Asking the right questions about slums.

• Author: Satterthwaite, David
• Position: Planet of Slums - Book review

PLANET OF SLUMS

By Mike Davis

Verso, London and New York, 2006 228 pages, ISBN 1-84467-022-8

It would be easy to write a damning review of this book based on its flaws and inaccuracies. But it also has well-crafted summaries, with valuable insights and some sensational turns of phrase, making up among the best general summaries of the problem of "slums and shanty towns" in Africa, Asia and Latin America, and what explains their growth. The author, Mike Davis, has written several fine books on urban issues, but focused mainly on the United States. His unfamiliarity with urban issues in the other three regions explains some of the inaccuracies, many of which arise from his failure to question the validity and accuracy of some sources from which he draws. But part of the book's strength is the fresh eyes it brings to the topic and the analytical insights, drawing on urban issues in the United States. This review will consider the book's strengths and weaknesses.

Its strengths are its readability and the evidence it marshals on the crisis in urban areas in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Many examples highlight the awful living conditions for hundreds of millions of urban dwellers. The book describes how large sections of low-income population live in very poor quality rented accommodation, with overcrowding and exploitation from landlords that rival the worst nineteenth-century slums. It emphasizes how poverty is created or exacerbated by government slum-eviction programmes and how these are often justified by "criminalizing" their inhabitants. It rightly emphasizes the much-reduced scope for low-income groups to illegally occupy land on which they can build housing.

The book discusses the reorganization of cities, as middle and upper-income groups concentrate in gated communities and protected sites from which poorer groups are excluded. It contains many nice historical digressions, comparing nineteenth-century Naples to present cities, considering how contemporary city problems are rooted in the policies and precedents of colonial governments. Many of the targets for its criticism get what they deserve, for instance, the false illusions of de Soto's "solutions" and the false promises of poverty reduction from the Washington consensus. The book rightly describes how most informal enterprises are highly exploitative, providing very inadequate incomes for long hours of work. "There is nothing" in the catalogue of Victorian misery, as narrated...