Orion Magazine | Slum Ecology 8/25/15, 12:08 PM

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Orion Magazine > Articles > Feature > The World As We Know It > Slum Ecology

Slum Ecology
by M IK E DAVIS

Photographs by SEBASTIÃO SALGADO/ AMAZONAS/ CONTACT PRESS IMAGES, used with permission

A VILLA MISERIA OUTSIDE Buenos Aires may have the worst feng shui in the world: it is built in a flood
zone over a former lake, a toxic dump, and a cemetery. Then there’s the barrio perched precariously on
stilts over the excrement-clogged Pasig River in Manila, and the bustee in Vijayawada that floods so
regularly that residents have door numbers written on pieces of furniture. In slums the world over,
squatters trade safety and health for a few square meters of land and some security of tenure. They are
pioneers of swamps, floodplains, volcano slopes, unstable hillsides, desert fringes, railroad sidings, rubbish
mountains, and chemical dumps — unattractive and dangerous sites that have become poverty’s niche in
the ecology of the city.

Cities have absorbed nearly two-thirds of the global population explosion since 1950, and are currently

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adding a million babies and migrants each week. Dhaka, Kinshasa, and Lagos today are each approximately
forty times larger than they were in 1950. According to the Financial Times, China in the 1980s alone added
more city dwellers than did all of Europe (including Russia) during the entire nineteenth century.

In this process of rampant urbanization, the planet has become marked by the runaway growth of slums,
characterized by overcrowding, poor or informal housing, inadequate access to safe water and sanitation,
and insecurity of tenure. UN researchers estimate that there were at least 921 million slum dwellers in
2001 and more than 1 billion in 2005, with slum populations growing by a staggering 25 million per year.

Today, new arrivals to the urban margin confront a condition that can only be described as marginality
within marginality, or, in the more piquant phrase of a desperate Baghdad slum dweller quoted by The New
York Times, a “semi-death.” An International Labor Organization researcher has estimated that the formal
housing markets in the Third World rarely supply more than 20 percent of new housing stock; out of
necessity, people turn to self-built shanties, informal rentals, pirate subdivisions, or the sidewalks. These
are moves of sheer survival. And because the geographic location of slums is becoming more and more
marginal, the destructive power of natural elements leaves today’s slum residents in an ever more
vulnerable state.

Slums begin with bad geology. Johannesburg’s shantytown periphery, for example, conforms unerringly to
a belt of dangerous, unstable dolomitic soil contaminated by generations of mining. At least half of the
region’s nonwhite population lives in informal settlements in areas of toxic waste and chronic ground
collapse. Likewise, the highly weathered lateritic soils underlying hillside favelas in Belo Horizonte and
other Brazilian cities are catastrophically prone to slope failure and landslides. Rio de Janeiro’s more
famous favelas are built on equally unstable soils atop denuded granite domes and hillsides that frequently
give way — with deadly results.

Caracas, however, with a population of 5.2 million in 2005, is the soil geologist’s “perfect storm”: slums
housing almost two-thirds of the city’s population are built on unstable hillsides and in deep gorges
surrounding the seismically active Caracas Valley. At one time vegetation held the friable schist in place,
but brush clearing and cut-and-fill construction have destabilized the densely inhabited hills and
precipitated a radical increase in major landslides and slope failures — from less than one per decade
before 1950 to the current average of two or more per month.

In mid-December 1999, an extraordinary storm clobbered northern Venezuela. A year’s worth of rain fell
in a few days upon already saturated soil; indeed, rainfall in some areas was reckoned to be a once-in-a-
millennium event. The result was flash floods and debris flows in Caracas — and along the Caribbean
coast on the other side of the Avila Mountains, where an onrush of 1.8 million tons of debris left the
coastal resort of Caraballeda devastated. The storm killed an estimated 32,000 people and left 140,000
homeless and another 200,000 jobless.

What the Caracas region is to landslides, metropolitan Manila is to frequent flooding. In July 2000 a
typhoon deluge caused the collapse of a notorious “garbage mountain” in Quezon City’s Payatas slum,

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burying five hundred shacks and killing at least a thousand people.

Earthquakes make even more precise audits of the urban housing crisis; seismic hazard is the fine print in
the devil’s bargain of “informal” housing marked by poor construction. Seismic destruction usually maps
poor-quality brick, mud, or concrete residential housing with uncanny accuracy.

But the urban poor do not lose much sleep at night worrying about earthquakes or even floods. Their chief
anxiety is a more frequent and omnipresent threat: fire. Slums, not Mediterranean brush or Australian
eucalyptuses, are the world’s premier fire ecology. Their mixture of flammable dwellings, extraordinary
density, and dependence upon open fires for heat and cooking is a superlative recipe for spontaneous
combustion. A simple accident with cooking gas or kerosene can quickly become a megafire that destroys
hundreds or even thousands of dwellings. Fire spreads through shanties at stunning velocity, and fire-
fighting vehicles, if they respond at all, are often unable to negotiate narrow slum lanes.

To make matters worse, slum fires are often anything but accidents. Rather than bear the expense of court
procedures or endure the wait for an official demolition order, landlords and developers frequently prefer
the simplicity of arson. Manila has a particularly notorious reputation for suspicious slum fires, especially
in areas targeted for industrial development. Urban sociologist Erhard Berner describes a favorite method
of Filipino landlords: to chase a “kerosene-drenched burning live rat or cat — dogs die too fast — into an
annoying settlement… The unlucky animal can set plenty of shanties aflame before it dies.”

ALL THE CLASSICAL PRINCIPLES of urban planning, including the preservation of open space and the
separation of noxious land uses from residences, are stood on their heads in poor cities. Almost every large
Third World city with some industrial base has a Dantean district shrouded in pollution and located next to
pipelines, chemical plants, and refineries: Mexico City’s Iztapalapa, São Paulo’s Cubatão, Rio’s Belford
Roxo, Jakarta’s Cibubur, Tunis’s southern fringe, southwestern Alexandria, and so on. The world usually
pays attention to such fatal admixtures of poverty and toxic industry only when they explode with mass
casualties, as happened at Bhopal, India, in 1984, when an accident at a Union Carbide chemical plant
killed twenty thousand people.

Urban theorists have long recognized that the environmental efficiency and public affluence of cities
require the preservation of ecosystems, open spaces, and natural services: cities need them to recycle urban
waste products into usable inputs for farming, gardening, and energy production. And along with intact
wetlands and agriculture, sustainable urbanism presupposes a basic level of safety — of meteorological,
hydrological, and geological stability, and protection against disasters like floods or fire. None of those
conditions can hold in most Third World cities. Suffering under a series of crushing pressures, most
recently a quarter-century-old regime of Draconian international economic policies, cities are
systematically polluting, urbanizing, and destroying their crucial environmental support systems.

Wealthy cities in vulnerable sites such as Los Angeles or Tokyo can reduce geological or meteorological risk
through massive engineering projects. And national flood insurance programs, together with fire and
earthquake insurance, can guarantee residential repair and rebuilding in the event of extensive damage. In

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the Third World, by contrast, slums that lack potable water and latrines are unlikely to be defended by
expensive public works or covered by disaster insurance. Researchers writing in the journal Cities point
out that foreign debt makes such infrastructure investment ever more unlikely. “Structural adjustment” —
the protocols by which indebted countries surrender their economic independence to the World Bank and
International Monetary Fund (IMF) — drives sinister trade-offs that favor export-oriented production,
competition, and efficiency at the expense of disaster-vulnerable settlements.

THE GLOBAL FORCES pushing people from the countryside seem to sustain urbanization even when the
pull of the city is drastically weakened by debt and economic depression.

As Deborah Bryceson emphasizes in her summary of recent agrarian research, the IMF and World Bank
policies of the 1980s and 1990s caused unprecedented upheaval in the global countryside. One by one, she
writes, national governments gripped in debt lost access to agricultural subsidies and support for rural
infrastructure. Latin American and African nations abandoned peasant “modernization” efforts and
deregulated national markets, subjecting peasant farmers to the “sink-or-swim” economic strategy of
international financial institutions. Pushed into global commodity markets, agricultural producers found it
hard to compete.

These anti-peasant policies had the same results throughout much of the developing world. As local safety
nets disappeared, poor farmers became increasingly vulnerable to any exogenous shock: drought, inflation,
rising interest rates, or falling commodity prices. (Or illness: an estimated 60 percent of Cambodian
peasants who sell their land and move to the city are forced to do so by medical debts.) Meanwhile,
rapacious warlords and chronic civil wars, often spurred by the economic dislocations of debt-imposed
structural adjustment or foreign economic predators (as in the Congo and Angola), were uprooting whole
countrysides. Cities — in spite of their stagnant or negative economic growth — have simply harvested
this world agrarian crisis. Peasants had no choice but to become urban.

The fallout has been predictable: hundreds of millions of new urbanites must further subdivide the
peripheral economic niches of personal service, casual labor, street-vending, ragpicking, begging, and
crime. With its high-tech border enforcement blocking large-scale migration to the rich countries, the new
world order has dictated a formula for the mass production of slums, and for rising suffering from flood,
slides, quakes, and fire.

But of all the dangerous ecological symptoms of runaway urban poverty, none poses a bigger threat than
overflowing waste. The chronic shortfalls between the rates of trash generation and disposal in Third
World cities are often staggering: the average collection rate in Dar es Salaam is barely 25 percent; in
Karachi, 40 percent; and in Jakarta, 60 percent. The city planning director in Kabul complained to the
Washington Post that his city is becoming “one big reservoir of solid waste… Every 24 hours, 2 million
people produce 800 cubic meters of solid waste. If all 40 of our trucks make three trips a day, they can still
transport only 200 to 300 cubic meters out of the city.”

Outside Hanoi, where farmers and fishermen are constantly uprooted by urban development, urban and

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industrial effluents are now routinely employed as free substitutes for artificial fertilizers. When
researchers writing for the journal Environment and Urbanization questioned this noxious practice, they
discovered cynicism among vegetable and fish producers about the “rich people” in cities. “They don’t care
about us and fool us with useless compensation [for farm land],” as one purveyor put it, “so why not take
some form of revenge?”

The subject of human waste is, of course, indelicate; but it is a fundamental problem of city life from
which there is surprisingly little escape. Lovly Josaphat, a resident of Port-au-Prince’s largest slum, Cité
Soleil, told author Beverly Bell, “I’ve suffered a lot. When it rains, the part of the Cité I live in floods and
the water comes in the house. There’s always water on the ground, green smelly water, and there are no
paths. The mosquitoes bite us. My four-year-old has bronchitis, malaria, and even typhoid now… The
doctor said to give him boiled water, not to give him food with grease, and not to let him walk in the water.
But the water’s everywhere; he can’t set foot outside the house without walking in it. The doctor said that if
I don’t take care of him, I’ll lose him.”

Green, smelly water everywhere. “Every day, around the world,” according to public-health expert Eileen
Stillwaggon, “illnesses related to water supply, waste disposal, and garbage kill thirty thousand people and
constitute 75 percent of the illnesses that afflict humanity.” Indeed, digestive-tract diseases arising from
poor sanitation and the pollution of drinking water are the leading cause of death in the world, affecting
mainly infants and small children. Open sewers and contaminated water are likewise rife with intestinal
parasites such as whipworm, roundworm, and hookworm that infect tens of millions of children in poor
cities. Cholera, the scourge of the Victorian city, continues to thrive off the fecal contamination of urban
water supplies, especially in African cities like Antananarivo, Maputo, and Lusaka, where UNICEF
estimates that up to 80 percent of deaths from preventable diseases (apart from HIV/AIDS) arise from poor
sanitation.

“At any one time,” adds a 1996 report by the World Health Organization, “close to half of the South’s urban
population is suffering from one or more of the main diseases associated with inadequate provision for
water and sanitation.” Although clean water is the cheapest and single most important medicine in the
world, public provision of water remains widely inadequate, and often competes with powerful private
interests. In Dhaka, vendors mark up the cost of water — often from municipal sources — by 500 percent;
in Faisalabad, 6,800 percent. Unable or unwilling to pay the extortionate price of water from vendors, some
Nairobi residents resort to desperate expedients, including, two local researchers write, “the use of
sewerage water, skipping bathing and washing, using borehole water and rainwater, and drawing water
from broken pipes.”

WHILE THE RESTRUCTURING of Third World urban economies has contributed to dangerous health
conditions it has also gutted the response to those conditions. Since the late 1970s, international economic
policy has devastated the public provision of healthcare, particularly for women and children. As the
Women’s Global Network for Reproductive Rights points out, structural adjustment programs “usually
require public spending, including health spending (but not military spending) to be cut.” In Latin

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America and the Caribbean, according to a World Bank researcher, the enforced austerity during the 1980s
reduced public investment in sanitation and potable water, thus eliminating the infant survival advantage
previously enjoyed by poor urban residents. In Mexico, following the adoption of a second adjustment
program in 1986, the percentage of births attended by medical personnel fell from 94 percent in 1983 to 45
percent in 1988, while maternal mortality soared from 82 per 100,000 in 1980 to 150 in 1988.

In Ghana, “adjustment” not only led to an 80 percent decrease in spending on health and education
between 1975 and 1983, it also caused the exodus of half of the nation’s doctors. Similarly, in the
Philippines in the early 1980s, per capita health expenditures fell by half. In oil-rich but thoroughly
“adjusted” Nigeria, a fifth of the country’s children now die before age five. Economist Michel
Chossudovsky blames the notorious outbreak of bubonic plague in Surat in 1994 upon “a worsening urban
sanitation and public health infrastructure which accompanied the compression of national and municipal
budgets under the 1991 IMF/World Bank-sponsored structural adjustment programme.”

The examples can easily be multiplied: everywhere, obedience to international creditors, whose policies
helped create slums in the first place, has dictated cutbacks in medical care and precipitated the emigration
of doctors and nurses, the end of food subsidies, and the switch of agricultural production from
subsistence to export crops.

More recently the World Bank has relentlessly pressured aid recipients to open themselves to global
competition from private First World healthcare providers and pharmaceutical companies. The Bank’s
1993 “Investing in Health” report outlined the new paradigm of market-based healthcare, as described by
Fantu Cheru, a leading UN expert on debt: “limited public expenditure on a narrowly defined package of
services; user fees for public services; and privatized health care and financing.” A sterling instance of the
new approach was Zimbabwe, where the introduction of user fees in the early 1990s led to a doubling of
infant mortality. As Cheru emphasizes, the coerced tribute that the Third World pays to the First World has
meant the literal difference between life and death for millions of poor people.

But if ecological reality prevails, it won’t stop there. Today’s megaslums are unprecedented incubators of
new and re-emergent diseases that can travel across the world at the speed of a passenger jet. And, as the
imminent peril of avian influenza indicates, economic globalization without concomitant investment in a
global public-health infrastructure is a formula for catastrophe. It takes only a little imagination — the
thought of a series of ill-fated airplane trips — to remind us that we’re all living on the same planet of
slums, under the same economic regime. The conditions creating the slums — greed, inequity, poor
planning, and disrespect for human rights — are human forces, but they tend to intensify the Earth’s
natural forces. Those forces, ecological and biological, don’t always behave as predictably as we would like,
or stay within their bounds.

This article has been abridged for the web.

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MIKE DAVIS is a MacArthur Fellow and the author of Late Victorian Holocausts and Ecology of Fear.
He lives in San Diego and teaches at the University of California, Irvine. His essay in this issue is adapted
from Planet of Slums, published in March 2006 by Verso, and is used here by permission.

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