Planet of Slums

In the 1970s, writes Davis, many developing world governments gave up the battle against slums, turning the power over to two institutions created by the Bretton Woods Accords: the IMF and the World Bank.

The World Bank’s urban development lending has gone from 10 million dollars in 1972 to over 2 billion in 1988. Led by Robert McNamara (the architect of the Vietnam War) and John Turner (a quasi-anarchist architectural theorist), the World Bank did not offer solutions to the slum problem. Turner saw squatters as creative problem solvers; excited by this idea, he built into the World Bank’s strategy having the poor help themselves. Davis argues that this praise for the ingenuity of poor people, however, was a neoliberal smokescreen to deflect attention from the fact that the World Bank was going to do little for slum housing. Funds intended as self-help loans were priced too high for people in extreme poverty and were instead taken up by middle class people not in real need of the help. Davis provides a litany of examples. In Mumbai, the World Bank proposed a strategy to provide massive aid, but projects like installing a toilet for every 20 residents only delivered one toilet for every 100 residents.