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 precipitous rise we also see our (urbanised) future. ’Where are the heroes, the colonisers, the victims of the Metropolis?’, wrote Brecht in his diary in 1921. In Planet of Slums, Mike 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.

Planet of Slums documents the growth of the slum, the semi-slum and the superslum, mainly (but not exclusively) in the cities of the developing world. The numbers, figures, and percentages come with crashingly rhythmic regularity. They are compelling. There were more than one billion slum dwellers in 2005 (even using the UN’s most restrictive definition). There are probably more than 200,000 slums on earth, ranging in population from a few hundred to more than a million people. Slum populations, according to the UN, are currently growing by a massive 25 million each year. In 2003, China had 194 million and India 158 million slum dwellers; the USA had 12.8 million. A third of the global urban population live in slums. In the least developed countries, this figure stands at four in five.

These facts, repeated and expanded on in each chapter, provide the book’s inner momentum, and drive Davis’ prose. While the absence of what would surely be heartbreaking tales of particular slum inhabitants is perhaps a missed opportunity to engender ‘humanitarian’ sympathy, the relentless torrent of facts shows not only the state of urban development, but also its increasing universality.

Returning to Brecht, that slum dwellers are the victims of the metropolis is in little doubt. Of the many problems (lack of clean water supply, extreme vulnerability to flooding, fire, ‘classquakes’, landslides, chemical explosions, and the shocking prevalence of road accidents), perhaps the worst is that to live in a slum is literally to live in shit. Excremental surplus, Davis argues, is the primordial urban contradiction. Even eight generations after Engels’ depiction of latrines in working class Manchester, shit still cakes the lives of the urban poor—‘a virtual objectification of their social condition, their place in society’, Davis quotes another urban theorist. Davis tells us the 10 million residents of Kinshasa have no waterborne sewage system at all; the 28,000 residents of the infamous Mathare 4A slum in Nairobi have only two public toilets. Instead, residents put their waste in a polythene bag and throw it on to the nearest roof or pathway. Industrious Kenyan ten year olds threaten to stuff balls of shit into passing car windows unless drivers pay ransoms. The informal economy also generates other, even more gruesome incentives. With the surging demand for human organs, an estimated one person per family in the impoverished periphery of Madras voluntarily sold a kidney for export to Malaysia. These are the so-called ‘One-Kidney Communities’.

The development of cities has confounded the predictions of classical social theorists from Marx to Weber who associated economic and population growth with industrialisation and an increase in job opportunities. Modern slums, though, are not products of industrial revolutions; the size of a city’s economy often bears little relation to its population size. Davis details how legacies of European colonialism, Asian Stalinism and Latin American dictatorships variously prevented the twin urbanising criteria of entry and citizenship, accounting for the retarded growth of cities in the period from 1900 to 1950. Since the ‘deluge’ of urban migrants from the 1950s, moreover, Davis argues that 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 these gaps between housing provision and formal employment opportunities.

Instead, as Davis explains, slums as a consequence of urbanisation without industrialisation are the legacy of a global political conjuncture: the IMF and the World Bank’s Structural Adjustment Programmes, to put it bluntly but accurately, drove the creation of modern slums. The recipe for the creation of slums has been rapid urban growth in the context of structural adjustment, currency devaluations, state retrenchments, and little or no housing provision. Viewing the state as a ‘market enabler’ led to the privatisation of utilities and services, and massive decreases in provision; 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. For individuals, their various 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’.

The key question which emerges from Davis’ book is whether the slums, ‘however deadly and insecure, have a brilliant future’ (p151). There will be two billion slum-dwellers by 2030 or 2040. Planet of Slums documents both the extent and the political causes of the late capitalist triage of humanity through the creation of slums; as Davis puts it:

[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. (p19)

However, the future direction of slums, as Davis too infrequently acknowledges in a book some reviewers have approvingly called ‘apocalyptic’, is to be determined by the political processes on the ground, rather than by uncontrollable economic developments. This question is largely pre-empted by Davis’ planned sequel, on the history and future of slum based resistance to global capitalism. The current volume does show the Victorian-era moralising of NGOs to be both patronisingly misplaced and counterproductive.

One of the central factors that will determine the future of the slum is the relation of its shifting, informal economy to political mobilisation behind radical causes; Davis argues that the informal sector (where ‘urban involution’ has lead 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 precendent. In this sense, the question of whether these vast informal proletariats possess ‘historical agency’ is an incredibly difficult one to answer except for through case studies (as Davis notes).

The future, then, as always, is crucially left open. Growing, to repeat, at a rate of an incredible 25 million a year without ready large-scale migration to the rich countries, slum dwellers are potentially the fastest growing class in the history of the world. It is an importantly open question whether the slums are volcanoes waiting to erupt, as Disraeli and Kennedy worried, or whether ruthless, state-endorsed competition will lead to increased involution and ‘self-annihilating communal violence’ (p201). The sheer range of responses (from charismatic churches and atavistic returns to witchcraft and superstition, street gangs, neoliberal NGOs and ethnic militias) suggests that 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.