Slums -- Talking Points

Note: These talking points are based on “Planet of Slums,” by Mike Davis (Verso: 2006.)

In 1950 there were 86 cities in the world with a population of more that one million. Today there are 400.1

An estimated 60% of Cambodian peasants who sell their land and move to the city are forced to do so by medical reasons.2

Of the 500,000 people who migrate to Delhi each year, it is estimated that fully 400,000 end up in slums: By 2015 India’s capital will have a slum population of more that 110 million.3

By 2015 Black Africa will have 332 million slum dwellers, a number that will continue to double every fifteen years.4

Residents of slums, while only 6% of the city population of the developed countries, constitutes 78.2% of urbanites in the least-developed countries or 66% of the global population.5

The world’s highest percentages of slum-dwellers are in Ethiopia and Chad (99.4% of the urban population in each country), Afghanistan (98.4%) and Nepal (92%).6

In absolute numbers rather that percentages the worlds biggest slums are as follows:7

  • Bombay with 10 to 12 million,
  • Mexico City with 9 to 10 million.
  • Daka, Lagos, Cairo Karachi, Kinshasa-Brazzaville, Sao Paulo, Shanghai, and Delhi, with 6 to 8 million

In Mubi there are about a million people who are living on the streets. Of the families living on the streets, 97% have at least one person who is employed full time.8

One of the most striking phenomena of the last decade and a half has been the explosive growth of gated communities on the peripheries of big cities in the “third world.” This proliferation of gated communities has been evident even in China where it has been called “the most significant development in recent urban planning and design.”9

Most shantytowns are built in areas that are in danger of landslides, floods, or other natural disasters, and/or dangerous industries:

  • A slum outside Buenos Aires is built over a former lake, a toxic dump, a cemetary and is in a flood zone.10
  • 32,000 people died, 140,000 were left homeless and 200,000 were left without a job due to a massive storm in Venezuela in 1999.11
  • In July of 2000 a typhoon caused the collapse of a “garbage mountain” in Quezon City’s slum, burying 500 shacks and killing at least 1000 people.12
  • In 1984 a Pemex liquefied natural gas plan exploded in a poor district of Mexico City, killing about 2000 people.13
  • Also in 1984 7,000 to 10,000 people were killed immediately and 15,000 later from related causes due to the accidental release of isocyanate at a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal.14


More than one million people are killed in road accidents in the Third World each year.15 The Who predicts that road accidents by 2020 will be the third leading cause of death.16

Every day illnesses related to water supply, waste disposal, and garbage kill 30,000 people and constitute 75% of the illnesses that afflict hamanity.17

Kinshasa, with a population close to 10 million, has no waterborne sewage system at all. The Laini Saba slum in Kibera, Nairobi, as of 1998, had ten working pit latrines for 40,000 people. In Mathare 4A there were two public toilets for 28,000 people.18

The solution offered by the Washington-based neoliberal establishment is for the poor to use pay-toilets. Pay toilets are now a growth industry in the Third World. Most poor people simply cannot afford this and continue to defecate in the streets.19

According to WHO, at any given time about half of the urban population in the Southern Hemisphere are suffering from at least one disease caused by inadequate water and sanitation.20

In Quito infant mortality is 30 times higher in the slums than in wealthier neighborhoods; in Cape Town, tuberculosis is 50 time more common amongst the poor blacks than amongst affluent whites.21

In Mexico, following the adoption of a second Structural Adjustment Program in 1986, the percentage of births attended by medical personnel fell from 94 percent in 1983 to 45 percent in 1988, while maternal mortality soared form 82 per 100,000 in 1980 to 150 in 1988.22

In Ghana, “adjustment” not only led to an 80 percent decrease in spending on health and education between 1975 and 1983, but also caused the exodus of half of the nation’s doctors.23

According to the economist Michel Chossudovsky, the outbreak of plague in Surat in 1994 was caused by “a worsening urban sanitation and public health infrastructure which accompanied the compression of national and municipal budgets under the 1991 IMF/World Band-sponsored structural adjustment programme.”24

1. Planet of Slums, p. 1.

2. Sebastien de Dainous, “Les Damnes de la Terre du Cambgodge,” Le Monde diplomatique (September 2004), p. 20. (POS, p. 15)

3. Rakesh K. Sinha, “New Delhi: The World’s Shanty Capital in the Making,” OneWorld South Asia, 26 August 2003. (POS, p. 18)

4. John Vidal, “Cities are Now the Frontline of Poverty.” Guardian, 2 February 2005 (POS, p 19)

5. Planet of Slums, p. 23

6. Planet of Slums, p. 23

7. Planet of Slums, p. 23

8. Minar Pimple and Lysa John, Security and Tenure in Mumbai’s Experience,” in Durand-Lasserve and Royston, Holding Their Ground, p. 78. (POS, p 36)

9. Pu Miao, “Deserted Streets in a Jammed Town. The Gated Community in Chinses Communities and its Solution.” Journal of Urban Design 8:1 (2003) p. 45. (POS, pg. 115.)

10. Stillwagon, Stunted Lives, Stagnent Economics, p. 67. (POS, p. 121)

11. Planet of Slums, p. 123.

12. Planet of Slums, p. 124.

13. Planet of Slums, p. 130.

14. Planet of Slums, p. 130.

15. Planet of Slums, p 133.

16. Who, “Road Safety is No Accident!” (November 2003.) (POS, p 133).

17. Stillwagon, Stunted Lives, Stagnant Economies, p. 95. (POS, p. 142.)

18. Planet of Slums, p. 139.

19. Planet of Slums, pp. 141, 142.

20. David Satterthwite, “The Links Between Poverty and the Environment in Urban Area of Africa, Asia, and Latin America,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 590 (1993). (POS, p. 144.)

21. Planet of Slums, p. 146.

22. Shi, “How Access to Urbane Potable Water and Sewerage Connection Affects Child Mortality.” pp. 4-5. (POS, p. 148).

23. Planet of Slums, p. 148.

24. Quoted in “A Decade After Cairo, p. 12. (POS, p. 148.)