»In principle, the mega-cities with nearly thirty million inhabitants already have more responsibility and decision-making authority today than many nation-states.« So says Armand Grüntuch, who, as general commissioner, is in charge of the German Pavilion at this year’s Architecture Biennale in Venice, along with Almut Ernst. The projects actually presented there, however, include a floating swimming pool on the River Spree (the »Badeschiff«) and a roof extension in the town of Merzig (31,000 inhabitants).
For the 2004 Biennale, Belgium commissioned the anthropologist Filip de Boeck, together with the photographer Marie-Françoise Plissart, to develop the project »Kinshasa – Tales from the Invisible City«. What is now the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo was founded in 1881 as the trading post Léopoldville, named after its owner, the Belgian king, Léopold II. Pentecostal church services, sales stands and portraits of everyday city life were used to give an impression the metropolis of Kinshasa, post-colonial since 1966. The pavilion received the prize for the best conception: here, for once, the Eurocentric show and its usual industrial-exhibition routine were thwarted.
The much-lauded European City is to be found not only in Siena or Brussels, but also in Tripolis and Kinshasa – as a colonial core that tries to separate itself from the urgent housing needs of the majority population. The slums – an effect of Europisation – were bulldozed down in vain. Informal settlements have formed almost inevitably beyond the formal and segregated cities. Here, streets were unlit and unsealed. Drinking water is now as rare in Kinshasa on the Congo as in the Sahara. Living in shit can be taken literally, as there are no sanitary facilities. While the colonial masters equipped their areas with drainage, the system of pipes stops at the poor districts.
When colonial rule ended around 1960, the barriers of colonial apartheid were torn down. Seen in this way, the opening of the colonial cities to the poor sections of the population was an act of liberation. In addition, the pavements provided space for kiosks and displays of goods. Soon, the old patterns returned in force: whereas fewer than 360 people per square kilometre live in Nairobi’s green district of Karen, there are more than 80,000 slum inhabitants crowded into parts of the district of Kibera. The US author Mike Davis speaks in his latest publication »Planet of Slums« of a post-colonial reproduction of the segregated colonial cities. This division is not decreed by nature, but the effect of an »endless social war,« reinforced by walls, road blocks, buffer zones and checkpoints.
Mike Davis calls the now imminent moment in which there will be more people living in cities than in the country the »watershed of human history,« comparable to the industrial revolution. Around 1800, two percent of the world’s population were still living in large settlements and cities. Today, there are four hundred cities with more than a million inhabitants, and by 2015 there will be at least 150 more of them. In contrast, the »global countryside« has reached its maximum population and will start to shrink after 2020. It will not be the »shrinking cities« of Halle or Detroit, but the cities of the global south that will bear the burden when ten thousand million people are living on the earth in 2050 and 95 percent of urban growth takes place in the southern hemisphere. A good half of urban dwellers will live in one of the 250,000 slums, ranging in population from several hundred to mega-slums with four million inhabitants. Ethiopia, Chad and Afghanistan top the statistics with over 98 percent of urban areas consisting of slum settlements. But the fastest growing slums are in the Russian Federation, particularly in the former industrial cities of now de-industrialised zones.
In the future, it won’t be the top ten mega-cities that will have to take in the urban growth, but urban regions of the second rank, up to now widely unknown, which have even less planning capacity at their disposal than, say, Shanghai or Mexico. »People from rural areas don’t need to move to the city anymore: it’s moving to them,« as Davis succinctly puts it. The price for the »new urban order« will be growing injustice between and within these conglomerations. There is a greater lack of salaried jobs in the rest of the boom metropolises than ever before. Two-fifths of the working population in so-called developing countries slaves away on an informal basis. The world’s workforce has doubled since 1980, but not the possibilities for earning a regular living. For Mike Davis, this rapidly growing billion of people is the new working class, which often operates in the background of formal work. Advancement here is seldom possible; instead, this poverty without solidarity is shared without rights. Shut off from the solidarity provided by village life and separated from the cultural and political life of the city, the slum residents are more isolated than ever.
The UN Habitat Report »The Challenge of Slums« of 2003 provides the empirical backbone for the global survey in »Planet of Slums« and is, according to Davis, »the first really global study of urban poverty.« The publication brings together for the first time the income levels of ninety percent of the global population and shows that not all poor people live in slums and that slums do not house only the poor. But the intersection is large. The appearance of cities will no longer be dominated by glass and steel, but by plastic sheets, wooden slats,crude bricks and corrugated iron. Slums are defined as over-populated, shabby or informal dwelling places with inadequate access to fresh water and drainage, as well as extremely insecure living conditions. What is harder to measure is the »social dimension«. The author sees the reasons for the rural exodus and new urban poverty as being caused above all by the structural adaptation policy of the International Monetary Fund. The new programme no longer aimed at the abolition of slums, but their improvement. Instead of social-democratic bliss imposed from above by the welfare state – a privilege of the global north – slum residents were to be empowered to improve their situation themselves. But »helping people to help themselves« remains a confession of failure. The thousandfold »NGO revolution« has absorbed the big non-governmental organisations as part of state-run operations. Formerly rebellious grass-roots approaches turned into bureaucratic arms of project implementation and established a new form of »clientelism«. Something that had grown from a collective act soon split up into individual case processing. However, this »SAPisation of the Third World« met with protest: up to 1992, there were reportedly 146 »IMF Riots«.
Slums are built on refuse and with refuse. They form alongside transport routes and rubbish heaps, in cemeteries, marshes, pest-ridden areas or contaminated disused industrial sites, on footpaths or roofs of other houses, in parks or slopes at risk of erosion – in other words, in places that could not otherwise be rented out. But living in a slum does not mean having a house for free: mostly, there is a usage fee to be paid, or police and politicians have to be bribed. Occupying land is not necessarily cheaper than purchasing land.
Davis does not hold any great hopes of appropriation praxes from below: »The squatter is still the big human symbol of the city in the Third World, whether as victim or as hero. However […] the golden era of squatting – the free or cheap occupation of land on the periphery – definitively finished in 1990.« The only model for bettering oneself is exploiting those who are even poorer as a »slum lord«, that is, subletting slum housing at a big profit. The book admits of the conclusion that slums are rented cities built using the division of labour.
The global history of informal urban development has yet to be written. In »Planet of Slums«, Mike Davis tries an approach situated between statistics and critique. He devotes his attention to the residents, seeking scandals: here it’s bad, there it’s really terrible, but it’s even more catastrophic in other places. In this way, the book builds up a case based on statistics, while jumping merrily between continents. This does result in a global view of the facts, but: Has he been everywhere? How can the material be compared? And what do we do with it?
In contrast, the studies of Brazzaville and Kinshasa that the Jan van Eyck Academy published under the title »Brakin« move within the urban terrain and bring together astonishing everyday practices. Mike Davis, on the other hand, is all too happy to paint a »Danteesque« scenario and thus manifests the victim discourse. But slums are often better organised than the rest of the mega-cities. And the fact that the barrios of Caracas, for example, are the source of the driving force behind the Bolivarian revolution1 seems to him not worth mentioning. There is little social empathy to be felt in Mike Davis’s weighty study. »Governments of the Poor« is to be his next book project. In it, he wants to write about the resistance of slum populations to global capitalism.

 

Translated by Timothy Jones

 

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