The accumulation of the wretched

A review of A Planet of Slums by Mike Davis at Asia Times Online.

If this review of Davis’ book by Pepe Escobar is haunting me, what would the book do?

Davis is an urban theorist and author of two previous books.

Already the combined populations of China, India and Brazil roughly equal that of Western Europe and North America. By 2025, Asia will have at least 10 hypercities, including Jakarta (24.9 million people), Dhaka (25 million), Karachi (26.5 million), Shanghai (27 million) and Mumbai (with a staggering 33 million). Davis also refers to the coming leviathan of the Rio/Sao Paulo Extended Metropolitan Region, a 450-kilometer-long axis between the two Brazilian mega-cities already encompassing 37 million people, even more than the Tokyo-Yokohama conurbation (33 million).

Davis sees the future as a realist, not as an apocalyptic visionary: “This great dragon-like sprawl of cities will constitute the physical and demographic culmination of millennia of urban evolution. The ascendancy of coastal East Asia, in turn, will surely promote a Tokyo-Shanghai ‘world city’ dipole to equal the New York-London axis in the control of global flows of capital and information.”

And this:

Gated-community heaven – be it in Beijing or Sao Paulo, Bangkok or Manila, Bangalore or Cairo – is an “off world”, and Davis is happy to borrow the terminology from the film Blade Runner. These replica southern Californias are also the epitome of an “architecture of fear”, as Nigerian researcher Tunde Agbola, quoted by Davis, defines fortified lifestyle in Lagos. Davis correctly points out that its most extreme forms are “in large urban societies with the greatest socio-economic inequalities: South Africa, Brazil, Venezuela and the US”.

It is indeed a “culture of the absurd” – as every upper-middle-class condo in Sao Paulo comes with armed guards, banks of closed-circuit-television cameras, electrified wiring connected with emergency alarms and sometimes connected to “armed response” security companies. Rich and poor, in this environment, rarely intersect. It’s what some Brazilian writers call “the return to the medieval city”. Gated-community heaven, as reached by the upwardly mobile in the developing world, elevates them, in Davis’s words, into “fortified, fantasy-themed enclaves and edge cities, disembedded from their own social landscapes but integrated into globalization’s cyber-California floating in the digital ether”. The whole thing also means the death of civil society as we know it.

and:

For the powers that be, the easiest way out is to demonize. Thus the “war on terror”, the “war on drugs” and the obliteration of any serious and honest debate about the unspeakable daily violence of perpetual economic exclusion. Davis sums it all up thusly: “The categorical criminalization of the urban poor is a self-fulfilling prophecy, guaranteed to shape a future of endless war in the streets.” And this is happening while virtually nobody in positions of political power is examining the terrifying geopolitical implications of a planet of slums.

Planet of Slums – Mike Davis

I found in Cerulean Sanctum’s post about his time living in Silicon Valley, shades of  Mike Davis premises – The Tyranny of Moderism.