Slum populations are growing. Do slum dwellers have any progressive role to play

1. Urbanisation
without
industrialisationBased on
Planet of the Slums
by Mike Davis

2. Shanghai

3. We are in the age of the city:
• For the first time in history, more
than half of humanity lives in our
planet’s urban areas
• Our cities have expanded; in their
rapid rise we also see our
(urbanised) future

4. • Davis focuses on the victims of the Metropolis of late
capitalism: those who live in the slums of
‘overurbanized’ cities, expanded by the reproduction
of poverty, not the supply of jobs.

5. The growth of the slum, the
semi-slum and the superslum
• This happened mainly
(but not exclusively) in
the cities of the
developing world
• There were more than
one billion slum dwellers
in 2005
• There are probably more
than 200,000 slums on
earth, ranging in
population from a few
hundred to more than a
million people
Alexandra with Sandton in the
background

6. The growth of the slum, the
semi-slum and the superslum
• Slum populations,
according to the UN,
are currently growing
by 25 million each year
• In 2003
– China had 194 million
– India 158 million
– And the USA had 12.8
million slum dwellers
Mexican slum

7. • A third of the global urban
population live in slums
1/3

8. • In the least developed countries,
four in five people are slum
dwellers

9. Slum dwellers face many
problems:
• Lack of clean water supply, extreme
vulnerability to flooding, fire, landslides,
chemical explosions, road accidents
• To live in a slum is literally to live in shit
• Davis:
“Excremental surplus is the
primordial urban contradiction”

10. • Eight generations
after Engels’
depiction of
latrines in working
class Manchester,
shit still cakes the
lives of the urban
poorFred Engels

11. ‘…a virtual objectification of their
social condition, their place in society’

12. Slum dwellers face
many problems:
• 10 million
residents of
Kinshasa have
no waterborne
sewage system
at all Kinshasa street scene

13. Slum dwellers face many problems:
• 28,000 residents of Mathare 4A slum in
Nairobi have only two public toilets
–Residents put their waste in a polythene
bag and throw it on to the nearest roof or
pathway.
–Ten year olds threaten to stuff balls of shit
into passing car windows unless drivers
pay ransoms.

14. The informal economy
• The informal economy also
generates other, even more
gruesome incentives:
– surging demand for human
organs
– estimated one person per
family in the impoverished
periphery of Madras voluntarily
sold a kidney for export to
Malaysia - so-called ‘One-
Kidney Communities’.

15. Social theorists
proved wrong
• They associated economic and population
growth with industrialisation and an increase
in job opportunities
• But modern slums are not products of
industrial revolutions
• The size of a city’s economy often bears little
relation to its population size

16. Social theorists proved wrong
• European colonialism, Asian Stalinism
and Latin American dictatorships (and
South African apartheid) prevented the
twin urbanising criteria of entry and
citizenship
• This resulted in retarded growth of
cities in the period from 1900 to 1950

17. Social theorists were
proved wrong
• Since 1950s public and state-
assisted housing in the Third
World has primarily benefited
the urban middle classes and
elites, through both high
levels of municipal services
and clientelist politics
• Slums are created in gaps
between housing provision
and formal employment
opportunities.

18. Slums as a consequence of urbanisation
without industrialisation
• Are the legacy of a global
political conjuncture
• IMF and the World Bank
Structural Adjustment
Programmes drove the
creation of modern slums:
– Rapid urban growth
happened in the context of
structural adjustment,
currency devaluations, state
retrenchments, and little or
no housing provision.
– State as a ‘market enabler’
led to the privatisation of
utilities and services, and
massive decreases in
provision

19. Slums as a consequence of
urbanisation without industrialisation
– Ideas of the magic power of people’s capitalism
providing land titles simply accelerated social
differentiation in the slums, and did nothing to aid
renters, the actual majority of the poor in many
cities
– Individuals’ needs - affordable commodities,
accommodation close to jobs, security, and the
possibility of owning property - were simply
ignored by the imposition of ill-suited neoliberal
‘boot-strap capitalism’.

20. The key question
Do slums, ‘however deadly and
insecure, have a brilliant
future’ (There will be two
billion slum-dwellers by 2030
or 2040)?

21. Future prospects?
Mike Davis:
“…[t]hus, the cities of the future, rather than
being made out of glass and steel as
envisioned by earlier generations of
urbanists, are instead largely constructed
out of crude brick, straw, recycled plastic,
cement blocks, and scrap wood. Instead of
cities of light soaring toward heaven, much
of the twenty-first century urban world
squats in squalor, surrounded by pollution,
excrement, and decay.”

22. Ramaphosa squatter camp

23. Future prospects?
• Will be determined by the
political processes on the ground,
rather than by uncontrollable
economic developments
• Will depend on future slum based
resistance to global capitalism

24. Future prospects?
• A central factor that will
determine the future of the
slum will be the relation of
its shifting, informal
economy to political
mobilisation behind radical
causes

25. Future prospects?
• The informal sector (where
‘urban involution’ has led
to the sub-dividing of
existing jobs rather than
job creation) is crucial to
the prevention of any
active ‘proletarianisation’
of slum dwellers in line
with historical precedent

26. Future prospects?
• Whether these vast informal proletariats
possess ‘historical agency’ is incredibly
difficult to assess except through case studies

27. The future?
• Is left open
• Slum populations are growing at a
rate of 25 million a year without
really large-scale migration to the
rich countries
• Slum dwellers are potentially the
fastest growing class in the history of
the world

28. Are the slums
volcanoes waiting to
erupt?

29. Or will ruthless, state-endorsed competition lead to
increased involution and ‘self-annihilating communal
violence’ ?

30. The future?• There is a wide range of
responses:
–charismatic churches
–returns to witchcraft and
superstition
–street gangs
–neoliberal NGOs

31. IFP Youth Brigade march through the streets of
Johannesburg to the legislature to hand over a
memorandum demanding that the
Mangosuthu highway in Durban be left as is
and the history curriculum at school be
changed
ethnic militias….

32. The future?
It is no exaggeration to say
that the future of the
whole of human solidarity
depends on the nature of
the response of the ‘victims
of the metropolis’ to the
marginality that late
capitalism has attempted to
assign to them.