Quote from "The Books of My Numberless Dreams," by Imani, London Review of Books, Vol. 29, No. 5 - Apr 18th, 2007http://imani.wordpress.com/2007/04/18/london-review-of-books-vol-29-no-5/
... [An] excellent [study] directly related to Africa and major urban areas worldwide was Jeremy Harding’s review of Planet of Slums by Mike Davis, It Migrates to Them. Davis wrote on the explosion of populations in urban areas in ways similar to the effects of the 19th century Industrial revolution: poor housing, poor infrastructure, generally sub-standard living conditions. In certain countries like Japan the rural dwellers did not even have to move closer to the city; the development came to them with highways cutting off their routes to the sea and the pollution killing the fish stock.
One of the major problems Davis identifies is that the populations far outnumber the economic opportunities offered in the cities; he disagrees with the idea that creating property rights will spur any development; and that too many people in these areas are forced to work in the same kind of jobs: “the informal sector…generates jobs not by elaborating new divisions of labour, but by fragmenting existing work, and thus subdividing incomes.” The IMF and the World Bank are implicated in sometimes causing and aggravating this problem in developing nations, along with the corruption of national governments.
The photographer Jonas Bendiksen took photographs of Kibera, an example of one of these slums, on the outskirts of Nairobi, Kenya for the Paris Review Winter 2006. (The piece is in PDF format.)
Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb by the same author is also reviewed, the link formed by Davis intention to “focus on ’slum-based resistance to global capitalism’”. Buda’s Wagon is an indirect way of addressing this (he plans a sequel to Planet Slums that will more thoroughly address the matter). For now he writes on this weapon that’s used by insurgents and secret services alike. Harding asserts that the “unwitting” overall picture Davis creates is the links between the outsider violent groups who use the car bombs and other tactics as weapons and the “state agencies” that taught them. ...
