BuzzFlash Reviews

BUZZFLASH REVIEWS

If Al Gore is reawakening the world to the dangers of global warming, Mike Davis reignites interest in an equally under-covered topic: the growth of urban mega-slums primarily, but not exclusively, in the third world.

This is not an abstract concept: it is a development with real and deadly consequences. In fact, Davis concludes his book by tying elements of the complex factions behind anti-U.S. fighters (all of whom Bush lumps together as terrorists) into products of the mega-slum.

"Indeed," Davis writes, "the unemployed teenage fighters of the 'Mahdi Army' in Baghdad's Sadr City -- one of the world's largest slums -- taunt American occupiers with the promise that their main boulevard is 'Vietnam Street.'" In short, at least one component of Bush's public relations "war on terrorism" is aimed at suppressing a revolt of the poor that the administration unleashed when it invaded Iraq.

Recently, many of us read of a gang uprising in Brazil that took many lives. It was, perhaps, a portent of things to come in a nation with many large swaths of slums that are lawless zones inhabited by criminals and the unemployed. "As the CIA grimly noted in 2002," Davis notes, "By the late 1990s a staggering one billion workers representing one-third of the world's labor force, most of them in the South[ern hemisphere], were either unemployed or underemployed."

In short, add to the list of hidden objectives in the alleged "war on terror" that the military is practicing urban warfare against the poor, were there an economic uprising among the residents of the world's squalid shanty towns. This contingency would have been vital, for instance, had the U.S.-backed coup of Chavez been successful. Why? Because Caracas is a modern city surrounded by slums built up into the mountains. The fortunate 10% or so of Venezuelans who live above the poverty line, many of them in great wealth, are in the center of a ring of economic desperation.

"Planet Slums" is not a sociological portrait of slum residents. Rather, it is a fact-based reflection on the development of large belts of wretched urban communities, without any sustainable economic viability -- and the implications for an earthquake of economic and real conflict that they represent.

"Planet Slums" presents the economic version of global warming, given the large-scale development of communities without financial ladders. We continue to ignore them at risk to international stability.

As one reviewer of the book noted, "In this trenchantly argued book, Mike Davis quantifies the nightmarish mass production of slums that marks the contemporary city. With cool indignation, Davis argues that the exponential growth of slums is no accident but the result of a perfect storm of corrupt leadership, institutional failure, and IMF-imposed Structural Adjustment Programs leading to a massive transfer of wealth from poor to rich. Scourge of neo-liberal nostrums, Davis debunks the irresponsible myth of self-help salvation, showing exactly who gets the boot from 'bootstrap capitalism.' Like the work of Jacob Riis, Ida Tarbell, and Lincoln Steffans over a century ago, this searing indictment makes the shame of our cities urgently clear."

There are many ticking time bombs in the world -- and the mega-slums are at the top of the list.

BUZZFLASH REVIEWS