In 1900 London was the largest city in the world at just under six and a half million inhabitants, followed by New York, Paris, Berlin and Chicago. Reaching a peak of 8.6 million in 1939, it is now either twentieth or seventeenth, depending on how you count it.

While New York is still huge - over 22 million including the greater metropolitan area - it is the cities of the third world which now dominate the stakes, and not only in numbers (Mexico City 22 million; Sao Paulo 19.9 million; Mumbai 19. 1 million) but also in rapid growth (Mexico City from 2.9 million in 1950). But it is especially the size of their slums that marks these out as a new phenomenon. In his extraordinary book – Planet of Slums - Mike Davis documents the barbaric lives of the slum dwellers, living in squalor, excluded from the formal economy and with child mortality rates (under five) of between 20 and 30 percent.

We are used to the idea that the cities of the newly industrialised imperialist cities of Europe had large slums in the nineteenth century. Engels wrote about them in The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. But these new third world slums are not the result of industrialisation. Rather, like Dublin between 1800 and 1850, the millions who are forced into these burgeoning cities are being turned off the land by industrial agribusiness as well as by civil war, drought and famine; but rather than becoming part of modern industry, they work in the informal economy such as sweatshops and in the ‘service’ sector.

A billion slum dwellers

The statistics Davis gives are staggering - there are now more than a billion slum dwellers, nearly equal to the population of the whole world in Engels’ time. The 193.8 million Chinese slum dwellers represent 37.8 percent of the urban population; in India the figures are 158.4 million and 55.5 percent; in Nigeria 41 .6 million and 79.2 percent. And all of this is taking place under the brutality of neo-liberal policies in agriculture, in the shrinking public sector, the structural adjustment and shock tactics of the World Bank and IMF. While we think of slums as being characteristically in the inner city, increasingly in these megacities the central areas are being gentrified. The squatters, without deed or title to their ‘homes’, despite having lived there for many years, have no rights to the area and are expelled to the edges of the city. Removed from the crowded, but known barrios and favelas, they end up many miles from work, without transport of any kind and forced to rebuild their home from scratch, without water or energy, or any other services. Meanwhile their previous homes, many with water and electricity laid on after long battles with the authorities, are torn down and rebuilt for the wealthy.

Indeed squatting, although the only answer to the penniless, is not necessarily cheaper than buying a plot of land and building on it. For squatters often have to bribe politicians, gangsters or police to gain access to a site. And these payments, ‘rents’ can continue for decades. But for those who spend every bit of money they can scrape together to live, buying is always out of the question.

Nor are these ‘peripheral’ slums made up only of evacuees from the inner cities. Often international and internally displaced refugees live in these places too. In Palestine for example, Gaza, ‘considered by some to be the world’s largest slum - is essentially an urbanised agglomeration of refugee camps (750,000 refugees) with two thirds of the population subsisting on less than $2 per day.

Neoliberalism expels the masses

In the late 1950s and 1960s it seemed possible that the world’s urban poor might be properly housed by state intervention. Not only in Cuba, where many homes were built until the collapse of its banker in the USSR, but in Egypt, in Algeria and Tanzania, in Brazil plans were made, and some even carried out, to build public sector housing. But in most places even these minimal government interventions have been overtaken by neoliberal economic programmes, tying countries to indebtedness and their poor to squalor.

Meanwhile, Davis points to the increasing adoption by the middle classes of fantasy suburbs. Fleeing the inner cities, too close to slum dwellers, the wealthy are developing an ‘architecture of fear’: fortified lifestyles, high security gated ‘communities’, where the car can take you through the ‘dangerlands’ on your journey from one fortress to another. Los Angeles, discussed in a previous Davis book, City of Quartz, with its freeways flying over the sordid and dangerous precincts, has become the model for many a third world city.

Unwanted reserve armies of labour

Davis finishes his extraordinary book with an epilogue, ‘Down Vietnam Street’. He points to US and other governments’ warnings about the millions of slum dwellers. What was once a reserve army of labour has become a ‘permanently redundant mass’. The CIA in 2002 noted, ‘By the late 1990s a staggering one billion workers representing one-third of the world’s labour force, most of them in the south, were either unemployed or underemployed’: a real crisis of global capitalism. These slum dwellers are the twenty-first equivalent of the ‘dangerous classes’ of nineteenth century Paris. And the US has plans for them. Their experience in Mogadishu in1993, when, ‘slum militias inflicted 60 percent casualties on elite Army Rangers’, has forced a Pentagon rethink on Military Operations on Urbanised Terrain (MOUT). Sadr City in Baghdad is now just one of the recipients of this rethink.

Watch out for the sequel to this brilliant book - on slum-based resistance to global capitalism - which Mike Davis is writing with Forrest Hylton.

Jane Kelly is one of the Editors of Socialist Outlook.