Megacities and Cities of Slums

Mike Davis argues that, in many parts of the world, the absence of large-scale infrastructure projects, suburbia, or powerful manufacturing sectors has forced large swathes of the population into poverty. With the American frontier long closed and postwar waves of migration a relic of the 1950s, in the 21st Century the job of absorbing the excess labor of capitalism has fallen to largely peripheral informal settlements. Furthermore, as Davis points out, “today[’s] surplus labor … faces unprecedented barriers - a literal ‘great wall of high tech border enforcement - blocking large-scale migration to the rich countries.” As the UN’s 2003 report Slums concludes, the insurmountable problems of the Third World have largely been created by the First, through SAP policies that ground economies and public services to a halt. Now, despite a context of drastically decreased worldwide labor mobility, even those who are able to travel to the world’s global cities find the doors to work increasingly closed. Those who manage to defy border controls must eke out a living in the informal economy and live in fear of deportation. Reality TV shows in the UK, US and Australia trivialise the encounters between border control staff and people attempting to enter illegally, where the implied hero is the border control officer and the villain the refugee. Considering the history of First World economic policies that have created this situation, a more truthful representation would see these roles reversed.