Inequality and Instability in the New Urban Order

Davis opens with these facts. Soon, if not already, the urban population of the earth will outnumber the rural for the first time, and in addition, cities will account for almost all future world population growth (1). He then explains what outcomes to expect from these changes. First, growth of megacities will present problems associated with large concentrations of poverty (5). The growth of megalopolises will provide new networks, corridors, and highways, but not all cities will have the ability to be part of networks of capital and information, like New York-London and Shanghai-Tokyo, or command centers (7). Inequality will increase between cities as much of the population growth will be absorbed by second-tier cities without the social infrastructure of megacities and as smaller, inland cities compete with giant, coastal metropolises for resources. The line between urban and rural will also blur as city-villages become prominent, forcing traditional and modern values to collide (9). Inequalities within cities will also become more noticeable in the developing world, where the size of a city's economy bears little relationship to its population size, unlike the cities of Europe and North America, where rising urbanization is associated with rising GDP (13). Davis contends this phenomenon has occurred because IMF market reforms and other structural adjustment programs forced peasants to the cities when they could not compete with global agricultural producers in the countryside (15). Thus, the classical stereotype of the labor-intensive countryside and capital-intensive metropolis has now been reversed; the Third World has capital-rich countrysides and labor-rich deindustrialized cities (16). There, urbanization is driven by the reproduction of poverty, not the supply of jobs. This ultimately leads to the mass production of informal slums that are growing faster than the cities themselves (17).

Davis does a great job of relaying the misery of overurbanization with examples from various parts of the globe, but the connection between the growth of slums and IMF and other structural adjustment programs is lacking. Davis does not explore the many other factors that play into the creation of slums. The national government can physically relocate the poor for development projects. Debt crises, like in Malaysia, Indonesia, Argentina, and Brazil, leave rural peasants with no other choice than to sell their homes and go to the city. Civil wars in the countryside cause mass exodus to the cities, and individuals can also choose to move to the slums to escape family restrictions or to be with a spouse. Moreover, he does not present any cases of slum dwellers or Third World scholars that actually see the existence of slums as a result of the government's choice to sign on to an IMF or World Bank program. The only source he cites for this argument is a European academic, writing from an ivory tower (15). Davis could do more to clarify exactly how the effects of market liberalization have contributed to economic depravity and the growth of slums in some parts of the Third World, especially when market liberalization had the opposite effects in other parts of the world.

* The page numbers in in-text citations correlate to the first chapter of the book.