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Tomdispatch Interview: Mike Davis, Green Zones and Slum Cities

[Note to Tomdispatch readers: In Humanity's Ground Zero, Part 1 of the latest Tomdispatch interview, Mike Davis took up the slumification of the planet -- the phenomenal (and little noted) expansion of cities, especially in the global south, that are gaining people by the minute and shedding jobs just as fast. Today, perhaps one billion, mostly young slum dwellers live in worlds almost devoid of economic development on urban peripheries of a sort unimagined by anyone who ever studied or dreamed of the city's fate. Now, Davis turns to the exchanges of planning and violence between the slum city and the imperial one, between the Pentagon and groups from the periphery intent on disruption and, often, damage -- and also to the possibilities that the city, even the slum city, holds for our future. Tom]

The Imperial City and the City of Slums

A Tomdispatch Interview with Mike Davis (Part 2)

TD: It occurs to me that, in Baghdad, the Bush administration has managed to create a weird version of the urban world you describe in Planet of Slums. There's the walled imperial Green Zone in the center of the city with its Starbucks and, outside it, the disintegrating capital as well as the vast slum of Sadr City -- and the only exchange between the two is the missile-armed helicopters going one way and the car bombs heading the other.

Davis: Exactly. Baghdad becomes the paradigm with the breakdown of public space and ever less middle ground between the extremes. The integrated Sunni/Shia neighborhoods are rapidly being extinguished, not just by American action now, but by sectarian terror.

Sadr City, at one point named Saddam City, the Eastern quadrant of Baghdad, has grown to grotesque proportions -- two million poor people, mainly Shia. And it's still growing, as are Sunni slums by the way, thanks now not to Saddam but to disastrous American policies toward agriculture into which the U.S. has put almost no reconstruction money. Vast farmlands have been turned back into desert, while everything focused, however unsuccessfully, on restoration of the oil industry. The crucial thing would have been to preserve some equilibrium between countryside and city, but American policies just accelerated the flight from the land.

Of course, Green Zones are gated communities of a kind, the citadel within the larger fortress. You see this, too, emerging across the world. In my book, I counterpoised this to the growth of the peripheral slums -- the middle class forsaking its traditional culture, along with the central city, to retreat into off-worlds with themed California lifestyles. Some of these are incredibly security conscious, real fortresses. Others are more typical American-style suburbs, but all of them are organized around an obsession with a fantasy America, and particularly the fantasy California universally franchised through TV.

So the nouveau riche in Beijing can commute by freeway to gated subdivisions with names like Orange County and Beverly Hills -- there's a Beverly hills in Cairo too, and a whole neighborhood themed by Walt Disney. Jakarta has the same thing -- compounds where people live in imaginary Americas. These proliferate, emphasizing the rootlessness of the new urban middle class across the world. With this goes an obsessiveness about getting things as they are in the TV image. So you have actual Orange County architects designing "Orange County" outside Beijing. You have tremendous fidelity to the things the global middle class sees on television or in the movies.

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posted by Annamarie at 10:32 PM