In the 1970s, writes Davis, many developing world governments gave up the battle against slums, turning the power over to two institutions created by the Bretton Woods Accords: the IMF and the World Bank.

The World Bank’s urban development lending has gone from 10 million dollars in 1972 to over 2 billion in 1988. Led by Robert McNamara (the architect of the Vietnam War) and John Turner (a quasi-anarchist architectural theorist), the World Bank did not offer solutions to the slum problem. Turner saw squatters as creative problem solvers; excited by this idea, he built into the World Bank’s strategy having the poor help themselves. Davis argues that this praise for the ingenuity of poor people, however, was a neoliberal smokescreen to deflect attention from the fact that the World Bank was going to do little for slum housing. Funds intended as self-help loans were priced too high for people in extreme poverty and were instead taken up by middle class people not in real need of the help. Davis provides a litany of examples. In Mumbai, the World Bank proposed a strategy to provide massive aid, but projects like installing a toilet for every 20 residents only delivered one toilet for every 100 residents.