By: Megan Bedford

Planet of Slums

By 2015 there will be at least 550 cities with a population of more than one million.

The population is growing at a massive rate by a million babies and migrants each week.

Mike Davis believes the peak of this overpopulation will come in 2050 when 10 billion people will be living in cities. “95% of this final build-out of humanity will occur in the urban areas of developing countries, whose populations will double to nearly 4 billion over the next generation”.

The Slums- Urbanization

These overpopulated cities are called ‘megacities’, having over 8 million people and growing.

Mexico City and Seoul are two ‘hypercities’ which contain over 20 million people.

Mike Davis is worried about the reproduction of inequality that megacities contain and that it will get worse over time.

He is concerned with the raft between owners and non-owners and the pressure of taxation on the non-owners in the slums.

Overpopulation

The population area of growth that Mike Davis describes is not one to admire. He describes the slums including: Poverty Child labor Prostitution Gangs Unemployment

People are migrating to these areas without the promise of economic growth or job opportunities (which use to be the reason for population growth in urban areas, i.e. the industrial revolution).

Slum Life

Davis argues that the IMF has been the cause behind the creation of modern slums. The foundation of the SAP (structural adjustment programs) which required borrowers to cut back on public expenditure and taxation. This encouraged privatization, public sector lay-offs, and the end of price subsidies.

This drove millions into the informal sector and left many without work.

It also reduced agricultural funding which made international market prices go up (sugar cocoa, coffee)

International Monetary Fund - IMF

A violent future is inevitable for the slums, Mike Davis predicts. It is doomed to the encounters between those living in the slums and those living outside the slums.

In the pentagon, strategists “now assert that the feral, failed cities of the third world will be the distinctive battle space of the twenty-first century” (Davis)

Davis leaves us with an uneasy feeling and a violent view of what the slums of the third world will end up in.

Future of the Slums