1. Planet of Slums

2. THE BROAD CONTEXT
“For the first time the urban population of the earth will out number the rural.” (1)
Professor Whiteley’s commentary: This circumstance is supposed to have occurred in 2008.  The central point is that the great challenges of global sustainability will be addressed, in part, in an urban context.  And planning for improving the environmental health of women and children must consider the problems they encounter in the slums of the world.

3. THE BROAD CONTEXT
“Mumbai (Bombay… is projected to attain a population of 33million [by 2025], although no one knows whether such gigantic concentrations of poverty are biologically or ecologically sustainable.” (5)
Professor Whiteley’s commentary: The context here is lack of infrastructure for providing clean water and sanitation, safe dwellings, schools and public safety, and jobs.

4. THE BROAD CONTEXT
“In most of the developing world, however, city growth lacks the powerful manufacturing export engines of China, Korea, and Taiwan, as well as China’s vast inflow of foreign capital (currently equal to half of total foreign investment in the entire developing world).” (13)
Professor Whiteley’s commentary: Davis notes that the great industrial cities of the [meaning the Southern hemisphere] South have all suffered massive plant closures and deindustrialization.  The size of a city’s economy often bears little relationships to its population size and vice versa.  This is a prescription for poverty.

5. THE BROAD CONTEXT
“How could cities in Côte d'Ivoire, Tanzania, Congo-Kinshasa, Gabon, Angola, and elsewhere—where economies were contracting by 2 to 5 percent per year—still support annual population growth of 4 to 8 percent?” (14)
Professor Whiteley’s commentary: Davis indicates that part of the reason is to be found in the Structural Adjustment Programs/Policies of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank (see the Cochabamba case study by Baer).  Davis is a harsh critic.  Pages are worth reading with care.

6. Ecological sustainability
Can a developing world city of 33 million be ecologically sustainable? A. Yes B. No

7. Ecological sustainability
Can a developing world city where economies are contracting still support annual population growth? A. Yes B. No

8. THE PREVALENCE OF SLUMS
“The classic definition of a slum, characterized by overcrowding, poor or informal housing, inadequate access to safe water and sanitation, and insecurity of tenure.” (23)
Professor Whiteley’s commentary: Davis comments on the more difficult to measure “social dimensions” which equate to economic and social marginality.  UN researchers estimate 1 billion live in urban slums as of 2005.

9. THE PREVALENCE OF SLUMS
2. “Not all urban poor, to be sure, live in slums, nor are all slum dwellers poor…Although the two categories obviously overlap in their majority, the number of urban poor is considerably greater:  at least one-half of the world’s urban population as defined by relative national poverty thresholds.” (25)

10. THE PREVALENCE OF SLUMS
“Accurate statistics are in fact difficult to come by, because poor and slum populations are often deliberately and sometimes massively undercounted by officials.” (26)
“There are probably more than 200,000 slums on earth…” (26)
“The urban poor have to solve a complex equation as they try to optimize housing cost, tenure security, quality of shelter, journey to work, and sometimes, personal safety.” (27)

11. THE LOCATIONS OF SLUMS
“The majority of the world’s urban poor no longer live in inner cities.  Since 1970 the larger share of world urban population growth has been absorbed by slum communities on the periphery of Third World cities.” (37).
“The urban edge is the societal impact zone where the centrifugal forces of the city collide with the implosion of the countryside…the two million poor people in Bangalore’s rapidly growing slum periphery include both slum-dwellers expelled from the center and farm laborers driven off the land.”  (46)
“But the principal function of the Third World urban edge remains as human dump.  In some cases, urban waste and unwanted immigrants end up together.” (47)

12. THE TREASON OF THE STATE
“…the idea of an interventionist state strongly committed to social housing and job development seems either a hallucination or a bad joke, because governments long ago abdicated any serious effort to combat slums and redress urban marginality.” (62)
“Urban elites and the middle classes in the Third World have also been extraordinarily successful in evading municipal taxation.” (67)

13. THE TREASON OF THE STATE
Urban status quo is not a frozen status quo, but rather a ceaseless social war in which the state intervenes regularly in the name of “progress,” “beautification,” and even “social justice for the poor” to redraw spatial boundaries to the advantage of landowners, foreign investors, elite homeowners, and middle-class commuters.” (98)
“The contemporary scale of population removal is immense:  every year hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, of poor people—legal tenants as well as squatters—are forcibly evicted from Third World neighborhoods.  The urban poor, as a result, are nomads.” (98)

14. THE TREASON OF THE STATE
“When it comes to the reclamation of high-value land, ideological symbols and promises made to the poor mean very little to the bureaucrats in power.” (101)
Professor Whiteley’s commentary: Points One through Twelve above cover several different chapters but have a common set of observations about the consequences of powerlessness and poverty in the face of the values of government which is most often reflecting the values of money and power.  Professor Davis continues his critique of what is called the “Washington Consensus” as manifested in the polices of the IMF and World Bank. 

15. Mission Impossible
Is the plight of a sixteen year old with drug resistant tuberculosis treason of the state?
Yes No
Do not know

16. Brazil’s slum warfare
Is the culture of drugs and violence in Rio de Janeiro slum treason of the state?
Yes No
Do not know

17. Mumbai Dehravi slum
Are the ambitious plans to develop the slum where ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ was filmed treason of the state?
Yes No
Do not know

18. Water woes in India
Is the condition of the sacred river in New Delhi treason of the state?
Yes No
Do not know

19. China’s Yellow River
Is China’s Yellow River an example of treason of the state?
Yes No
Do not know

20. China’s Yellow River
Is China’s Yellow River an example of disastrous values in Diamond’s framework?
Yes No
Do not know

21. China’s Yellow River
Is China’s Yellow River an example of the problem being beyond the capacity of China to solve it, to use Diamond’s framework?
Yes No
Do not know