Planet of Slums

The heart of Davis's argument is a decoupling. In the standard account of how societies modernize, farmers become factory workers: the countryside sheds labor, industry absorbs it, wages rise, and cities become engines of mobility. This is roughly what happened in Britain, then in the American Midwest, then in postwar Japan and later South Korea. Urbanization and industrialization moved together, and the misery of the early industrial slum was, at least, misery attached to a growing wage economy that eventually paid part of its debt back.

The cities Davis describes broke that link. Across much of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, urban populations exploded during exactly the decades when manufacturing employment stagnated or shrank. The structural-adjustment programs of the 1980s, pushed by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in exchange for debt relief, tended to shutter state industries, open markets to cheaper imports, and freeze public hiring. Formal jobs did not multiply to meet the arriving millions. They contracted.

If governments were not creating jobs, they were also, increasingly, not building homes. Davis devotes considerable attention to the retreat of the state from public housing, a retreat that accelerated with the same austerity policies that hollowed out industry. Where midcentury governments in the developing world had at least gestured toward slum clearance and subsidized construction, the newer orthodoxy handed the problem to the market and to the poor themselves.

The result was self-built urbanism on an epic scale. People arriving in the city occupied whatever ground they could — hillsides, floodplains, garbage dumps, the strips beside railway tracks and open sewers — and constructed their own shelter out of scavenged brick, corrugated iron, plastic, and cardboard. Davis maps the grim geography of this: the floating slums of Lagos, the ravine settlements of Caracas, the vast peripheral districts that ring nearly every Southern megacity. Often these homes sat precisely on the land nobody else wanted because it was dangerous, which is why disasters in these cities kill the poor first.

Step back from the individual cities and Davis wants us to see a systemic condition, one he names bluntly. The people accumulating in the slums of the Global South are, from the standpoint of the world economy, a surplus — labor for which formal capitalism has no assignment. This is what makes the moment genuinely new. The nineteenth-century slum was terrible, but it was integrated into an industrial system that needed its inhabitants and, over decades, was forced to concede them wages, rights, and eventually a share of the city. The twenty-first-century slum, in Davis's reading, is not obviously needed by anything.

This is where the book's argument turns its darkest and most contested. If global capitalism no longer requires these hundreds of millions as workers, then the old bargain — endure the misery now, inherit the prosperity later — no longer holds. Manchester's slum-dwellers were the ancestors of a middle class. The residents of the informal megacity may have no such trajectory available, because the ladder they are supposed to climb was dismantled before they arrived. Davis refuses the consoling assumption that development is simply slow to reach them; he suggests it may not be coming at all in the form once promised.

The book closes roughly where the statistic that opened it points: a world in which the majority of people are urban, and a growing share of those are informal, unhoused by any plan, unemployed by any formal reckoning. Davis does not offer a program of solutions, and he has been criticized for that. His purpose is diagnostic — to strip the word urbanization of its automatic hopefulness and force us to look at what is actually being built out there beyond the ring roads, on the hillsides and the floodplains.