You need only turn on E! to see that there is a city of humanity defined not by encircling interstates or a cluster of area codes, but by a shared set of eight-plus-figure values and opulent rites: a tribe of wealthy elites traveling from rave to yacht to penthouse, crossing the international dateline more often than most of us cross to the other side of town.
But according to Mike Davis, author of Planet of Slums, there’s another city that knows no geographic bounds, a global city of people living in shelters built from the trash of the penthouse set. It’s a city of the Arab street, the Soweto slums, the Rio shantytowns: the Palestinian child from the streets having more in common with a lost child of Mexico City than with the child of a Saudi sheik. And according to Davis, this city is growing faster than any assemblage of humanity we’ve ever known.
While the world’s rural population has plateaued, urban population growth continues to accelerate and is projected to continue into the middle of the century. “Ninety-five percent of this final buildout of humanity will occur in the urban areas of developing countries,” says Davis, “whose populations will double to nearly four billion over the next generation.”
Now, if people were being drawn to the cities by a wealth of opportunities, well, maybe there would be no call for doomsaying. But according to Davis, today’s new urbanites are being pushed out of rural subsistence only to land in urban slums.
Davis says this is not just another case of human irrationality invoking the law of unintended consequences. Capitalism, colonialism, corrupt states, neoliberal globalization … all are complicit in creating the city of slums. We’re uprooting traditional subsistence communities and warehousing that surplus humanity in the slums, where they form an indentured pool of unprotected labor with few choices beyond abject obedience to whatever capital demands of them.
OK, I guess we can all understand why this stuff doesn’t make the entertainment media. But Davis has a knack for presenting his visions of doom with a rare combination of scholarship and compassion.
This article appears in Mar 8-14, 2006.
