![“Bidonvilles” Growth in the earth’s population is expected to reach 10 billion by 2050. Of the growth, the majority will occur in the cities of developing countries, where the astonishing density, decrepit housing, disease-laden water, horrid sanitation, minimal or nonexistent social services and unemployment rates will co-exist in upwards of 50%. In Africa and Latin America, many are driven to cities by war or famine In China and Southeast Asia, many are drawn by the attraction of jobs in the factories that produce the world’s sneakers, t-shirts and toothbrushes. The movement from country side to city has been going since the 1st Industrial Revolution. ,[object Object]](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)
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Hist mono pt 2
- 1. Planet of the SlumsBy Mike Davis Historical Monograph By Bret Starr
- 3. Of the growth, the majority will occur in the cities of developing countries, where the astonishing density, decrepit housing, disease-laden water, horrid sanitation, minimal or nonexistent social services and unemployment rates will co-exist in upwards of 50%.
- 4. In Africa and Latin America, many are driven to cities by war or famine
- 5. In China and Southeast Asia, many are drawn by the attraction of jobs in the factories that produce the world’s sneakers, t-shirts and toothbrushes.
- 7. These are the important factors in the dramatic exodus from the countryside and consequent spike in urban poverty since the 1970s.
- 8. Under these programs governments are forced to cut spending, slash funding for hospitals and schools, privatize public utilities, lay off civil servants, eliminate agricultural subsidies, slash their tariffs and throw open their borders to foreign imports.
- 9. The harshness of Structural Adjustment varied greatly from country to country, other factors ranging from drought to corruption, played a larger role in many.
- 10. The United Nations concludes “the main single cause of increases in poverty and inequality during 1980s and 1990s was the retreat of the state.”
- 12. The fact is, that in these new urban milieusare of no use for the traditional strategies for organizing the economically oppressed.
- 13. Today religious organizations, Islamist, Hinduand Evangelical are the single most important sources of social cohesion among city dwellers.
- 14. Spiritual sustenance and community, religious organizations offer social services no longer provided by the state.
- 15. Religious groups however, don’t have the slums entirely to themselves. Non-Governmental Organizations have also stepped into the state. T
- 16. They direct an ever-greater portion of social welfare programs and development projects in Third World cities.
- 18. To Davis, “bootstrap capitalism” is little more than a fantasy cure-all. A romantic vision that fails to account for the great number of slum residents (especially children and women) who are neither squatters nor self-employed entrepreneurs, but rather street-dwellers, low-level renters or destitute laborers.
- 19. Davis portrays the people as his subject only in the abstract, as insurrectionary mass whose future “depends upon their militant refusal to accept their terminal marginality within global capitalism.”
- 20. A “Planet of the Slums,” in the long view is a planet doomed to violent encounters between those living in the slums and those outside them.
- 21. Davis concludes “Planet of Slums “with the war planners. He leaves us with a vision of the urban future: “hornet like helicopter gunships stalking enigmatic enemies in the narrow streets of the slum districts, pouring hellfire into the shanties night after night, the slums [replying each morning] with suicide bombers and eloquent explosions.”
- 22. Already these dark places occupy the center of our politics.