Planet of Slums
by Mike Davis
Verso £15.99, 240 pages

Any moment now, in fact it may have already happened, the world will reach a tipping point: for the first time, the urban population will outnumber the rural. Those new urbanites will not be living in city-centre lofts, Victorian terraces or even tower blocks, but in shacks of recycled plastic and corrugated tin. They will be on the peripheries of the most polluted and overcrowded cities, built on land made valueless because of its vulnerability to flooding or landslips, or its proximity to toxic industry. The streets of this new world will not welcome new inhabitants with pavements of gold but with makeshift streets of sewage.

Mike Davis, the famed apocalyptician whose last book, The Monster at Our Door, was a prescient exploration of avian flu, has returned to his favourite subject, inequalities inherent in the contemporary city. He made his name with brilliant writing about Los Angeles in City of Quartz and Magical Urbanism, then spread his urban polemic net wider with Dead Cities. Now he has abandoned troubled cities in the US to take a panoramic and depressing look at slums, the fastest growing sector in world housing.

The astonishing facts hit like anvil blows. China added more urban dwellers to the world population in the 1980s than did the whole of 19th-century Europe; there are 200,000 slums in the world; Nairobi’s Laini Saba slum has 10 pit latrines for 40,000 residents; 99.4 per cent of urban Ethiopians are slum dwellers; Mumbai, with up to 12 million slum squatters, remains the global slum capital. The relentless barrage of statistics crowds the reader into a fetid world of unimaginable despair, as if trying to evoke the tragedy of the slums through numbing drudgery rather than language alone.

This is only part criticism. Planet of Slums is far from an enjoyable read but the reliably leftwing Davis does his best to bring to our attention in the most direct way the scale of a problem too easily ignored from our privileged position.

He proposes no utopian solutions but points the finger of blame at the disastrous policies of the World Bank and IMF which have contributed to the collapse of economies that were quick to adopt austerity measures while their leaders took out loans that were siphoned straight into Swiss banks. He argues that the collapse of state sector employment led to what would be termed a “very flexible” [exploitative] third world labour market, to the brain drain, to the decimation of a middle class and to a situation of increasing hopelessness and exploitation. He is scathing about the neo-conservative solutions of the influential Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto, who pushes micro-entrepreneurs and the capitalisation of slum properties through granting property rights as ways of releasing new capital. De Soto, he says, is part of the problem, one compounded by well-meaning NGOs that allow corrupt governments to abdicate responsibility for social provision.

There could be few things more depressing for an architect than a book like this. While we rave about a hugely expensive new art gallery, building’s real growth area is the slums and there is so little that can be done. Davis has produced a heartbreaking book that hammers the reader a little further into the ground with the blow of each new and shocking statistic.

Our great metropolises will soon be left as mini-Venices, little enclaves of civility in an encroaching world of unimaginable squalor and poverty. This, it is painful to admit, is the real future for cities.