This article refers to the "informal" economy. There is no such thing. There is either a money economy or a barter economy. If people are getting paid with money, nothing they do is "informal."

What other result would Davis expect from exponential population growth?

It's not a fair critique of market systems to say they failed because they failed to grow as exponentially fast as the population. Slow or stop population growth tomorrow, and the slum problem would easily solve itself in a generation. (It might anyway with coming technical advances.) The book, if nothing else, is a strong argument for birth control.

Davis' vision is also insulting to the world's poor. By painting them as victims, and their cities as an unmitigated blight, he engages in a form of cultural imperialism (judging their lives and cities by our standards). And he strips any remaining power they may have to evolve, grow, and change their circumstances. The storied anarchy described in the slums might actually have a thing or two to teach the developed world about government.

I'm also tired of people focusing on the gaps between classes rather than on the absolute levels of the Human Development Index in the Third World, which has been rising steadily for years. The gap doesn't matter. What matters is if the people at the bottom are better off than they used to be--and they are.

I trust what Rem Koolhaas has to say far more than Davis. Koolhaas has actually built things. When he talks about buildings and cities, I'll pay a lot more attention to him than to yet another globalism-bashing, doomsaying crackpot.

I read this article and thought about the national freak out that occurred after Hurricane Katrina, and to some degree is still going on. The privation that people had to deal with for a few days after the natural disaster, is what hundreds of millions of people around the world deal with every day of their entire lives. I guess the real shock was not that humans were suffering from a lack of clean toilets, fresh food, air conditioning, and police protection but that AMERICANS were.

It is a shame that the British, French, and some of the other more paternalistic colonial powers didn't hang in there a bit longer to bring those parts of the world that they ruled closer to western ways of thinking and acting. Would this have required more compulsion and further erosion of native traditions and cultures? Yes...and? What the mega-slum dwellers have now is better than what existed under post WWII colonial rule? To anyone on earth that is well educated enough (and therefore has had at least some western influence)to even consider such things, massive cities that lack basic features of sanitation, organized infrastructure, and basic rule of law, are not "working". In the culture of the developed world, when a child is lost, maimed, suffers some other kind of abuse, or is killed, it is considered just about the worst that can happen, and we direct a lot of attention and resources to the problem. When such a thing happens in the culture of these slums, what is the response? Milk carton pictures? A report on the TV news? Police comb the area with volunteers, question witnesses and apprehend suspects? Social services arranges an intervention? Or do most people just kind of shrug their shoulders and move on with survival? Mere crowding is not an excuse for the way people live (or don't)in these slums. Look at Singapore and Japan which are even MORE densely populated and not even a cigarette butt on the ground anywhere. Many of the cities mentioned in the article are in countries that still have vast natural resources. What is keeping them from being even remotely decent places to live are cultural norms that have no place in the modern world.

The article, and presumably the book, has worthwhile things to say about poverty and inequality on a global scale. But the opening fact - that more people worldwide live in cities than rural areas - has nothing to do with that. All it means is that a smaller percentage of the population is involved in food production, which is partly due to modern farming methods, and partly due to population grown (as another poster mentioned). The slum is used as a symbol of poverty, but would people be better off living in abject poverty out in the countryside? Urban poverty isn't the issue here; poverty is.

...check out "City Planet" by Stewart Brand in the current Strategy+Business magazine (online or in bookstores).

A few things from the article:

- the global population boom is peaking and on its way down. The main reason for this: the move to cities. The economic realities of urban life encourage people to have fewer and better-educated children. City life also provides women with life opportunities other than having more children.

- people who live in third-world "slums" have a very different perspective on their neighborhoods than do the rich outsiders who turn up their noses at the crowding, the filth, the lack of privacy, etc. People often *like* many things about their "slum" houses, their neighbors and their neighborhoods, and they are working to improve them.

My point: there are multipe perspectives on the issue of "third-world slums." Many of the other views are not as apocalyptic as Davis'.

The conference's most illustrious presenter was the Dutch superstar architect Rem Koolhaas, who had just finished a four-year study of Lagos conducted with his students at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Rather than being famous as a "designer," Koolhaas should be known as a master flim-flam man. He has no real training in anything he does or meddles in, and nothing he says should be taken seriously. The fact that Harvard wasted money on him shows that those people defending Summer's tenure there are right: the College of Arts and Sciences are the lunatics, and the may indeed have taken over the asylum.

It is a shame that the British, French, and some of the other more paternalistic colonial powers didn't hang in there a bit longer to bring those parts of the world that they ruled closer to western ways of thinking and acting. -- John McMahon

Yes and no. Most of Africa was certainly a much safer and saner place than it has been since de-colonization. Kenya stands as probably the best example of this. However, the pattern typical in so many colonies was to freeze the natives out of any position of responsibility in the governments, and education was too spotty. Few of the colonial powers were willing to make the next step, and never had plans of leaving once they got the natives "up to speed" with civil society, commerce and all that. They weren't really out to "civilize" these "nations," most of which were completely artificial constructs to begin with.