> <http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080714/davis>
> Human Ecology
> by Mike Davis
>
> This planetary deficit of opportunity and social justice is captured in
> the fact that more than one billion people, according to UN-Habitat,
> currently live in slums and that their number is expected to double
> by 2030. An equal number, or more, forage in the so-called informal
> sector (a first-world euphemism for mass unemployment). Sheer
> demographic momentum, meanwhile, will increase the world's urban
> population by 3 billion people over the next forty years (9 percent of
> them in poor cities), and no one--absolutely no one--has a clue how
> a planet of slums, with growing food and energy crises, will
> accommodate their biological survival, much less their
> inevitable aspirations to basic happiness and dignity.
Finally found some time to read this - I respect Davis enormously for "Late Victorian Holocausts", one of the great meditations on colonialism, but his thesis of the contemporary global slum is problematic. Yes, cities are chaotic, and yes, global warming is an oncoming disaster.
But visions of ecological doom come perilously close to one of the central ideologies of imperialism - the notion of the periphery as masses of dirty, ill-nourished black and brown bodies with no history, agency, or humanity, requiring benevolent supervision by civilized white people. (I'm sure Davis didn't mean it this way, but this is how the breathless tone could all too easily be misconstrued.)
The ideology is a crock. Mega-cities like Kolkata, India (where my partner-in-crime is from) are vibrant, dynamic, maddening, endearing, scintillating, depressing, astounding, frustrating, exhilarating, and a whole bunch of adjectives that haven't been invented yet. If Davis sat down and studied a single mega-city in depth, he would discover extraordinary reservoirs of human creativity, ingenuity and solidarity.
-- DRR