Review:Planet of Slums – Mike Davis

Mike Davis’s Planet of Slums is not, as Arundhati Roy too generously comments on the cover, ‘A profound enquiry into an urgent subject…a brilliant book.’ It is true that as he rushes to his apocalyptic conclusions Davis does pull down numbers and quotes from a dazzling ranging of literature with a flamboyant confidence. And much of the research that he cites points to general truths of urgent importance. There are already a billion slum dwellers on the planet and our current trajectory is thrusting us into a future with many major cities primarily built on shit, made of mud, plastic and scrap wood and constantly at risk from fire. Post-colonial elites have aggressively adapted racial zoning to class and tend to withdraw to residential and commercial themeparks. Where states offer some alternative to shack dwellers it is usually forced removal to bleak ghettos outside of cities.

Shack Fires Are No Accident

Raj Patel & Richard Pithouse

Before the Treatment Action Campaign successfully politicised AIDS it was widely assumed that people killed by the HI virus had died from natural causes. Now, outside of the Presidency, it is widely accepted that people who die from AIDS are most often killed by a profoundly immoral policy rather than a treatable virus.

A similar politicisation needs to be fought for with regard to shack fires. Disastrous fires are regular events in shack settlements. People are regularly killed and badly burnt. They are also subject to the major set backs that follow from a total loss of property, including things like I.D. books and school uniforms that are necessary to access the resources that the state does provide to the poor.