First I would like to say this essay really made some good points and talked about things that I have never thought of or put together. At the start of his essay he makes his point very clear; the world’s population is being forced into smaller and smaller areas to live where the only way of life is to live in a slum in some mega cities. The time is even coming for the small rural towns; soon everything will merge close to one another or at least the mega cities will be where someone is going to have to live to survive. Davis states that “The exact event is unimportant and it will pass entirely unnoticed. Nonetheless it will constitute a watershed in human history. For the first time the urban population of the earth will outnumber the rural. Indeed, given the imprecision’s of Third World censuses, this epochal transition may already have occurred”. Davis puts out a view of the world around us and it does not look so good and he makes it clear that it is only getting worse with time.
He then goes on to explain that there are limits and those limits have been broken for years and are bound to get worse before they get better. He states “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. Cities, indeed, have absorbed nearly two-thirds of the global population explosion since 1950 and are currently growing by a million babies and migrants each week. The present urban population (3.2 billion) is larger than the total population of the world in 1960” which is crazy to even begin to think about and apply to the world around you. The majority of humanity live in a urban area and because of that places like China, Brazil and India only kind of equal the population of Europe plus North America and they is little room for the people that currently live there (Davis). Small cities and towns now have to deal with converting to the urban feeling of life. The urban are the poorest in the world and in some places of the world those people are living in environments that are unsafe, unsanitary and are breeding grounds for disease and death. In one part of this essay Davis suggest that some of these urban slums are comparable to Victorian London and it is the modern developed world. Davis explains the mass amount of growth in terms that when you think about it you kind of get a feeling that you wish you could have heard these years ago or go back and change history. He makes one see what is going to happen. He references research and science that has been proven to show that the more we grow as a global population the worse for humankind. It is not natural to grow in numbers that we cannot globally sustain.
Davis goes on to say that the urban slums are built upon economic, political and ways of government that seem to keep those in the slums there. They might not be meaning to but with the growth of the population and the way the economy is today the only way a good majority of people can survive is by moving into the slums or the cities, and towns next to the cities. Some are even forced to move to the largest parts of the cities where the feel like they can stay a float in the world around them. Davis gives great examples and one of the ones I think fit well and will bring the point home for the whole essay is when he is states that
“Slums is also unusual in its intellectual honesty. One of the researchers associated with the report told me that ‘the “Washington Consensus” types (World Bank, IMF, etc.) have always insisted on defining the problem of global slums not as a result of globalization and inequality but rather as a result of “bad governance”.’ The new report, however, breaks with traditional UN circumspection and self-censorship to squarely indict neoliberalism, especially the IMF’s structural adjustment programmes.[24] ‘The primary direction of both national and international interventions during the last twenty years has actually increased urban poverty and slums, increased exclusion and inequality, and weakened urban elites in their efforts to use cities as engines of growth”.
He is saying that slums are created and maintained and they are not going any where soon. Countries are struggling to survive but without the slums they would be dying and would be with even less resources, or at least they fear. The point Davis is trying to make is that being aware is a good thing, because of course someone needs to see the problem, but can we fix it? It might just be too late to fix what society has created and we might as well just ride it out, I think that Davis is suggesting the same thing. How would we live without mega cities with million people populations?
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
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This article brought a lot of things to light for me also. I never considered the increased urbanization a problem before, although in most futuristic movies they depict mega cities as worlds in themselves where the poor reside in the shadowy under layers of the society while the wealthy have floating residences in the sun. This seems to exemplify the future that Davis predicts. While the future he describes sounds pretty bleak I feel that he was warning us so that we could change our policies in order to aleivieate this comming problem. More money needs to be invested in city planning, public transportation, waste manegement, and employment services. With these facilities properly funded the urbanization of the planets population wouldn't be as big of a problem as depicted. Although the urban planning would most likely place the lower income housing in areas together, geographicaly separating the classes creating worse disparity between the classes. One of the more important things to keep in mind when preparing for the future is global economic policy, which pollins argued helped cause the surplus of workers that fueled the growth of sweatshops. One could look at this as a possible good thing, It would be easier to distribute resources with the majority of the population in the same area. Im sure other good things could come from the concentration of the population, although there will be far more problems. Some of the major problems described by the auther in the Dickenson society would not be as severe becuase of our technological advances, fire and pestilence would not be nearly as serious as they once were.
ReplyDeleteI couldn't agree more with what Kristian had to say about this reading, other than that too many people in one place is just too much for most cities to handle. I feel that Davis is correct in his accusations that people are simply too crowded in their current living situations and it cannot lead to anything good.
ReplyDeleteSlums are seeminly becoming a great place for some people to live, especially illegally as David pointed out. Whether or not the government is "keeping" these people there I do not particularly agree with. Granted I do not know the types of government assistance programs available nor do I know the unemployment situations, but I'm a firm believer in there's generally always SOME type of job. I feel that if somebody is living in a slum, than money is a problem and any type of job should be openly accepted. Although, perhaps the number of those living in the slums has finally reached a breaking point?
I do particularly agree with Davis on the fact that these slums have become ridiculously underestimated in their size. Looking at the slums in India they are built literally on top of one another and what I feel could be a major upset to these mega communities is not only the extreme poverty levels and starvation that comes along with poverty, but what of the need for medical care. God forbid another "black plague" type epidemic come through and within a matter of weeks it could wipe out an entire slum community. I agree with Davis and that these slums may be in part of a bad governance and the results are these slums. Given another decade in Michigan the way things are headed, I'm sure a slum might be looking like a good place to be. :(
Something I feel is often overlooked is people in these situations, that are desperate enough to begin living in a slum, often can see it as not the worse case scenario. They are living on their own, not in some type of "assistance" home for poor people and they are also surrounded by people in similar situations. I seriously doubt any of these people want any pity, they simply want a chance at a life worth living happily.