Chapter 22 - Greatest Accelerations II: Shacks and Citadels

Summary

Chapter 22 of Earthopolis: A Biography of Our Urban Planet is the second in a four-chapter series on the Greatest Acceleration from 1945 to the present. It focuses on the intensifying worldwide struggle over urban land and housing. As a billion migrants from the countryside joined rapidly expanding urban populations, enormous largely self-built cities of the poor grew on the peripheries of the world’s cities, especially in the Global South. There, the sheer numbers of poor migrants met up against states eager to transform cities into exemplars of national and developmental prowess and global finance and real estate capitalists eager to make profit on urban land – above all by developing luxury enclaves for elites and the middle class. As land prices soared and urban real estate became the second-most lucrative form of global investment, these elites weaponized a long-standing vocabulary of contempt for the poor, centered on words like “slum” and “informality.” While diminishing their stocks of affordable state housing, they also justified massive waves of “slum clearance” in the name of sanitation and “beautification.” Their goal was to create “World Cities” capable of attracting investment from prominent capitals of global capital such as New York, London, and Tokyo.