Architects of shantytowns.

• Author: Pal, Amitabh
• Position: Planet of Slums - Book review

Planet of Slums By Mike Davis Verso. 228 pages. $24.

The view from an Indian train can sometimes be depressing. When you are out in the countryside, the bucolic landscape and the furrowed fields often mask rural poverty. It is when a train approaches a megalopolis like Delhi that the destitution becomes all too obvious. Alongside the rails cluster shack after shack.

India is the world leader in the number (though not percentage) of slum dwellers.

The scale of such global poverty is staggering. "Bombay, with ten to twelve million squatters and tenement-dwellers, is the global capital of slum-dwelling, followed by Mexico City and Dhaka (nine to ten million each), and then Lagos, Cairo, Karachi, Kinshasa-Brazzaville, Sao Paulo, Shanghai, and Delhi (six to eight million each)," writes Mike Davis in his latest bracing work.

All told, he says, there are more than one billion slum dwellers the world over.

Davis started his book-writing career critiquing Los Angeles in works like City of Quartz and Ecology of Fear, but in recent years he has branched out. In Late Victorian Holocausts, Davis linked late-nineteenth-century weather patterns and misadministration to large-scale famines in British India, China, and Brazil. His penultimate book, The Monster at Our Door, was about the avian flu.

Davis includes everything in Planet of Slums that you would ever want to know about these communities. He even traces the word origin of slum, along with the typology, geology, and economic forces at work.

Davis implicates the colonial powers for their role in the formation of modern slums.

"The British were arguably the greatest slum-builders of all time," he writes. "Their policies in Africa forced the local labor force to live in precarious shantytowns on the fringes of segregated and restricted cities. In India, Burma, and Ceylon, their refusal to improve sanitation or provide even the most minimal infrastructure to native neighborhoods ensured huge death tolls from early-twentieth-century epidemics (plague, cholera, influenza) and created immense problems of urban squalor that were inherited by national elites after independence."

Davis shows us the various shaky locales that slum dwellers are forced into. Slum residents "are the pioneer settlers of swamps, floodplains, volcano slopes, unstable hillsides, rubbish mountains, chemical dumps, railroad sidings, and desert fringes," he writes.

These inhospitable environments have led to repeated disasters...