The Imperial City and the City of Slums (Part 2)
Mumbai slum, not the worst, by far.
A Tomdispatch Interview with Mike Davis (Part 2)
Mike Davis interviewed by Tom Engelhardt | May 12, 2006
TomDispatch
Victorian England under a triumphant laissez-faire…Wretched houses with broken windows patched with rags and paper; every room let out to a different family, and in many instances to two or even three – fruit and ‘sweetstuff’ manufacturers in the cellars, barbers and red-herring vendors in the front parlours, cobblers in the back; a bird-fancier in the first floor, three families on the second, starvation in the attics, Irishmen in the passage, a ‘musician’ in the front kitchen, a charwoman and five hungry children in the back one – filth everywhere – a gutter before the houses, and a drain behind – clothes drying, and slops emptying from the windows; … men and women, in every variety of scanty and dirty apparel, lounging, scolding, drinking, smoking, squabbling, fighting, and swearing.
Charles Dickens, Sketches by Boz, 1839 on St Giles Rookery
TD: It occurs to me that, in Baghdad, the Bush administration has managed to create a weird version of the urban world you describe in Planet of Slums. There’s the walled imperial Green Zone in the center of the city with its Starbucks and, outside it, the disintegrating capital as well as the vast slum of Sadr City — and the only exchange between the two is the missile-armed helicopters going one way and the car bombs heading the other. [Read more →]
