Slums

Some facts from Mike Davis’ article “Planet Of Slums“:

• In 1950 there were 86 cities in the world with a population over one million; today there are 400, and by 2015, there will be at least 550.
  • The present urban population (3.2 billion) is larger than the total population of the world in 1960.
    • ‘The primary direction of both national and international interventions during the last twenty years has actually increased urban poverty and slums, increased exclusion and inequality, and weakened urban elites in their efforts to use cities as engines of growth.’
      • There may be more than quarter of a million slums on earth. The five great metropolises of South Asia (Karachi, Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata and Dhaka) alone contain about 15,000 distinct slum communities with a total population of more than 20 million.
        • Whereas the classic slum was a decaying inner city, the new slums are more typically located on the edge of urban spatial explosions.
          • As in early Victorian London, the contamination of water by human and animal waste remains the cause of the chronic diarrhoeal diseases that kill at least two million urban babies and small children each year.
            • Today, on the other hand, populist Islam and Pentecostal Christianity (and in Bombay, the cult of Shivaji) occupy a social space analogous to that of early twentieth-century socialism and anarchism.