According to the United Nations, more than one billion people now live in the slums of the cities of the south. In this brilliant and ambitious book, Mike Davis explores the future of a radically unequal and explosively unstable urban world. He traces the global trajectory of informal settlement from the 1960s slums of hope , through urban poverty s big bang during the debt decades of the 1970s and 1980s, down to today s unprecedented megaslums like Cono Sur, Sadr City and the Cape Flats. From the sprawling barricadas of Lima to the garbage hills of Manila, urbanization has been disconnected from industrialization, even economic growth.
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There are over 200,000 slums on earth, situated in some of the most geologically unsound and polluted landscapes. The favelas of Rio de Janiero rest on unstable soils that regularly give way, whole areas of Manila are built on stilts over excrement-clogged rivers, and in Cairo more than a million people use Mameluke Tombs as dwellings, whilst smaller groups are living in abandoned Jewish cemeteries. This brilliant book outlines the catastrophic future of a "surplus humanity" exiled from the formal world economy. It delivers a scathing critique of the retreat of the state and the impact of the "civil society revolution" - which has de-radicalised urban social movements - together with the emergence of bootstrap micro-entrepreneurial remedies, benefiting a small minority and doing nothing to halt the rapid growth of urban poverty. Davis concludes with a provocative take on the "war on terror" as an incipient world war between the American empire and "feral, failed cities", imagining a future of "Orwellian technologies of repression" and a daily response from the slums of "suicide bombers and eloquent explosions". Aimee Shalan, The Guardian --The Guardian
Planet of Slums, by Mike Davis (Verso £8.99) Written in terse, staccato style, this account of some of the world's great slum metropolises is a tough read, urgent and fact-clogged but what facts they are. The poor are ferociously overcrowded (there are four million in one megaslum in Mexico City) and often live on unstable geology or even rubbish dumps, such as the evocatively-named Quarantina outside Beirut. In Cairo, a million people live in the Mameluke Tombs. In Mumbai, an equal number live on the pavements. Some 99.4 per cent of the urban population of Ethiopia live in slums. It comes as no surprise to discover that Baghdad contains one of the world's biggest slum areas. CH --The Independent
Planet of Slums, by Mike Davis (Verso £8.99) Written in terse, staccato style, this account of some of the world's great slum metropolises is a tough read, urgent and fact-clogged but what facts they are. The poor are ferociously overcrowded (there are four million in one megaslum in Mexico City) and often live on unstable geology or even rubbish dumps, such as the evocatively-named Quarantina outside Beirut. In Cairo, a million people live in the Mameluke Tombs. In Mumbai, an equal number live on the pavements. Some 99.4 per cent of the urban population of Ethiopia live in slums. It comes as no surprise to discover that Baghdad contains one of the world's biggest slum areas. CH --The Independent
About the Author
MacArthur Fellow Mike Davis lives in San Diego. He is the author of Prisoners of the American Dream, City of Quartz, Ecology of Fear, Magical Urbanism, Late Victorian Holocausts, Dead Cities, The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu and Buda's Wagon: A Short History of the Car Bomb.
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful
By M. A. Krul
TOP 1000 REVIEWER
Format:Hardcover
Mike Davis is always someone to seize an opportunity to decry the horrible situation somewhere, but in this case, it is an exposé that cannot be made often enough. "Planet of Slums" is a catalogue of the institutional failures, the despicable destruction, the filth and pollution, the poverty, misery and want, the disease and cynicism, in short the Verelendung of the worldwide poor that is the inevitable and eternal result of the capitalist mode of production. Within three decades, a stunning two billion people will live in the slums of megacities in the Third World, where all public services are absent, there are no toilets or drinking water, and where even the poor exploit the poor.
Mike Davis, as usual, pulls no punches and takes no prisoners in his description of the effects of the Washington Consensus on these undeveloped nations. Refuting the ideological mythologies of self-help such as De Sotoism and microlending, he demonstrates that the situation in the Third World is bleak and will get bleaker still. The longer the current order of neoliberalism and Structural Adjustment Programmes, led by such philanthropical heros as World Bank director Paul Wolfowitz, goes on, the more the absolute poverty, immiseration and loss of dignity of the world's poor will continue, and the greater inequality will become. Already one-third of the world's workforce is unemployed or underemployed, and worldwide average income has decreased the past decades. The megacities of the global south will become centers of hyper-alienation, and the inevitable result can only be the destruction of the current order, or the destruction of the world. The world's five billion poor are at our door - hear them knock!
Mike Davis, as usual, pulls no punches and takes no prisoners in his description of the effects of the Washington Consensus on these undeveloped nations. Refuting the ideological mythologies of self-help such as De Sotoism and microlending, he demonstrates that the situation in the Third World is bleak and will get bleaker still. The longer the current order of neoliberalism and Structural Adjustment Programmes, led by such philanthropical heros as World Bank director Paul Wolfowitz, goes on, the more the absolute poverty, immiseration and loss of dignity of the world's poor will continue, and the greater inequality will become. Already one-third of the world's workforce is unemployed or underemployed, and worldwide average income has decreased the past decades. The megacities of the global south will become centers of hyper-alienation, and the inevitable result can only be the destruction of the current order, or the destruction of the world. The world's five billion poor are at our door - hear them knock!
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
By Spin
Format:Paperback
Would you believe that, according to official international surveys and reports, the U.S.A has more slum-dwellers than Ethiopia? But how, you may ask, do you define a "slum". A New York slum-dweller would surely be "better off" (relatively speaking) than an Ethiopian slum-dweller. For a start, the New-Yorker has a T.V. and running water. In fact, they don't. The poor of the West live in the same conditions as the poor of the East and South. This book redefines your concept of poverty and puts forward such brutal and heart-breaking facts as to make you wish that your voice, along with all the poverty-stricken, could be heard in our so-called "civilised" world. This book makes you realise that pop-stars and well-meaning charities can do nothing to change the rise of mega-slums. Only the abandonment of a capitalist philosophy, a capitalist culture, a capitalist mode of thinking, can do that. In short, only you can. Read this book and be astounded at the true nature of cities, the pride of humankind's development.
13 of 15 people found the following review helpful
By lewism
Format:Hardcover
The scale and velocity of world population increase over the last fifty years has been unprecedented in human history. Urbanisation, with over a billion people living in cities has become the key signature of this growth, with the urban population for the first time greater than in the country. These facts are startling, if common knowledge, however they are not much examined in the mainstream. Mike Davis's book looks at this global phenomenon in detail, and shows clearly how the city has been turned into slums, and how poverty has been urbanised.
Slum mega cities have strange geographies, and densities that defy analysis and seeming logic. Here Peri urbanism where city and country are virtually indivisible is covered as is the continual subdivision of wealth and free space by mega slums that turn earthquake prone mountainsides into dense housing. These city slums are where the worlds problems will start, and where they must be solved.
But if you are looking for light reading this is not it, and although global capitalism is firmly blamed for this there are no fixes suggested in this book either. This story though is worth telling and the book is a powerfully argued proof that much of the world is suffering under impossible odds.
Slum mega cities have strange geographies, and densities that defy analysis and seeming logic. Here Peri urbanism where city and country are virtually indivisible is covered as is the continual subdivision of wealth and free space by mega slums that turn earthquake prone mountainsides into dense housing. These city slums are where the worlds problems will start, and where they must be solved.
But if you are looking for light reading this is not it, and although global capitalism is firmly blamed for this there are no fixes suggested in this book either. This story though is worth telling and the book is a powerfully argued proof that much of the world is suffering under impossible odds.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Planet of Slums
Very interesting book on the system of slums and not only their inner workings but also how they interact with the economy and greater government. Read more
Published 4 months ago by sarbern
3.0 out of 5 stars
A Worthy Cause Poorly Presented
There is no doubt that Mike Davis' Planet of Slums sets out to reveal if not a hidden feature of modern societies, then at least one in which many of us turn a blind eye to its... Read more
Published on 27 Sep 2009 by Herman Norford
3.0 out of 5 stars
Thorough Description with No Prescription
Marxist cultural critic Davis's latest book tackles the global problem of the slums (he uses the U.N. Read more
Published on 14 Feb 2007 by A. Ross
5.0 out of 5 stars
Provocative and vital
This stunning book compels the reader to a new view of the world. A "Planet of Slums" is pretty scary from a moral point of view. Read more
Published on 6 Dec 2006 by Dennis Littrell
4.0 out of 5 stars
Relentless, nihilistic, compelling
Mike Davis turns his sights away from Los Angeles and towards the phenomenon of global slums, and starts shooting away with his trademark machine gun prose style, a rat-a-tat-tat... Read more
Published on 17 Sep 2006 by Kosmograd
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