Planet of Slums. Mike Davis. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Mike Davis
Издательство: Ingram
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Жанр произведения: Техническая литература
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isbn: 9781781683682
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Bryceson, “Disappearing Peasantries? Rural Labour Redundancy in the Neo-Liberal Era and Beyond,” in Bryceson, Kay and Mooij, pp. 304–05.

      47 Sébastien de Dianous, “Les Damnés de la terre du Cambodge,”Le Monde Diplomatique, September 2004, p. 20.

      48 See Josef Gugler, “Overurbanization reconsidered,” in Gugler, Cities in the Developing World, pp. 114–23.

      49 Foreword to Jacinta Prunty, Dublin Slums, 1800–1925: A Study in Urban Geography, Dublin 1998, p. ix. Larkin, of course, forgets Dublin’s Mediterranean counterpart: Naples.

      50 Oberai, p. 13.

      51 UNCHS, An Urbanising World: Global Report on Human Settlements, Oxford 1996,p. 239.

      52 Priscilla Connolly, “Mexico City: our common future?”Environment and Urbanization 11:1 (April 1999), p. 56.

      53 Ivo Imparato and Jeff Ruster, Slum Upgrading and Participation: Lessons from Latin America, World Bank, Washington D.C. 2003, p. 333.

      54 John Browder and Brian Godfrey, Rainforest Cities: Urbanization, Development and Globalization of the Brazilian Amazon, New York 1997, p. 130.

      55 Yang Wenzhong and Wang Gongfan, “Peasant Movement: A Police Perspective,” in Michael Dutton (ed.), Streetlife China, Cambridge 1998, p. 89.

      56 Dileni Gunewardena, Urban Poverty in South Asia, working paper, Conference on Poverty Reduction and Social Progress, Rajendrapur, Bangladesh, April 1999, p. 1.

      57 Arif Hasan, “Introduction” to Akhtar Khan, Orangi Pilot Project: Reminiscences and Reflections, Karachi 1996, p. xxxiv.

      58 Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, New York 2004, p. 117.

      59 Gautam Chatterjee, “Consensus versus Confrontation,”Habitat Debate 8:2 (June 2002), p. 11. Statistic for Delhi from Rakesh Simha, “New Delhi: The World’s Shanty Capital in the Making,”OneWorld South Asia, 26 August 2003.

      60 Harvey Herr and Guenter Karl, Estimating Global Slum Dwellers, UN-Habitat working paper, Nairobi 2003, p. 19.

      61 Gordon Brown quoted in the Los Angeles Times, 4 October 2004.

      62 UN statistics quoted in John Vidal, “Cities are now the frontline of poverty,” The Guardian, 2 February 2005.

      Two

      The Prevalence of Slums

      He let his mind drift as he stared at the city, half slum, half paradise. How could a place be so ugly and violent, yet beautiful at the same time?

       Chris Abani 1

      The astonishing prevalence of slums is the chief theme of The Challenge of Slums, a historic and somber report published in October 2003 by the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat). This first truly global audit of urban poverty, which follows in the famous footsteps of Friedrich Engels, Henry Mayhew, Charles Booth, and Jacob Riis, culminates two centuries of the scientific reconnaisance of slum life which began with James Whitelaw’s 1805 Survey of Poverty in Dublin. It is also the long-awaited empirical counterpart to the World Bank’s warnings in the 1990s that urban poverty would become the “most significant, and politically explosive, problem of the next century.”2

      These classic slums were notoriously parochial and picturesquely local places, but reformers generally agreed with Charles Booth – the Dr. Livingstone of outcast London – that all slums were characterized by an amalgam of dilapidated housing, overcrowding, disease, poverty, and vice. For nineteenth-century liberals, of course, the moral dimension was decisive, and the slum was first and above all envisioned as a place where an incorrigible and feral social “residuum” rots in immoral and often riotous splendor; indeed, a vast literature titillated the Victorian middle classes with lurid tales from the dark side of town. “Savages,” rhapsodized the Reverend Chapin in Humanity in the City (1854), “not in gloomy forests, but under the strength of gas-light, and the eyes of policemen; with war-whoops and clubs very much the same, and garments as fantastic and souls as brutal as any of their kindred at the antipodes.”9 Forty years later, the new US Department of Labor, in the first “scientific” survey of American tenement life (The Slums of Great Cities, 1894), still defined a slum as “an area of dirty back streets, especially when inhabited by a squalid and criminal population.”10

      A Global Slum Census

      The authors of The Challenge of Slums discard these Victorian calumnies but otherwise preserve the classical definition of a slum, characterized by overcrowding, poor or informal housing, inadequate access to safe water and sanitation, and insecurity of tenure. This operational definition, officially adopted at a UN meeting in Nairobi in October 2002, is