Untitled - Rebel Studies Library

200 PLANET OF SLUMS
The contrast with the 1960s is dramatic: forty years ago ideological
warfare between the two great Cold War blocs generated competing
visions of abolishing world poverty and rehousing slum-dwellers. With ·
its triumphant Sputniks and ICBMs, the Soviet Union was still a plausible
model of breakneck industrialization via heavy industries and
five-year plans. On the other side, the Kennedy administration officially
diagnosed Third World revolutions as "diseases of modernization,"
and prescribed - in addition to Green Berets and B-52s - ambitious
land reforms and housing programs. To immunize Colombians against
urban subversion, for example, the Alliance for Progress subsidized
huge housing projects such as Ciudad Kennedy (80,000 people) in
Bogota and Villa Socorro (12,000 people) in Medellin. The Allianza
was advertised as a Western Hemisphere Marshall Plan that would soon
lift pan-American living standards to southern European, if notgtingo,
levels. Meanwhile, as we have seen, charismatic nationalist leaders like
Nasser, Nkrumah, Nehru, and Sukarno retailed their own versions of
revolution and progress.
But the promised lands of the 1960s no longer appear on neoliberal
maps of the future. The last gasp of developmental idealism is the
United Nations' Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) campaign
(caricatured as "Minimalist Development Goals" by some Mrican aid
workers) that aims to cut the proportion of people living in extreme
poverty in half by 2015, as well as drastically reducing infant and
maternal mortality in the Third World. Despite episodic expressions of
rich-country solidarity like the Make Poverty History and Live 8 events
during the July 2005 Gleneagles G8 Summit, the MDGs will almost certainly
not be achieved in the foreseeable future. In their Human
Development Report 2004, top UN researchers warned that at current rates
of "progress" sub-Saharan Mrica would not reach most MDGs until
well into the twenty-second century. The chief partners in Africa's underdevelopment,
the IMF and World Bank, repeated the same pessimistic
assessment in their Global Monitoring RepOrl issued in April 2005.4
With a literal "great wall" of high-tech border enforcement blocking
large-scale migration to the rich countries, only the slum remains as a
4 Human Development Report 2004, pp. 132-33; Tanya Nolan, "Urgent Action
Needed to Meet Millennium Goals," ABC Online, 13 April 2005.
EPILOGUE 201
fully franchised solution to the problem of warehousing this century's
surplus humanity. Slum populations, according to UN-HABITAT, are
currently growing by a staggering 25 million per year.s Moreover, as
emphasized in an earlier chapter, the frontier of safe, squattable land is
everywhere disappearing and nw arrivals to the urban margin confront
an existential condition that can only be described as "marginality
within marginality;' or, in the more piquant phrase of a desperate
Baghdad slum-dweller, a "semi-death."6 Indeed, peri-urban poverty - a
grim human world largely cut off from the subsistence solidarities of
the countryside as well as disconnected from the cultural and political
life of the traditional city - is the radical new face of inequality. The
urban edge is a zone of exile, a new Babylon: it was reported, for
example, that some of the young terrorists - born and raised in
Casablanca's peripheral bidonvilles - who attacked luxury hotels and
foreign restaurants in May 2003 had never been downtown before and
were amazed at the affluence of the medina.?
But if informal urbanism becomes a dead-end street, won't the poor
revolt? Aren't the great slums - as Disraeli worried in 1871 or Kennedy
fretted in 1961 - just volcanoes waiting to erupt? Or does ruthless
Danvinian competition - as increasing numbers of poor people
compete for the same informal scraps - generate, instead, selfannihilating
communal violence as yet the highest form of "urban
involution"? To what extent does an informal proletariat possess that
most potent of Marxist talismans: "historical agency"?
These are complex questions that must be explored via concrete,
comparative case studies before they can be answered in any general
sense. (At least, this is the approach that Forrest Hylton and I have
adopted in the book we are writing on the "governments of the poor.")
Portentous post-Marxist speculations, like those of Negri and Hardt,
about a new politics of "multitudes" in the "rhizomatic spaces" of
globalization remain ungrounded in any real political sociology. Even
within a single city, slum populations can support a bewildering variety
5 UN-HABITAT, "Sounding the Alarm on Forced Evictions," press release,
20th Session of the Governing Council, Nairobi, 4-8 April 2005.
6 Quoted in James Glanz, "Iraq's Dislocated Minorities Struggle in Urban
Enclaves," New York Times, 3 April 2005.
7 See accounts at www.maroc-hebdo.press.ma and www.bladi.net.