[Announce] Strategic Low-income Urban Management Systems (SLUMS)

Thu May 25 09:07:16 PDT 2006

>From time to time, I have been heard to observe 
that the modern situation looks more and more like 
1789 in France.  The article below, from the Asia 
Times, is a sobering reflection on the same theme: 
Strategic Low-income Urban Management Systems, 
a/k/a SLUMS.  I think I am going to order the 
book.

Bob Waldrop, Romero House, OKC

http://atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/HE20Aa01.html

BOOK REVIEW
The accumulation of the wretched
Planet of Slums by Mike Davis

Reviewed by Pepe Escobar

SAO PAULO - Pentagon planners must have loved what 
happened in South America's premier hypercity in 
the past few days; as urban warfare goes, it was 
more illuminating than Baghdad or Gaza. The 
leaders of the First Capital Command (PCC, for 
Primeiro Comando da Capital) - a super-gang 
involved in drug and arms trafficking, 
kidnappings, bank robberies and extortion and 
controlling most of Sao Paulo's overcrowded and 
notoriously corrupt prisons - declared war against 
Brazil's wealthiest state.

>From inside their prison cells, using US$150 
mobile phones, they ordered motorcyclist "bin 
Ladens" - warriors indebted to the PCC, heavily 
armed with guns, shotguns, hand grenades, 
machine-guns and Molotov cocktails - to conduct a 
violent orgy: spraying police cars with bullets, 
hurling grenades at police stations, attacking 
officers in their homes and after-hours hangouts, 
torching dozens of buses (after passengers had 
been ordered off), and robbing banks. Almost 100 
people were killed in three days. On Monday, the 
PCC managed single-handedly virtually to paralyze 
Sao Paulo, the third-largest of the world's 
hypercities (those with more than 19 million 
people).

The PCC leaders were demanding better jail 
conditions; and crucially - as this is soccer-mad 
Brazil - a few dozen television sets so inmates 
can follow the World Cup in Germany next month. 
Sooner or later, with better coordination, 
demonstrations  of force like this one will 
inevitably spread to Rio de Janeiro's slums, also 
a drug-dealing beehive. Brazil's mega-cities are 
used to urban civil war. And the war has been on 
since at least the late 1970s. "Baghdad is here" 
has become a common mantra.

Mike Davis, one of the United States' premier 
urban theorists and analysts of urban hell, author 
of City of Quartz and Dead Cities, should have 
been watching Sao Paulo's civil war first-hand; 
this is everything the future predicted in his 
remarkable new book is all about, the slums of the 
world's mega-cities rebelling against the state. 
We're heading toward a world where "cities will 
account for virtually all future world population 
growth, which is expected to peak at about 10 
billion in 2050".

Already the combined populations of China, India 
and Brazil roughly equal that of Western Europe 
and North America. By 2025, Asia will have at 
least 10 hypercities, including Jakarta (24.9 
million people), Dhaka (25 million), Karachi (26.5 
million), Shanghai (27 million) and Mumbai (with a 
staggering 33 million). Davis also refers to the 
coming leviathan of the Rio/Sao Paulo Extended 
Metropolitan Region, a 450-kilometer-long axis 
between the two Brazilian mega-cities already 
encompassing 37 million people, even more than the 
Tokyo-Yokohama conurbation (33 million).

Davis sees the future as a realist, not as an 
apocalyptic visionary: "This great dragon-like 
sprawl of cities will constitute the physical and 
demographic culmination of millennia of urban 
evolution. The ascendancy of coastal East Asia, in 
turn, will surely promote a Tokyo-Shanghai 'world 
city' dipole to equal the New York-London axis in 
the control of global flows of capital and 
information."

But most of all, the dire consequences of the 
hypercity explosion will be inevitable: appalling 
inequality within and between cities and, as far 
as China is concerned, the terror gripping their 
urban experts - the unbridgeable gap between small 
inland cities and coastal hypercities. Nobody yet 
has examined in full the implications of China 
ceasing to be the predominantly rural society it 
has been for millennia.

What we already have in the early 21st century, in 
rich as well as poor countries, is a new paradigm 
coined by German architect and urban theorist 
Thomas Sieverts: the Zwischenstadt ("in-between 
city"). Referring to Indonesia, Davis points out 
the advanced rural/urban hybridization of 
"Jabotabek", the Greater Jakarta region. 
"Researchers call these novel land-use patterns 
desakotas ('city villages') and argue whether they 
are transitional landscapes or a dramatic new 
species of urbanism," he writes.

As Davis points out with glee, "Eighty percent of 
[Karl] Marx's industrial proletariat now lives in 
China or somewhere outside of Western Europe and 
the US." Most are ready to explode. This 
accumulation of the wretched has been enhanced by 
"policies of agricultural deregulation and 
financial discipline enforced by the IMF 
[International Monetary Fund] and World Bank" that 
spawned "an exodus of surplus rural labor to urban 
slums even as cities ceased to be job machines". 
So this "over-urbanization" was driven "by the 
reproduction of poverty, not by the supply of 
jobs".

This is one of the unexpected tracks down which a 
neo-liberal world order is shunting the future. 
Davis proves his point by quoting an array of 
United Nations data, from the 16.4% annual growth 
rate of Sao Paulo favelas (slums) in the 1990s to 
the 200,000 floaters (unregistered rural workers) 
who arrive annually in Beijing or the 500,000 who 
migrate annually to Delhi (of these, 80% end up in 
slums). Davis dedicates a whole chapter - "SAPing 
the Third World" - to examining the dire 
consequences of the dreaded, one-size-fits-all, 
IMF-imposed "structural adjustment programs" 
(SAPs).

Abandon all hope those who dream about the 
glamorously high-tech cities of the future. They 
will be largely constructed of "crude brick, 
straw, recycled plastic, cement blocks and scrap 
wood. Instead of cities of light soaring toward 
heaven, much of the urban 21st century squats in 
squalor, surrounded by pollution, excrement, and 
decay". To see it live, right now, one just has to 
drive by Kolkata, Mumbai, Manila, Jakarta, Cairo, 
Changing or Sao Paulo.

According to UN-HABITAT figures, most places with 
the world's largest percentages of slum-dwellers 
are in Asia: Afghanistan (98.5%) and Nepal (92%). 
Mumbai holds the dubious record of being the slum 
capital of the world - as many as 12 million 
squatters - followed by Mexico City and Dhaka and 
then Lagos, Cairo, Karachi, Kinshasa-Brazzaville, 
Sao Paulo, Shanghai and Delhi.

Exclusion, of course, is the norm, as this 
correspondent, who has lived and worked in many a 
teeming, vast, messy hypercity in the developing 
world, can attest. Mumbai is a classic case, as 
Davis quotes research according to which the rich 
own 90% of the land, while the poor are 
overcrowded in the remaining 10%. "These polarized 
patterns of land use and population density 
recapitulate older logics of imperial control and 
racial dominance. Throughout the Third World, 
post-colonial cities have inherited and greedily 
reproduced the physical footprints of segregated 
colonial cities ... despite the rhetoric of 
national liberation and social justice."

As far as exclusion is concerned, Davis could not 
but refer to the most Orwellian "urban 
beautification" program in Asia - the preparation 
for Visit Myanmar Year 1996 undertaken by the 
junta that rules Myanmar. "One and a half million 
residents - an incredible 16% of the total urban 
population - were removed from their homes ... and 
shipped out to hastily constructed 
bamboo-and-thatch huts in the urban periphery, now 
creepily renamed the 'New Fields', thus leading to 
Rangoon [Yangon] being transformed into 'a 
nightmare combination of a Buddhist tourist 
wonderland, a giant barracks and a graveyard'."

Another crucial process, the criminalization of 
the slum - as it happened, among other examples, 
in Rio and Jakarta - runs parallel to what Davis 
describes as the "explosive growth of exclusive, 
closed suburbs on the peripheries of Third World 
cities. Chinese urban designer Pu Miao has called 
this 'the most significant development in recent 
urban planning and design'."

Gated-community heaven - be it in Beijing or Sao 
Paulo, Bangkok or Manila, Bangalore or Cairo - is 
an "off world", and Davis is happy to borrow the 
terminology from the film Blade Runner. These 
replica southern Californias are also the epitome 
of an "architecture of fear", as Nigerian 
researcher Tunde Agbola, quoted by Davis, defines 
fortified lifestyle in Lagos. Davis correctly 
points out that its most extreme forms are "in 
large urban societies with the greatest 
socio-economic inequalities: South Africa, Brazil, 
Venezuela and the US".

It is indeed a "culture of the absurd" - as every 
upper-middle-class condo in Sao Paulo comes with 
armed guards, banks of closed-circuit-television 
cameras, electrified wiring connected with 
emergency alarms and sometimes connected to "armed 
response" security companies. Rich and poor, in 
this environment, rarely intersect. It's what some 
Brazilian writers call "the return to the medieval 
city". Gated-community heaven, as reached by the 
upwardly mobile in the developing world, elevates 
them, in Davis's words, into "fortified, 
fantasy-themed enclaves and edge cities, 
disembedded from their own social landscapes but 
integrated into globalization's cyber-California 
floating in the digital ether". The whole thing 
also means the death of civil society as we know 
it.

All over the world, hundreds of millions survive 
by juggling within the so-called "informal 
sector". Davis agrees with an array of 
multinational researchers: the rise of the 
informal sector is a direct byproduct of 
neo-liberal policies. Some Brazilian sociologists, 
as Davis points out, call the process "passive 
proletarization". According to the UN, informal 
workers already constitute "two-thirds of the 
economically active population of the developing 
world".

In Latin America, the informal economy already 
supplies four out of five "new jobs". In the end 
Davis cannot but mock development aid bureaucrats 
and their air-conditioned utopian vision of slums 
as Strategic Low-income Urban Management Systems 
(SLUMS). There's nothing romantic about Varanasi, 
the "world capital of enslaved and exploited 
children", or the 200,000-plus rickshawallahs of 
Dhaka - "the unsung Lance Armstrongs of the Third 
World" earning about $1 for pedaling at least 60km 
every day.

Davis saves the best for last - the chapter titled 
"Down Vietnam Street". Reflecting reality in the 
streets of the world's hypercities, where the 
permanently redundant masses will never stand a 
chance of being included in socio-economic terms, 
he writes that "the late capitalist triage of 
humanity, then, has already taken place". The 
enterprising Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has 
also reached the same conclusion, he notes, as a 
2002 report stressed that already by the late 
1990s "a staggering 1 billion workers representing 
one-third of the world's labor force, most of them 
in the South, were either unemployed or 
underemployed".

Davis remembers how the administration of US 
president John Kennedy "officially diagnosed Third 
World revolutions as 'diseases of modernization' 
and prescribed - in addition to Green Berets and 
B-52s - ambitious land reforms and housing 
programs". Everyone living in Latin America in the 
1960s remembers the dreaded Alliance for 
Progress - advertised US-style as a sort of 
Marshall Plan that would "lift pan-American living 
standards to southern European, if not gringo, 
levels". The results were disastrous, just as the 
heavily advertised UN Millennium Development Goals 
(MDGs) will not be met. Davis quotes the UN's 
Human Development Report 2004, which warns that 
measuring by recent "progress", sub-Saharan Africa 
will not reach most of these goals "until well 
into the 22nd century".

So we're left with repression - the definitive 
neo-liberal paradigm, a literal "Great Wall" of 
high-tech border repression trying to suppress 
migration to rich countries - as in the 
conservative US vis-a-vis Mexico and Central 
America and the European Union vis-a-vis the 
Maghreb. Meanwhile, slum populations, according to 
UN-HABITAT, will keep growing at least by 25 
million people a year.

Squattable land is eroding. So welcome to "the 
radical new face of inequality", as Davis put it, 
"a grim human world largely cut off from the 
subsistence solidarities of the countryside as 
well as disconnected from the cultural and 
political life of the traditional city". This is 
the edge of the abyss, the new Babylon; and its 
inhabitants more than ever will include the young, 
dispossessed neo-terrorists who attacked 
Casablanca in May 2003 as well as the motorized 
"bin Ladens" attacking Sao Paulo police only a few 
days ago.

As much as he can't stand the IMF-World Bank 
"development" crowd, Davis's post-modern 
neo-realism has no time for "portentous 
post-Marxist speculations" like Toni Negri's 
"multitudes" acting in "rhizomatic spaces". This 
book is as much a scholarly effort - grounded in 
solid research ranging from urban-planning papers 
to the general media - as a cry of alarm. Davis 
presents the intractable problems but also sets 
the stage for finding solutions - the subject of 
his next book, to be written alongside Forrest 
Hylton, on the history and future of slum-based 
resistance to global capitalism. The only thing 
missing would be Davis himself spending more time 
in the developing world's hypercities and adding 
an element of reportage to his theoretical tour de 
force.

It may be an apocalyptic urban background that 
virtually no politicians, corporate types or 
think-tank "experts" ever visit - but this is real 
life, not virtual reality. As Davis correctly puts 
it, "the rulers' imagination ... seems to falter 
before the obvious implications of a world of 
cities without jobs". Thus the French elite's 
perplexity with the Paris banlieues on fire late 
last year, the US perplexity with the dispossessed 
becoming Salafi jihadis in the outskirts of 
Istanbul, Cairo, Karachi and Casablanca, the 
Brazilian authorities' impotence facing street 
gangs and narcotraficantes.

For the powers that be, the easiest way out is to 
demonize. Thus the "war on terror", the "war on 
drugs" and the obliteration of any serious and 
honest debate about the unspeakable daily violence 
of perpetual economic exclusion. Davis sums it all 
up thusly: "The categorical criminalization of the 
urban poor is a self-fulfilling prophecy, 
guaranteed to shape a future of endless war in the 
streets." And this is happening while virtually 
nobody in positions of political power is 
examining the terrifying geopolitical implications 
of a planet of slums.

So back to the standing order - to repress, 
repress, repress. Davis embarks on a short, 
brilliant analysis of the Pentagon's take on 
global urban poverty. He inevitably has to talk 
about MOUT - Military Operations on Urbanized 
Terrain. As the journal of the Army War College 
declared, Davis quotes, "The future of warfare 
lies in the streets, sewers, highrise buildings 
and sprawl of houses that form the broken cities 
of the world." The Santa Monica, California-based 
Rand Corporation - which helped to set strategy 
for the Vietnam War in the 1960s - has added a 
little more concept to MOUT.

Rand has concluded that the urbanization of world 
poverty has produced "the urbanization of 
insurgency"; insurgents are "following their 
followers into the cities, setting up 'liberated 
zones' in urban shantytowns". The Rand experts are 
obviously talking about Baghdad's Sadr City - one 
of the world's largest slums - where the young and 
the wretched join Muqtada al-Sadr's Mehdi Army to 
make life hell for the American occupier (no 
wonder Sadr City's squalid main boulevard is 
nicknamed "Vietnam Street").

But the Rand crowd could also be talking about the 
drug-infested slums of Sao Paulo, where 
"faculties" are prisons dominated by the PCC, 
monthly contributions by members - ranging from 
$25 to $250 - finance drug trafficking, prison 
exchange and attacks, and "bin Ladens" have either 
to fulfill their mission and pay their debt to the 
organization, scoring points with the criminal 
elite, or they become traitors to the "Party of 
Crime".

So this is the way the world ends: not with a 
whimper, but with bang after bang, the "homeland" 
cities of the world crouching in their defense 
against "forces of darkness", or the "axis of 
evil", or "terrorists", Islamic and otherwise, who 
threaten the "free world".

"Night after night, hornet-like helicopter 
gunships stalk enigmatic enemies in the narrow 
streets of the slum districts ... every morning 
the slums reply with suicide bombers and eloquent 
explosions." It's happening right now, over there 
in Baghdad and over here, in the vast, messy 
hypercity of Sao Paulo. Welcome to the 
(overcrowded) Dome of Hell - and this one is not 
digital, it's the real thing.

Planet of Slums by Mike Davis. Verso, 2006. ISBN 
1-84467-022-8. Price US$24, 256 pages hardcover.