Attached are a couple of readings that can be used to complete this assignment.

Short essay (100 points)

Instructions:

            Write a 1000-word (two pages single spaced, 12-point Times New Roman font, 1-inch margins) essay that discusses the links between coronavirus and core themes we have been studying this term. You can draw on articles posted in the “second essay” link on the group discussion page, as well as course materials and other relevant sources. To give you guidance your essay should answer the following questions:

1. How has the coronavirus epidemic been facilitated through infrastructurally-mediated social and environmental changes of the Anthropocene?
2. How are the impacts of the coronavirus epidemic socially and spatially differentiated? In other words, who, if anyone, is disproportionately impacted and why?
3. How do these differential impacts reflect the uneven power relations that determine the distribution of risks, harms and benefits in the Anthropocene?

A Global Sense
Of Place

The world is increasingly dominated
by movement – of people, images
and information. Doreen Massey

examines the nature of mobility in
the era of globalisation and what this

means for our sense of place

T
his is an era – it is often said –

when things are speeding up,
and spreading out. Capital is
going through a new phase of

internationalisation, especially in its
financial parts. More people travel
more frequently and for longer dis¬
tances. Your clothes have probably
been made in a range of countries from
Latin America to South East Asia.
Dinner consists of food shipped in from
all over the world. And if you have a
screen in your office, instead of opening
a letter which – care of Her Majesty’s
Post Office – has taken some days to
wend its way across the country, you
now get interrupted by e-mail.
This view of the current age is one now

frequently found in a wide range of
books and journals. Much of what is
written about space, place and post¬
modern times emphasises a new phase
in what Marx once called ‘the annihila¬
tion of space by time’. The process is
argued, or – more usually – asserted, to
have gained a new momentum, to have
reached a new stage. It is a phenomenon
which has been called ‘time-space-
compression’. And the general accept¬
ance that something of the sort is going
on is marked by the almost obligatory
use in the literature of terms and
phrases such as speed-up, global vil¬
lage, overcoming spatial barriers, the
disruption of horizons, and so forth.

One of the results of this is an increas¬
ing uncertainty about what we mean by
‘places’ and how we relate to them.
How, in the face of all this movement
and intermixing, can we retain any
sense of a local place and its particu¬
larity? An (idealised) notion of an era
when places were (supposedly) in¬
habited by coherent and homogeneous
communities is set against the current
fragmentation and disruption. The
counterposition is anyway dubious, of
course; ‘place’ and ‘community’ have
only rarely been coterminous. But the
occasional longing for such coherence
is nonetheless a sign of the geograph¬
ical fragmentation, the spatial disrup¬
tion, of our times. And occasionally, too,
it has been part of what has given rise to
defensive and reactionary responses –
certain forms of nationalism, sentimen¬
talised recovering of sanitised ‘herit¬
ages’, and outright antagonism to new¬
comers and ‘outsiders’. One of the ef¬
fects of such responses is that place
itself, the seeking after a sense of place,
has come to be seen by some as neces¬
sarily reactionary.
But is that necessarily so? Can’t we

re-think our sense of place? Is it not
possible for a sense of place to be prog¬
ressive; not self-enclosing and defens¬
ive, but outward-looking? A sense of
place which is adequate to this era of
time-space-compression? To begin with,

there are some questions to be asked
about time-space-compression itself.
Who is it that experiences it, and how?
Do we all benefit and suffer from it in
the same way?
For instance, to what extent does the

currently popular characterisation of
time-space-compression represent very
much a Western, coloniser’s, view? The
sense of dislocation which some feel at
the sight of a once well-known local
street now lined with a succession of
cultural imports – the pizzeria, the
kebab house, the branch of the Middle-
Eastern bank – must have been felt for
centuries, though from a very different
point of view, by colonised peoples all
over the world as they watched the im-
portation, maybe even used, the products
of, first, European colonisation, maybe
British (from new forms of transport to
liver salts and custard powder), later
US, as they learned to eat wheat instead
of rice or corn, to drink Coca Cola, just
as today we try out enchiladas.

oreover, as well as query-
ing the ethnocentricity of
the idea of time-space-
compression and its cur-

rent acceleration, we also need to ask
about its causes: what is it that deter-
mines our degrees of mobility, that in-
fluences the sense we have of space and
place? Time-space-compression refers
to movement and communication
across space, to the geographical
stretching-out of social relations, and to
our experience of all this. The usual
interpretation is that it results over-
whelmingly from the actions of capital,
and from its currently-increasing inter-
nationalisation. On this interpretation,
then, it is time space and money which
make the world go round, and us go
round (or not) the world. It is capitalism
and its developments which are argued
to determine our understanding and our
experience of space.
But surely this is insufficient. Among

the many other things which clearly
influence that experience, there are, for
instance, race and gender. The degree
to which we can move between coun-
tries, or walk about the streets at night,
or venture out of hotels in foreign cities,
is not just influenced by ‘capital’. Sur-
vey after survey has shown how women’s
mobility, for instance, is restricted – in
a thousand different ways, from phy-
sical violence to being ogled at or made
to feel quite simply ‘out of place’ – not
by ‘capital’, but by men. Or, to take a
more complicated example, Birkett, re-
viewing books on women adventurers
and travellers in the 19th and 20th cent-
uries, suggests that ‘it is far, far more
demanding for a woman to wander now
than ever before’.1 The reasons she
gives for this argument are a complex
mix of colonialism, ex-colonialism,
racism, changing gender-relations, and
relative wealth. A simple resort to
explanation in terms of ‘money’ or ‘capi-
tal’ alone could not begin to get to grips
with the issue. The current speed-up
may be strongly determined by econo-
mic forces, but it is not the economy

24 MARXISM TODAY JUNE 1991

‘The seeking
after a sense
of place has
come to be

seen by
some as

necessarily
reactionary’

Moving at a different pace: Travelling down to earth from the global perspective, control
over mobility both reflects and reinforces power

alone which determines our experience
of space and place. In other words, and
put simply, there is a lot more determin¬
ing how we experience space than what
‘capital’ gets up to.

What is more, of course, that last
example indicated that ‘time-space-
compression’ has not been happening
for everyone in all spheres of activity.
Birkett again, this time writing of the
Pacific Ocean: ‘Jumbos have enabled
Korean computer consultants to fly to
Silicon Valley as if popping next door,
and Singaporean entrepreneurs to
reach Seattle in a day. The borders of
the world’s greatest ocean have been
joined as never before. And Boeing has
brought these people together. But
what about those they fly over, on their
islands five miles below? How has the
mighty 747 brought them greater com¬
munion with those whose shores are
washed by the same water? It hasn’t, of
course. Air travel might enable business¬
men to buzz across the ocean, but the
concurrent decline in shipping has only
increased the isolation of many island
communities… Pitcairn, like many other
Pacific islands, has never felt so far
from its neighbours.’2

In other words, and most broadly,
time-space-compression needs diffe¬
rentiating socially. This is not just a
moral or political point about inequ¬
ality, although that would be sufficient
reason to mention it; it is also a concep¬
tual point.

Imagine for a moment that you are on a
satellite, further out and beyond all ac¬
tual satellites; you can see ‘planet earth’
from a distance and, rarely for someone
with only peaceful intentions, you are
equipped with the kind of technology
which allows you to see the colours of
people’s eyes and the numbers on their
numberplates. You can see all the move¬
ment and tune-in to all the communi¬
cation that is going on. Furthest out are
the satellites, then aeroplanes, the long
haul between London and Tokyo and the
hop from San Salvador to Guatemala
City. Some of this is people moving,
some of it is physical trade, some is
media broadcasting. There are faxes,
e-mail, film-distribution networks, finan¬
cial flows and transactions. Look in
closer and there are ships and trains,
steam trains slogging laboriously up
hills somewhere in Asia. Look in closer
still and there are lorries and cars and
buses, and on down further, somewhere
in sub-Saharan Africa, there’s a woman
on foot who still spends hours a day
collecting water.

Now, I want to make one simple point
here, and that is about what one might
call the power-geometry of it all; the
power geometry of time-space com¬
pression. For different social groups,
and different individuals, are placed in
very distinct ways in relation to these
flows and interconnections. This point
concerns not merely the issue of who
moves and who doesn’t, although that is
an important element of it; it is also
about power in relation to the flows and

25 MARXISM TODAY JUNE 1991

the movement. Different social groups
have distinct relationships to this any-
way differentiated mobility: some
people are more in charge of it than
others; some initiate flows and move¬
ment, others don’t; some are more on
the receiving-end of it than others;
some are effectively imprisoned by it.
In a sense at the end of all the spectra

are those who are both doing the moving
and the communicating and who are in
some way in a position of control in
relation to it – the jet-setters, the ones
sending and receiving the faxes and the
e-mail, holding the international confer¬
ence calls, the ones distributing the
films, controlling the news, organising
the investments and the international
currency transactions. These are the
groups who are really in a sense in
charge of time-space-compression, who
can really use it and turn it to advan¬
tage, whose power and influence it very
definitely increases. On its more
prosaic fringes this group probably in¬
cludes a fair number of Western acade¬
mics and journalists – those, in other
words, who write most about it.
But there are also groups who are also

doing a lot of physical moving, but who
are not ‘in charge’ of the process in the
same way at all. The refugees from El
Salvador or Guatemala and the un¬
documented migrant workers from
Michoacan in Mexico, crowding into
Tijuana to make a perhaps fatal dash for
it across the border into the US to grab a
chance of a new life. Here the exper¬
ience of movement, and indeed of a
confusing plurality of cultures, is very
different. And there are those from In¬
dia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, the Carib¬
bean, who come half way round the
world only to get held up in an inter¬
rogation room at Heathrow.
Or – a different case again – there are

those who are simply on the receiving
end of time-space-compression. The
pensioner in a bed-sit in any inner city
in this country, eating British working-
class-style fish and chips from a Chin¬
ese take-away, watching a US film on a
Japanese television; and not daring to
go out after dark. And anyway the
public transport’s been cut.
Or – one final example to illustrate a

different kind of complexity – there
are the people who live in the favelas of
Rio, who know global football like the
back of their hand, and have produced
some of its players; who have contri¬
buted massively to global music, who
gave us the samba and produced the
lambada that everyone was dancing to
last year in the clubs of Paris and Lon¬
don; and who have never, or hardly
ever, been to downtown Rio. At one
level they have been tremendous con¬
tributors to what we call time-space-
compression; and at another level they
are imprisoned in it.
This is, in other words, a highly com¬

plex social differentiation. There are
differences in the degree of movement
and communication, but also in the
degree of control and of initiation. The
ways in which people are placed within

‘time-space-compression’ are highly
complicated and extremely varied.
But this in turn immediately raises

questions of politics. If time-space-
compression can be imagined in that
more socially formed, socially evalu¬
ative and differentiated way, then there
may be here the possibility of develop¬
ing a politics of mobility and access. For
it does seem that mobility and control
over mobility both reflects and re¬
inforces power. It is not simply a ques¬
tion of unequal distribution, that some
people move more than others, and that
some have more control than others. It
is that the mobility and control of some
groups can actively weaken other
people. Differential mobility can weaken
the leverage of the already weak. The
time-space-compression of some groups
can undermine the power of others.

T
his is well established and of¬

ten noted in the relationship
between capital and labour.
Capital’s ability to roam the

world further strengthens it in relation
to relatively immobile workers, enables
it to play off the plant at Genk against
the plant at Dagenham. It also streng¬
thens its hand against struggling local
economies the world over as they com¬
pete for the favour of some investment.
The 747s that fly computer scientists
across the Pacific are part of the reason
for the greater isolation today of the
island of Pitcairn. But also, every time
someone uses a car, and thereby in¬
creases their personal mobility, they
reduce both the social rationale and the
financial viability of the public trans¬
port system – and thereby also poten¬
tially reduce the mobility of those who
rely on that system. Every time you
drive to that out-of-town shopping
centre you contribute to the rising
prices, even hasten the demise, of the
corner shop. And the ‘time-space-
compression’ which is involved in pro¬
ducing and reproducing the daily lives
of the comfortably-off in First World
societies – not just their own travel but
the resources they draw on, from all
over the world, to feed their lives – may
entail environmental consequences, or
hit constraints, which will limit the lives
of others before their own. We need to
ask, in other words, whether our relat¬
ive mobility and power over mobility
and communication entrenches the spa¬
tial imprisonment of other groups.

But this way of thinking about time-space-
compression also returns us to the ques¬
tion of place and a sense of place. How,
in the context of all these socially-
varied time-space-changes do we think
about ‘places’? In an era when, it is
argued, ‘local communities’ seem to be
increasingly broken up, when you can
go abroad and find the same shops, the
same music as at home, or eat your
favourite foreign-holiday food at a rest-
urant down the road – and when every¬
one has a different experience of all this
– how then do we think about ‘locality’?
Many of those who write about time-

space-compression emphasise the inse-

‘Every time
you drive to

the
out-of-town

shopping
centre you

contribute to
the rising

prices, even
hasten the
demise, of
the corner

shop’

curity and unsettling impact of its ef¬
fects, the feelings of vulnerability
which it can produce. Some therefore
go on from this to argue that, in the
middle of all this flux, people desp¬
erately need a bit of peace and quiet –
and that a strong sense of place, of
locality, can form one kind of refuge
from the hubbub. So the search after the
‘real’ meanings of places, the unear¬
thing of heritages and so forth, is in¬
terpreted as being, in part, a response to
desire for fixity and for security of
identity in the middle of all the move¬
ment and change. A ‘sense of place’, of
rootedness, can provide – in this form
and on this interpretation – stability
and a source of unproblematical iden¬
tity. In that guise, however, place and
the spatially local are then rejected by
many progressive people as almost
necessarily reactionary. They are in¬
terpreted as an evasion; as a retreat
from the (actually unavoidable) dy¬
namic and change of ‘real life’, which is
what we must seize if we are to change
things for the better. On this reading,
place and locality are foci for a form of
romanticised escapism from the real
business of the world. While ‘time’ is
equated with movement and progress,
‘space’/’place’ is equated with stasis and
reaction.
There are some serious inadequacies

in this argument. There is the question
of why it is assumed that time-space-
compression will produce insecurity.
There is the need to face up to – rather
than simply deny – people’s need for
attachment of some sort, whether
through place or anything else. None¬
theless, it is certainly the case that
there is indeed at the moment a recru¬
descence of some very problematical
senses of place, from reactionary nation¬
alisms, to competitive localisms, to in¬
troverted obsessions with ‘heritage’.
We need, therefore, to think through
what might be an adequately progress¬
ive sense of place, one which would fit
in with the current global-local times
and the feelings and relations they give
rise to, and which would be useful in
what are, after all, political struggles
often inevitably based on place. The
question is how to hold on to that notion
of geographical difference, of unique¬
ness, even of rootedness if people want
that, without it being reactionary.

T
here are a number of distinct

ways in which the ‘reaction¬
ary’ notion of place described
above is problematical. One is

the idea that places have single, essen¬
tial, identities. Another is the idea that
identity of place – the sense of place –
is constructed out of an introverted,
inward-looking history based on delv¬
ing into the past for internalised ori¬
gins, translating the name from the
Domesday Book. Thus Wright recounts
the construction and appropriation of
Stoke Newington and its past by the
arriving middle class (the Domesday
Book registers the place as ‘Newtowne’…
‘There is land for two ploughs and a
half… There are four villanes and thirty

26 MARXISM TODAY JUNE 1991

seven cottagers with ten acres’, pp 227
and 231), and contrasts this version with
that of other groups – the white work¬
ing class and the large number of im¬
portant minority communities.3A parti¬
cular problem with this conception of
place is that it seems to require the
drawing of boundaries. Geographers
have long been exercised by the prob¬
lem of defining regions, and this ques¬
tion of ‘definition* has almost always
been reduced to the issue of drawing
lines around a place. I remember some
of my most painful times as a geo¬
grapher have been spent unwillingly
struggling to think how one could draw
a boundary around somewhere like the
‘East Midlands’. But that kind of bound¬
ary around an area precisely dis¬
tinguishes between an inside and an
outside. It can so easily be yet another
way of constructing a counterposition
between ‘us’ and ‘them’.
And yet if one considers almost any

real place, and certainly one not defined
primarily by administrative or political
boundaries, these supposed character¬
istics have little real purchase.
Take, for instance, a walk down Kil-

burn High Road, my local shopping cen¬
tre. It is a pretty ordinary place, north
west of the centre of London. Under the
railway bridge the newspaper stand
sells papers from every county of what
my neighbours, many of whom come
from there, still often call the Irish Free
State. The postboxes down the High
Road, and many an empty space on a
wall, are adorned with the letters IRA.
Other available spaces are plastered
this week with posters for a special
meeting in remembrance: Ten Years
after the Hunger Strike. At the local
theatre Eamon Morrissey has a one-
man show; the National Club has the
Wolfe Tones on, and at the Black Lion
there’s Finnegan’s Wake. In two shops I
notice this week’s lottery ticket
winners: in one the name is Teresa
Gleeson, in the other, Chouman Hassan.
Thread your way through the often

almost stationary traffic diagonally
across the road from the newsstand and
there’s a shop which as long as I can
remember has displayed saris in the
window. Four life-sized models of In¬
dian women, and reams of cloth. On the
door a notice announces a forthcoming
concert at Wembley Arena: Anand Mi-
land presents Rekha, live, with Aamir
Khan, Salman Khan, Jahi Chawla and
Raveena Tandon. On another ad, for the
end of the month, is written ‘All Hindus
are cordially invited’. In another newsa¬
gents I chat with the man who keeps it, a
Muslim unutterably depressed by
events in the Gulf, silently chafing at
having to sell The Sun. Overhead there
is always at least one aeroplane – we
seem to be on a flight-path to Heathrow
and by the time they’re over Kilburn
you can see them clearly enough to tell
the airline and wonder as you struggle
with your shopping where they’re com¬
ing from. Below, the reason the traffic
is snarled up (another odd effect of
time-space-compression!) is in part

‘If it is now
recognised
that people

have
multiple
identities
then the

same point
can be made
in relation to

places’

because this is one of the main en¬
trances to and escape-routes from Lon¬
don, the road to Staples Corner and the
beginning of the Ml to the North.
This is just the beginnings of a sketch

from immediate impressions but a pro¬
per analysis could be done, of the links
between Kilburn and the world. And so
it could for almost any place.
Kilburn is a place for which I have a

great affection; I have lived there many
years. It certainly has ‘a character of its
own’. But it is possible to feel all this
without subscribing to any of the static
and defensive – and in that sense reac¬
tionary – notions of ‘place’ which were
referred to above. First, while Kilburn
may have a character of its own, it is
absolutely not a seamless, coherent
identity, a single sense of place which
everyone shares. It could hardly be less
so. People’s routes through the place,
their favourite haunts within it, the con¬
nections they make (physically, or by
phone or post, or in memory and imag¬
ination) between here and the rest of the
world vary enormously. If it is now
recognised that people have multiple
identities then the same point can be
made in relation to places. Moreover,
such multiple identities can either be a
source of richness or a source of con¬
flict, or both.

ne of the problems here has
been a persistent identifica-
tion of place with ‘commu¬
nity’. Yet this is a misidenti-

fication. On the one hand communities
can exist without being in the same
place – from networks of friends with
like interests, to major religious, ethnic
or political communities. On the other
hand, the instances of places housing
single ‘communities’ in the sense of
coherent social groups are probably –
and, I would argue, have for long been –
quite rare. Moreover, even where they
do exist this in no way implies a single
sense of place. For people occupy diffe¬
rent positions within any community.
We could counterpose to the chaotic
mix of Kilburn the relatively stable and
homogeneous community (at least in
popular imagery) of a small mining vill¬
age. Homogeneous? ‘Communities’ too
have internal structures. To take the
most obvious example, I’m sure a wo¬
man’s sense of place in a mining village
– the spaces through which she
normally moves, the meeting places,
the connections outside – are different
from a man’s. Their ‘senses of the place’
will be different.
Moreover, not only does ‘Kilburn’,

then, have many identities (or its full
identity is a complex mix of all these) it
is also, looked at in this way, absolutely
not introverted. It is (or ought to be)
impossible even to begin thinking about
Kilburn High Road without bringing
into play half the world and a consider¬
able amount of British imperialist his¬
tory (and this certainly goes for mining
villages too). Imagining it this way pro¬
vokes in you (or at least in me) a really
global sense of place.
And finally, in contrasting this way of

looking at places with the defensive reac¬
tionary view, I certainly could not begin
to, nor would I want to, define ‘Kilburn’
by drawing its enclosing boundaries.

So, at this point in the argument, get back
in your mind’s eye on a satellite; go
right out again and look back at the
globe. This time, however, imagine not
just all the physical movement, nor
even all the often invisible communi¬
cations, but also and especially all the
social relations, all the links between
people. Fill it in with all those different
experiences of time-space-compression.
For what is happening is that the
geography of social relations is chang¬
ing. In many cases such relations are
increasingly stretched out over space.
Economic, political and cultural social
relations, each full of power and with
internal structures of domination and
subordination, stretched out over the
planet at every different level, from
the household to the local area to the
international.
It is from that perspective that it is

possible to envisage an alternative in¬
terpretation of place. In this interpreta¬
tion, what gives a place its specificity is
not some long internalised history but
the fact that it is constructed out of a
particular constellation of social rela¬
tions, meeting and weaving together at
a particular locus. If one moves in from
the satellite towards the globe, holding
all those networks of social relations
and movements and communications in
one’s head, then each ‘place’ can be seen
as a particular, unique, point of their
intersection. It is, indeed, a meeting
place. Instead then, of thinking of pla¬
ces as areas with boundaries around,
they can be imagined as articulated
moments in networks of social relations
and understandings, but where a large
proportion of those relations, exper¬
iences and understandings are con¬
structed on a far larger scale than what
we happen to define for that moment as
the place itself, whether that be a street,
or a region or even a continent. And this
in turn allows a sense of place which is
extroverted, which includes a con¬
sciousness of its links with the wider
world, which integrates in a positive
way the global and the local.
This is not a question of making the

ritualistic connections to ‘the wider sys¬
tem’ – the people in the local meeting
who bring up international capitalism
every time you try to have a discussion
about rubbish-collection – the point is
that there are real relations with real
content – economic, political, cultural
– between any local place and the wider
world in which it is set. In economic
geography the argument has long been
accepted that it is not possible to under¬
stand the ‘inner city’, for instance its
loss of jobs, the decline of manufactur¬
ing employment there, by looking only
at the inner city. Any adequate explan¬
ation has to set the inner city in its wider
geographical context. Perhaps it is
appropriate to think how that kind of
understanding could be extended to the

28 MARXISM TODAY JUNE 1991

notion of a sense of place.
These arguments, then, highlight a

number of ways in which a progressive
concept of place might be developed.
First of all, it is absolutely not static. If
places can be conceptualised in terms
of the social interactions which they tie
together, then it is also the case that
these interactions themselves are not
motionless things, frozen in time. They
are processes. One of the great one-
liners in marxist exchanges has for long
been ‘ah, but capital is not a thing, it’s a
process’. Perhaps this should be said
also about places; that places are pro¬
cesses, too.

S
econd, places do not have to

have boundaries in the sense
of divisions which frame
simple enclosures. ‘Bound¬

aries’ may of course be necessary, for
the purposes of certain types of studies
for instance, but they are not necessary
for the conceptualisation of a place it¬
self. Definition in this sense does not
have to be through simple counterpos-
ition to the outside; it can come, in part,
precisely through the particularity of
linkage to that ‘outside’ which is there¬
fore itself part of what constitutes the
place. This helps get away from the
common association between penetra¬
bility and vulnerability. For it is this
kind of association which makes inva¬
sion by newcomers so threatening.
Third, clearly places do not have

single, unique ‘identities’; they are full
of internal conflicts. Just think, for

instance, about London’s Docklands, a
place which is at the moment quite
clearly defined by conflict: a conflict
over what its past has been (the nature
of its ‘heritage’), conflict over what
should be its present development, con¬
flict over what could be its future.
Fourth, and finally, none of this denies

place nor the importance of the unique¬
ness of place. The specificity of place is
continually reproduced, but it is not a
specificity which results from some
long, internalised history. There are a
number of sources of this specificity –
the uniqueness of place.4 There is the
fact that the wider social relations in
which places are set are themselves
geographically differentiated. Global¬
isation (in the economy, or in culture, or
in anything else) does not entail simply
homogenisation. On the contrary, the
globalisation of social relations is yet
another source of (the reproduction of)
geographical uneven development, and
thus of the uniqueness of place. There is
the specificity of place which derives
from the fact that each place is the
focus of a distinct mixture of wider and
more local social relations. There is the
fact that this very mixture together in
one place may produce effects which
would not have happened otherwise.
And finally, all these relations interact
with and take a further element of spec¬
ificity from the accumulated history of
a place, with that history itself ima¬
gined as the product of layer upon layer
of different sets of linkages, both local

‘Instead of
thinking of

places as
areas with
boundaries

around,they
can be

imagined as
articulated
moments in
networks of

social
relations’

and to the wider world.
In her portrait of Corsica, Granite Is¬

land, Dorothy Carrington travels the
island seeking out the roots of its char¬
acter.5 All the different layers of
peoples and cultures are explored; the
long and tumultuous relationship with
France, with Genoa and Aragon in the
13th, 14th and 15th centuries, back
through the much earlier incorporation
into the Byzantine Empire, and before
that domination by the Vandals, before
that being part of the Roman Empire,
before that the colonisation and settle¬
ments of the Carthaginians and the
Greeks… until we find… that even the
megalith builders had come to Corsica
from somewhere else.
It is a sense of place, an understanding

of ‘its character’, which can only be
constructed by linking that place to
places beyond. A progressive sense of
place would recognise that, without be¬
ing threatened by it. What we need, it
seems to me, is a global sense of the
local, a global sense of place.#

1. D Birkett, New Statesman And Society, 13 June
1990, pp 41-2.
2. D Birkett, New Statesman And Society, IS March
1991, p 38.
3. P Wright, On Living In An Old Country, Verso,
1985.
4. D Massey, Spatial Divisions Of Labour: Social
Structures And The Geography Of Production, Mac-
millan, 1984.
5. D Carrington, Granite Island: A Portrait Of Corsica,
Penguin.

Doreen Massey is the professor of
geography at the Open University.

The Environmental Transport Association is supported by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF)

29 MARXISM TODAY JUNE 1991

new left review 26 mar apr 2004 5

mike davis

P L A N E T O F S L U M S

Urban Involution and the Informal Proletariat

S
ometime in the next year, a woman will give birth in the
Lagos slum of Ajegunle, a young man will flee his village
in west Java for the bright lights of Jakarta, or a farmer will
move his impoverished family into one of Lima’s innumerable

pueblos jovenes. The exact event is unimportant and it will pass entirely
unnoticed. Nonetheless it will constitute a watershed in human history.
For the first time the urban population of the earth will outnumber
the rural. Indeed, given the imprecisions of Third World censuses, this
epochal transition may already have occurred.

The earth has urbanized even faster than originally predicted by the
Club of Rome in its notoriously Malthusian 1972 report, Limits of
Growth. In 1950 there were 86 cities in the world with a population
over one million; today there are 400, and by 2015, there will be at
least 550.1 Cities, indeed, have absorbed nearly two-thirds of the global
population explosion since 1950 and are currently growing by a million
babies and migrants each week.2 The present urban population (3.2 bil-
lion) is larger than the total population of the world in 1960. The global
country side, meanwhile, has reached its maximum population (3.2 bil-
lion) and will begin to shrink after 2020. As a result, cities will account
for all future world population growth, which is expected to peak at
about 10 billion in 2050.3

6 nlr 26

1. the urban climacteric

Where are the heroes, the colonisers, the victims of the Metropolis?
Brecht, Diary entry, 1921

Ninety-five per cent of this final buildout of humanity will occur in the
urban areas of developing countries, whose population will double to
nearly 4 billion over the next generation.4 (Indeed, the combined urban
population of China, India and Brazil already roughly equals that of
Europe plus North America.) The most celebrated result will be the
burgeoning of new megacities with populations in excess of 8 million,
and, even more spectacularly, hypercities with more than 20 million
inhabitants (the estimated urban population of the world at the time of
the French Revolution).5 In 1995 only Tokyo had incontestably reached
that threshold. By 2025, according to the Far Eastern Economic Review,
Asia alone could have ten or eleven conurbations that large, including
Jakarta (24.9 million), Dhaka (25 million) and Karachi (26.5 million).
Shanghai, whose growth was frozen for decades by Maoist policies of
deliberate under-urbanization, could have as many as 27 million resi-
dents in its huge estuarial metro-region.6 Mumbai (Bombay) meanwhile
is projected to attain a population of 33 million, although no one knows
whether such gigantic concentrations of poverty are biologically or eco-
logically sustainable.7

1 un Population Division, World Urbanization Prospects, the 2001 Revision, New York
2002.
2 Population Information Program, Population Reports: Meeting the Urban Challenge,
vol. xxx, no. 4, Fall 2002, p. 1.
3 Wolfgang Lutz, Warren Sandeson and Sergei Scherbov, ‘Doubling of world popu-
lation unlikely’, Nature 387, 19 June 1997, pp. 803–4. However the populations of
sub-Saharan Africa will triple and India, double.
4 Global Urban Observatory, Slums of the World: The face of urban poverty in the new
millennium?, New York 2003, p. 10.
5 Although the velocity of global urbanization is not in doubt, the growth rates of
specific cities may brake abruptly as they encounter the frictions of size and cong-
estion. A famous instance of such a ‘polarization reversal’ is Mexico City: widely
predicted to achieve a population of 25 million during the 1990s (the current popu-
lation is probably about 18 or 19 million). See Yue-man Yeung, ‘Geography in an
age of mega-cities’, International Social Sciences Journal 151, 1997, p. 93.
6 For a perspective, see Yue-Man Yeung, ‘Viewpoint: Integration of the Pearl River
Delta’, International Development Planning Review, vol. 25, no. 3, 2003.
7 Far Eastern Economic Review, Asia 1998 Yearbook, p. 63.

davis: Planet of Slums 7

But if megacities are the brightest stars in the urban firmament, three-
quarters of the burden of population growth will be borne by faintly visible
second-tier cities and smaller urban areas: places where, as un research-
ers emphasize, ‘there is little or no planning to accommodate these people
or provide them with services.’8 In China (officially 43 per cent urban in
1997), the number of official cities has soared from 193 to 640 since 1978.
But the great metropolises, despite extraordinary growth, have actually
declined in relative share of urban population. It is, rather, the small cities
and recently ‘citized’ towns that have absorbed the majority of the rural
labour-power made redundant by post-1979 market reforms.9 In Africa,
likewise, the supernova-like growth of a few giant cities like Lagos (from
300,000 in 1950 to 10 million today) has been matched by the trans-
formation of several dozen small towns and oases like Ouagadougou,
Nouakchott, Douala, Antananarivo and Bamako into cities larger than
San Francisco or Manchester. In Latin America, where primary cities long
monopolized growth, secondary cities like Tijuana, Curitiba, Temuco,
Salvador and Belém are now booming, ‘with the fastest growth of all
occurring in cities with between 100,000 and 500,000 inhabitants.’10

Moreover, as Gregory Guldin has urged, urbanization must be concep-
tualized as structural transformation along, and intensified interaction
between, every point of an urban–rural continuum. In his case-study
of southern China, the countryside is urbanizing in situ as well as
genera ting epochal migrations. ‘Villages become more like market and
xiang towns, and county towns and small cities become more like
large cities.’ The result in China and much of Southeast Asia is a
hermaphro ditic landscape, a partially urbanized countryside that Guldin
and others argue may be ‘a significant new path of human settlement
and develop ment . . . a form neither rural nor urban but a blending
of the two wherein a dense web of transactions ties large urban cores
to their surrounding regions.’11 In Indonesia, where a similar process

8 un-Habitat, The Challenge of the Slums: Global Report on Human Settlements 2003,
London 2003, p. 3.
9 Gregory Guldin, What’s a Peasant to Do? Village Becoming Town in Southern China,
Boulder, co 2001, p. 13.
10 Miguel Villa and Jorge Rodriguez, ‘Demographic trends in Latin America’s
metropolises, 1950–1990’, in Alan Gilbert, ed., The Mega-City in Latin America,
Tokyo 1996, pp. 33–4.
11 Guldin, Peasant, pp. 14, 17. See also Jing Neng Li, ‘Structural and Spatial Economic
changes and their Effects on Recent Urbanization in China’, in Gavin Jones and
Pravin Visaria, eds, Urbanization in Large Developing Countries, Oxford 1997, p. 44.

8 nlr 26

of rural/urban hybridization is far advanced in Jabotabek (the greater
Jakarta region), researchers call these novel land-use patterns desokotas
and debate whether they are transitional landscapes or a dramatic new
species of urbanism.12

Urbanists also speculate about the processes weaving together Third
World cities into extraordinary new networks, corridors and hierarchies.
For example, the Pearl River (Hong Kong–Guangzhou) and the Yangtze
River (Shanghai) deltas, along with the Beijing–Tianjin corridor, are
rapidly developing into urban-industrial megalopolises comparable to
Tokyo–Osaka, the lower Rhine, or New York–Philadelphia. But this may
only be the first stage in the emergence of an even larger structure:
‘a continuous urban corridor stretching from Japan/North Korea to
West Java.’13 Shanghai, almost certainly, will then join Tokyo, New York
and London as one of the ‘world cities’ controlling the global web of
capital and information flows. The price of this new urban order will
be increasing inequality within and between cities of different sizes and
specializations. Guldin, for example, cites intriguing Chinese discus-
sions over whether the ancient income-and-development chasm between
city and countryside is now being replaced by an equally fundamental
gap between small cities and the coastal giants.14

2. back to dickens

I saw innumerable hosts, foredoomed to darkness, dirt, pestilence,
obscenity, misery and early death.

Dickens, ‘A December Vision’, 1850

The dynamics of Third World urbanization both recapitulate and con-
found the precedents of nineteenth and early twentieth-century Europe
and North America. In China the greatest industrial revolution in history
is the Archimedean lever shifting a population the size of Europe’s from

12 See T. McGee, ‘The Emergence of Desakota Regions in Asia: Expanding a
Hypothesis’, in Northon Ginsburg, Bruce Koppell and T. McGee, eds, The Extended
Metropolis: Settlement Transition in Asia, Honolulu 1991.
13 Yue-man Yeung and Fu-chen Lo, ‘Global restructuring and emerging urban cor-
ridors in Pacific Asia’, in Lo and Yeung, eds, Emerging World Cities in Pacific Asia,
Tokyo 1996, p. 41.
14 Guldin, Peasant, p. 13.

davis: Planet of Slums 9

rural villages to smog-choked sky-climbing cities. As a result, ‘China
[will] cease to be the predominantly rural country it has been for millen-
nia.’15 Indeed, the great oculus of the Shanghai World Financial Centre
may soon look out upon a vast urban world little imagined by Mao or,
for that matter, Le Corbusier. But in most of the developing world, city
growth lacks China’s powerful manufacturing-export engine as well as
its vast inflow of foreign capital (currently equal to half of total foreign
investment in the developing world).

Urbanization elsewhere, as a result, has been radically decoupled from
industrialization, even from development per se. Some would argue
that this is an expression of an inexorable trend: the inherent tendency
of silicon capitalism to delink the growth of production from that of
employment. But in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, the Middle
East and parts of Asia, urbanization-without-growth is more obviously
the legacy of a global political conjuncture—the debt crisis of the late
1970s and subsequent imf-led restructuring of Third World economies
in the 1980s—than an iron law of advancing technology. Third World
urbanization, moreover, continued its breakneck pace (3.8 per cent per
annum from 1960–93) through the locust years of the 1980s and early
1990s in spite of falling real wages, soaring prices and skyrocketing
urban unemployment.16

This ‘perverse’ urban boom contradicted orthodox economic models
which predicted that the negative feedback of urban recession should
slow or even reverse migration from the countryside. The African case
was particularly paradoxical. How could cities in Côte d’Ivoire, Tanzania,
Gabon and elsewhere—whose economies were contracting by 2 to 5 per
cent per year—still sustain population growth of 5 to 8 per cent per

15 Wang Mengkui, advisor to the State Council, quoted in the Financial Times, 26
November 2003. Since the market reforms of the late 1970s it is estimated that
almost 300 million Chinese have moved from rural areas to cities. Another 250
or 300 million are expected to follow in coming decades. (Financial Times, 16
December 2003.)
16 Josef Gugler, ‘Introduction—II. Rural–Urban Migration’, in Gugler, ed., Cities in
the Developing World: Issues, Theory and Policy, Oxford 1997, p. 43. For a contrarian
view that disputes generally accepted World Bank and un data on continuing high
rates of urbanization during the 1980s, see Deborah Potts, ‘Urban lives: Adopting
new strategies and adapting rural links’, in Carole Rakodi, ed., The Urban Challenge
in Africa: Growth and Management of Its Large Cities, Tokyo 1997, pp. 463–73.

10 nlr 26

annum?17 Part of the secret, of course, was that imf- (and now wto-)
enforced policies of agricultural deregulation and ‘de-peasantization’
were accelerating the exodus of surplus rural labour to urban slums even
as cities ceased to be job machines. Urban population growth in spite
of stagnant or negative urban economic growth is the extreme face of
what some researchers have labelled ‘over-urbanization’.18 It is just one
of the several unexpected tracks down which a neoliberal world order
has shunted millennial urbanization.

Classical social theory from Marx to Weber, of course, believed that the
great cities of the future would follow in the industrializing footsteps of
Manchester, Berlin and Chicago. Indeed, Los Angeles, São Paulo, Pusan
and, today, Ciudad Juárez, Bangalore and Guangzhou, have roughly
approximated this classical trajectory. But most cities of the South are
more like Victorian Dublin which, as Emmet Larkin has emphasized,
was unique amongst ‘all the slumdoms produced in the western world in
the nineteenth century . . . [because] its slums were not a product of the
industrial revolution. Dublin, in fact, suffered more from the problems of
de-industrialization than industrialization between 1800 and 1850.’19

Likewise Kinshasa, Khartoum, Dar es Salaam, Dhaka and Lima grow
prodi giously despite ruined import-substitution industries, shrunken
public sectors and downwardly mobile middle classes. The global forces
‘pushing’ people from the countryside—mechanization in Java and India,
food imports in Mexico, Haiti and Kenya, civil war and drought through-
out Africa, and everywhere the consolidation of small into large holdings
and the competition of industrial-scale agribusiness—seem to sustain
urbanization even when the ‘pull’ of the city is drastically weakened by
debt and depression.20 At the same time, rapid urban growth in the context

17 David Simon, ‘Urbanization, globalization and economic crisis in Africa’, in
Rakodi, Urban Challenge, p. 95.
18 See Josef Gugler, ‘Overurbanization Reconsidered’, in Gugler, Cities in the
Developing World, pp. 114–23. By contrast, the former command economies of the
Soviet Union and Maoist China restricted in-migration to cities and thus tended
toward ‘under-urbanization’.
19 Foreword to Jacinta Prunty, Dublin Slums 1800–1925: A Study in Urban Geography,
Dublin 1998, p. ix.
20 ‘Thus, it appears that for low income countries, a significant fall in urban
incomes may not necessarily produce in the short term a decline in rural–urban
migration.’ Nigel Harris, ‘Urbanization, Economic Development and Policy in
Developing Countries’, Habitat International, vol. 14, no. 4, 1990, p. 21–2.

davis: Planet of Slums 11

of structural adjustment, currency devaluation and state retrenchment
has been an inevitable recipe for the mass production of slums.21 Much of
the urban world, as a result, is rushing backwards to the age of Dickens.

The astonishing prevalence of slums is the chief theme of the historic
and sombre report published last October by the United Nations’
Human Settlements Programme (un-Habitat).22 The Challenge of the
Slums (henceforth: Slums) is the first truly global audit of urban poverty.
It adroitly integrates diverse urban case-studies from Abidjan to Sydney
with global household data that for the first time includes China and
the ex-Soviet Bloc. (The un authors acknowledge a particular debt to
Branko Milanovic, the World Bank economist who has pioneered the
use of micro-surveys as a powerful lens to study growing global inequal-
ity. In one of his papers, Milanovic explains: ‘for the first time in human
history, researchers have reasonably accurate data on the distribution of
income or welfare [expenditures or consumption] amongst more than
90 per cent of the world population.’)23

Slums is also unusual in its intellectual honesty. One of the researchers
associated with the report told me that ‘the “Washington Consensus”
types (World Bank, imf, etc.) have always insisted on defining the prob-
lem of global slums not as a result of globalization and inequality but
rather as a result of “bad governance”.’ The new report, however, breaks
with traditional un circumspection and self-censorship to squarely indict
neoliberalism, especially the imf’s structural adjustment programmes.24
‘The primary direction of both national and international interventions
during the last twenty years has actually increased urban poverty and
slums, increased exclusion and inequality, and weakened urban elites in
their efforts to use cities as engines of growth.’25

21 On Third World urbanization and the global debt crisis, see York Bradshaw
and Rita Noonan, ‘Urbanization, Economic Growth, and Women’s Labour-Force
Participation’, in Gugler, Cities in the Developing World, pp. 9–10.
22 Slums: for publication details, see footnote 8.
23 Branko Milanovic, True world income distribution 1988 and 1993, World Bank, New
York 1999. Milanovic and his colleague Schlomo Yitzhaki are the first to calculate
world income distribution based on the household survey data from individual
countries.
24 unicef, to be fair, has criticized the imf for years, pointing out that ‘hundreds
of thousands of the developing world’s children have given their lives to pay their
countries’ debts’. See The State of the World’s Children, Oxford 1989, p. 30.
25 Slums, p. 6.

12 nlr 26

Slums, to be sure, neglects (or saves for later un-Habitat reports) some of
the most important land-use issues arising from super-urbanization and
informal settlement, including sprawl, environmental degradation, and
urban hazards. It also fails to shed much light on the processes expelling
labour from the countryside or to incorporate a large and rapidly grow-
ing literature on the gender dimensions of urban poverty and informal
employment. But these cavils aside, Slums remains an invaluable exposé
that amplifies urgent research findings with the institutional authority
of the United Nations. If the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change represent an unprecedented scientific consensus on
the dangers of global warming, then Slums sounds an equally authori-
tative warning about the global catastrophe of urban poverty. (A third
report someday may explore the ominous terrain of their interaction.)26
And, for the purposes of this review, it provides an excellent framework
for reconnoitering contemporary debates on urbanization, the informal
economy, human solidarity and historical agency.

3. the urbanization of poverty

The mountain of trash seemed to stretch very far, then gradually
without perceptible demarcation or boundary it became something else.
But what? A jumbled and pathless collection of structures. Cardboard
cartons, plywood and rotting boards, the rusting and glassless shells of
cars, had been thrown together to form habitation.

Michael Thelwell, The Harder They Come, 1980

The first published definition of ‘slum’ reportedly occurs in Vaux’s 1812
Vocabulary of the Flash Language, where it is synonymous with ‘racket’ or
‘criminal trade’.27 By the cholera years of the 1830s and 1840s, however,
the poor were living in slums rather than practising them. A generation
later, slums had been identified in America and India, and were gen-
erally recognized as an international phenomenon. The ‘classic slum’
was a notoriously parochial and picturesquely local place, but reformers
generally agreed with Charles Booth that all slums were characterized
by an amalgam of dilapidated housing, overcrowding, poverty and vice.
For nineteenth-century Liberals, of course, the moral dimension was

26 Such a study, one supposes, would survey, at one end, urban hazards and infra-
structural breakdown and, at the other, the impact of climate change on agriculture
and migration.
27 Prunty, Dublin Slums, p. 2.

davis: Planet of Slums 13

decisive and the slum was first and above all envisioned as a place where
a social ‘residuum’ rots in immoral and often riotous splendour. Slums’
authors discard Victorian calumnies, but otherwise preserve the classical
definition: overcrowding, poor or informal housing, inadequate access
to safe water and sanitation, and insecurity of tenure.28

This multi-dimensional definition is actually a very conservative gauge
of what qualifies as a slum: many readers will be surprised by the un’s
counter-experiential finding that only 19.6 per cent of urban Mexicans
live in slums. Yet, even with this restrictive definition, Slums estimates
that there were at least 921 million slum-dwellers in 2001: nearly equal
to the population of the world when the young Engels first ventured
onto the mean streets of Manchester. Indeed, neoliberal capitalism has
multiplied Dickens’s notorious slum of Tom-All-Alone in Bleak House by
exponential powers. Residents of slums constitute a staggering 78.2 per
cent of the urban population of the least developed countries and fully a
third of the global urban population.29 Extrapolating from the age struc-
tures of most Third World cities, at least half of the slum population is
under the age of 20.30

The world’s highest percentages of slum-dwellers are in Ethiopia (an
astonishing 99.4 per cent of the urban population), Chad (also 99.4
per cent), Afghanistan (98.5 percent) and Nepal (92 per cent).31 The poor-
est urban populations, however, are probably in Maputo and Kinshasa
where (according to other sources) two-thirds of residents earn less than
the cost of their minimum required daily nutrition.32 In Delhi, planners
complain bitterly about ‘slums within slums’ as squatters take over the
small open spaces of the peripheral resettlement colonies into which
the old urban poor were brutally removed in the mid-1970s.33 In Cairo
and Phnom Penh, recent urban arrivals squat or rent space on rooftops:
creating slum cities in the air.

28 Slums, p. 12. 29 Slums, pp. 2–3.
30 See A. Oberai, Population Growth, Employment and Poverty in Third World Mega-
Cities, New York 1993, p. 28. In 1980 the 0–19 cohort of big oecd cities was from
19 to 28 per cent of the population; of Third World mega-cities, 40 to 53 per cent.
31 Slums of the World, pp. 33–4.
32 Simon, ‘Urbanization in Africa’, p. 103; and Jean-Luc Piermay, ‘Kinshasa: A
reprieved mega-city?’, in Rakodi, Urban Challenge, p. 236.
33 Sabir Ali, ‘Squatters: Slums within Slums’, in Prodipto Roy and Shangon Das
Gupta, eds, Urbanization and Slums, Delhi 1995, pp. 55–9.

14 nlr 26

Slum populations are often deliberately and sometimes massively under-
counted. In the late 1980s, for example, Bangkok had an ‘official’ poverty
rate of only 5 per cent, yet surveys found nearly a quarter of the popula-
tion (1.16 million) living in slums and squatter camps.34 The un, likewise,
recently discovered that it was unintentionally undercounting urban
poverty in Africa by large margins. Slum-dwellers in Angola, for exam-
ple, are probably twice as numerous as it originally believed. Likewise
it underestimated the number of poor urbanites in Liberia: not surpris-
ing, since Monrovia tripled its population in a single year (1989–90) as
panic-stricken country people fled from a brutal civil war.35

There may be more than quarter of a million slums on earth. The five
great metropolises of South Asia (Karachi, Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata and
Dhaka) alone contain about 15,000 distinct slum communities with a
total population of more than 20 million. An even larger slum popu-
lation crowds the urbanizing littoral of West Africa, while other huge
conurbations of poverty sprawl across Anatolia and the Ethiopian high-
lands; hug the base of the Andes and the Himalayas; explode outward
from the skyscraper cores of Mexico, Jo-burg, Manila and São Paulo;
and, of course, line the banks of the rivers Amazon, Niger, Congo, Nile,
Tigris, Ganges, Irrawaddy and Mekong. The building blocks of this slum
planet, paradoxically, are both utterly interchangeable and spontaneously
unique: including the bustees of Kolkata, the chawls and zopadpattis of
Mumbai, the katchi abadis of Karachi, the kampungs of Jakarta, the iskwa-
ters of Manila, the shammasas of Khartoum, the umjondolos of Durban,
the intra-murios of Rabat, the bidonvilles of Abidjan, the baladis of Cairo,
the gecekondus of Ankara, the conventillos of Quito, the favelas of Brazil,
the villas miseria of Buenos Aires and the colonias populares of Mexico
City. They are the gritty antipodes to the generic fantasy-scapes and resi-
dential themeparks—Philip K. Dick’s bourgeois ‘Offworlds’—in which
the global middle classes increasingly prefer to cloister themselves.

Whereas the classic slum was a decaying inner city, the new slums
are more typically located on the edge of urban spatial explosions. The
horiz ontal growth of cities like Mexico, Lagos or Jakarta, of course, has
been extraordinary, and ‘slum sprawl’ is as much of a problem in the
developing world as suburban sprawl in the rich countries. The devel-
oped area of Lagos, for instance, doubled in a single decade, between

34 Jonathan Rigg, Southeast Asia: A Region in Transition, London 1991, p. 143.
35 Slums of the World, p. 34

davis: Planet of Slums 15

1985 and 1994.36 The Governor of Lagos State told reporters last year
that ‘about two thirds of the state’s total land mass of 3,577 square kilo-
metres could be classified as shanties or slums’.37 Indeed, writes a un
correspondent,

much of the city is a mystery . . . unlit highways run past canyons of
smouldering garbage before giving way to dirt streets weaving through 200
slums, their sewers running with raw waste . . . No one even knows for
sure the size of the population—officially it is 6 million, but most experts
estimate it at 10 million—let alone the number of murders each year [or]
the rate of hiv infection.38

Lagos, moreover, is simply the biggest node in the shanty-town corridor
of 70 million people that stretches from Abidjan to Ibadan: probably the
biggest continuous footprint of urban poverty on earth.39

Slum ecology, of course, revolves around the supply of settlement space.
Winter King, in a recent study published in the Harvard Law Review,
claims that 85 per cent of the urban residents of the developing world
‘occupy property illegally’.40 Indeterminacy of land titles and/or lax state
ownership, in the last instance, are the cracks through which a vast
humanity has poured into the cities. The modes of slum settlement
vary across a huge spectrum, from highly disciplined land invasions
in Mexico City and Lima to intricately organized (but often illegal)
rental markets on the outskirts of Beijing, Karachi and Nairobi. Even
in cities like Karachi, where the urban periphery is formally owned by
the govern ment, ‘vast profits from land speculation . . . continue to
accrue to the private sector at the expense of low-income households’.41
Indeed national and local political machines usually acquiesce in infor-
mal settlement (and illegal private speculation) as long as they can

36 Salah El-Shakhs, ‘Toward appropriate urban development policy in emerging
mega-cities in Africa’, in Rakodi, Urban Challenge, p. 516.
37 Daily Times of Nigeria, 20 October 2003. Lagos has grown more explosively than
any large Third World city except for Dhaka. In 1950 it had only 300,000 inhabit-
ants but then grew almost 10 per cent per annum until 1980, when it slowed to
about 6%—still a very rapid rate—during the years of structural readjustment.
38 Amy Otchet, ‘Lagos: the survival of the determined’, unesco Courier, June 1999.
39 Slums, p. 50.
40 Winter King, ‘Illegal Settlements and the Impact of Titling Programmes,’ Harvard
Law Review, vol. 44, no. 2, September 2003, p. 471.
41 United Nations, Karachi, Population Growth and Policies in Megacities series,
New York 1988, p. 19.

16 nlr 26

control the political complexion of the slums and extract a regular flow
of bribes or rents. Without formal land titles or home ownership, slum-
dwellers are forced into quasi-feudal dependencies upon local officials
and party bigshots. Disloyalty can mean eviction or even the razing of
an entire district.

The provision of lifeline infrastructures, meanwhile, lags far behind
the pace of urbanization, and peri-urban slum areas often have no
formal utilities or sanitation provision whatsoever.42 Poor areas of Latin
American cities in general have better utilities than South Asia which,
in turn, usually have minimum urban services, like water and electri-
city, that many African slums lack. As in early Victorian London, the
contamination of water by human and animal waste remains the cause
of the chronic diarrhoeal diseases that kill at least two million urban
babies and small children each year.43 An estimated 57 per cent of urban
Africans lack access to basic sanitation and in cities like Nairobi the poor
must rely on ‘flying toilets’ (defecation into a plastic bag).44 In Mumbai,
meanwhile, the sanitation problem is defined by ratios of one toilet seat
per 500 inhabitants in the poorer districts. Only 11 per cent of poor
neighbourhoods in Manila and 18 per cent in Dhaka have formal means
to dispose of sewage.45 Quite apart from the incidence of the hiv/aids
plague, the un considers that two out of five African slum-dwellers live
in a poverty that is literally ‘life-threatening’.46

The urban poor, meanwhile, are everywhere forced to settle on hazardous
and otherwise unbuildable terrains—over-steep hillslopes, river banks
and floodplains. Likewise they squat in the deadly shadows of refin-
eries, chemical factories, toxic dumps, or in the margins of railroads
and highways. Poverty, as a result, has ‘constructed’ an urban disaster
problem of unprecedented frequency and scope, as typified by chronic
flooding in Manila, Dhaka and Rio, pipeline conflagrations in Mexico
City and Cubatão (Brazil), the Bhopal catastrophe in India, a munitions
plant explosion in Lagos, and deadly mudslides in Caracas, La Paz and

42 The absence of infrastructure, however, does create innumerable niches for infor-
mal workers: selling water, carting nightsoil, recycling trash, delivering propane
and so on.
43 World Resources Institute, World Resources: 1996–97, Oxford 1996, p. 21.
44 Slums of the World, p. 25. 45 Slums, p. 99.
46 Slums of the World, p. 12.

davis: Planet of Slums 17

Tegucigalpa.47 The disenfranchised communities of the urban poor, in
addition, are vulnerable to sudden outbursts of state violence like the
infamous 1990 bulldozing of the Maroko beach slum in Lagos (‘an eye-
sore for the neighbouring community of Victoria Island, a fort ress for
the rich’) or the 1995 demolition in freezing weather of the huge squat-
ter town of Zhejiangcun on the edge of Beijing.48

But slums, however deadly and insecure, have a brilliant future. The
countryside will for a short period still contain the majority of the world’s
poor, but that doubtful title will pass to urban slums by 2035.49 At least
half of the coming Third World urban population explosion will be cred-
ited to the account of informal communities. Two billion slum dwellers
by 2030 or 2040 is a monstrous, almost incomprehensible prospect,
but urban poverty overlaps and exceeds the slums per se. Indeed, Slums
underlines that in some cities the majority of the poor actually live out-
side the slum stricto sensu.50 un ‘Urban Observatory’ researchers warn,
moreover, that by 2020 ‘urban poverty in the world could reach 45 to 50
per cent of the total population living in cities’.51

4. urban poverty’s ‘big bang’

After their mysterious laughter, they quickly changed the topic to
other things. How were people back home surviving sap?

Fidelis Balogun, Adjusted Lives, 1995

The evolution of the new urban poverty has been a non-linear historical
process. The slow accretion of shanty towns to the shell of the city
is punctuated by storms of poverty and sudden explosions of slum-
building. In his collection of stories, Adjusted Lives, the Nigerian writer
Fidelis Balogun describes the coming of the imf-mandated Structural

47 For an exemplary case-study, see Greg Bankoff, ‘Constructing Vulnerability: The
Historical, Natural and Social Generation of Flooding in Metropolitan Manila’,
Disasters, vol. 27, no. 3, 2003, pp. 224–38.
48 Otchet, ‘Lagos’; and Li Zhang, Strangers in the City: Reconfigurations of Space,
Power and Social Networks within China’s Floating Population, Stanford 2001; Alan
Gilbert, The Latin American City, New York 1998, p. 16.
49 Martin Ravallion, On the urbanization of poverty, World Bank paper, 2001.
50 Slums, p. 28. 51 Slums of the World, p. 12.

18 nlr 26

Adjustment Programme (sap) in the mid-1980s as the equivalent of a
great natural catastrophe, destroying forever the old soul of Lagos and
‘re-enslaving’ urban Nigerians.

The weird logic of this economic programme seemed to be that to restore
life to the dying economy, every juice had first to be sapped out of the under-
privileged majority of the citizens. The middle class rapidly disappeared,
and the garbage heaps of the increasingly rich few became the food table
of the multiplied population of abjectly poor. The brain drain to the oil-rich
Arab countries and to the Western world became a flood.52

Balogun’s complaint about ‘privatizing in full steam and getting more
hungry by the day’, or his enumeration of sap’s malevolent conse-
quences, would be instantly familiar to survivors, not only of the other
30 African saps, but also to hundreds of millions of Asians and Latin
Americans. The 1980s, when the imf and World Bank used the lever-
age of debt to restructure the economies of most of the Third World, are
the years when slums became an implacable future, not just for poor
rural migrants, but also for millions of traditional urbanites, displaced
or immiserated by the violence of ‘adjustment’.

As Slums emphasizes, saps were ‘deliberately anti-urban in nature’ and
designed to reverse any ‘urban bias’ that previously existed in welfare
policies, fiscal structure or government investment.53 Everywhere the
imf—acting as bailiff for the big banks and backed by the Reagan
and Bush administrations—offered poor countries the same poisoned
chalice of devaluation, privatization, removal of import controls and
food subsidies, enforced cost-recovery in health and education, and
ruthless downsizing of the public sector. (An infamous 1985 telegram
from Treasury Secretary George Shultz to overseas usaid officials com-
manded: ‘in most cases, public sector firms should be privatized’.)54

52 Fidelis Odun Balogun, Adjusted Lives: stories of structural adjustment, Trenton, nj
1995, p. 80.
53 The Challenge of Slums, p. 30. ‘Urban bias’ theorists, like Michael Lipton who
invented the term in 1977, argue that agriculture tends to be undercapitalized in
developing countries, and cities relatively ‘overurbanized’, because fiscal and finan-
cial policies favour urban elites and distort investment flows. At the limit, cities
are vampires of the countryside. See Lipton, Why Poor People Stay Poor: A Study of
Urban Bias in World Development, Cambridge 1977.
54 Quoted in Tony Killick, ‘Twenty-five Years in Development: the Rise and
Impending Decline of Market Solutions’, Development Policy Review, vol. 4,
1986, p. 101.

davis: Planet of Slums 19

At the same time, saps devastated rural smallholders by eliminating
subsidies and pushing them out, ‘sink or swim’, into global commodity
markets dominated by First World agribusiness.55

As Ha-Joon Chang points out, saps hypocritically ‘kicked away the ladder’
(i.e., protectionist tariffs and subsidies) that the oecd nations histori-
cally employed in their own climb from agriculture to urban high-value
goods and services.56 Slums makes the same point when it argues that
the ‘main single cause of increases in poverty and inequality during the
1980s and 1990s was the retreat of the state’. In addition to the direct
sap-enforced reductions in public-sector spending and ownership, the
un authors stress the more subtle diminution of state capacity that has
resulted from ‘subsidiarity’: the devolution of powers to lower echelons
of government and, especially, ngos, linked directly to major interna-
tional aid agencies.

The whole, apparently decentralized structure is foreign to the notion of
national representative government that has served the developed world
well, while it is very amenable to the operations of a global hegemony.
The dominant international perspective [i.e., Washington’s] becomes the de
facto paradigm for development, so that the whole world rapidly becomes
unified in the broad direction of what is supported by donors and interna-
tional organizations.57

Urban Africa and Latin America were the hardest hit by the artificial
depression engineered by the imf and the White House. Indeed, in
many countries, the economic impact of saps during the 1980s, in
tandem with protracted drought, rising oil prices, soaring interest rates
and falling commodity prices, was more severe and long-lasting than
the Great Depression.

55 Deborah Bryceson, ‘Disappearing Peasantries? Rural Labour Redundancy in
the Neoliberal Era and Beyond’, in Bryceson, Cristóbal Kay and Jos Mooij, eds,
Disappearing Peasantries? Rural Labour in Africa, Asia and Latin America, London
2000, p. 304–5.
56 Ha-Joon Chang, ‘Kicking Away the Ladder: Infant Industry Promotion in
Historical Perspective’, Oxford Development Studies, vol. 31, no. 1, 2003, p. 21. ‘Per
capita income in developing countries grew at 3 per cent per annum between 1960
and 1980, but at only about 1.5 per cent between 1980 and 2000 . . . Neoliberal
economists are therefore faced with a paradox here. The developing countries grew
much faster when they used ‘bad’ policies during 1960–80 than when they used
‘good’ (or least ‘better’) policies during the following two decades.’ (p. 28).
57 Slums, p. 48.

20 nlr 26

The balance-sheet of structural adjustment in Africa, reviewed by Carole
Rakodi, includes capital flight, collapse of manufactures, marginal or
negative increase in export incomes, drastic cutbacks in urban public
services, soaring prices and a steep decline in real wages.58 In Kinshasa
(‘an aberration or rather a sign of things to come?’) assainissement wiped
out the civil servant middle class and produced an ‘unbelieveable decline
in real wages’ that, in turn, sponsored a nightmarish rise in crime and
predatory gangs.59 In Dar es Salaam, public service expenditure per
person fell 10 per cent per year during the 1980s: a virtual demolition
of the local state.60 In Khartoum, liberalization and structural adjust-
ment, according to local researchers, manufactured 1.1 million ‘new
poor’: ‘mostly drawn from the salaried groups or public sector employ-
ees’.61 In Abidjan, one of the few tropical African cities with an important
manufacturing sector and modern urban services, submission to the
sap regime punctually led to deindustrialization, the collapse of con-
struction, and a rapid deterioration in public transit and sanitation.62
In Balogun’s Nigeria extreme poverty, increasingly urbanized in Lagos,
Ibadan and other cities, metastatized from 28 per cent in 1980 to 66
per cent in 1996. ‘gnp per capita, at about $260 today,’ the World Bank
reports, ‘is below the level at independence 40 years ago and below the
$370 level attained in 1985.’63

In Latin America, saps (often implemented by military dictatorships)
destabilized rural economies while savaging urban employment and
housing. In 1970, Guevarist ‘foco’ theories of rural insurgency still con-
formed to a continental reality where the poverty of the countryside (75
million poor) overshadowed that of the cities (44 million poor). By the
end of the 1980s, however, the vast majority of the poor (115 million in
1990) were living in urban colonias and villas miseria rather than farms
or villages (80 million).64

58 Carole Rakodi, ‘Global Forces, Urban Change, and Urban Management in Africa’,
in Rakodi, Urban Challenge, pp. 50, 60–1.
59 Piermay, ‘Kinshasa’, p. 235–6; ‘Megacities’, Time, 11 January 1993, p. 26.
60 Michael Mattingly, ‘The Role of the Government of Urban Areas in the Creation
of Urban Poverty’, in Sue Jones and Nici Nelson, eds, Urban Poverty in Africa,
London 1999, p. 21.
61 Adil Ahmad and Ata El-Batthani, ‘Poverty in Khartoum’, Environment and
Urbanization, vol. 7, no. 2, October 1995, p. 205.
62 Alain Dubresson, ‘Abidjan’, in Rakodi, Urban Challenge, pp. 261–3.
63 World Bank, Nigeria: Country Brief, September 2003.
64 un, World Urbanization Prospects, p. 12.

davis: Planet of Slums 21

Urban inequality, meanwhile, exploded. In Santiago, the Pinochet
dictator ship bulldozed shanty towns and evicted formerly radical squat-
ters: forcing poor families to become allegados, doubled or even tripled-up
in the same rented dwelling. In Buenos Aires, the richest decile’s share
of income increased from 10 times that of the poorest in 1984 to 23
times in 1989.65 In Lima, where the value of the minimum wage fell
by 83 per cent during the imf recession, the percentage of households
living below the poverty threshold increased from 17 percent in 1985
to 44 per cent in 1990.66 In Rio de Janeiro, inequality as measured in
classical Gini coefficients soared from 0.58 in 1981 to 0.67 in 1989.67
Indeed, throughout Latin America, the 1980s deepened the canyons
and elevated the peaks of the world’s most extreme social topography.
(According to a 2003 World Bank report, Gini coefficients are 10 points
higher in Latin America than Asia; 17.5 points higher than the oecd, and
20.4 points higher than Eastern Europe.)68

Throughout the Third World, the economic shocks of the 1980s forced
individuals to regroup around the pooled resources of households and,
especially, the survival skills and desperate ingenuity of women. In
China and the industrializing cities of Southeast Asia, millions of young
women indentured themselves to assembly lines and factory squalor.
In Africa and most of Latin America (Mexico’s northern border cities
excepted), this option did not exist. Instead, deindustrialization and the
decimation of male formal-sector jobs compelled women to improvise
new livelihoods as piece workers, liquor sellers, street vendors, cleaners,
washers, ragpickers, nannies and prostitutes. In Latin America, where
urban women’s labour-force participation had always been lower than
in other continents, the surge of women into tertiary informal activities
during the 1980s was especially dramatic.69 In Africa, where the icons
of the informal sector are women running shebeens or hawking pro-
duce, Christian Rogerson reminds us that most informal women are not

65 Luis Ainstein, ‘Buenos Aires: a case of deepening social polarization’, in Gilbert,
Mega-City in Latin America, p. 139.
66 Gustavo Riofrio, ‘Lima: Mega-city and mega-problem’, in Gilbert, Mega-City in
Latin America, p. 159; and Gilbert, Latin American City, p. 73.
67 Hamilton Tolosa, ‘Rio de Janeiro: Urban expansion and structural change’, in
Gilbert, Mega-City in Latin America, p. 211.
68 World Bank, Inequality in Latin America and the Caribbean, New York 2003.
69 Orlandina de Oliveira and Bryan Roberts, ‘The Many Roles of the Informal Sector
in Development’, in Cathy Rakowski, ed., Contrapunto: the Informal Sector Debate in
Latin America, Albany 1994, pp. 64–8.

22 nlr 26

actually self-employed or economically independent, but work for some-
one else.70 (These ubiquitous and vicious networks of micro-exploitation,
of the poor exploiting the very poor, are usually glossed over in accounts
of the informal sector.)

Urban poverty was also massively feminized in the ex-Comecon coun-
tries after capitalist ‘liberation’ in 1989. In the early 1990s extreme
poverty in the former ‘transitional countries’ (as the un calls them)
soared from 14 million to 168 million: a mass pauperization almost
without precedent in history.71 If, on a global balance-sheet, this eco-
nomic catastrophe was partially offset by the much-praised success of
China in raising incomes in its coastal cities, China’s market ‘miracle’
was purchased by ‘an enormous increase in wage inequality among
urban workers . . . during the period 1988 to 1999.’ Women and minori-
ties were especially disadvantaged.72

In theory, of course, the 1990s should have righted the wrongs of
the 1980s and allowed Third World cities to regain lost ground and
bridge the chasms of inequality created by saps. The pain of adjustment
should have been followed by the analgesic of globalization. Indeed
the 1990s, as Slums wryly notes, were the first decade in which global
urban develop ment took place within almost utopian parameters of neo-
classical market freedom.

During the 1990s, trade continued to expand at an almost unprecedented
rate, no-go areas opened up and military expenditures decreased. . . .
All the basic inputs to production became cheaper, as interest rates fell
rapidly along with the price of basic commodities. Capital flows were
increasingly unfettered by national controls and could move rapidly to
the most productive areas. Under what were almost perfect economic
conditions according to the dominant neoliberal economic doctrine, one
might have imagined that the decade would have been one of unrivalled
prosperity and social justice.73

70 Christian Rogerson, ‘Globalization or informalization? African urban economies
in the 1990s’, in Rakodi, Urban Challenge, p. 348.
71 Slums, p. 2.
72 Albert Park et al., ‘The Growth of Wage Inequality in Urban China, 1988 to 1999’,
World Bank working paper, February 2003, p. 27 (quote); and John Knight and
Linda Song, ‘Increasing urban wage inequality in China’, Economics of Transition,
vol. 11, no. 4, 2003, p. 616 (discrimination).
73 Slums, p. 34.

davis: Planet of Slums 23

In the event, however, urban poverty continued its relentless accumu-
lation and ‘the gap between poor and rich countries increased, just as
it had done for the previous 20 years and, in most countries, income
inequality increased or, at best, stabilized.’ Global inequality, as meas-
ured by World Bank economists, reached an incredible Gini coefficient
level of 0.67 by the end of the century. This was mathematically equiva-
lent to a situation where the poorest two-thirds of the world receive zero
income; and the top third, everything.74

5. a surplus humanity?

We shove our way about next to City, holding on to it by its
thousand survival cracks . . .

Patrick Chamoiseau, Texaco (1997)

The brutal tectonics of neoliberal globalization since 1978 are analo-
gous to the catastrophic processes that shaped a ‘third world’ in the
first place, during the era of late Victorian imperialism (1870–1900).
In the latter case, the forcible incorporation into the world market of
the great subsistence peasantries of Asia and Africa entailed the famine
deaths of millions and the uprooting of tens of millions more from
trad itional tenures. The end result, in Latin America as well, was rural
‘semi-proletarianization’: the creation of a huge global class of immis-
erated semi-peasants and farm labourers lacking existential security
of subsistence.75 (As a result, the twentieth century became an age,
not of urban revolutions as classical Marxism had imagined, but of
epochal rural uprisings and peasant-based wars of national liberation.)
Structural adjustment, it would appear, has recently worked an equally
fundamental reshaping of human futures. As the authors of Slums con-
clude: ‘instead of being a focus for growth and prosperity, the cities
have become a dumping ground for a surplus population working in
unskilled, unprotected and low-wage informal service industries and
trade.’ ‘The rise of [this] informal sector,’ they declare bluntly, ‘is . . . a
direct result of liberalization.’76

74 Shaohua Chen and Martin Ravallion, How Did the World’s Poorest Fare in the
1990s?, World Bank paper, 2000.
75 See my Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third
World, London 2001, especially pp. 206–9.
76 Slums, pp. 40, 46.

24 nlr 26

Indeed, the global informal working class (overlapping but non-identical
with the slum population) is almost one billion strong: making it the
fastest growing, and most unprecedented, social class on earth. Since
anthropologist Keith Hart, working in Accra, first broached the concept
of an ‘informal sector’ in 1973, a huge literature (mostly failing to distin-
guish micro-accumulation from sub-subsistence) has wrestled with the
formidable theoretical and empirical problems involved in studying the
survival strategies of the urban poor.77 There is a base consensus, how-
ever, that the 1980s’ crisis inverted the relative structural positions of the
formal and informal sectors: promoting informal survivalism as the new
primary mode of livelihood in a majority of Third World cities.

Alejandro Portes and Kelly Hoffman have recently evaluated the overall
impact of saps and liberalization upon Latin American urban class
structures since the 1970s. Congruent with un conclusions, they find
that both state employees and the formal proletariat have declined
in every country of the region since the 1970s. In contrast, the
informal sector of the economy, along with general social inequality, has
drama tically expanded. Unlike some researchers, they make a crucial
distinction between an informal petty bourgeoisie (‘the sum of owners
of microenterprises, employing less than five workers, plus own-account
professionals and technicians’) and the informal proletariat (‘the sum
of own-account workers minus professionals and technicians, domestic
servants, and paid and unpaid workers in microenterprises’). They dem-
onstrate that this former stratum, the ‘microentrepreneurs’ so beloved in
North American business schools, are often displaced public-sector pro-
fessionals or laid-off skilled workers. Since the 1980s, they have grown
from about 5 to 10 per cent of the economically active urban population:
a trend reflecting ‘the forced entrepreneurialism foisted on former sala-
ried employees by the decline of formal sector employment.’78

Overall, according to Slums, informal workers are about two-fifths of
the economically active population of the developing world.79 According
to researchers at the Inter-American Development Bank, the informal

77 Keith Hart, ‘Informal income opportunities and urban employment in Ghana’,
Journal of Modern African Studies, 11, 1973, pp. 61–89.
78 Alejandro Portes and Kelly Hoffman, ‘Latin American Class Structures: Their
Composition and Change during the Neoliberal Era’, Latin American Research
Review, vol. 38, no. 1, 2003, p. 55.
79 Slums, p. 60.

davis: Planet of Slums 25

economy currently employs 57 per cent of the Latin American work-
force and supplies four out of five new ‘jobs’.80 Other sources claim that
more than half of urban Indonesians and 65 per cent of residents of
Dhaka subsist in the informal sector.81 Slums likewise cites research find-
ing that informal economic activity accounts for 33 to 40 per cent of
urban employment in Asia, 60 to 75 per cent in Central America and
60 per cent in Africa.82 Indeed, in sub-Saharan cities ‘formal job’ crea-
tion has virtually ceased to exist. An ilo study of Zimbabwe’s urban
labour markets under ‘stagflationary’ structural adjustment in the early
1990s found that the formal sector was creating only 10,000 jobs per
year in face of an urban workforce increasing by more than 300,000
per annum.83 Slums similarly estimates that fully 90 per cent of urban
Africa’s new jobs over the next decade will somehow come from the
informal sector.84

The pundits of bootstrap capitalism, like the irrepressible Hernando
de Soto, may see this enormous population of marginalized labourers,
redundant civil servants and ex-peasants as actually a frenzied beehive
of ambitious entrepreneurs yearning for formal property rights and
unregulated competitive space, but it makes more obvious sense to con-
sider most informal workers as the ‘active’ unemployed, who have no
choice but to subsist by some means or starve.85 The world’s estimated
100 million street kids are not likely—apologies to Señor de Soto—to
start issuing ipos or selling chewing-gum futures.86 Nor will most of

80 Cited in the Economist, 21 March 1998, p. 37.
81 Dennis Rondinelli and John Kasarda, ‘Job Creation Needs in Third World Cities’,
in Kasarda and Allan Parnell, eds, Third World Cities: Problems, policies and prospects,
Newbury Park, ca 1993, pp. 106–7.
82 Slums, p. 103.
83 Guy Mhone, ‘The impact of structural adjustment on the urban informal sector
in Zimbabwe’, Issues in Development discussion paper no. 2, International Labour
Office, Geneva n.d., p. 19.
84 Slums, p. 104.
85 Orlandina de Oliveira and Bryan Roberts rightly emphasize that the bottom
strata of the urban labour-force should be identified ‘not simply by occupational
titles or whether the job was formal or informal, but by the household strategy
for obtaining an income’. The mass of the urban poor can only exist by ‘income
pooling, sharing housing, food and other resources’ either with kin or landsmen.
(‘Urban Development and Social Inequality in Latin America’, in Gugler, Cities in
the Developing World, p. 290.)
86 Statistic on street kids: Natural History, July 1997, p. 4.

26 nlr 26

China’s 70 million ‘floating workers’, living furtively on the urban
periphery, eventually capitalize themselves as small subcontractors or
integrate into the formal urban working class. And the informal working
class—everywhere subject to micro- and macro-exploitation—is almost
universally deprived of protection by labour laws and standards.

Moreover, as Alain Dubresson argues in the case of Abidjan, ‘the dyna-
mism of crafts and small-scale trade depends largely on demand from
the wage sector’. He warns against the ‘illusion’ cultivated by the ilo
and World Bank that ‘the informal sector can efficiently replace the
formal sector and promote an accumulation process sufficient for a city
with more than 2.5 million inhabitants’.87 His warning is echoed by
Christian Rogerson who, distinguishing (à la Portes and Hoffman) ‘sur-
vivalist’ from ‘growth’ micro-enterprises, writes of the former: ‘generally
speaking, the incomes generated from these enterprises, the majority
of which tend to be run by women, usually fall short of even a mini-
mum living standard and involve little capital investment, virtually no
skills training, and only constrained opportunities for expansion into a
viable business’. With even formal-sector urban wages in Africa so low
that economists can’t figure out how workers survive (the so-called ‘wage
puzzle’), the informal tertiary sector has become an arena of extreme
Darwinian competition amongst the poor. Rogerson cites the examples
of Zimbabwe and South Africa where female-controlled informal niches
like shebeens and spazas are now drastically overcrowded and plagued
by collapsing profitability.88

The real macroeconomic trend of informal labour, in other words, is the
reproduction of absolute poverty. But if the informal proletariat is not
the pettiest of petty bourgeoisies, neither is it a ‘labour reserve army’
or a ‘lumpen proletariat’ in any obsolete nineteenth-century sense. Part
of it, to be sure, is a stealth workforce for the formal economy and
numerous studies have exposed how the subcontracting networks of
WalMart and other mega-companies extend deep into the misery of
the colonias and chawls. But at the end of the day, a majority of urban
slum-dwellers are truly and radically homeless in the contemporary
international economy.

87 Dubresson, ‘Abidjan’, p. 263.
88 Rogerson, ‘Globalization or informalization?’, p. 347–51.

davis: Planet of Slums 27

Slums, of course, originate in the global countryside where, as Deborah
Bryceson reminds us, unequal competition with large-scale agro-industry
is tearing traditional rural society ‘apart at the seams’.89 As rural areas
lose their ‘storage capacity’, slums take their place, and urban ‘involu-
tion’ replaces rural involution as a sink for surplus labour which can only
keep pace with subsistence by ever more heroic feats of self-exploitation
and the further competitive subdivision of already densely filled sur-
vival niches.90 ‘Modernization’, ‘Development’ and, now, the unfettered
‘Market’ have had their day. The labour-power of a billion people has
been expelled from the world system, and who can imagine any plausi-
ble scenario, under neoliberal auspices, that would reintegrate them as
productive workers or mass consumers?

6. marx and the holy ghost

[The Lord says:] The time will come when the poor man will say that he has
nothing to eat and work will be shut down . . . That is going to cause the
poor man to go to these places and break in to get food. This will cause the
rich man to come out with his gun to make war with the labouring man. . .
. blood will be in the streets like an outpouring rain from heaven.

A prophecy from the 1906 ‘Azusa Street Awakening’

The late capitalist triage of humanity, then, has already taken place. The
global growth of a vast informal proletariat, moreover, is a wholly origi-
nal structural development unforeseen by either classical Marxism or
modernization pundits. Slums indeed challenges social theory to grasp
the novelty of a true global residuum lacking the strategic economic
power of socialized labor, but massively concentrated in a shanty-town
world encircling the fortified enclaves of the urban rich.

Tendencies toward urban involution, of course, existed during the nine-
teenth century. The European industrial revolutions were incapable of

89 Bryceson, ‘Disappearing Peasantries’, pp. 307–8.
90 In Clifford Geertz’s original, inimitable definition, ‘involution’ is ‘an over driving
of an established form in such a way that it becomes rigid through an inward
over-elaboration of detail’. (Agricultural involution: Social development and economic
change in two Indonesian towns, Chicago 1963, p. 82.) More prosaically, ‘involution’,
agricultural or urban, can be described as spiralling labour self-exploitation (other
factors fixed) which continues, despite rapidly diminishing returns, as long as any
return or increment is produced.

28 nlr 26

absorbing the entire supply of displaced rural labour, especially after
conti nental agriculture was exposed to the devastating competition of the
North American prairies from the 1870s. But mass immigration to the
settler societies of the Americas and Oceania, as well as Siberia, provided
a dynamic safety-valve that prevented the rise of mega-Dublins as well
as the spread of the kind of underclass anarchism that had taken root in
the most immiserated parts of Southern Europe. Today surplus labour,
by contrast, faces unprecedented barriers—a literal ‘great wall’ of high-
tech border enforcement—blocking large-scale migration to the rich
countries. Likewise, controversial population resettlement programmes
in ‘frontier’ regions like Amazonia, Tibet, Kalimantan and Irian Jaya
produce environmental devastation and ethnic conflict without substan-
tially reducing urban poverty in Brazil, China and Indonesia.

Thus only the slum remains as a fully franchised solution to the problem
of warehousing the twenty-first century’s surplus humanity. But aren’t
the great slums, as a terrified Victorian bourgeoisie once imagined,
volcanoes waiting to erupt? Or does ruthless Darwinian competition,
as increasing numbers of poor people compete for the same informal
scraps, ensure self-consuming 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’?
Can disincorporated labour be reincorporated in a global emancipatory
project? Or is the sociology of protest in the immiserated megacity a
regression to the pre-industrial urban mob, episodically explosive during
consumption crises, but otherwise easily managed by clientelism, popu-
list spectacle and appeals to ethnic unity? Or is some new, unexpected
historical subject, à la Hardt and Negri, slouching toward the supercity?

In truth, the current literature on poverty and urban protest offers few
answers to such large-scale questions. Some researchers, for example,
would question whether the ethnically diverse slum poor or econ-
omically heterogeneous informal workers even constitute a meaningful
‘class in itself’, much less a potentially activist ‘class for itself’. Surely, the
informal proletariat bears ‘radical chains’ in the Marxist sense of having
little or no vested interest in the preservation of the existing mode of
production. But because uprooted rural migrants and informal workers
have been largely dispossessed of fungible labour-power, or reduced to
domestic service in the houses of the rich, they have little access to
the culture of collective labour or large-scale class struggle. Their social

davis: Planet of Slums 29

stage, necessarily, must be the slum street or marketplace, not the fac-
tory or international assembly line.

Struggles of informal workers, as John Walton emphasizes in a recent
review of research on social movements in poor cities, have tended,
above all, to be episodic and discontinuous. They are also usually focused
on immediate consumption issues: land invasions in search of afford-
able housing and riots against rising food or utility prices. In the past,
at least, ‘urban problems in developing societies have been more typi-
cally mediated by patron–client relations than by popular activism.’91
Since the debt crisis of the 1980s, neopopulist leaders in Latin America
have had dramatic success in exploiting the desperate desire of the
urban poor for more stable, predictable structures of daily life. Although
Walton doesn’t make the point explicitly, the urban informal sector has
been ideologically promiscuous in its endorsement of populist saviours:
in Peru rallying to Fujimori, but in Venezuela embracing Chávez.92 In
Africa and South Asia, on the other hand, urban clientelism too often
equates with the dominance of ethno-religious bigots and their night-
mare ambitions of ethnic cleansing. Notorious examples include the
anti-Muslim militias of the Oodua People’s Congress in Lagos and the
semi-fascist Shiv Sena movement in Bombay.93

Will such ‘eighteenth-century’ sociologies of protest persist into the middle
twenty-first century? The past is probably a poor guide to the future.
History is not uniformitarian. The new urban world is evolving with
extraordinary speed and often in unpredictable directions. Everywhere
the continuous accumulation of poverty undermines existential security
and poses even more extraordinary challenges to the economic ingenu-
ity of the poor. Perhaps there is a tipping point at which the pollution,
congestion, greed and violence of everyday urban life finally overwhelm
the ad hoc civilities and survival networks of the slum. Certainly in the old

91 John Walton, ‘Urban Conflict and Social Movements in Poor Countries: Theory
and Evidence of Collective Action’, paper to ‘Cities in Transition Conference’,
Humboldt University, Berlin, July 1987.
92 Kurt Weyland, ‘Neopopulism and Neoliberalism in Latin America: how much
affinity?’, Third World Quarterly, vol. 24, no. 6, 2003, pp. 1095–115.
93 For a fascinating if frightening account of Shiv Sena’s ascendancy in Bombay
at the expense of older Communist and trade-union politics, see Thomas Hansen,
Wages of Violence: Naming and Identity in Postcolonial Bombay, Princeton 2001. See
also Veena Das, ed., Mirrors of Violence: Communities, Riots and Survivors in South
Asia, New York 1990.

30 nlr 26

rural world there were thresholds, often calibrated by famine, that passed
directly to social eruption. But no one yet knows the social temperature at
which the new cities of poverty spontaneously combust.

Indeed, for the moment at least, Marx has yielded the historical stage to
Mohammed and the Holy Ghost. If God died in the cities of the indus-
trial revolution, he has risen again in the postindustrial cities of the
developing world. The contrast between the cultures of urban poverty in
the two eras is extraordinary. As Hugh McLeod has shown in his magis-
terial study of Victorian working-class religion, Marx and Engels were
largely accurate in their belief that urbanization was secularizing the
working class. Although Glasgow and New York were partial exceptions,
‘the line of interpretation that associates working-class detachment from
the church with growing class consciousness is in a sense incontestable’.
If small churches and dissenting sects thrived in the slums, the great
current was active or passive disbelief. Already by the 1880s, Berlin was
scandalizing foreigners as ‘the most irreligious city in the world’ and in
London, median adult church attendance in the proletarian East End and
Docklands by 1902 was barely 12 per cent (and that mostly Catholic).94
In Barcelona, of course, an anarchist working class sacked the churches
during the Semana Trágica, while in the slums of St. Petersburg, Buenos
Aires and even Tokyo, militant workers avidly embraced the new faiths
of Darwin, Kropotkin and Marx.

Today, on the other hand, populist Islam and Pentecostal Christianity
(and in Bombay, the cult of Shivaji) occupy a social space analogous to
that of early twentieth-century socialism and anarchism. In Morocco, for
instance, where half a million rural emigrants are absorbed into the teem-
ing cities every year, and where half the population is under 25, Islamicist
movements like ‘Justice and Welfare’, founded by Sheik Abdessalam
Yassin, have become the real governments of the slums: organizing night
schools, providing legal aid to victims of state abuse, buying medicine
for the sick, subsidizing pilgrimages and paying for funerals. As Prime
Minister Abderrahmane Youssoufi, the Socialist leader who was once
exiled by the monarchy, recently admitted to Ignacio Ramonet, ‘We [the
Left] have become embourgeoisified. We have cut ourselves off from the
people. We need to reconquer the popular quarters. The Islamicists have

94 Hugh McLeod, Piety and Poverty: Working-Class Religion in Berlin, London and New
York, 1870–1914, New York 1996, pp. xxv, 6, 32.

davis: Planet of Slums 31

seduced our natural electorate. They promise them heaven on earth.’ An
Islamicist leader, on the other hand, told Ramonet: ‘confronted with the
neglect of the state, and faced with the brutality of daily life, people dis-
cover, thanks to us, solidarity, self-help, fraternity. They understand that
Islam is humanism.’95

The counterpart of populist Islam in the slums of Latin America and
much of sub-Saharan Africa is Pentecostalism. Christianity, of course, is
now, in its majority, a non-Western religion (two-thirds of its adherents
live outside Europe and North America), and Pentecostalism is its most
dynamic missionary in cities of poverty. Indeed the historical specifi-
city of Pentecostalism is that it is the first major world religion to have
grown up almost entirely in the soil of the modern urban slum. With
roots in early ecstatic Methodism and African-American spirituality,
Pentecostalism ‘awoke’ when the Holy Ghost gave the gift of tongues to
participants in an interracial prayer marathon in a poor neighbourhood
of Los Angeles (Azusa Street) in 1906. Unified around spirit baptism,
miracle healing, charismata and a premillennial belief in a coming
world war of capital and labour, early American Pentecostalism—as
religious historians have repeatedly noted—originated as a ‘prophetic
democracy’ whose rural and urban constituencies overlapped, respec-
tively, with those of Populism and the iww.96 Indeed, like Wobbly
organizers, its early missionaries to Latin America and Africa ‘lived
often in extreme poverty, going out with little or no money, seldom
knowing where they would spend the night, or how they would get
their next meal.’97 They also yielded nothing to the iww in their
vehement denunciations of the injustices of industrial capitalism and
its inevitable destruction.

Symptomatically, the first Brazilian congregation, in an anarchist
working-class district of São Paulo, was founded by an Italian artisan

95 Ignacio Ramonet, ‘Le Maroc indécis’, Le Monde diplomatique, July 2000, pp.
12–13. Another former leftist told Ramonet: ‘Nearly 65 per cent of the population
lives under the poverty line. The people of the bidonvilles are entirely cut off from
the elites. They see the elites the way they used to see the French.’
96 In his controversial sociological interpretation of Pentecostalism, Robert Mapes
Anderson claimed that ‘its unconscious intent’, like other millenarian movements,
was actually ‘revolutionary’. (Vision of the Disinherited: The Making of American
Pentecostalism, Oxford 1979, p. 222.)
97 Anderson, Vision of the Disinherited, p. 77.

32 nlr 26

immigrant who had exchanged Malatesta for the Spirit in Chicago.98
In South Africa and Rhodesia, Pentecostalism established its early foot-
holds in the mining compounds and shanty towns; where, according
to Jean Comaroff, ‘it seemed to accord with indigenous notions of
pragmatic spirit forces and to redress the depersonalization and power-
lessness of the urban labour experience.’99 Conceding a larger role to
women than other Christian churches and immensely supportive of
abstinence and frugality, Pentecostalism—as R. Andrew Chesnut discov-
ered in the baixadas of Belém—has always had a particular attraction to
‘the most immiserated stratum of the impoverished classes’: abandoned
wives, widows and single mothers.100 Since 1970, and largely because of
its appeal to slum women and its reputation for being colour-blind, it
has been growing into what is arguably the largest self-organized move-
ment of urban poor people on the planet.101

Although recent claims of ‘over 533 million Pentecostal/charismatics
in the world in 2002’ are probably hyperbole, there may well be half
that number. It is generally agreed that 10 per cent of Latin America
is Pentecostal (about 40 million people) and that the movement has
been the single most important cultural response to explosive and trau-
matic urbanization.102 As Pentecostalism has globalized, of course, it has

98 R. Andrew Chesnut, Born Again in Brazil: The Pentecostal Boom and the
Pathogens of Poverty, New Brunswick 1997, p. 29. On the historical associations
of Pentecostalism with anarchism in Brazil, see Paul Freston, ‘Pentecostalism in
Latin America: Characteristics and Controversies’, Social Compass, vol. 45, no. 3,
1998, p. 342.
99 David Maxwell, ‘Historicizing Christian Independency: The Southern Africa
Pentecostal Movement, c. 1908–60’, Journal of African History 40, 1990, p. 249;
and Jean Comaroff, Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance, Chicago 1985, p. 186.
100 Chesnut, Born Again, p. 61. Indeed, Chesnut found that the Holy Ghost
not only moved tongues but improved family budgets. ‘By eliminating expen-
ditures associated with the male prestige complex, Assembelianos were able to
climb from the lower and middle ranks of poverty to the upper echelons, and
some Quandrangulares migrated from poverty . . . to the lower rungs of the
middle class’: p. 18.
101 ‘In all of human history, no other non-political, non-militaristic, voluntary
human movement has grown as rapidly as the Pentecostal-Charismatic movement
in the last twenty years’: Peter Wagner, foreward to Vinson Synan, The Holiness-
Pentecostal Tradition, Grand Rapids 1997, p. xi.
102 The high estimate is from David Barret and Todd Johnson, ‘Annual Statistical
Table on Global Mission: 2001,’ International Bulletin of Missionary Research, vol.
25, no. 1, January 2001, p. 25. Synan says there were 217 million denominated
Pentecostals in 1997 (Holiness, p. ix). On Latin America, compare Freston,

davis: Planet of Slums 33

differentiated into distinct currents and sociologies. But if in Liberia,
Mozambique and Guatemala, American-sponsored churches have been
vectors of dictatorship and repression, and if some us congregations are
now gentrified into the suburban mainstream of fundamentalism, the
missionary tide of Pentecostalism in the Third World remains closer to
the original millenarian spirit of Azusa Street.103 Above all, as Chesnut
found in Brazil, ‘Pentecostalism . . . remains a religion of the informal
periphery’ (and in Belém, in particular, ‘the poorest of the poor’). In
Peru, where Pentecostalism is growing almost exponentially in the vast
barriadas of Lima, Jefrey Gamarra contends that the growth of the sects
and of the informal economy ‘are a consequence of and a response to
each other’.104 Paul Freston adds that it ‘is the first autonomous mass
religion in Latin America . . . Leaders may not be democratic, but they
come from the same social class’.105

In contrast to populist Islam, which emphasizes civilizational continu-
ity and the trans-class solidarity of faith, Pentecostalism, in the tradition
of its African-American origins, retains a fundamentally exilic identity.
Although, like Islam in the slums, it efficiently correlates itself to
the survival needs of the informal working class (organizing self-help
networks for poor women; offering faith healing as para-medicine; pro-
viding recovery from alcoholism and addiction; insulating children from
the temptations of the street; and so on), its ultimate premise is that
the urban world is corrupt, injust and unreformable. Whether, as Jean
Comaroff has argued in her book on African Zionist churches (many
of which are now Pentecostal), this religion of ‘the marginalized in the

‘Pentecostalism’, p. 337; Anderson, Vision of the Disinherited; and David Martin,
‘Evangelical and Charismatic Christianity in Latin America’, in Karla Poewe, ed.,
Charismatic Christianity as a Global Culture, Columbia 1994, pp. 74–5.
103 See Paul Gifford’s brilliant Christianity and Politics in Doe’s Liberia, Cambridge
1993. Also Peter Walshe, Prophetic Christianity and the Liberation Movement in South
Africa, Pietermaritzburg 1995, especially pp. 110–1.
104 Jefrey Gamarra, ‘Conflict, Post-Conflict and Religion: Andean Responses to New
Religious Movements’, Journal of Southern African Studies, vol. 26, no. 2, June
2000, p. 272. Andres Tapia quotes the Peruvian theologian Samuel Escobar who
sees Sendero Luminoso and the Pentecostals as ‘flip sides of the same coin’—‘both
were seeking a powerful break with injustices, only the means were different.’
‘With Shining Path’s decline, Pentecostalism has emerged as the winner for the
souls of poor Peruvians.’ (‘In the Ashes of the Shining Path’, Pacific News Service,
14 Feburary 1996).
105 Freston, ‘Pentecostalism’, p. 352.

34 nlr 26

shantytowns of neocolonial modernity’ is actually a ‘more radical’ resist-
ance than ‘participation in formal politics or labour unions’, remains to
be seen.106 But, with the Left still largely missing from the slum, the
eschatology of Pentecostalism admirably refuses the inhuman destiny of
the Third World city that Slums warns about. It also sanctifies those who,
in every structural and existential sense, truly live in exile.

106 Comaroff, Body of Power, pp. 259–63.

Political Geography 78 (2020) 102181

Available online 9 April 2020
0962-6298/© 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The coloniality of disaster: Race, empire, and the temporal logics of
emergency in Puerto Rico, USA☆

Yarimar Bonilla
Department of Africana, Puerto Rican and Latino Studies, Hunter College, 695 Park Ave, New York, NY, 10065, United States

A R T I C L E I N F O

Keywords:
Disaster
Emergency
Race
Coloniality
Resilience
Capitalism
Puerto Rico
Caribbean

A B S T R A C T

This essay uses the case of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico to discuss “the coloniality of disaster”: how cata-
strophic events like hurricanes, earthquakes, but also other forms political and economic crisis deepen the fault
lines of long-existing racial and colonial histories. It argues that disaster capitalism needs to be understood as a
form of racio-colonial capitalism and that this in turn requires us to question our understandings of both
“resilience” and “recovery.” The article focuses on the “wait of disaster” as a temporal logic of state subjugation
and on how Puerto Ricans responded to state abandonment through modes of autogesti�on, or autonomous
organizing. It concludes that while resiliency can be coopted in service of a neoliberal recovery, it can also be the
site for gestating new forms of sovereignty and new visions of postcolonial recovery.

1. Introduction

In September of 2017, two back to back hurricanes hit the US ter-
ritory of Puerto Rico causing unprecedented damage, leaving residents
without electricity for nearly a year, deepening an already existing fiscal
crisis, and bringing about massive social change that many are still
struggling to understand. Since Hurricane Maria, I have been trying to
think and write about how this storm ripped the veil off Puerto Rico’s
colonial status, as much for those observing from afar who had perhaps
never stopped to contemplate Puerto Rico’s relationship to the United
States, as well as for local residents who were forced into an affective
reckoning with the kinds of structural violence they had been enduring
for decades.

In this project, I seek to examine how climate change, the shifts
brought about by the epoch of the Anthropocene, and the gov-
ernmentality of debt with its neoliberal calls for austerity and resilience,
are all shaped by what some describe as the coloniality of power.1

Indeed, I ask whether colonialism itself might not be best understood as

a kind of disaster or, as Nelson Maldonado Torres (2016) suggests, a
veritable catastrophe.

This has led me towards an engagement with the large cannon of
work on “disaster-ology” within the social sciences, which allows me to
extend a series of already well-established arguments: First, the fact that
there is no such thing as a natural disaster: all disasters are socially
produced (Oliver-Smith, Hoffman, & Hoffman, 1999; Wisner, Blaikie,
Blaikie, Cannon, & Davis, 2004). Second, that disasters should not be
understood as sudden events, but rather the outcome of long processes of
slow, structural violence (Carrigan, 2015; Davies, 2018; Kwate &
Threadcraft, 2018; Nixon, 2011). Thirdly, that “Vulnerability” (both
social and environmental) is not a natural state but the product of
racio-colonial governance (Schuller, 2016; Wisner et al., 2004). Lastly,
that, despite lip service to the contrary, disasters do not operate as “great
levelers.”; tTheir effects are experienced differentially through
pre-existing hierarchies of race, class, and gender and in fact they often
sharpen those relations of inequality (Gómez-Barris, 2017; Nishime &
Hester Williams, 2018).

☆ Research for this project was made possible by support from the National Science Foundation and the Andrew Carnegie Fellows program. Earlier versions
benefitted from engagement with colleagues at the University of California-Santa Cruz, UCLA, Princeton, NYU, Stony Brook, Mount Holyoke, Harvard, and Rutgers. I
am grateful to Dawn Wells and Isabel Guzzardo for research assistance and to Raquel Salas-Rivera for editing.

E-mail address: yb672@hunter.cuny.edu.
1 On the coloniality of power see Quijano (1998, 2000), Mignolo (2000), and Maldonado-Torres (2007). On the relation between race, colonialism and the

anthropocene see Verges (2017), Haraway (2015), and (Alvater et al., 2016). On the coloniality of debt see Zambrana (2018); Mun~iz Varela (2013); Godreau
(2018) and Hudson (2017).

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

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Political Geography 78 (2020) 102181

2

Given all this, my focus is thus not on what Hurricane Maria has
caused, but on what it has revealed: namely, how it has laid bare the
forms of structural violence and racio-colonial governance that had been
operating in Puerto Rico for centuries.2

One of the first things Maria revealed is precisely the place of Puerto
Rico within a broad US archipelago of racialized neglect. This ties it to
sites of climatic disaster like New Orleans (Giroux, 2007, 2015; Danziger
& Danziger, 2006; Dyson & Elliott, 2010), but also to places of urban
ruin and social neglect like Detroit (Desan, 2014; Sugrue, 2014). This in
turn requires us to interrogate the United States as a racial-imperial
formation and to critically assess the intertwined nature of racial and
imperial governance.

Additionally, Maria reveals the insufficiencies of certain theories of
“disaster capitalism” that fail to show how it is the “slow violence” of
colonial and racial governance which sets the stage for the accelerated
dispossession made evident in a state of emergency (Schuller & Mal-
donado, 2016). That is, the accelerated forms of extraction and dispos-
session evident in the wake of modern disasters are conditioned by the
subjectivities and technologies of the colonial encounter. For this
reason, I argue that disaster capitalism needs to be understood as
foundationally a form of racio-colonial capitalism, that emerges directly
out of the capitalist incubator of plantation slavery (Beckert, 2015;
Beckles, 2013; Johnson, 2013; Mintz, 1977, 1985; Williams, 1961).3

This in turn requires us to question our understandings of
“¼resilience, or the ability to absorb and bounce back from experiences
of shock (Barrios, 2016; Fast & Collin-V�ezina, 2010; Kaika, 2017; Mul-
lings, 2005). In recent years, innumerable governmental and interna-
tional agencies have been promoting resilience as a desired state for
communities and nations. The United Nations and the World Bank have
numerous campaigns aimed at making cities and communities resilient.
There are even resilience scorecards that allow governments to measure
up against international targets and indicators (UNISDR, 2017).
Following the September 11 attacks, as FEMA fell under the jurisdiction
of Homeland Security, the idea of resilience has expanded and become
increasingly tied to the security apparatus, becoming a prescribed
quality for not just the neoliberal state, but the security state as well
(Anderson & Adey, 2011; Coaffee, 2008; 2016; Dunn Cavelty, Kauf-
mann, & Søby Kristensen, 2015). This suggests a new ideology in which
the state is imagined as incapable of eliminating threats—both political
and environmental—or addressing their causes. Instead, communities
and individuals must bear the brunt of mitigating rising threats of vio-
lence—both slow/structural and spectacular.

This push for resiliency must be approached with a great deal of
caution. We certainly want our buildings and bridges to be resilient, but
do we really want our communities to become well-adapted to structural
(and infrastructural) violence? Some see these rising calls for resilience
as part of the larger dominance of neoliberal forms of governmentality
across the globe, in which citizenship is increasingly being refashioned
as individualized self-care. With the increasing cuts in social safety nets,
all individuals are increasingly being called upon to take on entrepre-
neurial modes of self-care and self-management (Muehlebach, 2012).
However, we must ask: which communities have historically been
required to demonstrate resilience and incessantly forced to endure both
the shocks of neoliberalism and the slow traumatic violence of colonial
extraction? And is it possible that the push towards resillience has
actually made them disproportionately vulnerable to the current

challenges of climate change?
With these queries in mind, my hope is that ultimately this project

can help us develop new ways of imagining what recovery might look
like. That is, if we understand disasters to have deep colonial histories,
how can we formulate visions of repair that take those longer trajec-
tories into account? How can we develop visions of recovery that do
notsimply re-establish a previous state of inequity, or prepare pop-
ulations to endure future forms of structural violence, but which instead
offer substantive forms of transformation and redress?

This paper is divided into three broad sections. I begin by offering an
“affective map” of life in Puerto Rico after Maria. Here I give a sense of
the lived experience of the storm and its aftermath, focusing on the
temporal logics that transformed a state of emergency into a state of
endurance (Povinelli, 2011). The second part explores the economic and
political landscape that set the stage for the storm: how Puerto Rio was
already in ruins, already prey to vulture, disaster, and imperial capi-
talism, and already a site of increasing calls for neoliberal resilience. The
final section examines how local residents are trying to reimagine the
island’s political future in the aftermath of this catastrophic sedimen-
tation and how neoliberal calls for self-reliance converge with
anti-colonial projects of self-determination. Here I address the dual
meanings of emergencia as a state of both emergency and emergence.

2. The wait of disaster

“If there is only one thing I’ve come to understand about the colonies, my
dear man, it is that one does nothing here but wait.” – Marlon James, A
Book of Night Women

One thread that runs through this essay is an attempt to think about
what we might call “the temporality of disaster,” or how catastrophic
events (including colonialism and climate change) impact our experi-
ence of time, progression, social action, and political possibility. I
approach these questions through the politics of time because one of the
most striking things about the aftermath of hurricane Maria in Puerto
Rico was how it operated as a moment of temporal rupture. In the im-
mediate aftermath of the storm, residents felt trapped in a state of sus-
pension. For weeks on end, there was no school, no work, no electricity,
no phone service, no internet, no television, and no public services. With
hospitals closed or only able to treat the most critically ill, sick patients
were sent home unable to receive services such as cancer treatments or
dialysis. Without electricity, funeral homes were unable to embalm the
dead. (Although given the impassable roads, some are said to have
buried the dead in their own backyards.) For weeks on end, roads
remained blocked; food, water, and gasoline were scarce, and cell phone
towers were down rendering most phones inoperable.

I’ve written about temporal ruptures like this before, particularly in
my work about labor strikes in the French Caribbean (Bonilla, 2015).
There I looked at how social movements—like general strikes, hunger
strikes, or political encampments—create breaks in quotidian routines,
providing liminal moments of temporal suspension in which new futures
can become imaginable. However, the temporality of a social movement
is quite different from that of a disaster. In the context of social move-
ments, the present seems to expand in the sense that it becomes overly
eventful. Social movements are known to produce a kind of sped-up
time. As Lenin famously noted, there are decades where nothing hap-
pens, and then there are weeks where decades happen.

The temporal mode of emergency also comes with a heightened state
of awareness, a surge of adrenaline, a perceived need to move fast, to act
quick, to fix, to save, to repair, to restore. This in turn creates the
expectation of change: a desire and perceived need to move out of the
present state. That is, there is an assumption that the temporal mode of
emergency will be fleeting, quickly shifting over into that of recovery.

2 Although little remarked upon, Hurricane Maria passed through Puerto Rico
precisely on the 100th anniversary of the extension of US citizenship to local
residents.

3 For more on the notion of racial capitalism see Robinson (2019). I use the
term racio-colonial capitalism to stress the co-constitutive nature of race and
colonialism and foreground the importance of conquest and colonial outposts
for the development of modern capitalism. (For more see Walter Rodney (2018)
and Eric Williams (1961).

Y. Bonilla

Political Geography 78 (2020) 102181

3

Emergency is not expected to be an enduring state.4

However, in post hurricane Puerto Rico, this feeling of urgency was
met with a crushing wall of inaction. The present did not expand in its
eventfulness, but in its persistence. Time passed, and nothing changed.
Gone was what Reinhardt Kosselleck (2004) once described as the
“otherness of the future.” The present no longer felt ephemeral, quickly
dissolving into something new. Instead, the present lingered longer than
it should. This created a frenzied state of repetition in which each day
felt eerily like the last. Indeed, as one woman I interviewed in the town
of Comerío—who had spent the previous four months fighting with
FEMA to get a tarp on her roofless home—told me, if anything, each day
felt worse.

What characterized life after Maria thus was not progress but delay,
deterioration, degradation, and the forced act of waiting. Before the
storm hit, residents waited for María itself. They stockpiled provisions,
gathered those they called family, took stock of what they held dear, and
prepared themselves for the worst. Then, for nearly 24 h rain beat down
steadily on fragile homes, water poured in through windows and leaky
roofs, gusts of wind ripped windows straight off their hinges, and rivers
spilled out of their banks pushing residents onto their rooftops in search
of safety. Many of those I’ve interviewed spent the entire storm holding
on to a door that Maria seemed intent on ripping away. Some had to
leave their flooding homes mid-storm and wade through chest-deep
waters to find safety. Others have children who still wake up in the
middle of the night afraid that they or their parents might be drowning.

Those of us in the diaspora went through our own process of sus-
pension. We held our breath from across the ocean. We heard the
howling winds through phone lines and social media posts. We felt the
lights go out and the cell towers drop. And we panicked when suddenly
our loved ones fell out of digital reach.

Everyone waited for the storm to pass, thinking foolishly that the
winds and rain would be the worst of it. We didn’t realize that the true
disaster was not the storm itself, but what was laid bare in its wake: the
neglected infrastructure of an island in crisis, the economic cleavages of
a society marked by profound disparity, the naked disdain of an imperial
state, and the forms of structural neglect and social abandonment that
had already come to characterize this bankrupt colony.

After the winds subsided, residents once again waited for roads to be
cleared, for the lights to come back on, for stores to re-open, for cell
phone service to return and for running water to be restored. They
endured long lines that lastedanywhere from six to 8 h to obtain basic
necessities such as: food, fuel, water, and the ice needed to refrigerate
life-saving medications such as insulin. Without electricity or commu-
nication services, merchants were unable to accept credit cards or public
assistance payments. Thus, some of the longest lines were at the bank,
where residents waited to procure the cash needed to purchase what few
items were available in stores. For those without savings, many of whom
had not received income since the first of the two back-to-back storms it
was impossible to participate in the hurricane economy—they, most of
all, were left to wait.

For those who lost their homes, there was no line, just the labyrinth
of bureaucracy. They were told to sign up for FEMA assistance online,
which was impossible for most since they had no electricity, internet, or
cell phone service. Once they figured out how to fill out their paperwork,
they were then told to wait in their destroyed homes without cleaning or
repairing the damage, dwelling in disaster until the fabled FEMA in-
spectors could come to calculate their loss.

The wait reinforced the feeling of insularity. Those inside felt trap-
ped. They ambled around holding their phones to the sky searching for a
signal so they could let the world know that they had survived and that
they were “okay,” even though what it meant to be “okay” in post-Maria
Puerto Rico was unclear. For some, being “okay” meant they didn’t have

electricity or running water. For others, it meant they lost their roofs but
not their homes. For many it meant they lost everything but their lives.

Those too sick, too old, too young, or too impatient to weather this
period—or those for whom Puerto Rico still be homeland but not nec-
essarilyhome—headed to the airport in record numbers, often aban-
doning their cars in the parking lot, keys and all, for the bank to
repossess.

Many residents expressed frustration with this sense of stalled time.
The halt of capitalist flows and the halt of modernity suddenly made it
clear that Puerto Rico was one of those islands. Puerto Ricans had long
imagined that long lines, shortages, rationing, and a dependency on the
diaspora were things experienced elsewhere. It was believed that US-led
development had raised Puerto Rico above the standard of living of its
Caribbean neighbors. Many thought that being a US citizen meant not
having to stand in line for food or going to a river for water.

Thus, the first couple of days everyone waited patiently, grateful to
be alive and understanding that bouncing back from a disaster takes
time, but feeling confident that the government had an emergency plan
in motion. That is, there was an assumption that the temporal mode of
emergency would quickly shift over into that of recovery.

But the cavalry never arrived. Government trucks did not turn up to
clear the debris. Instead, neighbors had to clear their own paths with
machetes. Tankers of drinking water didn’t appear, so residents headed
to the river with buckets, or built their own make-shift infrastructure out
of PVC pipes that connected directly to mountain springs.

They drank rain water or opened up wells that were later revealed to
be toxic (Hern�andez & Dennis, 2017). Food was not delivered for weeks,
so community kitchens sprung up, sometimes feeding a single block,
sometimes feeding half the town. For weeks on end, there were no aid
workers, no helicopters, no military hospitals, no distribution centers.
The state simply left its citizens waiting. When government aid finally
arrived, it was a slow and insufficient trickle with none of the “shock and
awe” that many had come to associate with the “most powerful military
in the world.” Meal boxes distributed by the federal government offered
merely a can of sausages and a bag of skittles. This and an infamous roll
of paper towels hurled by the president, stood in sharp contrast to the
imagined bounty of empire.

The Diaspora agonized over this delay, this immobility, this impo-
tence. New migrants talked about having survivor’s guilt, feeling like
they had abandoned ship. They combed news and internet feeds for
traces of their communities. Multiple online groups were created for
keeping track of reports from different parts of the island.If people
couldn’t hear from their loved ones directly, they could at least console
themselves by finding out if the bridge to their town was still standing,
or if anyone from their neighborhood had shown proof of life.

With government aid indefinitely stalled, those on the outside took it
upon themselves to lead the recovery. Before post offices had even
opened, they began filling care boxes. They strategized on social media
about the best way to send items, calculating how many cans of food
could fit in a flat rate box, and wondering if it was possible to mail a
gallon of water. A young woman I met at a university event described the
feeling as one of catatonia: a mental state marked by purposeless ac-
tivity, immobility, and stupor.5

Many of those who were able to survive the storm were lost to its
wake. They succumbed to what anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot
once described as “ordinary accidents and ordinary diseases”—so ordi-
nary that anywhere else they would have been treated or altogether
avoided (Trouillot, 1990). They contracted banal diseases like
conjunctivitis due to lack of sanitation, and more deadly ones produced
by the presence of animal corpses in rivers and rat droppings amongst
the debris (Sosa Pascual & Sutter, 2018; Sutter 2018b). Some were run

4 For more on emergency as a “mode of eventfulness” see Anderson (2015,
2017), Berlant (2011) and Choi (2015).

5 In the months following Maria, a new podcast named Catatonia was
developed by journalist and artist Huascar Robles to discuss precisely these
issues. https://www.huascarrobles.com/catatonia.

Y. Bonilla

https://www.huascarrobles.com/catatonia

Political Geography 78 (2020) 102181

4

over in the night by cars due to the lack of street lights, others were
killed in accidents at intersections without traffic signals. Others, who
suffered from sleep apnea, choked in the night because electricity could
no longer power their CPAP machines (Sutter 2018a).

Surgeons operated by the light of their cellphones (Cummins, 2017).
With hospitals overrun or closed, home births rates increased, but so did
suicides (Acevedo, 2018; Liautaud, Giraldo, & x Paoli, 2017). One
woman who tried to take her own life left a final Facebook post com-
menting on the public demand for strength and resilience: “We’re so
obsessed with strength,” she wrote, “We’re told we have to be strong,
resilient, and what not and we believe it.” She signed off by posting a
YouTube video of Sting singing “Fragile.”

At one point, people thought that what was needed in Puerto Rico
was more media coverage. But the media came. They documented. They
managed to keep the story alive. Puerto Rico was featured in news re-
ports to an unprecedented degree, but this made no difference. The
suffering continued. It wasn’t a secret; it was a public display. Even
reporters from US news outlets felt as if they were trapped in a state of
suspension and repetition. CBS News reporter David Begnaud said to his
anchor, “I’ve never covered a natural disaster where the emergency was
endless” (Begnaud, 2017).

Nearly two years later, the social landscape remains stubbornly un-
changed. The leaves that were ripped off trees by hurricane winds have
now grown back, and the environmental ravages of the storm have
started to fade, but infrastructure remains in shatters. Most buildings
look battered: the violence of the hurricane winds chipped away their
paint, shattered their windows, and blew off their facades. Even fast food
restaurants have only empty poles where their signs used to be. Unre-
paired windows remain boarded up, other buildings are completely
abandoned. Electric cables still dangle perilously in the air, mere inches
from the cars passing beneath them. Utility poles still litter the ground
like forgotten corpses, or lean precariously against homes as vegetation
grows around them. Over a year after the storm, an estimated 60% of
traffic lights are still not working. Most public lighting remains out of
service, and throughout local towns an enduring feeling of abandonment
and ruin prevails.

Residents have become accustomed to this landscape. They’ve
become adept at circumventing the power lines and debris that still
surround their homes, and they’ve figured out how to deftly maneuver
intersections without traffic lights. At a crossroads in Guaynabo, a road
sign popped up (see Fig. 1) showing a broken streetlight. It’s telling that
I witnessed heated debate and speculation at a dinner table over whether
this was an artistic statement or an actual government-produced sign. In
other words, some were willing to entertain the idea that the govern-
ment might never repair the traffic system, and would instead simply
create a new iconography of disaster.

Well-meaning observers speculate: would this happen in a US state?
The answer is Yes. The answer is Flint, where austerity measures led to a
poisoned water supply that has yet to be remedied. Indeed, to under-
stand Puerto Rico, we must place it within this larger archipelago of
racialized neglect, connected through deep currents of racialized
governance (Meyers & Hunt, 2014). Just as police brutality runs on a
loop in the US via cell phone videos of police assault and murder, so do
images of neglected populations: abandoned urban spaces in Detroit,
poisoned water reserves in Flint, displaced communities in New Orleans,
and Puerto Ricans left to wait on rooftops for aid that refuses to arrive.
(See Fig. 2) These are not mistakes or even events. rThese are the logics
of disposability at work. As Christina Sharpe asserts, this is the weather,
the total climate, an environment in which black and brown bodies are
rendered disposable (Sharpe, 2016).

Those who were quick to assert indignantly “But these are US citi-
zens!” seemed to forget that citizenship does not save you. Citizenship
doesn’t mean you won’t be shot dead in plain daylight by a police of-
ficer, or left abandoned without food or water for days on end—on a
rooftop, at a superdome, in a prison cell, or in a flood zone. It is precisely
the second class citizenship that Puerto Ricans have long

experienced—the legal categories in which they have been purposefully
placed through the technologies of racio-colonial governance—which
ensures that for years on end Puerto Ricans will continue to wait under
blue tarps, much like residents of New Orleans waited in FEMA trailers,
pushed to the limits of bureaucratic exhaustion. This is not the result of
failed inclusion, but of successful occupation.

Sociologist Javier Auyero suggests that waiting is a temporal process
through which political subordination is produced (Auyero, 2012). He
argues that recipients of government assistance are often made to wait
days, months, even years for the bureaucratic machinery of state assis-
tance. Auyero shows how temporal delay operates as a governmental
technique and an assertion of state power. However, as some anthro-
pologists have suggested, waiting also implies the existence of a certain
horizon of expectation, a faith in the chances of an arrival (Hage, 2009;
Janeja & Bandak, 2018). Waiting (esperar) implies hope (esperanza). It
involves anticipation, a form of thinking and living towards the future
(Adams, Murphy, & Clarke, 2009). But what happens when you stop
waiting? What happens when you give up?

In Puerto Rico at present many have given up by taking their own
lives, or by getting on a plane, but you also have those who have given
up on the government by individually taking on the task of recovery:
clearing roads, setting up community kitchens, delivering aid to
forgotten residents, building roofs, and even directing traffic at
intersections.

One of the popular hashtags that emerged in the storm’s wake to
highlight these efforts was #Puerto Rico Se Levanta (Puerto RicoRises).
The slogan was first used by the Puerto Rican government to inform the
public about the Post-Irma recovery process, along with stylized

Fig. 1. Street sign in Puerto Rico. Photo by author.

Y. Bonilla

Political Geography 78 (2020) 102181

5

graphics detailing recovery efforts on social media6. In these govern-
ment posts, #PuertoRicoSeLevanta represented an assertion of govern-
mental efficiency and care at a time of crisis.

However, after Hurricane Maria there was no government. The head
of emergency management made a statement to the press asking citizens
to stay calm and wait because there was no working government, and
there wouldn’t be for several days. (Shortly afterwards he went on
vacation.) For days on end, there was no communication between the
central offices in San Juan and the different towns throughout Puerto
Rico. For months, there was little progress or accountability about how
and when state aid would arrive. Residents and local mayors were left in
limbo, forced to sort things out on their own.

During this period, the hashtag #PuertoRicoSeLevanta morphed
from an assertion of governmental care, to a demonstration of individual
resilience. With this shift, the meaning of “Puerto Rico” in #Puerto Rico
Se Levanta was transfromed from indexing a state apparatus to signaling
a body politic forced to self rely in the absence of the state. The slogan
was subsequently used to show images of residents coming together with
their neighbors and finding creative solutions to the lack of infrastruc-
ture, such as building washing machines out of bicycle parts or gener-
ators out of lawnmowers. Some of these posts showed residents taking
on government roles such as setting up centros de acopio (aid centers),
delivering food and water to rural areas, and taking charge of

intersections that lacked working traffic lights. In other words, the
hashtag was used to show how residents were stepping into the roles of
an absent state.

They say it takes twenty-one days for new habits to cement. The great
majority of Puerto Ricans spent well over a hundred days without
electricity, running water, or traffic signals — that is, without the
invisible infrastructure of daily life.7 Feeling abandoned by the gov-
ernment became habitual. Being forced to self-rely became ingrained.
Many have celebrated Puerto Rican’s resilience in the aftermath of the
storm, indeed, it’s quite remarkable that there was so little violence,
looting, or unrest. However, one must wonder: what will these
increasingly individualized and privatized form of resilience and self-
reliance produce in a place that was already bracing itself for auster-
ity? At what point does resilience become a form of neoliberal
endurance?

3. Bankrupt states and resilient individuals

It is important to remember that the 2017 storms arrived just two
years after the previous Governor of Puerto Rico had declared that this
US territory was on the verge of a financial “death spiral” (Walsh, 2016).
Years of overborrowing to compensate for a deflated economic base had
led to a multi-billiondollar debt, which the state was now incapable of

Fig. 2. Tweet comparing Puerto Rico to new orleans.

6 For an example of these kinds of posts see https://twitter.com/fortalezapr/s
tatus/906223691792617477

7 As Starr and Bowker (1995) argue, infrastructure is often invisible until it
breaks or fails. See also Cowen (2017) on the infastructure of empire.

Y. Bonilla

https://twitter.com/fortalezapr/status/90622369179261747

7

[Informe] Puerto Rico se levanta: Tras 36 horas de trabajo. @ACUEDUCTOSPR pic.twitter.com/dik8mqsFgh

— La Fortaleza (@lafortalezadepr) September 8, 2017

Political Geography 78 (2020) 102181

6

servicing.
The local government tried to file for bankruptcy, but Puerto Rico

was mysteriously written out of the bankruptcy law by an unexplained
1984 amendment to the tax code (Greenberg, 2016; Lubben, 2014).
Puerto Rico’s territorial status thus leaves its municipalities unable to
declare bankruptcy—a right only afforded within the 50 states. It is also
unable to follow the path of sovereign nations like Argentina by
defaulting because it is written into the territorial constitution that
government debts must be serviced before any other public
expenditures.

This dates back to the moment when Congress established Puerto
Rico’s civil government in 1917 (after nearly two decades of military
rule). At that point, it decreed that any bonds issued by its government
would be free from taxation. Later, in 1952, when the United States
convinced the United Nations to remove Puerto Rico from the list of non
self-governing societies, it was written into the island’s new constitution
that the repayment of public debt must take priority over financing
public services. In other words, one of the founding principles of terri-
torial status was its establishment as a site of US investment and Puerto
Rican debt.

When Puerto Rico’s commonwealth status was established, it was
portrayed as a temporary measure. Its proponent, Luis Mu~noz Marín,
suggested that the territory needed time to industrialize and strengthen
its economy in order to either become a US state or develop as an in-
dependent nation. However, here too residents were left waiting. The
industrialization efforts that followed did not succeed in elevating the
island’s economy to the level of a US state. Even before the hurricane,
Puerto Rico’s gross national income was roughly one third the level of
the fifty states and close to 45% of the population lived at or below the
poverty line.

The causes of the current economic crisis are complex. In many ways
it is linked to the larger financial crisis of 2008, but it was also precip-
itated by the elimination of tax incentives to US businesses during the
Clinton administration in 1993.8 This led to a massive loss of revenue as
manufacturers moved to sites with lower operational costs. As manu-
facturers moved away, so too did the military, which closed most of the
bases on the island causing even greater economic compression. The
latter was a clear indication of the loss of Puerto Rico’s geopolitical
importance in the wake of the Cold War. It’s is telling that at the same
time that the Obama administration refused to offer a financial package
to address Puerto Rico’s economic crisis, they sought to re-establish
diplomatic ties with the Cuban government.

Puerto Rico’s debt crisis was also fueled by the particular financial
apparatus that are Puerto Rican bonds, and the role they played in the
global financial crisis. In addition to having constitutionally guaranteed
repayment terms, bonds issued by the Puerto Rican government also
have the unique and singular quality (unavailable within any of the 50
states) of being triple tax exempt, which makes them free of tax obli-
gations at the state, federal, or local level (Walsh, 2015). This made
them irresistible to Wall Street financiers, who kept finding new and
creative ways of re-packaging what had clearly become a shell game. In
fact, it was the Lehman Brothers firm (before its crash) which helped
establish the island’s sales tax system in 2016 as a way of skirting
constitutional limits on public debt.9

As a result, Puerto Rico accrued an unfathomable amount of public
debt. As its ability to service that debt came into question, the loan terms
became less and less favorable—resulting in what some describe as the
societal equivalent of a payday loan. Most of its Capital Appreciation
bonds, for example, have an effective interest rate of 785% (Bhatti &

Sloan, 2016).
Numerous civic groups have called for the cancellation of the debt, or

at the very least its audit. The local government petitioned for the right
to declare bankruptcy, but instead Congress passed the 2016 Puerto Rico
Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA), which
allowed restructuring under the control of a congressionally-appointed
Oversight Boardlocally referred to as “La Junta,” which was charged
with shrinking the local government’s budget through the imple-
mentation of austerity measures and the reduction of public services.

Many compare these austerity measures to those imposed elsewhere,
such as in Greece. However, in the Greek case, austerity measures rep-
resented a pre-condition for the extension of a larger aid package,
whereas in Puerto Rico austerity was implemented with no accompa-
nying assistance. The PROMESA law did not provide any transfer of
funds from the federal government. If anything, it imposed a new eco-
nomic burden on the Puerto Rican government which subsequently had
to pay the board’s overhead— to the tune of over $200 million dollars a
year.

As with emergency boards that have been put into place in other
racialized and indebted societies such as Detroit and Flint, the board’s
main task has been to shrink the state apparatus, which has meant
closing schools, consolidating agencies, suspending public services, and
privatizing public infrastructure (such as airports, highways, and utility
systems), all while raising the sales tax and government fees. As
mentioned above, Puerto Rico didn’t even have a sales tax before 2006.
By 2017 it reached 11.5%–the highest of any US state or territory. These
revenues however are earmarked for debt repayment, not maintenance
of public services.

The debt crisis thus paved the way for infrastructural vulnerability
and social abandonment long before hurricane María. For example, the
electric grid had not received proper maintenance. Just a year prior to
Maria, there had been an island-wide three day blackout that demon-
strated the weakness of the grid (Stanchich, 2016). The water system
was also in crisis. A report from May of 2017 showed that 70% of the
island’s drinking water was possibly toxic (Llor�ens & Stanchich, 2019;
Cotto, 2017). A report on the hospital system had also tried to sound the
alarm about the inability of the health system to respond in case of a
crisis (Gonz�alez, 2018). We now know that it was these infrastructural
failures which led to Maria’s high death toll—estimated to be some-
where between three and five thousand (Sosa Pascual et al., 2018; Sosa
Pascual et al., 2019). This makes Hurricane Maria the deadliest disaster
on US soil in recent history, withan even higher death toll than 9/11.

Puerto Rico’s ongoing crisis had also spurred a historic migratory
wave even before the hurricane hit, with more Puerto Ricans already
residing in the continental United States than in the Puerto Rican ter-
ritory (Cohn, Patten, & Lopez, 2014). It is clear that many of those
evacuating are not imagining a return, not imagining a collective future,
just an extended state of emergency.

While migration rates continue to climb, the current government has
been focused on attracting new “stakeholders” to come to Puerto Rico
under Act 20/22, a pivotal piece of legislation that allows wealthy elites
from the states to use Puerto Rico as a tax haven (Neate, 2016). Passed in
2012, the legislation was established to bring capital investment to the
island once it was barred from borrowing. The law originally carried
certain restrictions requiring direct capital investment and job creation.
Under the current administration, however, these rules have been lifted.
Now, any new transplant from the US who spends half the year on the
island can receive exemptions from federal and local taxes, capital gains
tax, and taxes on passive income until the year 2035, regardless of
whether they generate employment or invest in the local economy
(Bonilla, 2018). This makes Puerto Rico the only place on US soil where
such income can go untaxed. (Of course, this is only available to “new
arrivals” not current residents or those originally born in the territory
who have since migrated.)

Originally designed to attract wealthy financiers, the law has ended
up luring tech entrepreneurs, cryptocurrency devotees, digital nomads,

8 For critical resources on the background and social implications of the debt
crisis, see www.puertoricosyllabus.com.

9 A portion of the newly created sales tax (now at 11.5%) would be used to
securitize new bonds that won’t be counted as part of the money borrowed by
the government (Scahill, 2018).

Y. Bonilla

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Political Geography 78 (2020) 102181
7

and tax dodgers who choose their countries of residence based on eco-
nomic incentives, regulatory freedom, and “value opportunities,” rather
than on cultural or political ties.

Puerto Rico’s status as an unincorporated US territory suits these
untethered entrepreneurs. Since Puerto Rico is neither a nation nor a US
state, new arrivals are able to retain their US citizenship while opting out
of tax obligations. One of these wealthy part-time residents, Peter Schiff,
the CEO of Euro Pacific Capital, was quoted by CNN as saying “Yeah, I’m
saving a lot of money … It’s the closest thing to renouncing your US
citizenship without actually doing it … You’re still an American, you’re
just out from under the IRS” (Gillespie, 2015). In a recent GQ magazine
article, another recent arrival justified his decision similarly. He ex-
plains, “I was looking at different tax havens: Andorra, Lichtenstein,
Monaco. But the problem is, you have to give up your US passport. When
I heard about this, it was too good to be true. But it’s real. I live in
paradise. I live at the Ritz-Carlton. I drive my golf cart to the beach club
for breakfast. Then I go to my sunset yoga class on the beach” (Barron,
2018).

Some argue that these new arrivals will offer a much-needed boost to
the local economy, however these self-described “ex-pats” tend to live in
isolated enclaves, and even then for only part of the year— carefully
avoiding hurricane season, for example. They provide little in the way of
long-term, secure employment, particularly as the majority of those
arriving are part of what the governor describes as members of the
“human cloud”—untethered digital nomads who can set up shop any-
where because they require little local infrastructure (Bonilla, 2018). It
is this disregard for social infrastructure, combined with a broader lib-
ertarian ideology that scorns the state apparatus, which makes Puerto
Rico such an attractive destination for these digital nomads. Unlike
long-term residents, these new arrivals are not concerned with the
withering capacities of an already moribund and bankrupt
non-sovereign local state. For them, state retreat is strategically useful.

By claiming Puerto Rico as their primary residence, these new ar-
rivals lose the right to vote in US presidential or congressional elections,
but when asked about this, they seem unconcerned. One new arrival
quoted in a GQ article said he didn’t care about voting: “We’ve got a civil
war going on. Red versus blue. We’ve got four percent unemployment,
and I feel safer being here than in Miami or New York. The world’s going
to shit, and that doesn’t mean Puerto Rico won’t go down further. They
are already way down.” In other words, Puerto Rico has already been
forced to deal with the precarity, disparity, and increased vulnerability
that is forecasted for the world as a whole in the age of the Anthro-
pocene. While some experience disasters as triggers of dispossession,
others spout ideals of “Anti-Fragility” seeing moments of crisis—both
environmental and economic—as possibilities for creative destruction
(Taleb, 2012).

Some argue that climate change will serve as a great leveler and that
it could bring about greater social consciousness around the globe.
However, reports have shown that although the “super rich” are highly
concerned about apocalyptic futures and an impending class war, they
are not preparing for these scenarios by investing in social infrastruc-
ture, but rather by generating individualized doomsday survival stra-
tegies through the construction of stealth bunkers and the exploration of
space travel (Osnos, 2017; O’Connell, 2018). In the Caribbean, this re-
sults in self-sufficient mansions complete with solar panels, water
desalination plants, helipads, and massive emergency supplies—none of
which require a functioning state. Given the fantasies that continue to
circulate about remote and uninhabited deserted isles, it is perhaps not
surprising that tropical islands would become a fantasy scenario for an
apocalyptic future.

I once asked one of these wealthy expats how he felt about moving
and doing business in a place with unreliable public services, spotty
internet, and frequent power outages. He responded immediately that he
lives in Condado—the most expensive enclave of San Juan—where the
internet is faster than Silicon Valley, and all the buildings have under-
ground electric cabling and reserve water tanks. He also stressed that the

hardships experienced after María had strengthened his resolve to move
here. The ability with which Puerto Ricans were able to carry on with
little protest or violence in the face of disaster—in other words their
resilience—had convinced him that this was a safe place to ride out
future storms.

It is concerning that the local government views these groups as
important new “stakeholders” in Puerto Rico’s future and has created
advisory groups and other official channels to involve them in the
articulation of Puerto Rico’s recovery. At a time when the government
was already reducing public services and enacting austerity measures
that disproportionately impact the poor, these new constituents could
help tip the scales towards a recovery that centers on “individual re-
sponsibility” at the same time that local populations are left without
collective safety nets.

While the local government tries to lure new wealthy non-Puerto
Ricans to the island, it simultaneously continues to increase austerity
measures for locals. One of the first measures passed by the Rossell�o
administration was a labor reform act that eliminated sick days,
extended the probationary period, and allowed workers to be paid less
than minimum wage. These reforms are a response to arguments made
by certain economic analyssts, such as a writer for Forbes who had
suggested that Puerto Rico’s problem was that it had applied “rich
country policies” to a poor society (Sotomayor, 2015). In other words,
the writer suggests that Puerto Ricans took their US citizenship too
literally and imagined they were entitled to the same kind of infra-
structure and living standards of a US state.

The debt crisis that preceded the hurricane had already began to shift
expectations about what it meant to be a US citizen in Puerto Rico, what
economic rights you were entitled to, what services you should expect to
receive from the state, and what kind of political futures were imagin-
able in a bankrupt colony. Although the semblance of a benefactor state
remained alive through federal programs such as Pell grants and food
stamps, the local government was no longer seen as capable of pro-
tecting its citizens by offering them a safety net or even basic services. As
a result, preparing yourself for things such as a natural disaster had
increasingly come to be seen as an individual duty, not a state
responsibility.

As one man I interviewed explained,

“We have to change that attitude that the government has to provide
for us, because we will never get back on our feet that way. Here we
depend too much on the government and the government is bank-
rupt. The government doesn’t work. So now we have to work harder
because the government can no longer help us.” (Research Interview
June 2017)

Many I’ve interviewed emphasized this idea that it was up to in-
dividuals to prepare for the storm. They had to fill their gas tanks,
stockpile food and water, and withdraw money from the bank before the
storm hit. Some even considered it irresponsible, given Puerto Rico’s
decaying infrastructure, to lack a home generator or solar panels.10

What is absent from this narrative is the fact that for many hurricane
preparedness had become impossible. The debt crisis had left in-
dividuals in a deep state of vulnerability, that was both societal, (in
terms of fragile infrastructure) as well as personal (in terms of financial
precarity) at the precise moment they were being called upon to act as
agents of their own recovery. I was struck by the irony of all of this as I
stumbled upon a banner in front of one of Puerto Rico’s banks which
declared “Un nuevo Puerto Rico est�a en uno,” meaning that a new Puerto
Rico lies within each individual. On the one hand, the slogan emphasizes
the importance of individualized recovery, on the other hand it also

10 Indeed, a year after Maria the hashtag #AUnA~noDeMaría [#OneYear-
AfterMaria] went viral on Twitter with dark satirical takes on these discourses,
mocking those who suggested that a year after Maria you were irresponsible
citizen if you didn’t have these items.

Y. Bonilla

Political Geography 78 (2020) 102181
8

suggests that the future of Puerto Rico is already here, already gestating
within its residents.

3.1. From self-reliance to self determination

“They want everything to be done for them when it should be a community
effort.”

– Donald Trump, Twitter.

In the weeks after hurricane Maria, there was a great deal of outrage
over a statement Donald Trump made on Twitter about Puerto Rico. In
response to the Mayor of San Juan’s critiques of federal efforts, he said
that Puerto Ricans wanted everything done for them. He came under fire
with good reason. However, as is often the case with Trump, his words
spoke to broader shared expectations, not just about the distribution of
state resources, but also about disaster recovery and its agents.

As mentioned above, in the days following the storm, the slogan
“Puerto Rico se levanta” went viral on social media and in real life. It was
spray-painted on battered buildings, and written onto cars, often
accompanied by the Puerto Rican flag, which was suddenly everywhere.
It’s interesting to contrast this with the role played by national flags in
other disaster landscapes. In New Orleans, for example, US flags were
raised as calls for help, but also as public reminders of residents’ enti-
tlement to government aid. The Puerto Rican flags that emerged after
the hurricane, however, were not calling for government assistance, but
rather asserting that citizens didn’t need the government in order to
move forward. When I asked one local schoolteacher about his decision
to place a flag above his home, he explained, “Those of us who raise the
Puerto Rican flags are saying we can do it on our own]. We can raise
ourselves on our own. We are the protagonists of our recovery.”

The Puerto Rican flag has always been a symbol of independence. It
was once seen as subversive and was censured but later became
commodified and was channeled into a form of cultural nationalism that
co-exists with the US presence on the island (D�avila, 1997). It is thus not
surprising that businesses quickly began incorporating the flag and the
slogan “Puerto Rico se levanta” into their publicity ads. The Medalla beer
company issued a new Puerto Rico “restart” can for its products. Bill-
boards promoting pain relief medicine declared that small pains would
not stop Puerto Rico from rebuilding and hip boutiques in the tourist
enclave of Condado exhibited the slogan on store windows, along with
displays of expensive clothing ill-suited for the hard work of digging
yourself out of a flood. You could also purchase a Puerto Rico se levanta
souvenir t-shirt or baseball cap at the airport, and I even discovered a
Puerto Rico se levanta series of Hallmark cards at a local Walgreens (See
Figs. 3 and 4). The greeting cards included notes thanking the receiver
for acts of kindness, encouraging the reader to stay positive in the face of
difficulty, and calls for collective unity.

For some, the overwhelming presence of nationalist affect in the
wake of the disaster might seem like an assertion of independence in the
face of imperial neglect. One can also view it as the cooptation of col-
lective sentiment in the service of a neoliberal recovery. This is similar to
the role of volunteerist affect that Vincanne Adams (2013) saw under-
pinning the New Orleans recovery and which others have also described
as key to the production of neoliberal state retreat (Muehlebach, 2012).

It is interesting that “Puerto Rico se levanta” is a double entendre—it
could mean that Puerto Rico is getting back on its feet, but it could also
mean that Puerto Rico is having an uprising. The fact that this latter
meaning was so little discussed or rallied, shows how seemingly depo-
liticized the recovery efforts were. Even though some residents spent
nearly a year without electricity, there were very few protests or dem-
onstrations. Some communities placed banners outside their neighbor-
hoods simply noting the fact that they still didn’t have electricity. Others
held torch-lit processions to call attention to their plight. Interestingly,
none of these actions were held in front of state agencies or sites of
governmental power. Instead, communities mostly turned inward. In the

town of Quebradillas, residents managed to bring the freeway to a
standstill during a protest, refusing to let business carry on as usual. Yet,
the slogan for their demonstration “Tratamos de Levantarnos” (We are
trying to get up) seems almost apologetic, suggesting that they bore the
responsibility of raising themselves up from their plight even as the state
failed to provide even the most basic services (Cyber News, 2017).

As stated previously, in the initial aftermath of the storm, many
Puerto Ricans came together to set up community kitchens, organize
solidarity brigades, clean up debris, place tarps on roofless homes,
distribute solar lights, and take charge, if not of the recovery, at least of
the emergency in the face of an absent state. Some examples of these
kinds of organizations include Casa Pueblo, an organization that
emerged from 1980s environmental activism around the town of
Adjuntas (Massol Dey�a, 2018). Long before Maria, Casa Pueblo was
promoting solar energy, sustainable development, and self-sufficiency
through a well-established network and protocol of community action.
Another example is Comedores Sociales, an initiative that emerged out
of the 2010 university strike and the Pre-Maria protests against the
Fiscal Control Board and in favor of auditing the debt (Roberto, 2019).
Additionally, new groups spontaneously emerged to fill in the gaps left
by absentee state agencies. Some of these were temporary solidarity
brigades, but others became new non-profit organizations that continue
to operate and serve their communities years after Maria.

These efforts are reminiscent of the maroon politics that long char-
acterized Caribbean societies in which parallel communities developed
on the margins of the colonial state. They also echo projects forged by
diasporic communities throughout the US. This inlcudes the breakfast
programs, health and education services developed by groups like the
Black Panthers, the Young Lords, and the Brown Berets, which were
themselves in dialogue with indigenous groups and other communities
struggling against internal colonialism. As well as contemporary forms

Fig. 3. “Puerto Rico se levanta” greeting cards. Photo by Author.

Y. Bonilla

Political Geography 78 (2020) 102181

9

of “DIY urbanism” that have developed in places that have also been
abandoned by the state, such as Detroit (Kinder, 2016). All these efforts
reflect contexts in which the state has never been a site of political
guarantees, but of exploitation at worst and abandonment at best. In the
colonial context of Puerto Rico, these initiatives represent the search for
an alternative form of sovereignty. That is, going off the grid or engaging
in self-reliance in the context of contemporary Puerto Rico becomes a
broader kind of freedom project that sees self-sufficiency and commu-
nity care as a possible way of breaking with US dependence
(Massol-Dey�a, 2019; 2020).

These emerging initiatives are small and localized. They are not
territory-wide, instead they are each tied to particular constituencies or
municipalities and are not necessarily interested in carrying out what in
a different era one would call a mass movement. For some observers
there is something frustrating about this because their efforts don’t look
like a modernist political project. That is, they do not constitute what
anthropologist James Scott would describe as an effort to “see like a
state” or think like a state (Scott, 1998). In other words, they do not
resemble a modernist nation building movement.

These various efforts are often described through the concept of
autogesti�on, which before Maria had already become a watchword in
Puerto Rico. Particularly in thewake of the debt crisis, it had become
common to hear people talk about the need to autogestionarse. Taken
literally, autogestion can be translated as self-reliance or self-manage-
ment\.11 Yet, gestionar can have a different meaning, not just of man-
agement but of gestation (like a fetus), that is, it can be imagined as the

process of incubating and developing a new being.
At a post-Maria event at the University of Puerto Rico, local scholar

and filmmaker Mariolga Reyes Cruz (2018) explicitly talked about these
projects as forms of gestating sovereignty. In a speech titled “Por quienes
esperamos” (“Who are We Waiting For” or “The Ones We are Waiting
For”) she said that Maria had demonstrated that Puerto Ricans didn’t
need to wait for anyone. While both local and federal governments
stalled, Puerto Ricans had taken care of themselves. She asserted that the
autogesti�on initiatives emerging after Maria were not simply about
taking on the task of recovery but about reimagining the future.

Cruz went on to directly connect the wait of Maria to the wait of
colonialism—the wait to resolve political status that Puerto Ricans have
been engaged in for over a century—and suggested that in both cases
what appeared to be a wait was actually a gestation process. While
waiting for decolonization, she argued, community organizations in
Puerto Rico had forged new visions of sovereignty: food sovereignty
through back-to-the-land movements, territorial sovereignty through
land occupations and community trusts, energy sovereignty (soberanía
energ�etica) through solar power initiatives, and even political sover-
eignty through a reimagining of the means and forms of collective ac-
tion. She also spoke of what one might call a diasporic sovereignty
forged by Puerto Rican communities abroad who mobilized in the wake
of the storm to send aid in the face of governmental failure.

Looking to the future, she said it was now time to knit together these
forms of sovereignty (es hora de entreteger soberanias). It is unclear what
this process will entail and where it will lead, but for Cruz, and many
others, this archipelago of sovereignty (which reaches beyond the ter-
ritory and into the diaspora) offers a ray of hope within an otherwise
bleak landscape. After both local and federal governments abandoned
their citizens, forcing them to wait, and in a context where over a decade
of austerity and over a century of US empire had already whittled down
the expectations regarding state capacity and care, these islands of
sovereignty offer an alternative.

However, while Mariolga and other activists are busy gestating new
sovereignties, the government continues to recruit new stakeholders
who have their own vision of what might emerge out of the ruins of
Maria. At an investor’s conference in New York, just a few months after
Maria, I observed as the governor and his cabinet members urged US
entrepreneurs to take advantage of Puerto Rico’s economic and colonial
crisis. Among the many competitive advantages they ascribed to the
territory was precisely the resilience of its population. Resilience, it
seems, is good for business.

4. Imagining repair

I would like to end by giving the final word to one of the participants
in my study, a woman that I shall call Annie, who echoed in her own way
the same arguments that Mariolga Cruz was trying to make in her re-
marks at the university.

Annie is an extremely youthful and stylish 71-year old retired school
teacher, with short salt and pepper hair who is always relentlessly en-
ergetic and upbeat. I had originally met her while conducting research
about Puerto Rico’s economic crisis. After the hurricane, I was unable to
reach her for months because both her landline and her cellphone had
stopped working. I later learned she had spent the hurricane alone at
home, in a working-class suburb on the outskirts of San Juan, and later
rode out the blackout with her daughter in Florida. I caught up with her
a year later after she was settling back into her life in San Juan.

With her characteristic upbeat style, she said that she suffered little
during the hurricane. She had done everything she needed to prepare.
She had stockpiled food, water, and batteries. She had her medicines,
and she had cash. In other words, she was a responsible, self-sufficient
citizen. Her home suffered little damage, and in the days following the
storm she says she was happily in the “bubble” of her working-class
neighborhood. Her aunts, uncles, and cousins all live nearby, so they
were able to spend those early days together taking care of each other.

Fig. 4. Puerto Rico se levanta greeting cards. Photo by Author.

11 Others have defined this form of practice as “autonomous organizing”
(Garriga-Lopez 2019).

Y. Bonilla

Political Geography 78 (2020) 102181

10

Everyday, her younger cousins would venture out to get water, ice, hot
meals, and other supplies, and they would come back with stories of long
lines and shortages, but for Annie these were just that: stories. They were
something you heard about, something that happened to someone else,
not something you lived through. She kept referring to those events as
things that happened “afuera” – outside of her little bubble.

After a few weeks of this, her daughter in Florida sent for her and
Annie says it was then that she truly discovered the magnitude of the
disaster as she watched images of devastation flash across the screen.
Still, she still insisted on cultivating resilience: “I’m very positive. I al-
ways try to get rid of the negative so I can manage daily life because if I
start crying then I can’t get organized. And you have to stay organized. If
I lose it [Si me voy en brote], I can’t think …” I asked her if she finally “lost
it” once she got to Florida, but she said no: there she got busy once again,
filling out paper work, figuring out a new city, learning how to take the
bus, “I didn’t want to fall into sadness, so I just saw it as an adventure.”

She started to sound almost manic as she narrated what she described
as herself in “el survival mode” but then she paused and said: “Honestly,
I’m now sadder than I was in that survival mode, because that mode
gives you energy and excitement. Now I am back here. Now we are
supposed to be back to normal, but here we are … still waiting. I’m no
longer in survival mode, now I have to absorb everything that
happened.” She said it in precisely this way: absorber lo que ha pasado –
take the hit, absorb the shock.

She talked about the despair she felt when she looked around and the
landscape was still in ruins. She also talked about the pain of losing her
best friend: “We are not sure what happened to her. She was fine before
Maria, and now she is in an assisted living facility and has lost her ability
to speak.”

Part of what upsets Annie is that climate change itself is no longer “a
story,” no longer something you hear about happening elsewhere. She is
worried that nobody seems to be thinking about this, that they are not
rebuilding more sustainable stuctures, or turning to alternative energy
sources: “Nena, we have this sun beating down on us everyday. We
should be using that. It should be doing something more than just giving
us skin cancer.” She is also extremely upset at how the recovery is
unfolding: all the profiteering that is being revealed and the fact that
rich parts of town have streetlights and look like nothing has happened,
while her neighborhood still has no street or traffic lights.

I asked her what she thought a fair recovery would look like and if
she wanted more policicing— since she mentioned several times that she
was worried about crime and mad that only the rich areas were getting
police protection. She laughed and said no, of course not, what she
wants is to see people’s needs attended to. She then went on to think in
larger political terms, saying:

We have to work towards something new. I know it won’t be inde-
pendence because these 120 years of coloniaje americano, and the
ones we had before with the Spanish, have made us think that we
can’t be independent. And there are no leaders … so that alternative
is not possible. In any case, she said, what we need is real sover-
eignty, not that soberanía de papel – where they give you sovereignty
on a piece of paper, where they have some big ceremony and the US
declares us independent, that is not going to solve our problems on
the day to day. That’s not what we need. What we need is real sov-
ereignty, emotional sovereignty, mental sovereignty. This is not
about the Olympics, or Miss Universe, or a seat at the U.N. It’s about
feeling fully human [que nos sintamos gente], it’s about feeling like a
people [que nos sintamos pueblo].

In other words, for Annie, real sovereignty is about addressing the
dehumanization of colonialism, a matter that mere independence does
not tackle.

She went on to say that statehood is out of the question as well
because, “If this disaster has proved anything, it’s that the US doesn’t
care about us. And it’s not because we’re crap; it’s that we just don’t

matter to them. I’m not even mad about it.” When I asked her why the
US didn’t care, she retorted:

For whatever reason! For whatever reason. Because we are not white,
we do not have blue eyes, because we don’t have oil. For whatever
reason, they are no longer interested in us. They had their military
bases here; they threw their bombs; they contaminated the land, and
they left. They’re done. It’s like when a husband uses a woman and
gets tired of her and leaves her. They are not interested, and there is
no point in chasing after them because they are done. It’s over.

Perhaps it goes without saying that Annie is divorced. However,
comparing the Puerto Rico-US relationship to a bad romance, is a
common practice. Even politicians and pundits recurr to it repeatedly.
Yet, Annie gave it a particular spin: she went on to talk about how Puerto
Rico was constantly chasing after the US as if it was Prince Charming,
but she said the truth is “the US is not a prince; it’s just a frog.” She
explained, “They have tremendous problems, huge racial problems,
terrible poverty, health problems—they basically have all the same
problems we have. So, if they can’t resolve their problems, how are they
going to resolve ours?” She concluded by saying:

We have to find something that works for us. We have to create
something new. And I think that’s where we are headed. There is a
new movement that is being forged here. It still hasn’t been born, but
it’s about to be born. A new future for Puerto Rico is already
developing.”

Her words gave new meaning to the bank’s eerie slogan, “A new
Puerto Rico lies within.”

5. From recovery to redress

The events that have been unfolding in Puerto Rico over the past few
years, and those that have unfolded elsewhere in other sites of racio-
colonial disaster, require us to think more expansively about what
disaster recovery should look like and how to build models of recovery
that aren’t about bringing places like Puerto Rico back to their previous
states as sites of imperial capitalism, but which instead can help us
reimagine the very nature of the debts incurred and the damages caused.
As Deborah Thomas (2019) and others have argued, this is about the
larger need and desire among colonized people to find new ways of
being human in the wake of the Plantation. For Annie, and others like
her in Puerto Rico, the search for a post-disaster future is thus about
more than just repairing roofs and restoring streetlights. It is also a
matter of attending to the deep inequities and long histories of dispos-
session that had already left certain populations disproportionately
vulnerable to disaster.

This also a question of temporality and futurity. The victims of
disaster, including the disaster of colonialism, have repeatedly been
forced to wait for repair. It is easy to fall into pessimistic thinking about
the future outcomes of all of this, particularly as ideologies of shrinking
states and resilient individuals continue to deepen long-standing debts
and inequities. However, among Annie and many others in Puerto Rico,
there is a hope that this period of extended waiting, this arrested post-
colonial present, is actually a period of gestation. It is worth noting that
emergencia in Spanish carries a double meaning: suggesting both a state
of emergency and a state of emergence. Perhaps, for this reason, many in
Puerto Rico remain in a hopeful wait, that what might seem to be a
stalled present, could actually be the dawn of a new political future.

Declaration of competing interest

None.

Y. Bonilla

Political Geography 78 (2020) 102181

11

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• The coloniality of disaster: Race, empire, and the temporal logics of emergency in Puerto Rico, USA

1 Introduction
2 The wait of disaster
3 Bankrupt states and resilient individuals
3.1 From self-reliance to self determination
4 Imagining repair
5 From recovery to redress
Declaration of competing interest
References