Slumming it: Mike Davis's grand narrative of urban revolution

Radical Philosophy

Volumn , Issue 142, 2007, Pages 8-18

  Cunninghan, David ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WESTMINSTER   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 33847785476     PISSN: 0300211X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (47)

1. Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, trans. Robert Bononno, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis and London, 2003, pp. 2-5, 14. Nonetheless, Lefebvre observes that 'so-called underdeveloped countries are now characterized by the fact that they undergo the rural, the industrial and the urban simultaneously. They accumulate problems without accumulating wealth' (p. 32).
2. Mike Davis, 'Planet of Slums', New Left Review 26, March/April 2004, pp. 5-34.
3. Mute, vol. 2, no. 3, Special Issue: Naked Cities: Struggle in the Global Slums, 2006.
4. Iain Boal, '21st Century Noir', Naked Cities, p. 12.
5. David Cunningham, 'The Concept of Metropolis: Philosophy and Urban Form', Radical Philosophy 133, September/October 2005, pp. 13-25.
6. In my previous article in Radical Philosophy 133, I suggested that the forms of spatial relationality characteristic of the modern capitalist metropolis, determined as they are by 'pure' exchangeability, mean that 'units' of urban form are always subject (in however minor a way) to a kind of potential détournement: 'A church can, in the formal structure of universal equi-valence, become a café, an art gallery, a recording studio, a set of apartments, a recording studio, or whatever' (p. 22). The squatting culture of the slum perhaps suggests a very different manifestation of what would nonetheless be the same kind of formal structure. In such a structure, by contrast to the earlier forms of what Lefebvre terms 'absolute' and 'historical' space - in which, as in the polis, the 'incomparability' of the intrinsic qualities of certain sites remains essential - 'specific values' (to use Simmel's phrase) are no longer, in themselves, definitive of the urban as such, but are constitutively mediated by a pure form of exchangeability.
7. Rem Koolhaas/Harvard Project on the City, 'Lagos', in Francine Fort and Michel Jacques, eds, Mutations, ACTAR, Barcelona, 2001, pp. 718-19.
8. See also Koolhaas, 'Fragments of a Lecture on Lagos', in Okwui Enwezor et al., eds, Documenta 11 _Platform 4. Under Siege: Four African Cities, Ostfildern-Ruit, 2003.
9. Matthew Gandy, 'Learning from Lagos', New Left Review 33, May/June 2005, p. 38.
10. As Davis notes, the occupants of shanty-town shacks are neither necessarily squatters, nor de facto 'owners' of their property. In many instances, housing is itself a generator of capital for 'slumlords' legally or illegally coercing economic 'tribute' from the poor.
11. See Paul Cammack, 'Attacking the Poor', New Left Review 13, January/ February 2002, pp. 125-34.
12. David Harvey, Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Development, Verso, London and New York, 2006, p. 27.
13. Gandy, 'Learning from Lagos', p. 46.
14. Richard Pithouse, Review of Planet of Slums, Sunday Independent, 2006, www.nu.ac.za/ccs/default. sp?3,28,10,2578;
15. 'Coffin for the Councillor (or, The Left in the Slums)', Interactivist Info Exchange, http://info.interactivist.net/article.pl?sid=05/10/07/ 148251;
16. 'Thinking Resistance in the Shanty Town', Naked Cities, pp. 16-31.
17. Marshall Berman, 'L.A. Raw', The Nation, 1 April 1991, pp. 417-21.
18. Manuel Castells, 'European Cities, the Informational Society, and the Global Economy', New Left Review I/204, March/April 1994, p. 18.
19. See Tristram Hunt, 'Lessons from Beijing Emerge from the Dickensian Smog', Guardian, 28 July 2006.
20. Manuel Castells, The Urban Question: A Marxist Approach, Edward Arnold, London, 1977.
21. Edward W. Soja, Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions, Blackwell, Oxford, 2000, p. 76.
22. Gandy, 'Learning From Lagos', p. 38, 42.
23. Nanna de Ru, 'Hollocore', in OMA/Rem Koolhaas, ed., Content, Taschen, Cologne, 2004, p. 336.
24. See also Cunningham, 'Concept of Metropolis', p. 22.
25. Cunningham, 'Concept of Metropolis', p. 20.
26. Georg Simmel, 'The Metropolis and Mental Life', trans. Hans Gerth, in Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings, Sage, London, Thousand Oaks CA and Delhi, 1997, pp. 176, 178.
27. Koolhaas, 'Lagos', p. 653.
28. Peter Osborne, 'Non-Places and the Spaces of Art', Journal of Architecture, vol. 6, no. 2, 2001, p. 185.
29. Koolhaas, 'Fragments of a Lecture on Lagos', p. 175.
30. Harvey, Spaces of Global Capitalism, pp. 65-6.
31. Gaza, as Davis points out, could in certain respects plausibly be regarded as the world's single biggest slum - 'essentially an urbanized agglomeration of refugee camps (750,000 refugees) with two thirds of the population existing on less than $2 per day' (48).
32. Lefebvre, Urban Revolution, p. 43.
33. Andy Merrifield, Metromarxism: A Marxist Tale of the City, Routledge, London and New York, 2002, pp. 2-3.
34. Famously, Marx writes: 'The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life.' Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, Penguin, Harmondsworth 1967, pp. 84, 89.
35. Karl Marx, Capital Volume 1, trans. Ben Fowkes, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1976, p. 876.
36. Retort, Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War, Verso, London and New York, 2005, p. 163.
37. Ibid., pp. 172-3.
38. In fact Pentecostalism shares some things with much twentieth-century Third World Marxism to the degree that it, too, has as 'its ultimate premise ... that the urban world is corrupt, injust and unreformable'. See Davis, 'Planet of Slums', NLR, p. 33.
39. Robert Neuwirth, Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters in a New Urban World, Routledge, London and New York, 2005, p. 16.
40. Alberto Toscano, 'Factory, Territory, Metropolis, Empire', Angelaki, vol. 9, no. 2, August 2004, p. 198.
41. Slavoj Žižek, 'Knee Deep', London Review of Books, vol. 26, no. 17, 2004.
42. Harvey, Spaces of Global Capitalism, p. 52.
43. Ibid., p. 63.
44. World Charter of the Rights to the City, www.choike.org/nuevo_eng/ informes/2243.html.
45. Pithouse, 'Thinking Resistance', p. 26.
46. Gandy, 'Learning from Lagos', p. 52.
47. One of Davis's most startling observations is that the 'fastest-growing slums' are now in the former Second World. It is perhaps in places like Baku, Yerevan and Ulaanbaatar that 'urban dereliction' has accompanied 'civic disinvestment' at the most 'stomach-churning velocity' (24-5).