Precis on Slum Ecology by Mike Davis

The basic argument is that Cities are growing very rapidly in the past few decades. He writes: "
Cities have absorbed nearly two-thirds of the global population explosion since 1950, and are currently adding a million babies and migrants each week. Dhaka, Kinshasa, and Lagos today are each approximately forty times larger than they were in 1950." 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. Slums begin with bad geology. They are more often than not built on unstable dolomitic soil contaminated by generations of mining or in areas of toxic waste and chronic ground collapse. Interestingly enough, he argues that all this is not necessary at all. We read half way in the article that: "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." Yet, none of those conditions can hold in most Third World cities.

In the Third World 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. One by one, 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

The audience is middle or upper class Americans. People who know about feng shui and probably have the luxury to actually discriminate between living places with high or low feng shui. His humor is directly addressed to an audience who is taken to be completely ignorant of such facts. This, reminds a more knowledgeable reader how the majority of her society is like. For example when he says "earthquakes make even more precise audits of the urban housing crisis," and continues to say that this is the "devil's bargain of 'informal' housing," he is using our own terms to remind us the sort of denial that goes on among the middle class of industrialized societies. We see two more of such examples when he says they "dont lose much sleep at night worrying," the thing that we modern societies so often do. And reminds us that when hearing wild fires, instead of thinking Mediterranean brush, we have to think of slums as the "world's premier fire ecology." He follows all this harsh language with a final shock when he tells the reader that before developing a slum site, rather than bearing the expense of court procedures or enduring the wait for an official demolition order, a favorite method of Filipino landlords is 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.”

Amin Ebrahimi