But in fact less than a fifth of those houses where constructed and the money went to others than the poor. In one of Lagos greatest slums, called Ajegunle, 1.5 million people live on not much more than 8 square kilometers of swampy land.and the spen on an average 3 hours a day commuting to work.
Public and state assisted housing in the global south has primarily benifited the urban elites and middle classes. Powerfull local intrerests such as politicians, big developers, and military juntas usually take advantage of peripheral land sales to the poor migrants. Usually the postcolonial elites have "inherited and greedily reproduced the physical footprints of segregated colonial cities"..." the indigenous elites(have after independence) took over european posts and all the benefits attached". In this way "the colonial template provided a basis for the almost total segregation of state officials and African professionals from their poorer compatriots".
Many high profile events like the olympics or beauty pagents have been used as an excuse to relocate slum inhabitants. They are the "dirt" that the governments dont want visitors to see. Relocating individuals from urban slum areas has also been a way for governments to get rid of slum-based resistance to their rule. So the city centers are restructured to allow "more effective control and policing". An example of this type of relocation occured in Lagos in Nigeria, when a vast corridor was cleared through a densley populated slum area to create an expressway so that officials could easier get back and forth to work.
In contrast to the growing slums another type of settlement has started to arise. This is the explosive rise of exclusive closed suburbs on the peripheries of third world cities. These are also reffered to as "gated communities". These suburbs are often styled after southern Californian neighbourhoods like Beverly Hills or Orange County. These semi detached homes allow the affluent to live faux Californian lifestyles while their maids sleep in "chicken coop like sheds on the rooftops".
Much of the land that the slums are built on is unsafe. They are often located near garbage dumps which means that a high concentration of "toxic industrial activities" contaminate the ground and the water. The sewage often becomes mixed up with the water causing digestive tract diseases. The air is also often polluted. The air in the city of Mumbai in India for example is so polluted that breathing it for a day is considered to be the equivalent of smoking two and a half packs of cigarettes. Sewage is also a major problems since there is often a major or total lack of toilets. This means that people relieve themselves on the streets or into bags which they throw onto rooftops. This is alos a big problem for women in India for example. Since having to go to the bathroom in public means exposing ones private parts. This is impossible in a society where its important that women uphold strict standars of modesty. The poorer women usually dont go to the bathroom at all during the daylight hours but instead wait till it gets dark to relieve themselves. Often the public toilets like the water, becomes privatized, reaping huge profits for the owners of the contracts.
Child labour is something that the slum areas produce. It is "usually the weakest and smallest shoulders that have to bear the heaviest burdens". Most of the children in the global south who live in slums dont go to school and almost half of those kids between 10 and 14 are working. Some work 20 hour days in the carpet, garment or restaurant businesses. They often indure work related wounds, like young girls in India whose eyesight is damaged from "endless hours of embroidering in poor lighting" or other small children whom "are made to crouch on their toes, from dawn to dusk every day, severly stunting heir growth during their formative years" while working with carpet looms.
Summary of Planet of Slums
A celebrated urban historian?s bestselling account of the global explosion of slums.
According to the united nations, more than one billion people now live in the slums of the cities of the South. In this brilliant and ambitious book, Mike Davis explores the future of a radically unequal and explosively unstable urban world. From the sprawling barricadas of Lima to the garbage hills of Manila, urbanization has been disconnected from industrialization, and even from economic growth. Davis portrays a vast humanity warehoused in shantytowns and exiled from the formal world economy. He argues that the rise of this informal urban proletariat is a wholly unforeseen development, and asks whether the great slums, as a terrified Victorian middle class once imagined, are volcanoes waiting to erupt.Economics Books
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