Presentation Transcript

1. Planet of Slums

   Mike Davis. 2006. London: Verso HV4028 .D38 2006
2. Source: United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2010). World Urbanization Prospects : The 2009 Revision. CD-ROM Edition - Data in digital form (POP/ DB/WUP/Rev.2009).http://esa.un.org/unpd/wup/index.htm
3. Cities with more than 750,000 people in 2009 by Country Another 68 countries have one city >750k people.
4. Thirty largest cities in the world in 1950 and in 2025. 1950 2025
5. Megacities, Hypercities, & Continuous Corridor Megalopolises Megacities have more than 8 million pop. Hypercities have more than 20 million pop. Posturban large scale human habitation Pearl River Delta (Hong Kong-Guangzhou) Yangtze River Delta (Shanghai) Beijing-Tianjin urban corridor Tokyo-Osaka urban corridor Lower Rhine Valley in Western Europe New York-Philadelphia The new Chinese megalopolises may eventually create one gigantic urban corridor from North Korea/Japan to West Java
6. East Asian Megalopolis?
7. Most People Will Live in Smaller Cities In China, though the megacities have grown they have a smaller percentage of the urban population than they did two decades ago. The Chinese state embraced policies designed to promote a more balanced urban hierarchy of industrial investment and population. In India small cities and town have economic traction and population, but medium size cities are growing rapidly.
8. Visakhapatnam had a population of 969,608 and the urban area 1,329,472. After the state government approved the formation of Greater Visakhapatnam with the merger of Gajuwaka municipality and 32 villages in the vicinity in the Visakhapatnam Municipal Corporation, the population of the city and the metro area swelled to 3.3 million. Males constitute 50% of the population and females 50%. Male literacy is 74% and female literacy is 64 %. 10% of the population is younger than six. Visakhapatnam is listed as one of the Ten Fastest Growing Cities of the World
9. Urban Change Occurs Along a Continuum Villages become more like market towns and country towns and small cities become more like large cities. A significant new form of human settlement is being created as the urban moves out to the rural and forms space that is neither urban nor rural, an “in-between city” of diffuse urbanism. “Globalization has increased the movement of people, goods, services, information, news, products, and money, and thereby the presence of urban characteristics in rural areas and of rural traits in the urban centers.” Anthropologist Magdalena Nock writing about Mexico.
10. “From Karl Marx to Max Weber, classical social theory believed that the great cities of the future would follow in the industrializing footsteps of Manchester, Berlin, and Chicago – and indeed Los Angeles, São Paulo, Pusan, and today Ciudad Juárez, Bangalore, and Guangzhou have roughly approximated this canonical trajectory. Most cities of the South, however, more closely resemble Victorian Dublin, which, as historian Emmet Larkin has stressed, was unique amongst “all the slumdoms produced in the western world in the nineteenth century… [because] its slums were not a product of the industrial revolution. Dublin, in fact, suffered more from the problems of de-industrialization than industrialization between 1800 and 1850.” Mike Davis
11. The Prevalence of Slums The term slum originated in the early 19th century to describe a “racket” or “criminal trade.” Cardinal Wiseman is sometimes given credit for transforming slum from street slang to a word that could be used by genteel writers to describe “room in which low goings-on occurred.” Writers competed to identify the worst slums.
12. Charles Booth’s Characterization of Slums Dilapidated housing Overcrowding Disease Poverty Vice Charles Booth, Survey Into Life and Labour in London
13. The Challenge of SlumsUN-HABITAT 2003 Overcrowding Poor or informal housing Inadequate access to safe water or sanitation Insecurity of tenure
14. A Slum Typology Megaslum = when shanty-towns and squatter communities merge in continuous belts of informal housing and poverty, usually on the urban periphery. (Mexico City, Lima, Kolkata, Dhaka
15. A. Metro Core Formal Tenements Hand-me-downs Built for poor Public housing Hostels, flophouses, etc. Informal Squatters Authorized Unauthorized Pavement-dwellers
16. B. Periphery Formal Private rental Public housing Informal Pirate subdivisions Owner occupied Rental Squatters Authorized (including site-and-service) Unauthorized Refugee Camps
17. World Variation in Slum Patterns North American slums tend to be located in central cities, producing the “doughnut” shape of wealth distribution. European slums tend to be located in housing projects in the periphery around the city center, producing the inverse “doughnut” shape. Slums in the global South have a more mixed pattern with both central and peripheral slums.
18. Third World Slums Did Not Grow Much Prior to WWII State power was used to prevent urban growth. European colonialists were intent on keeping peasants out of the cities. “The British, always the ideologues of divide and rule, feared that city life would ‘detribalize’ Africans and foster anticolonial solidarities.” “Despite their antipathy to large urban settlements, the British were arguably the greatest slum-builders of all time. Their policies in Africa forced the local labor force to live in precarious shantytowns on the fringes of segregated and restricted cities.” South African apartheid took this system to it’s dystopian extreme.
19. Third World Slums Did Not Grow Much Prior to WWII In India, the Raj use “Town Improvement Trusts” to Clear slums Remove “plague spots” from in between better residential and commercial areas “Encroachment laws” outlawed Squatting Street vending Even Bombay with entrepreneurial elites and textile factories grew slowly, not even doubling between 1891 and 1941
20. Third World Slums Did Not Grow Much Prior to WWII “In tropical Africa, the French tightly regulated the movement of rural labor while consigning African town-dwellers to grim peripheries.” In colonial slums there were few sewers, usually open or crudely covered and few public water pumps where queues waited from early morning. “this almost universal refusal to provide even minimal sanitary infrastructures for the ‘native quarters’ until the 1950s was more than stinginess: it pointedly symbolized the lack of any native ‘right to the city.’”
21. Asian Stalinism In China, even though raised to power by peasant revolt, the government tried to staunch the influx from the countryside. The Chinese Revolution in 1949 opened the gates and 14 million people arrived in the cities in four years. In 1953 the government put stringent controls on internal migration The urban proletariat was protected by the “iron rice bowl” cradle to grave welfare But constrained by the household registration system (hukou) that tied social citizenship and residence to a work unit. City and countryside were conceived as separate worlds that intersected only under conditions carefully defined by the party state. In the 1960s perhaps 50 million unregistered urban migrants were deported back to their villages.
22. Latin American Slum Before WWII most poor urban Latin Americans lived in inner-city rental housing. Industrial expansion in the late 1940s spurred a wave of squatter invasion on the outskirts. National and local governments, supported by the urban middle class, waged war on informal settlement and squatting. Many of these migrants were either indigenous or African ancestry, so the campaigns had a racist overtone.
23. The Deluge In Asia and Africa, colonial counterinsurgency and national independence removed the road blocks to fast urban growth in the 1950s and 1960s. In Latin America the dictatorships and slow-growth regimes were replaced. The poor were driven to the cities by brutal and irresistible forces. Violence of counterinsurgency Loss of traditional agrarian work as land was brought under capitalist production
24. The Deluge Mumbai
25. The Deluge In the Indian subcontinent partition into India and Pakistan drove millions into slums Bombay doubled in population in the late 1940s and early 1950s In South Vietnam, forced urbanization was an integral part of US military strategy. Samuel Huntington, war strategist wrote that “The Maoist inspired rural revolution is undercut by the American-sponsored urban revolution.”
26. The Deluge Manila
27. The Deluge Beirut Nairobi
28. The Deluge In sub-Saharan Africa until the 1980s city growth was subsidized by coercive policies that forced peasants to deliver farm products at below-market-value prices and taxed rural people at disproportionate rates. In Latin America, the overthrow of dictators gave urban immigrants opportunities to trade votes for land and infrastructure and elites relaxed opposition to informal barrios in order to increase the supply of cheap labor for the new import-substitution industrial policy.
29. Quito
30. The Deluge China began to relax control on urban growth in the early 1980s. Officially sanctioned migration was overshadowed by unauthorized immigrants. A mass of perhaps 100 million poor peasants live in Chinese cities without legal entitlement to social services or housing They are a super cheap human fuel for the sweatshops of the Pearl River Delta and the building sites of Shanghai and Beijing. In South Africa in the late 1980s the most significant shanty town uprising in world history the totalitarian system of controls had to be dismantled. Pass Law overturned in 1986 Group Areas Act overturned in 1991 The black African population of Cape Town more than tripled between 1982 and 1992
31. The Slum Was Not Inevitable In early 1960 Cuba’s National Institute of Savings and Housing began to replace Havana’s notorious shantytowns with prefab houses erected by the residents. Many of these projects were drab adaptations of modernist architecture. Revolutionary Algeria and Tanzania also had ambitious plans to relocate urban slum-dwellers into new low-cost housing. Nasser in Egypt, Nehru in India, and Sukarno in Indonesia promised to rebuild slums and create immense quantities of new housing. Virtually all of these plans fell short because of global political and economic pressure. But apart from the special cases of Hong Kong and Singapore, the Chinese state alone in the developing world managed to create a large amount of decent mass housing, even though this effort fell far short of the need.
32. Middle Class “Poaching” The middle-class, especially civil servants, have been able to get preference for government housing and the poor are pushed into shantytowns. With only a few exceptions Third World state-assisted housing has primarily benefited the urban middle classes and elites, who expect to pay low taxes while receiving high levels of municipal services.
33. Shenzhen City Limits (New York Times) Articles in this series are examining the phenomenal growth of Shenzhen from a sleepy fishing village near Hong Kong to a booming Chinese metropolis. Part 1: In Chinese Boomtown, Middle Class Pushes Back (December 18, 2006) Part 2: Chinese Success Story Chokes on Its Own Growth (December 19, 2006) The New, New City NY Times Magazine June 8, 2008
34. Miscellaneous Links Mumbai Slum Redevelopment Stalled by Financial Crisis Space and Culture: Revisioning Slums Mumbai for Tourists NY Times Travel Sept 23, 2007
35. Ghetto vs. Slum Ghettoization is a process of societal othering Stigmatized  Discriminated against  Racialized  Ghettoized Herbert Gans. 2008. “Involuntary Segregation and the Ghetto: Disconnecting Process and Place.” City & Community 7(4):353-357. Slums are defined by Overcrowding Poor or informal housing Inadequate access to safe water or sanitation Insecurity of tenure UN-HABITAT 2003