Introduction
You live in a historical era where urban populations permanently outnumber rural populations across the planet. You might assume this massive urban shift signals global economic progress and industrial prosperity. Mike Davis reveals that globalization has decoupled urbanization from industrial job creation, producing a planet of informal megaslums. You will discover how neoliberal policies, structural adjustment programs, and colonial legacies manufactured a billion slum-dwellers. The book provides a structural analysis of housing strategies, ecological hazards, and the rise of a global informal proletariat. You will confront several pressing questions as you read this work:
- How did cities grow rapidly without matching industrialization or formal employment?
- What mechanisms sustain pirate urbanization and informal rental markets in the developing world?
- Why did international financial institutions and postcolonial states abandon public housing for self-help schemes?
- How do squatters survive extreme environmental hazards and severe exploitation in the informal economy?
1. Global Urban Transition and Slum Growth
Humanity has crossed a historical watershed where urban populations permanently outnumber rural populations, driven by massive developing world growth. You can observe a transition comparable to the Neolithic or Industrial revolutions. While developed nations plateau, 95 percent of future population growth will occur in developing world urban areas.
The global urban climacteric absorbs millions of migrants and newborns weekly.
A watershed event is marked by routine occurrences such as a woman giving birth in the Ajegunle slum of Lagos, a young man fleeing a west Java village for Jakarta, or a farmer moving his family into a pueblo joven in Lima. For the first time in history, the global urban population exceeds the rural population.
Developing countries are giving rise to massive hypercities and extensive trans-regional urban corridors that dwarf historical precedents. The scale and velocity of urbanization in developing countries completely surpass nineteenth-century Europe. Cities are expanding to form enormous polycentric urban regions and cross-border mega-corridors.
The Rio/São Paulo Extended Metropolitan Region spans a 500-kilometer transport axis with a population of 37 million. A West African conurbation along the Gulf of Guinea is projected to house over 60 million inhabitants across a 600-kilometer strip by 2020.
Urbanization often occurs in place without migration, as rural landscapes transform directly into dense urban networks and hybrid spaces. You see a structural transformation along an urban-rural continuum where the city engulfs and transforms the countryside around it through infrastructure and pollution.
Penang fishermen in Malaysia were engulfed by urbanization without migrating when a new highway cut off their homes from the sea. Their daughters were forced to work in nearby Japanese-owned sweatshops. Accra experienced an 188 percent increase in its surface area during the 1990s.
Economic Disconnect and SAPs
Unlike the classical trajectory of Western Europe, much of contemporary Third World urbanization is radically decoupled from industrial growth and job creation. Classical social theory assumed future cities would follow the industrializing path of Manchester, Berlin, or Chicago.
Many southern cities experience population growth despite deindustrialization and shrinking public sectors.
Major industrial hubs like Bombay, Johannesburg, Buenos Aires, and São Paulo have suffered massive plant closures and tendential deindustrialization since the mid-1980s. They continue to grow rapidly in population despite lacking manufacturing booms, resembling Victorian Dublin.
International financial policies and debt crises forced a massive agrarian exodus, driving overurbanization through the reproduction of poverty. Structural adjustment programmes and market deregulation imposed by the IMF and World Bank slashed agricultural subsidies and rural infrastructure.
Small farmers were pushed into uncompetitive global markets, causing mass de-agrarianization. This drove surplus rural labor into cities regardless of urban job availability. African countries like Côte d'Ivoire and Tanzania experienced annual economic contraction rates of 2 to 5 percent while populations grew rapidly.
An estimated 60 percent of Cambodian small peasants who sell their land and migrate to the city are forced to do so specifically by accumulated medical debts. Rapid urban growth under state retrenchment and economic devaluation inevitably leads to the mass production of informal slums rather than formal housing.
Because formal housing markets in the developing world rarely supply a significant portion of new housing stock, incoming populations rely on self-built shanties. Slum growth consistently outpaces general urbanization rates.
In São Paulo, favelas grew from a tiny fraction of the population to nearly twenty percent by 1993, expanding at an explosive annual rate throughout the decade. Between 1989 and 1999, Nairobi and Mombasa slums absorbed 85 percent of Kenya's population growth. Projections indicate that Black Africa will host 332 million slum-dwellers by 2015.
2. A Global Slum Census and Housing Strategies
Slums constitute the vast majority of urban growth in the developing world, sustained through diverse shelter strategies, pirate urbanization, and multi-tiered rental markets.
The official UN definition focuses strictly on physical and legal housing characteristics rather than social conditions. The operational definition adopted in Nairobi in 2002 restricts slums to overcrowding, poor housing, inadequate safe water and sanitation, and insecurity of tenure.
Using this restrictive definition, UN researchers found that only 19.6 percent of urban Mexicans live in slums. Local experts concede that nearly two-thirds live in colonias populares or older tenements. By 2001, the global tally reached 921 million slum-dwellers, climbing to more than one billion by 2005.
Definitions and Scale
Slums account for 78.2 percent of urbanites in the least developed countries. Ethiopia and Chad show astonishing slum-dweller rates of 99.4 percent of their urban populations. Bombay houses 10 to 12 million squatters and tenement-dwellers.
Governments frequently and deliberately undercount poor and slum populations. Bangkok reported an official poverty rate of only 5 percent in the late 1980s, while surveys revealed nearly a quarter of the population lived in 1,000 slums and squatter camps. Jakarta officially claimed less than 5 percent of its population was poor.
Pirate Urbanization and Renters
Housing for the urban poor is a complex behavioral and economic calculus involving trade-offs between cost, tenure security, shelter quality, commute time, and personal safety. As anarchist architect John Turner famously pointed out, housing is a verb.
In Turner's model based on 1960s Peru, rural migrants first move to the city center as bridgeheaders to secure jobs, and later move to the periphery as consolidators where ownership is attainable. Ahmed Soliman identifies four shelter strategies in Cairo:
- central rental tenements;
- small illegal rooftop spaces near jobs;
- squatting on downwind public desert land;
- buying house sites in semi-informal developments.
In Cairo's City of the Dead, one million poor people use Mameluke tombs as prefabricated housing components. They adapt cenotaphs and grave markers as desks, headboards, and shelving.
Seventy-five percent of Mumbai's formal housing stock consists of chawls. In Hong Kong, caged men rent single bedspaces enclosed with wire mesh to prevent theft, averaging 38.3 residents per apartment. Cairo contains 1.5 million residents sleeping on roofs.
Most peripheral slum growth occurs through pirate urbanization where entrepreneurs sell extralegal subdivisions without zoning compliance. In Karachi, local middlemen known as dalals collaborate with politicians and bureaucrats to secure possession of public land and sell protection and plots in katchi abadis like Orangi.
Informal housing has spawned multi-tiered rental markets. In Nairobi's Korogocho slum, sites-and-services schemes feature absentee landlords who rent out shacks, turning homeowners into petty exploiters of poorer arrivals.
The outer edges of Third World cities serve as regulatory vacuums and human dumps where polluting industries, urban waste, evicted populations, and war refugees are warehoused. In Bogotá, over 400,000 internally displaced persons from civil conflict occupy peripheral poverty belts like Ciudad Bolívar and Soacha. Youth lacking formal employment there are prime recruits for gangs and death squads.
Other edge-city camps host massive refugee populations, such as 125,000 Somalis housed in Dadaad on the Kenyan border, and 700,000 Rwandans in Goma during the mid-1990s.
3. The Treason of the State
Postcolonial governments, colonial legacies, and international financial agencies systematically blocked the poor from formal housing while middle classes and elites poached state resources.
European colonial powers systematically restricted rural natives from urban citizenship, land ownership, and permanent residence to prevent anticolonial solidarity and control labor. British and other colonial administrations used pass laws, vagrancy ordinances, and spatial zoning to treat native populations as temporary sojourners whose only purpose was labor service. Lack of basic sanitary infrastructure in native quarters symbolized the deliberate denial of the right to the city.
In racially zoned Nairobi until 1954, Africans were legally restricted as temporary sojourners unable to own leasehold property. French colonial slums like Medina in Dakar and Poto-poto in Brazzaville featured dirt tracks, open sewers, and a total lack of public lighting.
Asian communist regimes attempted to halt rural migration to cities through strict internal migration controls and household registration systems. Following initial post-revolution population influxes, governments established legal and bureaucratic barriers that tied social citizenship and welfare to sedentary membership in specific work units or rural communes.
Following an influx of 14 million people in four years after the 1949 revolution, China instituted the hukou household registration system in 1953 and deported millions of unregistered urban immigrants back to their villages in the early 1960s.
Postwar Latin American dictators and urban authorities launched aggressive crackdowns, bulldozing shantytowns and forcibly relocating the rural poor to peripheral housing. Faced with rapid import-substitution industrialization and massive squatter invasions, urban elites and leaders viewed poor migrants as responsible for social and physical urban decay, prompting systematic evictions.
Venezuelan dictator Marcos Perez Jimenez used bulldozers to clear barrios and relocate residents into fifteen-story superbloques. In Mexico City, mayor Ernesto Uruchurtu evicted paracaidistas and fought the growth of colonias populares.
Civil wars, political partitions, and military counter-insurgency campaigns served as the most efficient drivers of forced, massive informal urbanization. Geopolitical upheavals and deliberate military strategies uprooted millions of peasants from rural areas, flooding cities with impoverished refugees who populated expanding peripheral slums.
In South Vietnam, US military strategy used massive terror bombing to force peasants into urban areas to eliminate the rural constituency of the Vietcong, swelling the urban share of the population from 15 percent to 65 percent.
Many national governments tolerated or encouraged informal settlements because populist clientelism allowed politicians to trade land access and regularization for political support. Rather than providing public housing, regimes relied on the informal appropriation of land, syncing land invasions and legalizations with electoral cycles to maintain voter loyalty.
In Turkey, the Kemalist state avoided building public housing, leading to the heroic age of squatting between 1955 and 1965 where the gecekondu population soared as politicians used arbitrary land allocation to build clientelistic support.
Broken Promises and Stolen Dreams
State-subsidized public housing and land distribution programs in developing nations were overwhelmingly captured by middle classes, civil servants, and elites rather than the poor. Governments repeatedly abdicated serious efforts to house the poor. When low-cost housing or plots were built, affluent groups poached them or sublet them out, leaving the poorest populations confined to illegal shantytowns.
In Delhi, development agencies distributed half a million plots, but most were grabbed by the well-to-do, leaving only 110,000 houses built for the poor while 450,000 slum-dwellers were evicted.
Public highrise housing projects frequently failed because they ignored the livelihood strategies, home-workshop needs, and community structures of the urban poor. State planners viewed slums as a cancer and imposed sterile, uniform tower blocks on the periphery, which increased isolation, raised transportation costs, and destroyed the informal economic spaces necessary for subsistence.
In Jakarta, public housing remained unattractive to the informal labor force because it lacked space for home workshops, causing most tenants to be military personnel and civil servants.
Urban elites and middle classes in the developing world successfully evaded municipal taxation, shifting the tax burden onto the poor via regressive user fees. Hard-pressed cities relying on regressive sales taxes and user charges failed to assess and collect property taxes from the affluent, an inequity often worsened by IMF and World Bank policy recommendations.
In Mexico City, regressive sales taxes and user charges generated 40 percent of municipal revenue, demonstrating a systemic refusal to tax wealth, conspicuous consumption, or real estate.
4. Illusions of Self-Help and the End of the Frontier
The World Bank shifted state responsibility to neoliberal self-help schemes and land-titling projects that ultimately displaced the poor, enriched speculators, and densified the urban fringe.
In the 1970s and 1980s, international financial institutions abandoned large-scale public housing in favor of incremental self-help and slum-upgrading projects. As Third World governments stepped back, agencies like the World Bank assumed control over urban housing policy. Posing as an enabler of the poor rather than a provider of structural reform, the World Bank used low-cost sites-and-services schemes and privatization to reduce state entitlements and shift the financial burden onto slum residents.
World Bank lending for urban development surged from 10 million dollars in 1972 to over 2 billion dollars in 1988, financing 116 sites-and-services or slum-upgrading schemes across 55 nations.
World Bank self-help and upgrading projects routinely failed their target populations, displacing the poorest residents and benefiting middle classes or developers. Due to high minimum savings requirements and cost-recovery provisions, the poorest segments of the population were priced out of self-help schemes. Projects frequently underwent gentrification as original low-income dwellers sold their plots to wealthier buyers or speculators.
In Manila's Tondo foreshore project and St. Joseph’s Village in Pasig, original low-income residents left within five years after selling their lots to wealthy families. In Mumbai's upgrading scheme, only 9 percent of recipients belonged to low-income groups by 1989.
Soft Imperialism
The proliferation of NGOs in the developing world created a tiered system of coordination that deradicalized urban social movements and instituted new forms of clientelism. By bypassing national governments to fund local and international NGOs, major aid institutions integrated grassroots groups into dependent bureaucratic networks. Rather than empowering civil society, this system bureaucratized dissent, co-opted local leaders, and deflected political rage away from structural inequalities.
In Jakarta, a neighborhood microbank grew into a complex, top-down bureaucracy that was less accountable to its low-income base. Activist P.K. Das noted that Mumbai NGOs systematically intervened to substitute class struggles with appeals for sympathetic favors.
Celebrated international showcase projects for slum upgrading often masked severe infrastructure failures and unfulfilled designs. High-profile projects praised by international conferences frequently collapsed under the weight of poor execution, leaving residents with severe shortages, disease outbreaks, and unbuilt master plans.
The UK-sponsored Indore scheme provided sewer connections but failed to supply enough water to flush waste, leading to backed-up sewage and outbreaks of malaria and cholera. Similarly, the Aranya resettlement project in India was celebrated internationally despite its winning elements existing only on paper.
Hernando de Soto's popular theory that land-titling converts informal slum assets into live capital acts as a double-edged sword that harms tenants and accelerates inequality. While land regularization incorporates owners into the formal city and increases asset values, it introduces property taxes, exposes residents to municipal utilities, and divides communities. Renters and those unable to pay taxes are frequently pushed off the housing ladder entirely, creating a vulnerable underclass.
In São Paulo, municipal regularization and upgrading drove up real-estate prices inside favelas, leading to the emergence of sub-standard tenements called cortiços rented out to the poorest of the poor.
Profits of Poverty
The destruction of productive economies through structural adjustment turned urban real estate into a capital trap, fueling massive land speculation and profitable slumlordism. High inflation and currency devaluations discouraged industrial investment, driving savings into undeveloped land and rental housing. Slum dwellings often yield higher profits per square foot than formal real estate, turning politicians, civil servants, and elites into absentee slumlords.
In Nairobi's Mathare 4A slum, 57 percent of dwellings in specific areas are owned by politicians and civil servants who quickly recoup their shack investments. In Karachi, 80,000 to 100,000 plots developed by the Karachi Development Authority lay vacant ten years later due to speculative holding.
The golden age of free or low-cost squatting on peripheral land has ended, replaced by corporate developers, market commercialization, and extreme population density. As powerful private organizations and corrupt officials take control of the urban fringe, informal and non-market access to land has closed. Blocked from expansion, modern mega-slums experience severe densification, vertical growth, and overcrowding reminiscent of feedlots.
Dharavi in Mumbai compacts up to 18,000 people per acre into multi-story rooms, while Kolkata bustees house an average of 13.4 people per room. In Caracas, barrios densify vertically up mountainsides, requiring residents to climb the equivalent of 25 stories.
5. Slum Ecology, Hazards, and the Informal Economy
Squatters inhabit disaster-prone environmental niches, endure extreme sanitation deficits, and supply a massive global informal working class facing severe exploitation.
Slum Ecology and Disease
Economic necessity forces you to inhabit dangerous niches that wealthy populations avoid. A villa miseria outside Buenos Aires is built over a former lake, a toxic dump, a cemetery, and in a flood zone.
Natural hazards combine with lack of public protection to multiply catastrophe. In Caracas, steep hillsides occupied by dense slums suffered a radical increase in major landslides, culminating in the December 1999 storms that killed an estimated 32,000 people, left 140,000 homeless, and rendered 200,000 jobless.
Shanties also form the world's premier fire ecology. Extreme density and open cooking fires spark frequent blazes, while landlords and developers use arson for hot demolition.
Poor planning places slums adjacent to dangerous industrial sites. The Union Carbide plant in Bhopal released a cloud of methyl isocyanate, causing 7,000 to 10,000 immediate deaths and 15,000 subsequent deaths among surrounding squatters.
Basic sanitation deficits leave you living amid human waste. In Nairobi's Kibera slum, a 1998 study found exactly ten working pit latrines for 40,000 people. This shortage forces millions in contemporary India to defecate in the open and gives rise to flying toilets.
Water privatization compels you to pay extortionate mark-ups. The population of Nairobi's Kibera slum pays up to five times more per liter for water than average American citizens. In Luanda, the poorest households spend 15 percent of their income on water pumped from the polluted Bengo River.
Surplus Humanity and Exploitation
Neoliberal globalization has generated a global informal working class numbering about one billion strong, completely lacking legal rights or formal employment.
Structural adjustment programs dismantled formal jobs, forcing millions into unprotected informal services. In Mexico, the only jobs created between 2000 and 2004 were in the informal sector. By the 1980s, the informal petty bourgeoisie grew by 5 to 10 percent among the economically active urban population.
Intense competition in overcrowded markets triggers urban involution, where work is endlessly fragmented. In Dar es Salaam, 200,000 petty traders were surveyed in 1992, mostly representing unemployed youth pushed into survival trade.
Children bear the heaviest burdens of informalization. In Dhaka, 750,000 children work as laborers. In Varanasi, India, more than 200,000 children under fourteen weave carpets and embroider saris as bonded labor, working up to 20 hours a day without a break. Firozabad glass factories employ another 50,000 children.
Desperation fuels a gruesome market for organs. In Bharathi Nagar, a Chennai suburb dubbed Kidney Nagar, more than 500 people sold their kidneys for local transplants or export between 1987 and 1995.
In Kinshasa, formal employment dropped below 5 percent as the economy collapsed. With 30,000 children living on the streets, desperate parents and charismatic churches scapegoat vulnerable dependents as witches.
10 Key Ideas
- Humanity has crossed a historical watershed where urban populations permanently outnumber rural populations, driven by massive developing world growth.
- Much of contemporary Third World urbanization is radically decoupled from industrial growth and job creation, producing population growth despite deindustrialization.
- UN researchers found that the global tally of slum-dwellers reached more than one billion by 2005, driven by structural adjustment programmes and housing shortages.
- Most peripheral slum growth occurs through pirate urbanization where entrepreneurs sell extralegal subdivisions without zoning compliance.
- Postcolonial governments, colonial legacies, and international financial agencies systematically blocked the poor from formal housing while middle classes and elites poached state resources.
- The World Bank shifted state responsibility to neoliberal self-help schemes and land-titling projects that ultimately displaced the poor, enriched speculators, and densified the urban fringe.
- Public highrise housing projects frequently failed because they ignored the livelihood strategies, home-workshop needs, and community structures of the urban poor.
- Economic necessity forces squatters to inhabit disaster-prone environmental niches, endure extreme sanitation deficits, and live amid human waste.
- Structural adjustment programs dismantled formal jobs, forcing millions of surplus humans into unprotected informal services and extreme exploitation.
- Children bear the heaviest burdens of informalization, working up to 20 hours a day without a break or facing extreme desperation in overcrowded markets.