Deep Thoughts: interviews with the very original Mike Davis

When you're in throng to and bedazzled by the Foucauldian/Derridaen/Zizekian theory/discourse spiderweb of thought -- caught inside its sticky academic cliches, and willy-nilly attached to the clusterfucked minds of the thousands of other intellectuals stuck there -- it's really refreshing to come across some kind of thinking person whose ideas and interests hit you from an entirely different direction. Such a chap is Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz and Planet of Slums; here are two interviews with this fascinating lad, from BLDGBLOG and TomDispatch.

1. From BLDGBLOG:
Interview with Mike Davis: Part 1

I first discovered Mike Davis's work about a decade ago, through his book City of Quartz, a detailed and poetic look at the social geography of Los Angeles. Perhaps most memorably, City of Quartz describes the militarization of public space in LA, from the impenetrable "panic rooms" of Beverly Hills mansions to the shifting ganglands of South Central. Not only does the Los Angeles Police Department use "a geo-synchronous law enforcement satellite" in their literal oversight of the city, but "thousands of residential rooftops have been painted with identifying street numbers, transforming the aerial view of the city into a huge police grid." In Los Angeles today, "carceral structures have become the new frontier of public architecture."

Many of Davis's conclusions will annoy you – but that's half the point of reading his books.

A more wide-ranging – yet also more openly political – book is Davis's 2002 collection Dead Cities. While it's one of Davis's least cohesive books, with arguably the worst copy-editing in recent publishing history, it nonetheless ends with an invigorating bang. Its final section, called "Extreme Science," is a perfect example of how Davis's books remain so consistently interesting. We come across asteroid impacts, prehistoric mass extinctions, Victorian disaster fiction, planetary gravitational imbalances, and even the coming regime of human-induced climate change, all in a book ostensibly dedicated to West Coast American urbanism.

Of course, Mike Davis's particular breed of urban sociology has found many detractors – detractors who accuse Davis of falsifying his interviews, performing selective research, deliberately amplifying LA's dark side (whether that means plate tectonics, police brutality, or race riots), and otherwise falling prey to partisan battles in which Davis's classically Marxist approach seems both inadequate and outdated. In fact, these criticisms are all justified in their own ways – yet I still find myself genuinely excited whenever a new book of his hits the bookshop display tables.

In any case, the following interview took place after the publication of Davis's most recent book, Planet of Slums. Having reviewed that book for the Summer 2006 issue of David Haskell's Urban Design Review, I won't dwell on it at length here; but Planet of Slums states its subject matter boldly, on page one. There, Davis writes that we are now at "a watershed in human history, comparable to the Neolithic or Industrial revolutions. For the first time the urban population of the earth will outnumber the rural."

This "urban" population will not find its home inside cities, however, but deep within horrific mega-slums where masked riot police, raw human sewage, toxic metal-plating industries, and emerging diseases all violently co-exist with literally billions of people. Planet of Slums quickly begins to read like some Boschian catalog of our era's most nightmarish consequences. The future, to put it non-judgmentally, will be interesting indeed.

Mike Davis and I spoke via telephone.

BLDGBLOG :First, could you tell me a bit about the actual writing process of Planet of Slums ? Was there any travel involved?

Davis : This was almost entirely an armchair journey. What I tried to do was read as much of the current literature on urban poverty, in English, as I could. Having four children, two of them toddlers, I only wish I could visit some of these places. On the other hand, I write from our porch, with a clear view of Tijuana, a city I know fairly well, and that’s influenced a lot of my thinking about these issues – although I tried scrupulously to avoid putting any personal journalism into the narrative.

Really, the book is just an attempt to critically survey and synthesize the literature on global urban poverty, and to expand on this extraordinarily important report of the United Nations – The Challenge of Slums – which came out a few years ago.

BLDGBLOG :So you didn't visit the places you describe?

Davis : Well, I was initially anticipating writing a much longer book, but when I came to what should have been the second half of Planet of Slums – which looks at the politics of the slum – it became just impossible to rely on secondary or specialist literature. I’m now collaborating on a second volume with a young guy named Forrest Hylton, who’s lived for several years in Colombia and Bolivia. I think his first-hand experience and knowledge makes up for most of my deficiencies, and he and I are now producing the second book.


BLDGBLOG :I’m curious about the vocabulary that you use to describe this new “post-urban geography” of global slums: regional corridors ,polycentric webs ,diffuse urbanism , etc. I’m wondering if you’ve found any consistent forms or structures now arising, as cities turn away from centralized, geographically obvious locations, becoming fractal, slum-like sprawl.

Davis : First of all, the language with which we talk about metropolitan entities and larger-scale urban systems is already eclectic because urban geographers avidly debate these issues. I think there’s little consensus at all about the morphology of what lies beyond the classical city.

The most important debates really arose through discussions of urbanization in southern China, Indonesia, and southeast Asia – and that was about the nature of peri-urbanization on the dynamic periphery of large Third World cities.

BLDGBLOG :And "peri-urbanization" means what?

Davis : It’s where the city and the countryside interpenetrate. The question is: are you, in fact, looking at a snapshot of a very dynamic or perhaps chaotic process? Or will this kind of hybrid quality be preserved over any length of time? These are really open questions.

There are several different discussions here: one on larger-order urban systems – similar to the Atlantic seaboard or Tokyo-Yokohama, where metropolitan areas are linked in continuous physical systems. But then there’s this second debate about the spill-over into the countryside, this new peri-urban reality , where you have very complex mixtures of slums – of poverty – crossed with dumping grounds for people expelled from the center – refugees . Yet amidst all this you have small, middle class enclaves, often new and often gated. You find rural laborers trapped by urban sweatshops, at the same time that urban settlers commute to work in agricultural industries.

This, in a way, is the most interesting – and least-understood – dynamic of global urbanization. As I try to explain in Planet of Slums , peri-urbanism exists in a kind of epistemological fog because it’s not well-studied. The census data and social statistics are notoriously incomplete.


BLDGBLOG :So it's more a question of how to study the slums – who and what to ask, and how to interpret that data? Where to get your funding from?

Davis : At the very least, it’s a challenge of information. Interestingly, this has also become the terrain of a lot of Pentagon thinking about urban warfare. These non-hierarchical, labyrinthine peripheries are what many Pentagon thinkers have fastened onto as one of the most challenging terrains for future wars and other imperial projects. I mean, after a period in which the Pentagon was besotted with trendy management theory – using analogies with Wal-Mart and just-in-time inventory – it now seems to have become obsessed with urban theory – with architecture and city planning. This is happening particularly through things like the RAND Corporation’s Arroyo Center, in Santa Monica.

The U.S. has such an extraordinary ability to destroy hierarchical urban systems, to take out centralized urban structures, but it has had no success in the Sadr Cities of the world.

BLDGBLOG :I don't know – they leveled Fallujah, using tank-mounted bulldozers and Daisy Cutter bombs –

Davis : But the city was soon re-inhabited by the same insurgents they tried to force out. I think the slum is universally recognized by military planners today as a challenge . I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there’s a great leap forward in our understanding of what’s happening on the peripheries of Third World cities because of the needs of Pentagon strategists and local military planners. For instance, Andean anthropology made a big leap forward in the 1960s and early 1970s when Che Guevara and his guerilla fighters became a problem.

I think there’s a consensus, both on the left and the right, that it’s the slum peripheries of poor Third World cities that have become a decisive geopolitical space. That space is now a military challenge – as much as it is an epistemological challenge, both for sociologists and for military planners.

BLDGBLOG :What kind of imaginative role do you see slums playing today? On the one hand, there's a kind of CIA-inspired vision of irrational anti-Americanism, mere breeding grounds for terrorism; on the other, you find books like The Constant Gardener , in which the Third World poor are portrayed as innocent, naive, and totally unthreatening, patiently awaiting their liberal salvation. Whose imaginination is it in which these fantasies play out?

Davis : I think, actually, that if Blade Runner was once the imaginative icon of our urban future, then the Blade Runner of this generation is Black Hawk Down – a movie I must admit I’m drawn to to see again and again. Just the choreography of it – the staging of it – is stunning. But I think that film really is the cinematic icon for this new frontier of civilization: the “white man’s burden” of the urban slum and its videogame-like menacing armies , with their RPGs in hand, battling heroic techno-warriors and Delta Force Army Rangers. It’s a profound military fantasy. I don’t think any movie since The Sands of Iwo Jima has enlisted more kids in the Marines than Black Hawk Down . In a moral sense, of course, it’s a terrifying film, because it's an arcade game – and who could possibly count all the Somalis that are killed?

BLDGBLOG :It’s even filmed like a first-person shooter. Several times you're actually watching from right behind the gun.

Davis : It’s by Ridley Scott, isn’t it?

BLDGBLOG :Yeah – which is interesting, because he also directed Blade Runner .

Davis : Exactly. And he did Black Rain , didn’t he?

BLDGBLOG :The cryptic threat of late-1980s Japan…

Davis : Ridley Scott – more than anyone in Hollywood – has really defined the alien Other.

Of course, in reality, it’s not white guys in the Rangers who make up most of the military presence overseas: it’s mostly slum kids themselves, from American inner cities. The new imperialism – like the old imperialism – has this advantage, that the metropolis itself is so violent, with such concentrated poverty, that it produces excellent warriors for these far-flung military campaigns. I remember reading a brilliant book once by a former professor of mine, at the University of Edinburgh, on British imperial warfare in the nineteenth century. He showed, against every expectation, that, in fact, most often for the British Army, in imperial wars, what was decisive wasn’t their possession of better weapons, or artillery, or Maxim guns: it was the ability of the British soldier to engage in personal carnage, hand-to-hand combat, up close with bayonets – and that was strictly a function of the brutality of life in British slums.

Now, if you read the literature on warfare today, this is what the Pentagon’s really capitalizing on: they’re using the American inner city as a kind of combat laboratory, in addition to these urban test ranges they’ve built to study their new technologies. The slum dwellers’ response to this, and it’s a response that has yet to be answered – and maybe it’s unanswerable – is the poor man’s Air Force: the car bomb. That’s the subject of another book I’m finishing up right now, a short history of the car bomb. That has to be one of the most decisive military innovations of the late twentieth century. If you look at what’s happening in Iraq, it may be the Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) that are killing Americans, but what’s just ripping that country apart is these fortified car bomb attacks. The car bomb has given poor people in slums – small groups and networks – a new, extremely traumatic kind of geopolitical leverage.

What’s happened, I think, at the end of the 20th century – and at the beginning of the 21st – is that the outcasts have discovered these extraordinarily cheap and horrific weapons. That's why I argue, in Planet of Slums, that they have “the gods of chaos” on their side.

BLDGBLOG :Beyond a turn toward violence and insurgency, do you see any intentional, organized systems of self-government emerging in the slums? Is there a slum “mayor,” for instance, or a kind of slum city hall? In other words, who would a non-military power negotiate with in the first place?

Davis : Organization in the slums is, of course, extraordinarily diverse. The subject of the second book – that I’m writing with Forrest Hylton – will be what kinds of trends and unities exist within that diversity. Because in the same city – for instance, in a large Latin American city – you’ll find everything from Pentacostal churches to the Sendero Luminoso , to reformist organizations and neoliberal NGOs. Over very short periods of time there are rapid swings in popularity from one to the other – and back. It’s very difficult to find a directionality in that, or to predict where things might go.

But what is clear, over the last decade, is that the poor – and not just the poor in classical urban neighborhoods, but the poor who, for a long time, have been organized in leftwing parties, or religious groups, or populist parties – this new poor, on the fringes of the city, have been organizing themselves massively over the last decade. You have to be struck by both the number and the political importance of some of these emerging movements, whether that’s Sadr, in Iraq, or an equivalent slum-based social movement in Buenos Aires. Clearly, in the last decade, there have been dramatic increases in the organization of the urban poor, who are making new and, in some cases, unprecedented demands for political and economic participation. And where they are totally excluded, they make their voices heard in other ways.

BLDGBLOG :Like using car bombs?

Davis : I mean taking steps toward formal democracy. Because the other part of your question concerns the politics of poor cities. I’m sure that somebody could write a book arguing that one of the great developments of the last ten or fifteen years has been increased democratization in many cities. For instance, in cities that did not have consolidated governments, or where mayors were appointed by a central administration, you now have elections, and elected mayors – like in Mexico City.

What’s so striking, in almost all of these cases, is that even where there’s increased formal democracy – where more people are voting – those votes actually have little consequence. That’s for two reasons: one is because the fiscal systems of big cities in the Third World are, with few exceptions, so regressive and corrupt, with so few resources, that it’s almost impossible to redistribute those resources to voting people. The second reason is that, in so many cities – India is a great example of this – when you have more populist or participatory elections, the real power is simply transferred into executive agencies, industrial authorities, and development authorities of all kinds, which tend to be local vehicles for World Bank investment. Those agencies are almost entirely out of the control of the local people. They may even be appointed by the state or by a provisional – sometimes national – government.

This means that the democratic path to control over cities – and, above all, control over resources for urban reform – remains incredibly elusive in most places.

Comment:
Anonymous said...

For the most part, I agree with what is being said but sometimes theory requires a bit of fact checking. While I am not using this to dispute the over-arching argument, I do get tired of the post-modernist myth of the Iraq War being a 'minority-led/minority sacrifice for the white power structure' war tossed around.

from your interview:

"Of course, in reality, it’s not white guys in the Rangers who make up most of the military presence overseas: it’s mostly slum kids themselves, from American inner cities."

The following are two excerpts:

But a close examination of Pentagon statistics suggests that at least some of the conventional wisdom about who is most at risk during wartime is misleading. For example, although blacks account for 26% of Army troops, they make up a much smaller percentage of those in front-line combat units, the most likely to be killed or injured in a conventional war.

In all four military branches, black recruits tend to favor support jobs, from mechanic to unit administrator, over traditional combat slots such as infantryman or fighter pilot. That division of labor is well known within the armed forces.

The report shows there are some significant differences in the makeup of the military and the civilian work force in the U.S.

• Whites are underrepresented in the military. The U.S. work force is 71 percent Caucasian — or other ethnic groups included as whites — while the military is 67 percent white.

• Blacks are overrepresented, comprising 17 percent of the military and 11 percent of the civilian work force

• Hispanics are underrepresented, making up 9 percent of the military and 11 percent of the work force.

• Women, not surprisingly, are also underrepresented, comprising just 16 percent of the military, although policies and laws restricting assignment possibilities for women are the chief reason, not other recruiting factors.

• Deaths of U.S. troops in Operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom also have been disproportionate to ethnic makeup of the military, the report states. Based on the 1,841 deaths and 12,658 wounded service members as of May 28, when the report was being prepared, 71 percent of the dead are classified as white, 9 percent as black and 10 percent as Hispanic.

Nicky said...

Good points from the anonymice, but nonetheless, the phrase, "they’re [the Pentagon] using the American inner city as a kind of combat laboratory," is a spur to the most entertaining conspiracy theories. For example, they aren't resurfacing any of the roads in Center City Phila. after digging them up a month ago, because "they" are surreptiously training urban drivers to deal with potholed and object-strewn roads. Mayor Street's Neighborhood Transformation Initiative is obviously a Pentagon-directed strategic terrain change, from dense yet crumbling housing stock to a situtation that provides a great deal less cover--like Fallujah post-daisy-cutters-and-bull-dozers ...

Anyway, I'm 85% positive we can't infer the Pentagon's current preferred/planned mode of combat just from a trip through North Philly, but speculating about urban administration and planning failures in this way does make a nice change from frustration.

Interview with Mike Davis: Part 2

In this installment, Davis discusses the rise of Pentecostalism in global mega-slums; the threat of avian flu; the disease vectors of urban poverty; criminal and terrorist mini-states; the future of sovereignty; environmental footprints; William Gibson; the allure of Hollywood; and Viggo Mortensen's publishing imprint, Perceval Press.

BLDGBLOG :In an earlier, essay-length version of Planet of Slums, you write at some length about the rise of Pentecostalism as a social and organizational force in the slums – but that research is missing from the actual book ,Planet of Slums. Are you distancing yourself from that research, or perhaps less interested now in its implications?

Davis : Actually, several hundred pages on Pentecostalism are now being decanted in the second volume, written with Forrest Hylton, where they properly belong. But the historical significance of Pentecostalism – evangelical Christianity – is that it’s the first modern religious movement, I believe – or religious sect – which emerged out of the urban poor. Although there are many gentrified Pentecostal churches in the United States today, and even in places like Brazil, the real crucible of Pentecostalism – the spiritual experience which propels it – the whole logic of Pentecostalism – remains within the urban poor.

Of course, Pentecostalism, in most places, is also, overwhelmingly, a religion of women – and in Latin America, at least, it has an actual material benefit. Women who join the church, and who can get their husbands to join with them, often see significant increases in their standard of living: the men are less likely to drink, or whore, or gamble all their money away.

For someone like myself, writing from the left, it’s essential to come to grips with Pentecostalism. This is the largest self-organized movement of poor urban people in the world – at least among movements that emerged in the twentieth century. It has shown an ability to take root, dynamically, not only in Latin America but in southern and western Africa, and – to a much smaller extent – in east Asia. I think many people on the left have made the mistake of assuming that Pentecostalism is a reactionary force – and it’s not. It’s actually a hugely important phenomenon of the postmodern city, and of the culture of the urban poor in Latin American and Africa.

BLDGBLOG :Outside of simply filling a void left behind by the retreat of the State, what's the actual appeal of Pentecostalism for this new generation of urban poor?

Davis : Frankly, one of the great sources of Pentecostalism’s appeal is that it’s a kind of para-medicine. One of the chief factors in the life of the poor today is a constant, chronic crisis of health and medicine. This is partially a result of the World Bank’s Structural Adjustment Programs in the 1980s, which devastated public health and access to medicine in so many countries. But Pentecostalism offers faith healing , which is a major attraction – and it’s not entirely bogus. When it comes to things like addictive behavior, Pentecostalism probably has as good a track record curing alcoholism, neuroses, and obsessions as anything else. That’s a huge part of its appeal. Pentecostalism is a kind of spiritual health delivery system.

BLDGBLOG :It would seem that human overpopulation is, in and of itself, turning cities into slums. In other words, no matter what governmental steps or state-based programs are devised to address urban poverty, slums are just a by-product of overpopulation .

Davis : Well, I don’t actually believe in the notion of overpopulation – particularly as it's now become clear that the most extreme projections of human population growth just aren’t coming to pass. Probably for the last ten or fifteen years, demographers have been steadily reducing their projections.

The paramount question is not whether the population has grown too large, but: how do you square the circle between, on the one hand, social justice with some kind of equitable right to a decent standard of living, and, on the other, environmental sustainability? There aren’t too many people in the world – but there is, obviously, over-consumption of non-renewable resources on a planetary scale. Of course, the way to square that circle – the solution to the problem – is the city itself. Cities that are truly urban are the most environmentally efficient systems that we have ever created for living together and working with nature. The particular genius of the city is its ability to provide high standards of living through public luxury and public space, and to satisfy needs that can never be meet by the suburban private consumption model.

Having said that, the problem of urbanization in the world today is that it's not urbanism in the classic sense. The real challenge is to make cities better as cities . I think Planet of Slums addresses the reality that every complaint made by sociologists in the 1950s and 60s about American suburbia is now true on an exponentially increased scale with poor cities: all the problems with sprawl, all the problems with an increasing amount of time and resources tied up in commutes to work, all the problems with environmental pollution, all the problems with the lack of traditional urban apparatuses of leisure, recreation, social services and so on.

BLDGBLOG :Yet a city like Khartoum – or even Cairo – simply doesn’t have the environmental resources to support such a large human population. No matter what the government decides to do, there are simply too many people. Eventually you hit a wall. So there can't be a European-style social model, based on taxation and the supply of municipal services, if there aren’t the necessary environmental resources.

Davis : Well, I’d say it the other way around, actually. If you look at a city like Los Angeles, and its extreme dependence on regional infrastructure, the question of whether certain cities become monstrously over-sized has less to do with the number of people living there, than with how they consume, whether they reuse and recycle resources, whether they share public space. So I wouldn’t say that a city like Khartoum is an impossible city; that has much more to do with the nature of private consumption.

People talk about environmental footprints, but the environmental footprints of different groups who make up a population tend to differ dramatically. In California, for instance, within the right-wing of the Sierra Club, and amongst anti-immigrant groups, there’s this belief that a huge tide of immigration from Mexico is destroying the environment, and that all these immigrants are actually responsible for the congestion and the pollution – but that's absurd. Nobody has a smaller environmental footprint, or tends to use public space more intensely, than Latin American immigrants. The real problem is white guys in golf carts out on the hundred and ten golf courses in the Coachella Valley. In other words, one retired white guy my age may be using up a resource base ten, twenty, thirty times the size of a young chicana trying to raise her family in a small apartment in the city.

So Malthusianism, in a crude sense, keeps reappearing in these debates, but the real question is not about panicking in the face of future population growth or immigration, but how to invest in the genius of urbanism. How to make suburbs, like those of Los Angeles, function as cities in a more classical sense. There's an absolute, essential need to preserve green areas and environmental reserves. A city can’t operate without those. Of course, the pattern everywhere in the world is for poverty – for housing and development – to spill over into crucial watersheds, to build up around reservoirs and open spaces that are essential to the metabolism of the city. Even this astonishing example in Mumbai, where people have pushed so far into the adjacent Sanjay Gandhi National Park that slum dwellers are now being eaten by leopards – or Sao Paulo, which uses astronomical amounts of water purification chemicals because it’s fighting a losing battle against the pollution of its watershed.

If you allow that kind of growth, if you lose the green areas and the open spaces, if you pump out the aquifers, if you terminally pollute the rivers, then, of course, you can do fatal damage to the ecology of the city.

BLDGBLOG :One of the things I found most interesting in your recent book, Monster At Our Door, is the concept of "biosecurity." Could you explain how biosecurity is, or is not, being achieved on the level of urban space and architectural design?

Davis : I see the whole question of epidemic control and biosecurity being modeled after immigration control. That’s the reigning paradigm right now. Of course, it’s a totally false analogy – particularly when you deal with something like influenza, which can’t be quarantined. You can’t build walls against it. Biosecurity, in a globalized world that contains as much poverty and squalor as our urban world does, is impossible. There is no biosecurity. The continuing quest will be to achieve the biological equivalent of a gated community, with the control of movement and with regulations that just enforce all the most Orwellian tendencies – the selective creation and provision of vaccines, anti-virals, and so on.

But, at the end of the day, biosecurity is an impossibility – until you address the essence of the problem: which is public health for the poor, and the ecological sustainability of the city.

In Monster At Our Door, I cite what I thought was an absolutely model study, published in Science, about how breakneck urbanization in western Africa is occurring at the same time that European factory ships are coming in and scooping up all the fish protein. This has turned urban populations massively to bush meat – which was already a booming business because of construction crews logging out the last tropical forests in west Africa – and, presto: you get HIV, you get ebola, you get unknown plagues. I thought the article was an absolutely masterful description of inadvertent causal linkages, and the complex ecology – the environmental impact – that urbanization has. Likewise, with urbanization in China and southeast Asia, the industrialization of poultry seems to be one of the chief factors behind the threat of avian flu.

As any epidemiologist will tell you, these are just the first, new plagues of globalization – and there will be more. The idea that you can defend against diseases by the equivalent of a gated community is ludicrous, but it’s exactly the direction in which public health policy is being directed. As we’ve seen, unless you’re prepared to shoot down all the migratory birds in the world –

BLDGBLOG :Which I’m sure someone has suggested.

Davis : I mean, I did a lot of calculator work on the UN data, from The Challenge of Slums , calculating urban densities and so on, and this is the Victorian world writ large. Just as the Victorian middle classes could not escape the diseases of the slums, neither will the rich, bunkered down in their country clubs or inside gated communities. The whole obsession now is that avian flu will be brought into the country by –

BLDGBLOG :A Mexican!

Davis : Exactly: it’ll be smuggled over the border – which is absurd. This ongoing obsession with illegal immigration has become a one-stop phantasmagoria for… everything. Of course, it goes back to primal, ancient fears: the Irish brought typhoid, the Chinese brought plague. It’s old hat.

The other thing that’s happening, of course, is that bird flu is being used as a competitive strategy by large-scale, industrialized producers of livestock to force independent producers to the wall. These industrial-scale farms are claiming that only indoor, bio-secured, industrially farmed poultry is safe. This is part of a very complex process of global competition. In Monster At Our Door I cite the case of CP , in Thailand – the Tyson of SE Asia. Even as they’re being wiped-out in Thailand, unable to exploit their chickens, they’re opening new factories in Bulgaria – and profiting from the panic over chicken from Thailand. In other words, avian flu is being used to rationalize and further centralize the poultry industry – yet it appears, to a lot of people, that it’s precisely the industrialization of poultry that has not just allowed the emergence of avian flu but has actually sped up its evolution.

BLDGBLOG :What would a biosecure world actually look like, on the level of architecture and urban design? How do you construct biosecurity? Do you see any evidence that the medical profession is being architecturally empowered, so to speak, influencing the design of "disease-free" public spaces?

Davis : Well, sure. It’s exactly how Victorian social control over the slums was defined as a kind of hygienic project – or in the same way that urban segregation was justified in colonial cities as a problem of sanitation. Everywhere these discourses reinforce one another. What really has been lacking, however, is one big epidemic, originating in poverty, that hits the middle classes – because then you’ll see people really go berzerk. I think one of the most important facts about our world is that middle class people – above all, middle class Americans – have lived inside a historical bubble that really has no precedent in the rest of human history. For two, three, almost four, generations now, they have not personally experienced the cost of war, have not experienced epidemic disease – in other words, they have lived in an ever-increasing arc not only of personal affluence but of personal longevity and security from accidental death, war, disease, and so on. Now if that were abruptly to come to a halt – to be interrupted by a very bad event, like a pandemic, that begins killing some significant number of middle class Americans – then obviously all hell is going to break loose.

The one thing I’m firmly convinced of is that the larger, affluent middle classes in this country will never surrender their lifestyle and its privileges. If suddenly faced with a threat in which they may be made homeless by disaster, or killed by plagues, I think you can expect very, very irrational reactions – which of course will inscribe themselves in a spatial order, and probably in spectacular ways. I think one thing that would emerge after an avian flu pandemic, if it does occur, will be a lot of focus on biosecurity at the level of domestic space.

BLDGBLOG :Duct tape and plastic sheeting.

Davis : Sure.

BLDGBLOG :What has happened to the status or role of the nation-state – of sovereignty, territory, citizenship, etc.? For instance, are national governments being replaced by multinational corporations, and citizens by employees?

Davis : That’s a very interesting question. Clearly, though, what’s happened with globalization has not been the transcendence of the nation-state by the corporation, or by new, higher-level entities. What we’ve seen is much more of a loss of sovereignty on some levels – and the reinforcement of sovereignty on others.

Obviously, the whole process of Structural Adjustment in the 1980s meant the ceding of much local sovereignty and powers of local government to the international bodies that administer debt. The World Bank, for example, working with NGOs, creates networks that often dilute local sovereignty. A brilliant example of this problem is actually what’s happening right now in New Orleans: all the expert commissions, and the oversight boards, and the off-site authorities that are being proposed will basically destroy popular government in New Orleans, reducing the city council to a figurehead and transferring power back to the traditional elite. And that’s all in the name of fighting corruption and so on.

But whether you’ll see new kinds of supra-national entities emerge depends, I think, on the country. Obviously some countries are strengthening their national positions – the state remains all important – while other countries have effectively lost all sovereignty. I mean, look at an extreme case, like Haiti.

BLDGBLOG :How are these shifts being accounted for in the geopolitical and military analyses you mentioned earlier ?

Davis : The problem that military planners, and some geopoliticians, are talking about is actually something quite different: that’s the emergence, in hundreds of both little and major nodes across the world, of essentially autonomous slums governed by ethnic militias, gangs, transnational crime, and so on. This is something the Pentagon is obviously very interested in, and concerned about, with Mogadishu as a kind of prototype example. The ongoing crisis of the Third World city is producing almost feudalized patterns of large slum neighborhoods that are effectively terrorist or criminal mini-states – rogue micro-sovereignties. That’s the view of the Pentagon and of Pentagon planners. They also seem quite alarmed by the fact that the peri-urban slums – the slums on the edges of cities – lack clear hierarchies. Even more difficult, from a planning perspective, there’s very little available data. The slums are kind of off the radar screen. They therefore become the equivalent of rain forest, or jungle: difficult to penetrate, impossible to control.

I think there are fairly smart Pentagon thinkers who don’t see this so much as a question of regions, or categories of nation-states, so much as holes , or enclaves within the system. One of the best things I ever read about this was actually William Gibson’s novel Virtual Light . Gibson proposes that, in a world where giant multinational capital is supreme, there are places that simply aren’t valuable to the world economy anymore – they don’t reproduce capital – and so those spaces are shunted aside. A completely globalized system, in Gibson's view, would leak space – it would have internal redundancies – and one of those spaces, in Virtual Light , is the Bay Bridge.

But, sure, this is a serious geopolitical and military problem: if you conduct basically a triage of the world's human population – where some people are exiled from the world economy, and some spaces no longer have roles – then you’re offering up ideal opportunities for other people to step in and organize those spaces to their own ends. This is a deeper and more profound situation than any putative conflicts of civilization. It is, in a way, a very unexpected end to the 20th century. Neither classical Marxism, nor any other variety of classical social theory or neoliberal economics, ever predicted that such a large fraction of humanity would live in cities and yet basically outside all the formal institutions of the world economy.

BLDGBLOG :Is there an economic solution, then?

Davis : You’ll never re-conquer these parts of the city simply through surveillance, or military invasion, or policing – you have to offer the people some way to re-connect with the world economy. Until you can provide resources, or jobs, the danger is that this will worsen. People are being thrown back onto tribal and ethnic clientelism of one kind or another as a means of survival – even as a means of excluding other poor people from these already limited resources. Increasingly, new arrivals in the city – the sons and daughters of the urban poor – are being pressed by tighter housing markets, and by the inability to find cheap – certainly not free – land. Where cheap land does exist, it only exists because the land is otherwise undevelopable. It’s too dangerous. You’re just wagering on natural disaster. In fact, the end of this frontier of squattable land is one conclusion of Planet of Slums.

Another conclusion is that almost all the research on informal urban economies has shown that informality is simply not generating job ladders. Sure, some micro-entrepreneurs go on to become mini-entrepreneurs – but the larger fact is you’re just subdividing poverty. You’re getting more and more people competing, trying to pursue the same survival strategies in the same place. Those are the facts that darken this book the most, I think. They’re also what darken the horizon of research on the city in general, even more than questions of sanitation and so on. What the World Bank, what the NGOs, what all the apostles of neoliberal self-help depend on is the availability of cheap, squattable land, and the existence of entrepreneurial opportunities in the informal sector.

If you exhaust those two, people will be driven to the wall – and then the safety valves won’t work. Then the urban poor will run out of the resources for miracles.

BLDGBLOG :I’ll wrap up with two quick questions. It's interesting that you're raising a family – even two young toddlers – in a world where, as you write, there are emerging super-plagues, earthquakes, race riots, tornadoes in Los Angeles, mega-slums, etc. Are you nervous about the future for your kids?

Davis : Well, of course. I mean, people who read into my work a kind of delight in disaster and apocalypse either are reading incorrectly or I’m a bad writer – because that isn’t the intention. To be honest with you, there’s more of a yearning for these kinds of apocalypse in the literature of Pentecostalism –

BLDGBLOG :Good point.

Davis : – and that's apocalypse properly understood, its real, Biblical meaning. It’s precisely this idea of an unrevealed, secret history of the world that will become luminously clear in the last hour, and will rewrite history from the standpoint of the people who had previously been history’s victims. I would say that, as somebody who’s ultimately an old-fashioned socialist, or rationalist, with an almost excessive faith in science – you know, I tremble when I write this stuff. I take no joy in writing a book about car bombs, but it just struck me that here was this technology nobody had written about on its own terms, yet it had become horribly successful. It’s a lot easier for me to cope with hypochondria about avian flu – having written a book about it – than if I hadn’t written about it. Let’s put it that way. I feel the same way about the future of my children.

BLDGBLOG :Finally, have you ever considered working outside the genre of critical nonfiction, and – in an almost Ridley Scott-like way – directing a film, or writing a novel?

Davis : [ laughs ] Well, I have in an extremely minor way: I’ve published two young adult science adventure novels – which is the name I’ve given to the genre – through Viggo Mortenson’s little press, Perceval Press . Three young kids, including my son who lives in Dublin, are the heroes.

BLDGBLOG :How’d that come about?

Davis : It all arose out of the fact that, in 1998, I got this MacArthur Foundation money – and I just wasted it all [ laughter ]. My kids and I went to the four corners of the earth. I took my son to east Greenland, and one night – because the sun never sets, and the sled dogs howl into the wee hours – he asked me to tell him a story, and I spun it off into a novel. But that’s as far as I’ll get. I mean, living in LA as long as I have, the one thing you learn is: stay away from Hollywood. Never, ever contemplate writing a screenplay or getting involved in a movie; it’s just a graveyard of talented people. I’ve literally seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by the allure of that kind of stuff. And I’ve never had the slightest desire to do it. If I wrote fiction it would be very forgettable.

BLDGBLOG :So if Ridley Scott called you in to write his next screenplay you’d have to refuse?

Davis : I’ve seen people I admire greatly – hugely talented, much greater writers than I am – just crash and burn and destroy their lives: partially because they never learned the difference between good writing and Hollywood. It’s the same way with the seduction of becoming a public intellectual, having lots of fans, and reading in bookstores all the time – which I’ve learned to run away from with horror. Right now I’m trying to simplify my life by cutting out as much of that stuff as possible, because I’m having a ball with my two two-year olds, hanging out in Balboa Park everyday.

COMMENTS:
Anonymous said...

But the "pentecostals" ARE a reactionary force, at least in Latin America! The CIA bankrolled American "missionaries" in the region since the 60s. Even guatemala's butcher "president" Montt was a notorious pentecostal fanatic. Seeing faith healing as an alternative to medicine seems sarcastic, to say the least.
Will praying cure cholera?
Opium of the people indeed.
What's next? Quartz crystals?
Colby, Gerard with Dennett, Charlotte.
Thy Will Be Done -- The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil.

CIA under attack for using missionaries.
National Catholic Reporter; 3/8/1996; Jones, Arthur

CIA-Contractor Christian Aviation Missionaries Smuggling Afghan Heroin
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2006/02/333982.shtml

CIA "missionaries" in Delta Amacuro shilled for US mining and pharmaceutical firms
http://www.vheadline.com/readnews.asp?id=50029
Wed May 24, 08:56:20 PM
Anonymous said...

The CIA funded Jackson Pollack, intellectual magazines in the 1950s and the museum of Modern Art - are they reactionary? Anything involving the CIA is reactionary? If your "president" Montt liked eating spaghetti does that make spaghetti reactionary? If a Chomsky-breathing leftist moonbat in Oregon shoots up his high school does that make you a homicidal sociopth likely to shoot people, anonymous ? What other Pentecostals do isn't the question - did they brush their teeth? - it's Pentecostalism itself you should be talking about. Keep the Hollywood gossip and personal attacks to yourself - I'll stick with the CIA, thanks

orhan ayyuce said...

excellent interview with supported facts and real episodes constructed. slums are here to stay and grow more complex and middle class threatening. my fear is that it will get bloody towards the beginning of the real transformations. i never thought mike davis was doomsday broadcaster but a great fact projector.
he is absulately right; we have to work with "genious of the city" whether its bombay or istanbul or los angeles. urban renewals are just white barons' idea of real estate developing for profit. no serious solutions there. kind of like last tango before everything breaks loose. you can't just keep saving the day, day after day.

Geoff Manaugh said...

Orhan - Thanks! Glad you like it. aviatrix, too: thanks for your thoughts. And I don't know if the CIA actually "funded" Jackson Pollack, anon, but hey - the CIA did sponsor American arts and academia, and probably still does. Oh well.

Meanwhile, another interview with Davis that I neglected to link to appeared in The Believer, where Davis talks about his brief career as a truck driver (among others).

Geoff Manaugh said...

Sorry to comment again here, but a few quotations I wanted to add, taken from Monster at our Door: "With population densities as high as 200,000 residents per square kilometer," Davis writes, slums "offer perfect environments for the evolution of flu virulence." He continues: "Moreover, the contemporary megaslum may be a crucial link in a new global disease ecology."

Davis also explains how the "emergence of Third World 'supercities' and their slums" is roughly equivalent to the trenches of WWI, in that they now serve "as a human medium for potential pandemic spread and virulence evolution." Etc. My interest here is simply that this new geography of megaslums, with its incredible population densities and its unchecked proximities between humans and other, disease-bearing species (birds, rats, fleas, etc.), has become a new kind of ecosystem in the world, a virus incubator. Viral super-evolver ®.

e-tat said...

and now, for a little levity, I'd like to propose a topic for an upcoming post. We've heard about Planet of Slums, so let's pretend to be a bit hard of hearing and discuss the Planet of Plums....

We could start in Northern California, with Jack Kerouac, as he rides the rails through the 'fields of prune and juice joy to San Jose', then take in an arc of reflection upon the changes since that time, and ask whether any of the regional architectural plums take fruit crops into account. We might also ask who picked those plums, and whether Steinbeck would have had trouble with the title of his novel, and how his Dust Bowl Okies would have responded to more recent arrivals of migrant workers. At this point we might diverge to see if Don Mitchell has addressed that question in any of his discussions of labour and landscape.

Planet of Plums could be a journey through the fruitier aspects of horticulture-cum-architecture, or it could be an attempt to locate what's left of the Garden of Eden, in a global search for those places where the apricots are always ready for plucking, and of the prospects for an urban fruiticulture unlike anything seen before.

2. From Tomdispatch:
Humanity's Ground Zero
Interview With Mike Davis (Part 1)

His short hair and mustache are heavily flecked with grey, but he still retains the stocky, powerful build of a butcher's son, who once, long ago, hauled animal carcasses for his father in the San Diego suburb of El Cajon. At a moment's notice, he puts you in his four-wheel drive and takes you out to San Diego's McMansion exurbs or down to the Mexican border and right up to the new, controversial triple fence just being erected (where you have a passing run-in with the Border Patrol). He is the tour guide of your dreams, a walking encyclopedia of whatever is strange and riveting about Southern California. No object on the landscape seems to escape comment, brief description, or analysis. The bridge on the Interstate you drive across somewhere in the desert lands far out of town is the highest poured-concrete one in the country. The military vessels of every sort that crisscross San Diego's blue harbor are identified and discussed, including the stealth landing craft of the Navy SEALs. ("The Navy has more toys out here!")

A small lecture on the local real-estate market follows the complaint that "all anybody talks about these days in San Diego is real-estate values!" Each military base and reservation you pass is carefully pointed out. "People here don't notice the wall-to-wall military. They don't see the death all around them, the killing platforms. They just edit it all out." And every now and then, an odd memory from earlier days surfaces. ("The only good thing about growing up in San Diego was Navy-town and its cheap movie theaters. It was a teenage paradise.") Sitting shotgun in his car, you can't help but be aware that you are watching a dazzling -- if everyday -- performance from a polymath who seems never to have forgotten a thing.

His modest house is at the edge of one of San Diego's poorest neighborhoods which you get a brief spin through -- with a passing discussion of local graffiti thrown into the bargain. His small living room, where we set up my tape recorders, is dominated by a giant, multi-colored plastic playhouse for his two year-old twins, James and Cassandra (or Casey). To interview him in this house is to be surrounded by a world of revolutionary history. No wall, no nook or cranny, not even the bathroom, is lacking its revolutionary poster. ("Camarada! Trabaja y Lucha por la Revolution!") All around you feet threaten to stamp on Russian plutocrats, giant hands to smash the German exploiting class, while you are urged to "Vote Spartacus!" in 1919.

Mike Davis, whose first book about Los Angeles, City of Quartz, burst into bestsellerdom and put him on the map as this country's most innovative urban scholar, has since written about everything from the literary destruction of LA to Victorian holocausts of the 19th century and the potential avian flu pandemic of our own moment. He has most recently turned his restless, searching brain upon the global city in a new book, Planet of Slums , whose conclusions are so startling that I thought they should be the basis for our conversation.

We create a makeshift spot in the living room, my tape recorders between us, and begin. Davis has in him something of the older, nearly lost American tradition of the autodidact. In a tribal world, he would certainly have been any tribe's storyteller of choice. Midway through our interview, which is largely an inspired monologue, we are suddenly interrupted by weeping from elsewhere in the house. Casey has awoken from her nap upset. He quickly excuses himself, returning moments later with a collapsed, still sniffling, dark-haired little girl in pink pants and shirt on his shoulder. Under his ministrations she perks up, then sits up, then begins to talk, hardly less volubly (though slightly less comprehensibly) than her father. Soon she is seated inside the large plastic house, engaging both of us in a game of "big bad wolf." When she wanders off, perhaps twenty minutes later, he turns back to me and, before I can cue him on the interview (I've just checked his last words), he picks up in mid-sentence exactly where he left off and just rolls on.

Tomdispatch: I was hoping you would start by telling me how you came to the subject of the city.

Mike Davis: I came to the city by the most parochial path, which was studying Los Angeles, and I came to LA because, having been a Sixties new leftist and having invested a lot of time in studying Marxism, I thought radical social theory could explain just about anything. But it struck me that the supreme test would be understanding Los Angeles.

Maybe I shouldn't say this, but almost everything I've written about other cities has grown, at least in part, out of my LA project. For instance, investigating the tendency toward the militarization of urban space and the destruction of public space in Los Angeles has led me to explore similar trends as a global phenomenon. Interest in suburban Los Angeles got me considering the fate of older suburbs across the country and then the emergent politics of edge cities. So, in this consistently parochial way, the world emerged from Los Angeles which, in my original project, was a mosaic of about 450 individual pieces.

Let me explain: Back in the 1950s, when county welfare agencies were worried that war veterans moving into new suburbs had no sense of place, it did this big study of how many actual life-worlds there were in Greater Los Angeles and came to the conclusion that people lived in about 350 communities -- small towns, neighborhoods, suburbs. (Now, there are maybe 500 of these.) Behind my strategy for doing Los Angeles lay the thought that each of these constituent pieces had an entirely local, totally eccentric story to tell about itself, but also refracted some important aspect of the larger whole. I literally believe I could spend several lifetimes telling a story in each of these places about Los Angeles; so that was my methodology. I suppose in the process I only became an urbanist because people started calling me that. I've never actually considered myself a historian, sociologist, political economist, or urban theorist.

TD: So do you have a name for yourself?

Davis: Like some of the other survivors of the New Left, I thought of myself as an organizer, as doing power-structure or political analysis. Almost everything I've written or thought about corresponds in some insane way to what, in my mind at a given moment, seems to be the imperative from a strategic or tactical standpoint -- as if I were still answerable to the SDS National Council or the Chicago office of the IWW.

And this was all part of the strategic puzzle I addressed in City of Quartz . LA was at a critical cusp in its history. Globalization had reorganized its economy, rewiring it in dramatic ways, and many people were being left behind. Yet the city had -- and still has -- this incredible, protean potential for better things, for progressive politics, for surprising activism. At the time, I wanted to write a book that was usable by a new generation of activists, while trying to figure out how to look at a place like Los Angeles whose fantasy self has been embodied materially in its structure. It's a city that lives its images.

TD: And then the riots of 1992 burst out, no?

Davis: …and I tried to understand them as a direct consequence of the globalization process. Some people were victors, some losers. It was also a fact that globalization ultimately came to South-central LA in the form of the transnational drug industry. That was the only form of globalization which ever put any money on those streets. The successor volume to City of Quartz was to be a history of the Rodney King riots, told on a neighborhood by neighborhood basis -- the only narrative strategy that could possibly grasp the complexity of the events. Almost by accident, I had access to some of the key protagonists. I knew, for example, the mother of the guy who went to prison for almost killing the truck driver. I was also friends with the family of Dewayne Holmes, the principle instigator of the gang truce in Watts.

I hoped to weave these stories together with neighborhood histories to explain an uprising that was simultaneously a justifiable explosion of rage at the police, a postmodern bread riot, and a pogrom against Asian shop owners. But my ambition encountered crisis on two fronts. I could never find sufficient moral ground to loot people's lives for my narrative purposes or to assume the right to tell their stories. At the same time, I found the project too emotionally harrowing. The lives of my friends and acquaintances were filled with so much difficulty and pain, so much sadness and frustration. To live that with them -- and this was a time when I was working several jobs and about to become a single parent to a teenager -- this, I decided, was not what I could do. I had what I thought was an extraordinary design for a book in mind, but I couldn't find either the clear conscience or emotional stamina to write it.

Fortunately, natural disasters were added to my project -- and the riot book morphed into Ecology of Fear, a study of the fetishism of disaster in Southern California where the natural gets seen in social terms (with coyotes and mountain lions compared to street gangs), while social problems (like street gangs) are seen as natural events ("feral and wilding youth"). Ecology of Fear was about the inability of Anglo-American civilization ever to completely understand the metabolism of the actual Mediterranean world it lives in -- a misunderstanding that constitutes the very essence of Southern California.

In essence, I retreated to science and shifted from the micro-scale of biographies to the macro-scale of plate tectonics and El Nino. Science was my first love and I ended up writing that book largely in the geology library at Cal Tech rather than in the living rooms of people I knew in South and Central LA.

TD: If we jump 15 years to your newest book, Planet of Slums, with its vast urban canvas, can we imagine that you're now taking your marching orders from some global central committee? And can you launch us on the subject of our slumifying planet today?

Davis: Stunningly enough, classical social theory, whether Marx, Weber, or even Cold War modernization theory, none of it anticipated what's happened to the city over the last 30 or 40 years. None of it anticipated the emergence of a huge class, mainly of the young, who live in cities, have no formal connection with the world economy, and no chance of ever having such a connection. This informal working class isn't the lumpenproletariat of Karl Marx and it isn't the "slum of hope," as imagined 20 or 30 years ago, filled with people who will eventually climb into the formal economy. Dumped into the peripheries of cities, usually with little access to the traditional culture of those cities, this informal global working class represents an unprecedented development, unforeseen by theory.

TD: Just lay out some of the figures on the slumification of the planet.

Davis: Only in the last few years have we been able to see urbanization clearly on a global scale. Previously, the data was untrustworthy, but the United Nations Habitat has made heroic efforts involving new data bases, household surveys, and case studies to establish a reliable baseline for discussing our urban future. The report it issued three years ago, The Challenge of Slums , is as pathbreaking as the great explorations of urban poverty in the 19th century by Engels or Mayhew or Charles Booth or, in the United States, Jacob Riis.

By its conservative accounting, a billion people currently live in slums and more than a billion people are informal workers, struggling for survival. They range from street vendors to day laborers to nannies to prostitutes to people who sell their organs [for transplant]. These are staggering figures, even more so since our children and grandchildren will witness the final build-out of the human race. Sometime around 2050 or 2060, the human population will achieve its maximum growth, probably at around 10 to 10.5 billion people. Nothing as large as some of the earlier apocalyptic predictions, but fully 95% of this growth will occur in the cities of the south.

TD: In essence, in the slums…

Davis: The entire future growth of humanity will occur in cities, overwhelmingly in poor cities, and the majority of it in slums.

Classical urbanization via the Manchester/Chicago/Berlin/ Petersburg model is still occurring in China and a few other places. It's important to note, though, that the urban industrial revolution in China precludes similar ones in other places. It absorbs all the capacity for light manufacturing goods -- and increasingly everything else. But in China and a few adjacent economies, you still see city growth with an industrial motor. Everywhere else it's occurring largely without industrialization; even more shockingly, often without development in any sense. Moreover, what were, historically, the great industrial cities of the south -- Johannesburg, Sao Paulo, Mumbai, Bello Horizonte, Buenos Aires -- have all suffered massive deindustrialization in the last twenty years, absolute declines in manufacturing employment of 20-40%.

The mega-slums of today were largely created in the 1970s and 80s. Before 1960, the question was: Why were Third World cities growing so slowly? There were, in fact, huge institutional obstacles to fast urbanization then. Colonial empires still restricted entry to the city, while in China and other Stalinist countries, a domestic passport system controlled social rights and so internal migration. The big urban boom comes in the 1960s with decolonization. But then, at least, revolutionary nationalist states were claiming that the state could play an integral role in the provision of housing and infrastructure. In the 70s, the state begins to drop out, and with the 80s, the age of structural adjustment, you have the decade of going backwards in Latin America, and even more so in Africa. By then, you had sub-Saharan cities growing at faster velocities than Victorian industrial cities in their boom periods -- but shedding formal jobs at the same time.

How could cities sustain population growth without economic development in the textbook sense? Or, to put it differently, why didn't Third World cities explode in the face of these contradictions? Well, they did to some extent. At the end of the 80s and in the early 90s, you have anti-debt riots, IMF [International Monetary Fund] riots, all across the world.

TD: Are the '92 LA riots part of that?

Davis: Because Los Angeles combines features of a Third World as well as a First World city, it fits into the global pattern of unrest. What was invisible to LA's policymakers and leaders at the time, but obvious on the streets was the impact of the most severe recession since 1938 in Southern California -- from which the worst damage wasn't to the aerospace industry (though that was much written about at the time), but to the city's poor and immigrant neighborhoods. In a year -- where I lived downtown -- a vacant hillside populated by a handful of homeless, middle-aged black males suddenly had 100, 150 young Latinos camped out. They had been day laborers or dishwashers six months before.

If the detonating event was the Rodney King atrocity and the accumulated grievances of black youth in a community where global employment meant crack cocaine, it became a more complex, larger-scale event because of the widespread looting in Latino neighborhoods where people were hungry and living at the edge of homelessness.

TD: How did policymakers and leaders globally interpret what was happening in the cities?

Davis: The discovery by the World Bank, developmental economists, and big NGOs in the 1980s that, despite the almost total abdication of the role of the state in planning and providing housing for poor urban dwellers, people were still somehow finding shelter, squatting, surviving, led to the rise of a bootstrap school of urbanization. Give poor people the means and they'll build their own houses and organize their own neighborhoods. This was, in part, an entirely justifiable celebration of rank-and-file urbanism. But in the World Bank's hands, it became a whole new paradigm: The state is done; don't worry about the state; poor people can improvise the city. They just need some micro-loans…

TD: …And high-interest micro-loans at that.

Davis: Yes, that's right, and then poor people would miraculously create their own urban worlds, their own jobs.

Planet of Slums is intended to follow up the UN Challenge report, which alerted us that the global urban unemployment crisis was coequal to climate change as a threat to our collective future. Admittedly an armchair journey to cities of the poor, it is an attempt to synthesize a vast specialist literature on urban poverty and informal settlement. Two fundamental conclusions emerged.

First, the supply of free land for squatting had ended, in some cases a long time ago. The only way you can build a shack on free land now is to choose a place so hazardous that it will have no market value whatsoever. This increasing wager with disaster is what squatting has become. So, for instance, if I were to take you a few miles south and across the border to Tijuana you'd see almost immediately that land which once made up squatters' neighborhoods is now being sold, sometimes even subdivided and developed. Very poor people in Tijuana are squatting in the traditional fashion only at the edges of ravines and in streambeds where their houses will collapse in a couple of years. This is true all over the Third World.

Squatting has been privatized. In Latin America, it's called "pirate urbanization." Where, twenty years ago, people would have occupied vacant land, resisted eviction, and eventually been recognized by the state, they now pay high prices for small parcels of land or, if they can't afford it, rent from other poor people. In some slums, the majority of dwellers aren't squatters, they're renters. If you went to Soweto [in Johannesburg, South Africa], you'd see that people fill their backyards with shanties which they rent. The major survival strategy of millions of poor urban dwellers, who have been in the city long enough to have a little property, is to subdivide it and become landlords to yet poorer people, who sometimes subdivide and rent to others. So a fundamental safety valve, this much romanticized frontier of free urban land, has largely ended.

The other major conclusion concerns the informal economy -- the ability of poor people to improvise livelihoods through unrecorded economic activity like street vending, day labor, domestic service, or even subsistence crime. If anything, economic informality has been romanticized more than squatting, with vast claims about the ability of micro-entrepreneurship to leverage people out of poverty. Yet scores of case studies from around the world show ever more people squeezed into a limited number of survival niches: Too many rickshaw wallahs, too many street vendors, too many African women turning their shanties into shabeens to sell liquor, too many people taking in laundry, too many people queued up at work sites.

TD: In a way, aren't you saying that the former Third World is being turned into something like the Three Hundredth world?

Davis: What I'm saying is that the two principle mechanisms for accommodating the poor to cities in which the state long ago ceased to invest have reached their limits just when we're looking forward to two generations of continued high-speed growth in poor cities. The ominous but obvious question is: What lies beyond that frontier?

TD: Here's a quote from Planet of Slums : "With a literal great wall of high-tech border enforcement blocking large-scale migration to the rich countries, only the slum remains as a fully franchised solution to the problem of warehousing this century's surplus humanity."

Davis: The two major poor cities of 19th century Europe that fit our present model were Dublin and Naples, but nobody saw them as the future; and the reason there weren't more Dublins and Naples was, above all, the safety valve of the Atlantic emigration. Today, most of the south is, in fact, blocked from migrating. There's simply no precedent, for instance, for the kinds of borders Australia and Western Europe have constructed, essentially designed for total exclusion -- except for a limited flow of high-skill labor. The American border with Mexico has historically been of a different kind. It acts as a dam to regulate the supply of labor, not to close it off completely. But more generally, for people in poor countries today, there aren't the options poor Europeans had back then.

Inexorable forces are expelling people from the countryside and that population, made surplus by the globalized economy, piles up in the slums, on city peripheries that are neither countryside, nor really city, and that urban theorists have difficulty wrapping their minds around.

In the United States, we would call them exurbia, but exurbs here are quite a different phenomena. If you look at American cities, the most striking thing is that exurban settlement -- people who commute to edge cities from the former countryside are now living in McMansions on ever larger lots with more SUVs parked in front. They're making the traditional 50s Levittown suburb, with its ticky-tacky homes, its little cubicles of consumption, look environmentally efficient. In other words, as middle-class people move farther out, their environmental footprint goes up two or three shoe sizes.

The other side of this is the poorest people shoehorned into the most dangerous sites on tumbling hillsides, next to toxic waste dumps, living in flood plains, leading to every year's rising toll from natural disasters -- less a measure of changing nature than the desperate wagers poor people have to make. In the large cities of the Third World, you do have the flight of some of the rich to gated communities far out in the suburbs, but what you mainly have is two-thirds of the slum dwellers of the world piled up in a kind of urban no-man's land.

TD: You've called this "existential ground zero."

Davis: It is, because it's urbanization without urbanity. An example of this is the case of the radical Islamist group that attacked Casablanca a few years ago -- about 15 or 20 poor kids who grew up in the city but were in no sense part of it. They were born on the edge, not in traditional working-class and poor neighborhoods that support a fundamentalist Islam but not a nihilist one, or they were expelled from the countryside but never integrated into the city. In their slum worlds, the only kind of society or order was provided by mosques or Islamicist organizations.

According to one account, when these kids attacked the city, some of them had never been downtown before and this, for me, became a metaphor for what is happening across the world: a generation consigned to the urban dumping grounds, and not just in the poorest, most savage cities either.

Take Hyderabad, India's high-tech showcase, a city of 60,000 software workers and engineers where people duplicate the California lifestyle in Santa Clara Valley-like suburbs and you can go to Starbucks. Well, Hyderabad is surrounded by endless exterior slums, several million people. There are more rag pickers than software engineers. Some of these urban dwellers consigned to pick over the scraps of the high-tech economy had been expelled from more centrally located slums, torn down to make room for the research parks of the new middle class.

The Imperial City and the City of Slums (Part 2)

TD: It occurs to me that, in Baghdad, the Bush administration has managed to create a weird version of the urban world you describe in Planet of Slums. There's the walled imperial Green Zone in the center of the city with its Starbucks and, outside it, the disintegrating capital as well as the vast slum of Sadr City -- and the only exchange between the two is the missile-armed helicopters going one way and the car bombs heading the other.

Davis: Exactly. Baghdad becomes the paradigm with the breakdown of public space and ever less middle ground between the extremes. The integrated Sunni/Shia neighborhoods are rapidly being extinguished, not just by American action now, but by sectarian terror.

Sadr City, at one point named Saddam City, the Eastern quadrant of Baghdad, has grown to grotesque proportions -- two million poor people, mainly Shia. And it's still growing, as are Sunni slums by the way, thanks now not to Saddam but to disastrous American policies toward agriculture into which the U.S. has put almost no reconstruction money. Vast farmlands have been turned back into desert, while everything focused, however unsuccessfully, on restoration of the oil industry. The crucial thing would have been to preserve some equilibrium between countryside and city, but American policies just accelerated the flight from the land.

Of course, Green Zones are gated communities of a kind, the citadel within the larger fortress. You see this, too, emerging across the world. In my book, I counterpoised this to the growth of the peripheral slums -- the middle class forsaking its traditional culture, along with the central city, to retreat into off-worlds with themed California lifestyles. Some of these are incredibly security conscious, real fortresses. Others are more typical American-style suburbs, but all of them are organized around an obsession with a fantasy America, and particularly the fantasy California universally franchised through TV.

So the nouveau riche in Beijing can commute by freeway to gated subdivisions with names like Orange County and Beverly Hills -- there's a Beverly hills in Cairo too, and a whole neighborhood themed by Walt Disney. Jakarta has the same thing -- compounds where people live in imaginary Americas. These proliferate, emphasizing the rootlessness of the new urban middle class across the world. With this goes an obsessiveness about getting things as they are in the TV image. So you have actual Orange County architects designing "Orange County" outside Beijing. You have tremendous fidelity to the things the global middle class sees on television or in the movies.

TD: Just to leap to the other Bush urban project, something a little like this seems to be happening in New Orleans, no?

Davis: Absolutely. Unfortunately much of the white upper class in New Orleans would prefer to live in a totally phony, theme-park version of the historical New Orleans rather than confront the real task of reconstructing the city or living with an African-American majority. People's expectations of authenticity have long lost any reference point in reality. In The Ecology of Fear , I pointed out how Universal Studios had extracted from Los Angeles its icons, miniaturized them, and put them in one gated, secure place called City Walk. And then you substitute going there -- or the Las Vegas equivalent -- for actually visiting the city. You visit the city's theme park, which is essentially a mall. If you had a casino, you'd have the full experience. In this process, the poor are increasingly cut off from access to the culture and public space of the city, while the wealthy voluntarily abdicate it to withdraw into what is now a generic universal space that differs little from country to country. The middle ground is falling apart.

But there are still big differences between culture zones and continents. In Latin America, what's most frightening is the degree of political polarization that occurs, the ferocity of middle-class resistance to the demands of the poor. Chavez has to get Cuban doctors, because he can only get a handful of Venezuelan doctors to work in the slums. The Middle East is very different. In Cairo, for instance, where the state has withdrawn or is too corrupt to provide essential services, the need is met by Islamic professionals. The Muslim Brotherhood has taken over the association of doctors, the association of engineers. Unlike the Latin American middle class, mobilizing just to preserve its privilege, it's organized to provide services, a parallel civil society, for the poor. Part of that arises from the Koranic obligation to tithe, but it's a striking difference with important effects on the life of the city.

TD: I want to take just a brief side trip. The book you wrote before Planet of Slums was The Monster at Our Door on the avian flu and I realize, as we talk, that it's thematically linked to Planet of Slums because it's also about a kind of planetary slumification -- of agriculture.

Davis: A Dickensian world of Victorian poverty is being recreated, but on a scale that would have staggered the Victorians. So, naturally, you wonder whether the preoccupation of the Victorian middle classes with the diseases of the poor isn't returning as well. Their first reaction to epidemics was to move to Hampstead, to flee the city, to try to separate from the poor. Only when it was obvious that cholera was sweeping from the slums into middle-class areas anyway, did you get some investment in minimum sanitation and the public-health infrastructure. The illusion today, as in the 19th century, is that we can somehow separate ourselves, or wall ourselves off, or take flight from the diseases of the poor. I don't think most of us realize the huge, literally explosive concentrations for potential disease that exist.

More than twenty years ago, the leading infectious disease researchers in a series of volumes warned about new and reemerging diseases. Globalization, they observed, was causing planetary environmental instability and ecological change likely to shift the balance between humans and their microbes in a way that could bring about new plagues. They warned as well of the failure to create a disease-monitoring or public-health infrastructure commensurate with globalization.

In my book, I looked at the relationship between the pervasive global slum, everywhere associated with sanitation disasters, with classical conditions favoring the rapid movement of disease through human populations; and on the other side, I focused on how the transformation of livestock production was creating entirely new conditions for the emergence of diseases among animals and their transmission to humans.

Influenza is an important paradigm for infectious disease. Its ancient reservoir lies in the uniquely productive agricultural system of southern China with its long, intimate ecological association among wild birds, domestic birds, pigs, and humans. As for bird flu: On the one hand, you've created optimal conditions in the modern world for its spread; on the other hand, even the growth of poor cities has been increasing the demand for protein in people's diets and this demand can no longer be met by traditional protein sources; it's met by industrialized livestock production.

What that means quite simply is the urbanization of livestock. Instead of 15 or 20 chickens in someone's yard and a couple of hogs on the farm, we're talking about, around Bangkok for instance, a chicken-raising belt very similar to what you'd find in Arkansas or northwestern Georgia -- millions of chickens living in warehouses, in factory farms. Bird densities like this have never existed in nature and they probably favor, according to epidemiologists I've talked to, maximum virulence, the accelerated evolution of diseases.

At the same time, wetlands around the world have been degraded and water diverted, usually for the sake of irrigated agriculture, displacing migratory wild birds to irrigated fields, rice paddies, farms. And all of this -- the livestock revolution, the growing urban demand particularly for chicken (now the number two protein meat source on the planet), the growth of slums, the degradation of wetlands -- has happened with particular speed in the last ten to fifteen years; and all of it we were warned about a generation ago by experts on infectious disease. This is ecological disorder of a very radical kind and it has changed the ecology of influenza and the conditions under which animal diseases pass to humans. It's also happened at a time when public health in much of the urban Third World has declined. One of the consequences of structural adjustment in the 1980s was to force hundreds of thousands of doctors, nurses, and public-health workers to emigrate, leaving Kenya or the Philippines to work in England or Italy.

This is a formula for biological disaster and avian flu is the second pandemic of globalization. It's very clear now that HIV AIDS emerged at least partially through the bush-meat trade, as West Africans were forced to turn to bush meat because European factory ships were vacuuming up all the fish in the Gulf of Guinea, the major traditional source of protein in urban diets. There's also a hypothesis, with a lot of circumstantial evidence, that HIV probably reached a critical mass in Kinshasha [in the Congo], a great city that is the ultimate current example of what happens after the state collapses or withdraws.

So HIV, avian flu, SARS -- another disease that emerged from the bush-meat trade, this time in the cities of southern China, and spread around the world with frightening speed. This is the future of disease...

TD: ...and slumification.

Davis: Yes, disease in a world of slums. Something like the avian flu's spread to humanity is almost inevitable, given the combination of the global slum and large-scale shifts in the ecology of humans and animals. What's more troubling than the mere threat of a disease like avian flu, though, is the reaction to it -- an immediate hoarding of vaccines and anti-virals, an exclusive focus on protecting the health of populations in a handful of rich countries which also monopolize the production of these lifeline medicines. In other words, the almost reflexive abandonment of the poor without a second thought. If avian flu happened not this year, but five years from now, the difference would be in the degree of protection in the United States, Germany, or England. The poor would be in the same place, particularly Africans who are most at risk because the HIV holocaust creates a population optimally susceptible to other infections.

TD: So that's one potential exchange between the imperial city and the slum city. The other virulent exchange is of violence, our wars on terror, drugs, whatever. I mean if you think about Vietnam and then Iraq, the jungle quite literally becomes the slum city in the annals of modern war.

Davis: Without minimizing the explosive social contradictions still stored up in the countryside, it's clear that the future of guerrilla warfare, insurrection against the world system, has moved into the city. Nobody has realized this with as much clarity as the Pentagon, or more vigorously tried to grapple with its empirical consequences. Its strategists are way ahead of geopoliticians and traditional foreign-relations types in understanding the significance of a world of slumsÖ

TD: ...and of global warming .

Davis: Yes, because they realize the potential instability it will create and also perhaps imagine advantageous shifts in the balance of power in its wake.

What the U.S. has demonstrated in recent years is an extraordinary ability to knock out the hierarchical organization of the modern city, to attack its crucial infrastructures and nodes, to blow up the TV stations, take out the pipelines and bridges. Smart bombs can do that, but simultaneously the Pentagon discovered that this technology isn't applicable to the slum periphery, to the labyrinthine, unmapped, almost unknown parts of the city which lack hierarchies, lack centralized infrastructures, lack tall buildings. There's really quite an extraordinary military literature trying to address what the Pentagon sees as the most novel terrain of this century, which it now models in the slums of Karachi, Port au Prince, and Baghdad. A lot of this goes back to the experience of Mogadishu [in 1993], which was a big shock to the United States and showed that traditional urban war-fighting methods don't work in the slum city.

TD: ...Although nobody mentions that while a small number of American soldiers were killed in the streets of Mogadishu and we were shocked, an unknown but vast number of Somalis also died, in the hundreds at least.

Davis: Well, you can commit carnage on a huge scale; you can kill thousands of people. What you lack the ability to do is surgically take out the crucial nodes because they hardly exist; because you're dealing neither with a hierarchical spatial system, nor generally with hierarchical organizations. I'm not sure the National Security Council understands this, but many military thinkers certainly do. If you read studies from the Army War College, for example, you discover a different geopolitics from that embraced by the Bush administration. The war-planners don't emphasize axes of evil or over-arching conspiracies, instead they stress the terrain -- the sprawling peripheral slum and the opportunities it provides to a miscellany of opponents -- drug barons, al-Qaeda, revolutionary organizations, religious cults -- to carve out fiefdoms. As a result, Pentagon theorists are studying architecture and urban-planning theory. They're using GIS technology and satellites to fill in missing knowledge, because the state usually knows very little about its own slum peripheries.

The question of the exchange of violence between the city of slums and the imperial city is linked to a deeper question -- the question of agency. How will this very large minority of humanity that now lives in cities but is exiled from the formal world economy find its future? What is its capacity for historical agency? The traditional working class -- as Marx pointed out in the Communist Manifesto -- was a revolutionary class for two reasons: because it had no stake in the existing order, but also because it was centralized by the process of modern industrial production. It possessed enormous potential social power to go on strike, simply shut down production, take over the factories.

Well, here you have an informal working class with no strategic place in production, in the economy, that has nonetheless discovered a new social power -- the power to disrupt the city, to strike at the city, ranging from the creative nonviolence of the people in El Alto, the vast slum twin of La Paz, Bolivia, where residents regularly barricade the road to the airport or cut off transport to make their demands, to the now universal use of car bombs by nationalist and sectarian groups to strike at middle-class neighborhoods, financial districts, even green zones. I think there's much global experimentation, trying to find out how to use the power of disruption.

TD: I'll tell you what I suspect may be the greatest of disruptive powers -- the power to disrupt global energy flows. Poor people with minimal technology are capable of doing that across the thousands of miles of unguardable pipeline on this planet.

Davis: In that sense, you already see elements of an emergent campaign. In the last month alone, there was an attempted car bombing of Saudi Arabia's major oil facility and the first car bombing in the Niger delta in Nigeria. It didn't hurt anybody, but it did raise the stakes.

TD: You end Planet of Slums on this note: "If the empire can deploy Orwellian technologies of repression, its outcasts have the gods of chaos on their side."

Davis: And chaos is not always a force for bad. The worst case scenario is simply when people are silenced. Their exile becomes permanent. The implicit triaging of humanity occurs. People are assigned to die and forgotten about in the same way we forget about the AIDS holocaust or become immune to famine appeals.

The rest of the world needs to be woken up and the slum poor are experimenting with a huge variety of ideologies, platforms, means of using disorder -- from almost apocalyptic attacks on modernity itself to avant-garde attempts to invent new modernities, new kinds of social movements. But one of the fundamental problems is that, when you have so many people fighting for jobs and space, the obvious way to regulate them is through the emergence of godfathers, tribal chieftains, ethnic leaders, operating on principles of ethnic, religious, or racial exclusion. This tends to create self-perpetuating, almost eternal wars among the poor themselves. So, in the same poor city, you find a multiplicity of contradictory tendencies -- people embracing the Holy Ghost, or joining street gangs, or enlisting in radical social organizations, or becoming clients of sectarian or populist politicians.

TD: Just a last observation: You're often thought of as an apocalypt, a prophet of hopeless, catastrophic doom, but almost everything you write is actually about the human contribution to catastrophe, the way we refuse to come to grips with the realities of our world; and so, to my mind, your work always has an element of use and of hope in it. After all, if it's a human contribution, it's also obviously something that we could humanly avoid or deal with differently.

Davis: Well, my obligation is to try to be as clear-sighted and honest as possible about my beliefs, the ideas I'm compelled to hold from my research and observation -- and from my limited life experience. I feel no obligation to sweeten any of this with dollops of so-called optimism. Somebody once denounced Ecology of Fear for its almost erotic enjoyment of apocalypse, which said to me that it was either badly written or badly read; because, for instance, in one chapter about the literature of apocalypse in Los Angeles, I make clear that the enjoyment of apocalypse usually tends to be a kind of racist voyeurism.

But finally it's important to remember the true meaning of apocalypse in the Abrahamic religions, which is, ultimately, in the end time, at the end of history, the revelation of history's real text, real narrative, not the one written by the ruling classes, by the scribes of power. It's the history written from below. That's why I've always had a great interest in the religions of the oppressed, why I've given -- some people think uncritical -- attention to phenomena like Pentecostalism.

TD: So is our collective future simply likely to be a downhill ride to destruction?

Davis The city is our ark in which we might survive the environmental turmoil of the next century. Genuinely urban cities are the most environmentally efficient form of existing with nature that we possess because they can substitute public luxury for private or household consumption. They can square the circle between environmental sustainability and a decent standard of living. I mean, however big your library is or vast your swimming pool, it'll never be the same as the New York Public Library or a great public pool. No mansion, no San Simeon, will ever be the equivalent of Central Park or Broadway.

One of the major problems, however, is: We're building cities without urban qualities. Poor cities, in particular, are consuming the natural areas and watersheds which are essential to their functioning as environmental systems, to their ecological sustainability, and they're consuming them either because of destructive private speculation or simply because poverty pours over into every space. All around the world, the crucial watersheds and green spaces that cities need to function ecologically and be truly urban are being urbanized by poverty and by speculative private development. Poor cities, as a result, are becoming increasingly vulnerable to disaster, pandemic, and catastrophic resource shortages, particularly of water.

Conversely, the most important step toward coping with global environmental change is to reinvest -- massively -- in the social and physical infrastructures of our cities, and thereby reemploy tens of millions of poor youth. It should haunt us that Jane Jacobs -- who saw so clearly that the wealth of nations is created by cities not nations -- should have devoted her last, visionary book to the specter of a coming dark age.