[DEBATE] : (Fwd) Two reviews of Mike Davis books (London Review of Books)

[Patrick Bond]

LRB | Vol. 29 No. 5 dated 8 March 2007 | Jeremy Harding

It Migrates to Them
Jeremy Harding

Planet of Slums by Mike Davis · Verso, 228 pp, £15.99

Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb by Mike Davis · Verso, 228 
pp, £12.99

If any of us has seen the places in the developing world that Mike Davis 
catalogues remorselessly in Planet of Slums, it was probably from an 
aeroplane. That doesn’t always mean 35,000 feet, for as Davis points 
out, poorer people tend to colonise the marginal land of cities where 
air terminals were once built at a comfortable distance from prosperous 
centres of medium or high population density. Prosperity in the newer, 
informal urban environment – in Caracas or Lagos, say – is reckoned by 
incomparably different standards. Davis, the urban historian who also 
excels at apocalyptic geography, sketches the various ways in which its 
inhabitants can make ends meet. He also lists ways, based mostly on 
exploitation, in which they might even profit. In the end, the 
burgeoning pauper conurbations are as wretched as they look from the 
cabin window.

Davis’s books are great evidential engines. Planet of Slums howls with 
figures. Copious examples drawn from around the globe are stacked up to 
illustrate a single point; comparative tables drive it home. This 
constant production of numbers – and a seamless access between 
continents – offers us the world as a single, intelligible place defined 
by the universal laws of accumulation and deprivation. Any sense that 
slum cultures and slum cities might have a specific character, beyond 
the common lot of misery, is tenuous. No book will give readers the 
impression of covering greater distances, even if they will feel by the 
end as though they’d been cooped up in a narrow, featureless room. 
Homogeneity, Davis would argue, is what late capitalism does: already a 
billion people live in roughly the same extraordinary way in roughly 
similar environments. Vast, contiguous slums are the habitat of the 
future for even larger numbers, yet the future looks more and more like 
it did the day before yesterday.

And so to the figures. By 2015 there will be at least 550 cities with a 
population of more than one million. Already this aggregate population 
is growing ‘by a million babies and migrants each week’. The peak will 
come in 2050, when ten billion people, by then the great majority of 
humankind, will be living in cities: ‘95 per cent of this final 
build-out of humanity will occur in the urban areas of developing 
countries, whose populations will double to nearly four billion over the 
next generation.’ Even more striking than these huge projected increases 
and the assertion that they are ‘final’ is the accelerating rate at 
which they’re taking place – nowhere faster than in China. Davis refers 
to cities with a population of eight million and rising as ‘megacities’. 
There are more than 20 megacities in the developing world. Two of these 
– Mexico City and Seoul – were ‘hypercities’ (with 20 million 
inhabitants) at the time he published this book. Since then São Paulo 
and Mumbai must also have hit the 20 million mark, with Delhi fast 
approaching it.

Concentric sprawl at the edges of discrete metropolitan centres is not 
the only model of substandard housing growth. There is also the built-up 
corridor, which takes shape as the hinterlands between smaller and 
larger cities become developed, or strictly speaking underdeveloped, and 
an elongated urban swathe begins to form, like that of the Rio/São Paulo 
Extended Metropolitan Region, effectively a serpentine city 500 km in 
length, with a megacity at either end and two bulges – medium-size 
cities – in between. A similar urban ribbon is developing in West 
Africa; by 2020, according to an OECD study, it will run for 600 km from 
Accra to Benin City and contain 60 million inhabitants. Davis believes 
it will be ‘the biggest single footprint of urban poverty on earth’. In 
China, larger developments are underway on the Pearl River delta, the 
Yangtze delta and along the Beijing-Tianjin corridor. Unlike the strips 
in Brazil and the Gulf of Guinea, these ‘post-urban structures’, as 
Davis calls them, are aggressively planned. They also have a glamorous 
touch of Asian tiger, hinting as they do at the emergence of a 
‘Tokyo-Shanghai “world city”’ as influential as the New York/London axis 
on ‘the control of global flows of capital and information’.

Planet of Slums is not much interested in the pzazz of the megacity, or 
even in its dystopian double, the Pacific Rim limbo of Blade Runner. 
Davis is concerned with the reproduction of inequality that megacities 
already entail and which he believes will get worse, ‘within and between 
cities of different sizes and economic specialisations’. He is troubled, 
too, by urban encroachment on what’s left of rural livelihoods. He cites 
the work of Jeremy Seabrook on Penang fishermen, their homes cut off 
from the sea by a large highway and their fishing grounds polluted by 
the spread of urbanisation: the next generation ended up in 
Japanese-owned sweatshops. ‘In many cases,’ Davis observes, ‘rural 
people no longer have to migrate to the city: it migrates to them.’

Whether the city signals its arrival in the form of public projects, or 
private development contracts signed off by local authorities, often in 
return for cash, is really a technicality. Ragged, substandard urban 
sprawl, constantly reshaping its margins, is for Davis the manifest 
destiny of cities in poor countries expanding under the pressure of 
deregulated market economies. If there are countries in the South where 
more people live in slums than live in cities proper, and if by 2020 
half of the world’s urban population will exist in poverty, then the 
slum deserves more attention than it’s getting from planners, 
sociologists, environmentalists, epidemiologists and demographers. Davis 
points out that ‘of the 500,000 people who migrate to Delhi each year, 
it is estimated that fully 400,000 end up in slums’ and that 85 per cent 
of Kenya’s population growth in the 1990s ‘was absorbed in the fetid, 
densely packed slums of Nairobi and Mombasa’.

Davis does not see the new slums seething with economic potential. He 
mistrusts the Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto’s theory that thriving 
economies would begin to emerge if only land titles in slum areas were 
formalised, enabling owners to liquidate, or secure loans on the basis 
of property ownership. Doing away with the ‘artificial shortage of 
property rights’ in slums, Davis argues, will simply create new 
divisions between owners and non-owners, making the latter visible to 
government and adding a new pressure – taxation – to those that exist 
already: this seems to have been the case with property ‘regularisation’ 
in Mexico City.

Bootstrap micro-entrepreneurial remedies leave Davis equally unimpressed 
because, even though they benefit a small minority, they do nothing to 
halt the growth of slums. In the Victorian era, the typical big city 
owed its population increase – and its slums – to industrialisation. 
Towns like Manchester were ‘job machines’ and the industrial revolution 
was the bitter road to prosperity for hundreds of thousands of people. 
But there are exceptions, including Dublin, which in the first half of 
the 19th century showed few signs of industrialising – quite the 
reverse, according to the historian Emmet Larkin – even as it hosted a 
large slum population. The ‘canonical trajectory’ of the big city, as 
understood by classical social theory – ‘Manchester, Berlin and Chicago’ 
– offers no useful perspective on the vast encampments of poor springing 
up in the South, even though some have roughly conformed to the old 
pattern. In Davis’s planet of slums, urban growth is not linked to the 
capacity of cities to provide work. This, rather than the failure to 
encourage local business or issue property deeds in the barrios, is the 
heart of the problem.

The World Bank and the IMF, Davis argues, have been the driving force 
behind the creation of modern slums. And Structural Adjustment 
Programmes – drastic mechanisms of conditionality imposed on borrowers 
or debtors negotiating repayment – have been the means. This is true 
especially since the 1980s, when both the World Bank and the IMF began 
carpet-bombing debtors with SAPs. Structural Adjustment required 
borrowers to cut back on public expenditure and taxation. It encouraged 
privatisation, public sector lay-offs and the end of price subsidies. 
Millions were driven into the informal sector. A few got rich, some got 
a living, but most found themselves reduced to petty barter, minor 
service or the Third World equivalent of the dole queue, lining up daily 
outside construction sites in the hope of a couple of hours’ work. 
Meanwhile, agricultural project funding was severely reduced and 
SAP-signatories were more or less obliged to fall back on primary 
agriculture – sugar, cocoa, coffee – in an international market where 
prices could go through the floor, as they did in the early 1980s. More 
and more livelihoods on the land, not least among subsistence farmers 
who had been forced to grow cash crops, failed as a consequence.

About a billion people worldwide operate in the informal sector. Davis 
tells us they constitute ‘the fastest-growing . . . social class on 
earth’. In the neoliberal model they are ‘the heroic self-employed’, 
operating in a paradise of deregulation where initiative and 
entrepreneurialism will eventually triumph to the benefit of all. In 
practice, the growth of the informal sector has not even brought about 
the satisfaction of rudimentary needs – clean water, medical care, a 
stab at education – for most people living in the 21st-century slum. 
‘Informal survivalism’ is Davis’s expression for the economic regime 
under which they live. Even though there are sweatshop sectors and other 
labour-intensive niches in this informal economy, there simply aren’t 
enough jobs to go around. Far from becoming active participants in a 
virtuous cycle of wealth creation, the huge numbers of people at the 
lower end of the slum – the petty traders and service-providers – find 
their specialities endlessly replicated by others and their takings 
diminished. ‘The informal sector,’ Davis explains, ‘generates jobs not 
by elaborating new divisions of labour, but by fragmenting existing 
work, and thus subdividing incomes.’ This holds as well for the platoons 
of barbers and shoeshine boys as it does for the gaggles of ‘parking 
attendants’ – usually children – who pile out of their homes every 
morning and beg for the right to watch over cars outside UN compounds 
and downtown hotels for a couple of dollars.

Neoliberalism’s remedies for mass poverty are so counterintuitive as to 
be indistinguishable, in Davis’s view, from nonsense. Yet there were 
already economies in trouble before 1978 – arguably the date when SAPs 
came into their own. Several countries with large public sectors and 
balance-of-payments deficits were hit hard, and left reeling, by the 
1973 oil crisis. Even as their leaders took on the biggest debts that 
most of these young states would ever incur, public employees had begun 
driving cabs and repairing transistor radios to stay above water. 
Corruption in the upper echelons of the civil service, and in 
government, skimmed off impressive amounts of GNP.

Casting a retrospective gaze across the wastes of structural adjustment, 
Davis discerns a better past, in which the state played an important 
role as job provider, national project manager and sovereign 
decision-maker on fiscal and monetary policy. He quotes an article by 
Stefan Andreasson in the Journal of Contemporary African Studies to the 
effect that the ‘virtual democracy’ which obtains in countries hit by 
structural adjustment has come ‘at the expense of inclusive, 
participatory democracy’. He finds reason, too, in the assertion of a 
2003 UN-Habitat report, The Challenge of Slums, that the ‘main single 
cause of increases in poverty and inequality during the 1980s and 1990s 
was the retreat of the state’.

Sub-Saharan Africa’s dwindling population of fiftysomethings would be 
surprised to hear that there was ‘inclusive, participatory democracy’ at 
a national level before the epidemic of structural adjustment. Others 
would have mixed feelings about the demise of the state. There was, it’s 
true, a magnanimous, inclusive aspect to sub-Saharan government 
bureaucracy in the old days: thousands of civil servants slumped over 
reams of single-spaced copy, all of it in triplicate, with sheaves of 
addled carbon paper set beside abandoned typewriters, the whole scene 
sanctified by a row of overhead fans which had ceased turning when the 
grid installed by the former colonial power ran into a parts problem. 
But too often the rattle of the Weimar wheelbarrow was the theme tune of 
the Third World functionary in this period that Davis regrets. Not all 
public sector employees did badly, however. From Jakarta to Kinshasa and 
west to Guatemala City, various well-paid servants of the state enforced 
the curfews and ran the detention centres.

Despite there having been no golden era, Davis’s account of the 
destruction visited on the poor by SAPs is compelling. The woes of the 
early 1970s grew far more serious with the hardening of IMF and World 
Bank conditionality: Davis thinks of it as ‘urban poverty’s Big Bang’. 
In a chapter called ‘SAPing the Third World’, he follows the effects of 
structural adjustment, through a synthesis of work by other scholars and 
researchers, from the broad picture of crumbling infrastructure and 
soaring prices to the microcosm of the family unit whose adult males are 
thrown out of jobs while the children leave school to begin scratching a 
living and the women bear the burden of extra, unpaid work – a hidden 
burden that hardly ever shows up in World Bank reckonings. There is a 
touching elegy to solidarity – the solidarity of daily gestures and 
simple courtesies between the poor – now that a cup of coffee at your 
sister’s or a measure of oil from your neighbour has to go on the slate, 
and a warning that even the two success stories of dynamic neoliberalism 
in action, India and coastal China, have involved ‘soaring inequality’ 
(and in China’s case, millions of redundancies).

Planet of Slums cannot see a way back from the brink, and it would be 
odd if it could. Davis’s vestigial admiration for the USSR and Maoist 
China, based on Communist housing supply, will not convert into a 
programme for the 21st century. He notes that the ‘late capitalist 
triage of humanity’ has ‘already taken place’ and quotes Jan Breman, the 
Asia specialist and labour anthropologist: ‘A point of no return is 
reached when a reserve army waiting to be incorporated into the labour 
process becomes stigmatised as a permanently redundant mass, an 
excessive burden that cannot be included now or in the future, in 
economy and society.’ A prospectus of slum ‘resistance’ is offered, from 
tactical squatting and food riots to the less rhetorical challenge of 
families and individuals hanging on through thick and thin; and perhaps 
it’s true that people who ‘stubbornly refuse to let go’ are expressing a 
kind of dissent, however inchoate.

Finally, Davis picks his way through the publications of the 
war-planners, noting the strategic fashion, at the Pentagon and the RAND 
Corporation, for MOUT, or ‘Military Operations on Urbanised Terrain’ – 
places like Mogadishu or Sadr City. But who are the enemies of the 
wealthy West, apart from (the wealthy) al-Qaida and the new wave of 
adversaries we’ve recruited with the invasion of Iraq? For an answer, 
Davis quotes a 1995 article by the Fort Leavenworth researcher Geoffrey 
Demarest: potentially the ‘dispossessed’ in general; ‘excluded 
populations’ everywhere; ‘criminal syndicates’; slum children coming of 
age (ripe for child soldiering as religious martyrs or warlord cannon 
fodder). In short, the extremely poor and extremely oppressed, which as 
this book makes clear means an awful lot of enemies. To Davis, the new 
strategic thinking is largely demonisation and delusion, yet he can 
imagine how it will go. ‘Night after night, hornet-like helicopter 
gunships stalk enigmatic enemies in the narrow streets of the slum 
districts, pouring hellfire into shanties or fleeing cars. Every morning 
the slums reply with suicide bombers and eloquent explosions.’

This book about the global future we already inhabit without facing up 
to the fact is also an invocation of the past. The period in question 
predates the Soviet and Maoist command economies. We get intimations of 
it once Davis has signed off an intriguing passage about the etymology 
of the term ‘slum’ and started coming to grips with contemporary urban 
poverty: absence of amenities; local power struggles for control of 
income-sources, including garbage; the politics of squatting; the 
crackly, intermittent dialogue between shrinking states and swelling 
multitudes of abandoned outsiders.

Davis has a rich sense of the Victorian era, yet much of the story of 
the modern-day slum pulls its own precedents along as a subliminal 
narrative, without his having to flag them. So, for example, when he 
turns to the subject of water, we are carried back a century and a half 
to the arguments in Victorian cities about utilities and how they should 
be made available to the poor. There are striking links between the 
dismal story of water privatisation in Luanda or Dar es Salaam, as told 
by Davis, and the story of private owners of pumps in Manchester 
resisting moves for a publicly administered water supply, as told by 
Edwin Chadwick in his report of 1842 on the health of Great Britain’s 
labouring population. And when Davis writes of the money made by owners 
of substandard or slum accommodation in Brazil, there are clear echoes 
of the medical officer in Whitechapel telling Chadwick’s colleagues how 
high the rents were set in the deplorable ‘courts’ – or tenements – off 
Rosemary Lane.

Davis prefers Engels to Chadwick, who had more pettifogging detail to 
hand, being an outstanding public official concerned to maximise the 
efficiency of the working classes. All three evince a commitment to the 
state that is much harder to conceive now that public responsibility for 
almost everything, including the reconstruction of bombed countries, has 
been subcontracted or devolved away to NGOs and corporations with hungry 
shareholders. Davis isn’t a slave to statism: Planet of Slums contains 
eloquent passages about the corporatist evolution of contemporary China 
– corporatism minus trade unions – and a wonderful section about 
prestige demolitions (evidently it’s a black moment for the poor in the 
capitals of developing nations when they get to host the Olympics). Yet 
his undeclared message to onlookers in prosperous countries is that they 
should hope fervently for the resurrection of the state – which failed 
to wither away in the manner advertised on the menu fixe – in the hope, 
perhaps, of watching it wither correctly next time around. They should 
also protest the effects of IMF and World Bank strategies in places 
which, if they’re lucky, they will never get to see from lower than two 
or three hundred feet, at the edge of a Third World airport runway.

In other ways, the high-maintenance habits of wealthier countries will 
make it hard for many readers to get on the right side of the war 
against global poverty. At the end of his litany of misery and 
injustice, Davis seems prepared, even a trifle too prepared, for the day 
this war is carried to the rich world. He has announced a sequel to 
Planet of Slums, in collaboration with Forrest Hylton, which will focus 
on ‘slum-based resistance to global capitalism’, a box that gets ticked 
in the present volume with the promise of more to come. In the meantime 
he has produced Buda’s Wagon, a short and fascinating history of the car 
bomb. From Palestine in the 1940s, through Algeria, Vietnam, Northern 
Ireland, Corsica, various Mafia badlands, Lebanon, Oklahoma and on to 
the present wars of asymmetry, he plots the incidental progress of a 
weapon prized by insurgencies, mad persons and secret services alike. 
Davis calls it the ‘poor man’s air force’.

The prototype is probably the ‘machine infernale’ devised by a handful 
of royalists in 1800 to kill Napoleon. It consisted of a large barrel 
charged with gunpowder attached to a cart, attached in turn to an old 
mare and stationed between the Tuileries and the Opéra. It was detonated 
on Christmas Eve, but missed its mark by very much more than a whisker: 
the First Consul and his entourage had passed about a minute earlier. 
This bizarre episode is so removed from Davis’s modern urban narrative 
that he locates the origins of the contemporary car bomb 120 years later 
in another horse and cart left near the intersection of Wall Street and 
Broad Street by the Italian anarchist Mario Buda, four months after the 
arrest of Sacco and Vanzetti. The result was forty dead and two hundred 
injured. ‘A poor immigrant with some stolen dynamite, a pile of scrap 
metal and an old horse had managed to bring unprecedented terror to the 
inner sanctum of American capitalism.’

The car bomb, Davis says, is ‘a promiscuous equaliser of combat between 
elephants and fleas’, and at the same time ‘an inherently fascist 
weapon’, though he finds the use of massive military force by ‘the 
United States, the United Kingdom, France and Israel’ worse. Dresden in 
1945 or the southern suburbs of Beirut last summer lend weight to this 
assertion. Guernica and London during the Blitz suggest other countries 
whose names could have gone on the list. Nevertheless, politics cannot 
‘inhere’ in a weapon; it’s all far more slippery, and he hints early on 
that when the right side uses a car bomb (an anarchist at the junction 
of Wall St and Broad St) it’s a weapon of legitimate grievance, but when 
the wrong side uses it (the OAS in Algeria), it’s underhand and 
reactionary. This contradiction, primed and ready to go off, with the 
possibility of major collateral damage to Davis’s short history, is 
quickly neutralised by his account of the tactical purposes car bombing 
has served; he is informative, especially, on the OAS and Lebanese 
Hizbullah. He also interprets most of the incidents and tendencies he 
writes about as ‘blowback’: a response to, or consequence of, imperial 
misadventure, seeds sown with the original failure of judgment. Often, 
too, he points out, violent groups – jihadists, typically – originally 
acquired their expertise and technology from secret services such as the 
CIA or the Pakistani ISI. In this, the biography of the car bomb 
contains a sinister crux, best described as unwitting complicity – 
‘unwitting’ because it is forged across time, with history as the 
intermediary – between state agencies engaged in killing and maiming and 
clandestine groups doing the same. The tyre tracks differ, but there is 
only one road.

This book is commendably free of words like ‘innocent’, 
‘indiscriminate’, ‘freedom’ and so on. Of the term ‘terrorist’ Davis 
simply remarks that it is ‘a playground epithet in the serious business 
of geopolitics’, leaving us to recall on our own that history regularly 
elects members of terrorist groups to sit in government: the Stern Gang, 
Umkhonto we Sizwe and, more recently, the Iraqi National Accord 
(figurehead Iyad Allawi), which was setting car bombs in Baghdad under 
CIA supervision long before the recent invasion.

That people understand similar acts of atrocity in different ways 
suggests that ‘senseless’ violence is a rare phenomenon. Davis tells us 
early on that the booby-trapped vehicle will not be part of his study, a 
good decision which avoids overloading Buda’s Wagon. Yet a brief survey 
of the bomb in the car of the unwanted person would have reinforced his 
view that violence is full of intention – and confirmed his gritty sense 
that in this not so new nightmare, tactics and ‘signal’ are always 
thought through. The car bomb that targets the individual is perfunctory 
and spectacular at the same time. It proclaims the killers’ ambiguous 
mastery of the secret and the explicit, inflicting a public punishment 
on the victim while vaunting its intimacy with his daily routines. It is 
a warning to his colleagues and supporters. The assassination of the 
novelist and PFLP member Ghassan Kanafani in Beirut in 1972 was 
exemplary in just these ways. So was the attempted murder of Albie 
Sachs, the lawyer and ANC member, in Maputo in 1988. Sachs survived and, 
through the post-apartheid process, came face to face with the man who 
organised the attempt on his life. Under what circumstances would an 
Israeli agent come forward to meet the relatives of Kanafani and his 
17-year-old niece, also killed in the car? Probably not even peace. It 
is too long ago and anyway, as Davis says in Buda’s Wagon, ‘all sides . 
 . now play by Old Testament rules.’ In the Middle East, this has been 
true for some time, though Davis suspects that the car bomb has a 
‘brilliant future’ everywhere.

Jeremy Harding is a contributing editor at the LRB. His most recent book 
is Mother Country, a memoir. He and Lorna Scott Fox are co-translators 
of Le Même et l’autre by Vincent Descombes, published in English as 
Modern French Philosophy.