Planet Slum

Sound like the title of a game to you? Sorry, it''s the future of Planet Earth as related in a recent paper on the subject of population growth, urbanization and poverty: Planet of Slums. The paper has more than 100 citations to back up it''s descriptions of the future of our planet. Here are a few of it''s projections regarding future population figures (mostly my paraphase): * World population is expected to peak at about 10 billion in 2050. * By 2050, more than 70% of all human beings will live in cities. * Many of these cities will have populations in excess of 20 million and many more will have populations in excess of 10 million. * In 1950 there were 86 cities in the world with a population over one million; today there are 400, and by 2015, there will be at least 550. * Most of this growth will occur in China, Indonesia and India, but will also occur in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. The author of the paper identifies structural adjustment programs foisted on the third world by the IMF etc. as the primary force excerbating the growth of slums. You can read the details of that part of the paper for yourself. I''m not interested in placing blame. I''m more interested in the descriptions of these slums that the paper provides. For example, this paragraph from the paper conveys the various flavors of our slum planet:

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There may be more than quarter of a million slums on earth. The five great metropolises of South Asia (Karachi, Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata and Dhaka) alone contain about 15,000 distinct slum communities with a total population of more than 20 million. An even larger slum population crowds the urbanizing littoral of West Africa, while other huge conurbations of poverty sprawl across Anatolia and the Ethiopian highlands; hug the base of the Andes and the Himalayas; explode outward from the skyscraper cores of Mexico, Jo-burg, Manila and São Paulo; and, of course, line the banks of the rivers Amazon, Niger, Congo, Nile, Tigris, Ganges, Irrawaddy and Mekong. The building blocks of this slum planet, paradoxically, are both utterly interchangeable and spontaneously unique: including the bustees of Kolkata, the chawls and zopadpattis of Mumbai, the katchi abadis of Karachi, the kampungs of Jakarta, the iskwaters of Manila, the shammasas of Khartoum, the umjondolos of Durban, the intra-murios of Rabat, the bidonvilles of Abidjan, the baladis of Cairo, the gecekondus of Ankara, the conventillos of Quito, the favelas of Brazil, the villas miseria of Buenos Aires and the colonias populares of Mexico City. They are the gritty antipodes to the generic fantasy-scapes and residential themeparks—Philip K. Dick’s bourgeois ‘Offworlds’—in which the global middle classes increasingly prefer to cloister themselves.

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The Philip K. Dick reference is what initially gave me the idea to start this thread, because this paper provides an outline of the near future of our planet that shouldn''t be ignored by anyone interested in crafting stories or games with that setting. The author also offers a few more paragraphs describing the living conditions in these slums:

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The provision of lifeline infrastructures, meanwhile, lags far behind the pace of urbanization, and peri-urban slum areas often have no formal utilities or sanitation provision whatsoever. [42] Poor areas of Latin American cities in general have better utilities than South Asia which, in turn, usually have minimum urban services, like water and electricity, that many African slums lack. As in early Victorian London, the contamination of water by human and animal waste remains the cause of the chronic diarrhoeal diseases that kill at least two million urban babies and small children each year. [43] An estimated 57 per cent of urban Africans lack access to basic sanitation and in cities like Nairobi the poor must rely on ‘flying toilets’ (defecation into a plastic bag). [44] In Mumbai, meanwhile, the sanitation problem is defined by ratios of one toilet seat per 500 inhabitants in the poorer districts. Only 11 per cent of poor neighbourhoods in Manila and 18 per cent in Dhaka have formal means to dispose of sewage. [45] Quite apart from the incidence of the hiv/aids plague, the un considers that two out of five African slum-dwellers live in a poverty that is literally ‘life-threatening’. [46] The urban poor, meanwhile, are everywhere forced to settle on hazardous and otherwise unbuildable terrains—over-steep hillslopes, river banks and floodplains. Likewise they squat in the deadly shadows of refineries, chemical factories, toxic dumps, or in the margins of railroads and highways. Poverty, as a result, has ‘constructed’ an urban disaster problem of unprecedented frequency and scope, as typified by chronic flooding in Manila, Dhaka and Rio, pipeline conflagrations in Mexico City and Cubatão (Brazil), the Bhopal catastrophe in India, a munitions plant explosion in Lagos, and deadly mudslides in Caracas, La Paz and Tegucigalpa. [47] The disenfranchised communities of the urban poor, in addition, are vulnerable to sudden outbursts of state violence like the infamous 1990 bulldozing of the Maroko beach slum in Lagos (‘an eyesore for the neighbouring community of Victoria Island, a fortress for the rich’) or the 1995 demolition in freezing weather of the huge squatter town of Zhejiangcun on the edge of Beijing. [48] But slums, however deadly and insecure, have a brilliant future. The countryside will for a short period still contain the majority of the world’s poor, but that doubtful title will pass to urban slums by 2035. [49] At least half of the coming Third World urban population explosion will be credited to the account of informal communities. Two billion slum dwellers by 2030 or 2040 is a monstrous, almost incomprehensible prospect, but urban poverty overlaps and exceeds the slums perse. Indeed, The Challenge of the Slums underlines that in some cities the majority of the poor actually live outside the slum strictosensu. [50] UN ‘Urban Observatory’ researchers warn, moreover, that by 2020 ‘urban poverty in the world could reach 45 to 50 per cent of the total population living in cities’. [51]

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And there are a few more similarly themed paragraphs in the paper as well that you''ll have to read for yourself. The overall description is bleak, but surprisingly, the author doesn''t expect these cauldrons of humanity to boil over with "red fury". Rather he sees populist Islam and Pentecostal Christianity filling the role that socialism played in the 20th century. And moreover, he doesn''t see these movements boiling over into global religious wars. That is probably because he sees them less as political movements and more as social movements rising to provide the social services that incapacitated governments no longer can. Overall the paper is an interesting read, even if the author indulges himself with jargon in a few places (History is not uniformitarian - and it''s not a member of the Rotary Club either!). Anyway, after reading the paper, do you think the author''s description of the near future is on the mark, near the mark or way off the mark? Is it too rosy or too bleak? Do you see a different outcome and if so what do you see and why?