Megacities and Cities of Slums

Cities are growing. Future world population growth will be shouldered by cities, which will pose many challenges for planners. In his article Planet of Slums: Urban Involution and the Informal Proletariat, Mike Davis describes this population growth and this new “species of urbanism” and its price—inequality between and within cities(8). Much of the world’s future population growth will occur in second-tier cities, which lack adequate planning and infrastructure to absorb the exponential growth. This urbanization is decoupled from industrialization everywhere except for China. Davis describes this rapid urbanization as a “’perverse’ urban boom.” Even though the population is increases, residents of cities are still facing falling wages, rising prices, and unemployment. This “‘perverse’ urban boom” is a result of IMF enforced programs and Structural Adjustment Programs that pushed people from the country though mechanization, food imports, and the consolidation of small holdings into large agribusiness farms and pulled them into cities. Davis indicts neoliberalism and the IMF’s Structural Adjustment Programs for increasing urban poverty and slums. With no other job opportunities, people are forced to participate in informal economies in order to support themselves. In his chapter Urban Informality as a “New” Way of Life, Nezar AlSayyad writes, “We have learned that urban informality does not simply consist of the activities of the poor, or a particular status of labor, or marginality. Rather, it is an organizing logic which emerges under a paradigm of liberalization”(26).