The City Beautiful

In the urban Third World, poor people dread high-profile international events - conferences, dignitary visits, sporting events, beauty contests, and international festivals - that prompt authorities to launch crusades to clean up the city: slum-dwellers know that they are the "dirt" or "blight" that their governments prefer the world not to see. During the Nigerian Independence celebration in 1960, for example, one of the first acts of the new government was to fence the route from the airport so that Queen's Elizabeth's representative, Princess Alexandria, would not see Lagos's slums. These days governments are more likely to improve the view by razing the slums and driving the residents out of the city.

Manilenos have a particular horror of such "beautification campaigns." During Imelda Marcos's domination of city government, shanty-dwellers were successively cleared from the parade routes of the 1974 Miss Universe Pageant, the visit of President Gerald Ford in 1975, and the IMF-World Bank meeting in 1976. Altogether 160,000 squatters were moved out of the media's field of vision, many of them dumped on Manila's outskirts, 30 kilometers or more from their former homes. The subsequent "People's Power" of Corazon Aquino was even more ruthless: some 600,000 squatters were evicted during the Aquino presidency, usually without relocation sites. Despite campaign promises to preserve housing for the urban poor, Aquino's successor, Joseph Estrada, continued the mass evictions: 22,000 shanties were destroyed in the first half of 1999 alone. Then, in preparation for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Summit, demolition crews in November 1999 attacked the slum of Dabu-Dabu in Pasay. When 2000 residents formed a human wall, a SWAT team armed with M16s was called in, killing 4 people and wounding 20. Homes and their contents were burnt to the ground, and Dabu-Dabu's miserable inhabitants were relocated to a site along the banks of a sewer where their children promptly caught deadly gastrointestinal infections.

As president upon a throne built by US Marines in 1965, the Dominican Republic's Juan Balaguer was notorious as "the Great Evictor." Returning to power in 1986, the elderly autocrat decided to rebuild Santo Domingo in preparation for the quincentenary of Columbus's discovery of the New World and the visit of the Pope. With support from European governments and foundations, he launched a series of over-scaled projects without precedent in Dominican history: the Columbus Lighthouse, Plaza de Armas, and an archipelago of new middle-class subdivisions. In addition to monumentalizing himself, Balaguer also aimed to Haussmannize the traditional hearths of urban resistance. His principal target was the huge low-income upper town area of Sabana Perdida, northeast of the city center. "The plan," write researchers working in Sabana Perdida, "was to get rid of troublesome elements in the working-class barrios of the upper town by shunting them to the outskirts. Memories of the 1965 revolts and the riots of 1984 suggested it would be wise to eliminate this centre of political protest and opposition."

After massive protests by the barrio rights coordinadora supported by the UN Commission on Human Rights, the upper city was saved, but massive demolitions, often involving the army, were carried out in the center, southwest, and southeast of Santo Domingo. Between 1986 and 1992, 40 barrios were bulldozed and 180,000 residents were evicted. In an important report on the neighborhood demolitions, Edmundo Morel and Manuel Mejia described the campaign of government terror against the poor.

Houses were demolished while their inhabitants were still inside, or when the owners were away; paramilitary shock troops were used to intimidate and terrorize people and force them to abandon their homes; household goods were vandalized or stolen; notice of eviction was given only on the very day a family was to be thrown out; people were kidnapped; pregnant women and children were subjected to physical violence; public services to the barrios were cut off - a pressure tactic; families were insulted and threatened; and the police acted as judges.

The modern Olympics have an especially dark but little-known history. In preparation for the 1936 Olympics, the Nazis ruthlessly purged homeless people and slum-dwellers from areas of Berlin likely to be seen by international visitors. While subsequent Olympics - including those in Mexico City, Athens, and Barcelona - were accompanied by urban renewal and evictions, the 1988 Seoul games were truly unprecedented in the scale of the official crackdown on poor homeowners, squatters, and tenants: as many as 720,000 people were relocated in Seoul and Injon, leading a Catholic NGO to claim that South Korea vied with South Africa as "the country in which eviction by force is most brutal and inhuman."

Beijing seems to be following the Seoul precedent in its preparations for the 2008 Games: "350,000 people will be resettled to make way for stadium construction alone." Human Rights Watch has drawn attention to extensive collusion between official planners and developers, who manipulate the patriotic excitement inherent to the Olympics in order to justify mass evictions and selfish landgrabs in the heart of Beijing. Anne-Marie Broudehoux, in her brilliant book, The Making and Selling Of Post-Mao Beijing (2004), claims that in state-capitalist China the current preference is to hide poverty behind "Potemkin-like" facades, not substantively ameliorate it. She predicts that Olympic planning will repeat the traumatic (and for the working classes, darkly ironic) experience of the fiftieth anniversary celebration of the Chinese Revolution.

For more than two years, Beijingers had endured the disruption caused by the diverse beautification campaigns initiated to camouflage the city's social and physical blight. Hundreds of houses had been demolished, thousands of people expelled, and billions of taxpayers' yuans spent to build a facade of order and progress. To ensure that the carefully planned ceremonies were carried out smoothly, the capital had been brought to a standstill for the duration of the week-long festivities. Beijing residents were ordered to stay home and follow the festivities on television as they had been during the opening ceremony for the Asian Games.

The most Orwellian "urban beautification" program In Asia in recent times, however, was undoubtedly the preparations for "Visit Myanmar Year 1996" undertaken by the heroin-financed Burmese military dictatorship in Rangoon and Mandalay. One-and-a-half million residents - an incredible 16 percent of the total urban population - were removed from their homes (frequently by state-sponsored arson) between 1989 and 1994 and shipped out to hastily constructed bamboo-and-thatch huts in the urban periphery, now creepily renamed the "New Fields." No one knew when their turn might come, and even the dead were evicted from the cemeteries. In her book Karaoke Fascism, Monique Skidmore describes brutal scenes in Rangoon and Mandalay reminiscent of Pol Pot's infamous depopulation of Phnom Penh. "Whole city blocks disappear in a matter of days, the population loaded onto trucks and forcibly relocated to the new townships that the government has established on rice fields outside the major cities."Urban neighborhoods were replaced by projects like the new Rangoon Golf Course, aimed at Western tourists and Japanese businessmen. "The generals moved a community that had been on the site for 40 years. Those who resisted were either arrested or forcibly removed to a settlement 15 miles away."

Skidmore argues that this constant spatial dislocation has become the foundation of the regime's "politics of fear." "Through the renaming, rebuilding, and relocating of familiar landmarks and the heavy presence of the army and weaponry, the military council imposes a new spatial configuration on Rangoon . . . suppressing potential democratic neighborhoods, demolishing the inner city, and creating new urban centers that immortalize the principle of authoritarianism." In place of traditional neighborhoods and historic buildings, laundered drug money finances glass-and-concrete highrises ("narco-architecture"), hard-currency tourist hotels, and garish pagoda complexes. Rangoon has become a nightmare combination of a "Buddhist tourist wonderland," a giant barracks, and a graveyard: it is "a landscape glorifying the control and authoritarian vision of its leaders."

dank_xiaopeng posted:

garfield is not marxist and consistently erases class

Garfield is the bourgeois. John is the striving middle class that manages the extraction of profit, in the form of lasagne. The working class is Odie. Drooling and easily manipulated.

It's pretty cynical and reactionary when you think about it.

Makeshift_Swahili posted:

coincidentally ive just finished reading mike davis' "planet of slums"...

Real Good Shit:

The child witches of Kinshasa, like the organ-exporting slums of India and Egypt, seem to take us to an existential ground zero beyond which there are only death camps, famine, and Kurtzian horror. Indeed, an authentic Kinois, Thierry Mayamba Nlandu, in a poignant but Whitmanesque ("the shanties, too, sing Kinshasa . . ." ) reflection, asks: "How do these millions survive the incoherent, miserable life of Kinshasa?" His answer is that "Kinshasa is a dead city. It is not a city of the dead." The informal sector is not a deus ex machina, but "a soulless wasteland," yet also "an economy of resistance" that confers honor on the poor "where otherwise the logic of the market leads to total despair." The Kinois, like the inhabitants of the Martinican slum called "Texaco" in Patrick Chamoiseau's famed novel of the same name, hold on to the city "by its thousand survival cracks" and stubbornly refuse tolet go.

The late-capitalist triage of humanity, then, has already taken place. As Jan Breman, writing of India, has warned: "A point of no return is reached when a reserve army waiting to be incorporated into the labour process becomes stigmatized as a permanently redundant mass, an excessive burden that cannot be included now or in the future, in economy and society. This metamorphosis is, in my opinion at least, the real crisis of world capitalism." Alternately, as the CIA grimly noted in 2002: "By the late 1990s a staggering one billion workers representing one-third of the world's labor force, most of them in the South, were either unemployed or underemployed." Apart from the de Sotan cargo cult of infinitely flexible informalism, there is no official scenario for the reincorporation of this vast mass of surplus labor into the mainstream of the world economy.

The contrast with the 1 960s is dramatic: forty years ago ideological warfare between the two great Cold War blocs generated competing visions of abolishing world poverty and rehousing slum-dwellers. With its triumphant Sputniks and ICBMs, the Soviet Union was still a plausible model of breakneck industrialization via heavy industries and five-year plans. On the other side, the Kennedy administration officially diagnosed Third World revolutions as "diseases of modernization," and prescribed - in addition to Green Berets and B-52s - ambitious land reforms and housing programs. To immunize Colombians against urban subversion, for example, the Alliance for Progress subsidized huge housing projects such as Ciudad Kennedy (80,000 people) in Bogota and Villa Socorro (12,000 people) in Medellin. The Allianza was advertised as a Western Hemisphere Marshall Plan that would soon lift pan-American living standards to southern European, if not gringo, levels. Meanwhile, as we have seen, charismatic nationalist leaders like Nasser, Nkrumah, Nehru, and Sukarno retailed their own versions of revolution and progress.

But the promised lands of the 1960s no longer appear on neoliberal maps of the future...With a literal great wall" of high-tech border enforcement blocking large-scale migration to the rich countries, only the slum remains as a fully franchised solution to the problem of warehousing this century'ssurplus humanity. Slum populations, according to UN-HABITAT, are currently growing by a staggering 25 million per year.s Moreover, as emphasized in an earlier chapter, the frontier of safe, squattable land is everywhere disappearing and new arrivals to the urban margin confront an existential condition that can only be described as "marginality within marginality;' or, in the more piquant phrase of a desperate Baghdad slum-dweller, a "semi-death." Indeed, peri-urban poverty - a grim human world largely cut off from the subsistence solidarities of the ountryside as well as disconnected from the cultural and political life of the traditional city - is the radical new face of inequality. The urban edge is a zone of exile, a new Babylon: it was reported, for example, that some of the young terrorists - born and raised in Casablanca's peripheral bidonvilles - who attacked luxury hotels and foreign restaurants in May 2003 had never been downtown before and were amazed at the affluence of the medina.

But if informal urbanism becomes a dead-end street, won't the poor revolt? Aren't the great slums - as israeli worried in 1871 or Kennedy fretted in 1961 - just volcanoes waiting to erupt? Or does ruthless Darwinian competition - as increasing numbers of poor people compete for the same informal scraps - generate, instead, selfannihilating communal violence as yet the highest form of "urban involution"? To what extent does an informal proletariat possess that most potent of Marxist talismans: "historical agency"?

...

The rulers' imagination, moreover, seems to falter before the obvious implications of a world of cities without jobs. True, neoliberal optimism is dogged by a certain quotient of Malthusian pessimism, perhaps best illustrated by the apocalyptic travel writing of Robert D. Kaplan (The Ends of the Earth and The Coming Anarcby). But most of the deep thinkers at the big American and European policy think tanks and international relations institutes have yet to wrap their minds around the geopolitical implications of a "planet of slums." More successful - probably because they don't have to reconcile neoliberal dogma to
neoliberal reality - have been the strategists and tactical planners at the Air Force Academy, the Army's RAND Arroyo Center, and the Marines' Quantico (Virginia) Warfighting Laboratory. Indeed, in the absence of other paradigms, the Pentagon has evolved its own distinctive perspective on global urban poverty.

The Mogadishu debacle of 1 993, when slum militias inflicted 60 percent casualties on elite Army Rangers, forced military theoreticians to rethink what is known in Pentagonese as MOUT: "Military Operations on Urbanized Terrain." Ultimately a National Defense Panel review in December 1997 castigated the Army as unprepared for protracted combat in the nearly impassable, mazelike streets of poor Third World cities. All the armed services, coordinated by the Joint Urban Operations Training Working Group, launched crash programs to master street-fighting under realistic slum conditions. "The future of warfare," the journal of the Army War College declared, " lies in the streets, sewers, highrise buildings, and sprawl of houses that form the broken cities of the world . . . . Our recent military history is punctuated with city names - uzla, Mogadishu, Los Angeles , Beirut, Panama City, Hue, Saigon, Santo Domingo - but these encounters have been but a prologue, with the real drama still to come.

One of the most important RAND projects, initiated in the early 1990s, has been a major study of " how demographic changes will affect future conflict." The bottom line, RAND finds, is that the urbanization of world poverty has produced "the urbanization of insurgency" - the title of their report. "Insurgents are following their followers into the cities," RAND warns, "setting up 'liberated zones' in urban shantytowns.
Neither U.S. doctrine, nor training, nor equipment is designed for urban counterinsurgency." The RAND researchers focus on the example of EI Salvador during the 1980s, where the local military, despite massive support from Washington, was unable to stop FMLN guerrillas from opening an urban front. Indeed, "had the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front rebels effectively operated within the cities earlier in the insurgency, it is questionable how much the United States could have done to help maintain even the stalemate between the government and the insurgents." The mega-slum, the researchers clearly imply, has become the weakest link in the new world order.

...

In summary, the Pentagon's best minds have dared to venture where most United Nations, World Bank or Department of State types fear to go: down the road that logically follows from the abdication of urban reform. As in the past, this is a "street without joy:' and, indeed, the unemployed teenage fighters of the 'Mahdi Army' in Baghdad's Sadr City - one of the world's largest slums - taunt American occupiers with the promise that their main boulevard is "Vietnam Street." But the war planners don't blench. With coldblooded lucidity, they now assert that the "feral, failed cities" of the Third World - especially their slum outskirts - will be the distinctive battlespace of the twenty-first century. Pentagon doctrine is being reshaped accordingly to support a low-intensity world war of unlimited duration against criminalized
segments of the urban poor. This is the true "clash of civilizations."

MOUT doctrine - according to Stephen Graham, who has written extensively on the geography of urban warfare - is thus the highest stage of Orientalism, the culmination of a long history of defining theWest by opposition to a hallucinatory Eastern Other. According to Stephen Graham, this dichotomizing ideology - now raised to "moral absolutism" by the Bush administration - "works by separating the 'civilised world' - the 'homeland' cities which must be 'defended' - from the 'dark forces,' the 'axis of evil,' and the 'terrorists' nests' of Islamic cities, which are alleged to sustain the 'evildoers' which threaten the health, prosperity, and democracy of the whole of the 'free' world." This delusionary dialectic of securitized versus demonic urban places, in turn, dictates a sinister and unceasing duet: Night after night, hornetlike helicopter gunships stalk enigmatic enemies in the narrow streets of the slum districts, pouring hellfire into shanties or fleeing cars. Every morning the slums reply with suicide bombers and eloquent explosions. If the empire can deploy Orwellian technologies of repression,its outcasts have the gods of chaos on their side.