Planet of Slums

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Planet of Slums (eBook) Pub. Date: 9/17/2007 Publisher: Verso
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Planet of Slums (Reprint) Pub. Date: 9/1/2007 Publisher: Verso
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Planet of Slums Pub. Date: 3/13/2006 Publisher: Verso

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Overview

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.

From the sprawling barricadas of Lima to the garbage hills of Manila, urbanization has been disconnected from industrialization, even economic growth. Davis portrays a vast humanity warehoused in shantytowns and exiled from the formal world economy. He argues that the rise of this informal urban proletariat is a wholly original development unforeseen by either classical Marxism or neoliberal theory.

Are the great slums, as a terrified Victorian middle class once imagined, volcanoes waiting to erupt? Davis provides the first global overview of the diverse religious, ethnic, and political movements competing for the souls of the new urban poor. He surveys Hindu fundamentalism in Bombay, the Islamist resistance in Casablanca and Cairo, street gangs in Cape Town and San Salvador, Pentecostalism in Kinshasa and Rio de Janeiro, and revolutionary populism in Caracas and La Paz.Planet of Slums ends with a provocative meditation on the "war on terrorism" as an incipient world war between the American empire and the new slum poor.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781844670222
Publisher: Verso
Publication date: 3/13/2006
Pages: 256
Sales rank: 731,272
Product dimensions: 5.90 (w) x 8.50 (h) x 1.00 (d)

Meet the Author

Mike Davis is the author of several books including City of Quartz, Ecology of Fear, Late Victorian Holocausts, and Magical Urbanism. He was recently awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. He lives in Papa'aloa, Hawaii.

1	The urban climacteric	1
2	The prevalence of slums	20
3	The treason of the state	50
4	Illusions of self-help	70
5	Haussmann in the tropics	95
6	Slum ecology	121
7	SAPing the third world	151
8	A surplus humanity?	174
	Epilogue : down Vietnam street	199

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Anonymous

Posted September 12, 2006

Barrio in Stereo

One comes away from reading 'Planet of Slums' with a far-reaching, well-documented sense of poverty's vast urban scale and its topology. As to the causes and possible solutions, we are left wanting. Globalization, the IMF, World Bank and NGOs are singled out for guilt by association as though slum growth and exploitation of the urban underclass are unintended consequences of ill-conceived development and aid policies. However, a clear analysis of this pattern and direct linkages between slum growth and development policies get lost in the book's focus on demographic statistics, urbanization trends and descriptions of dire circumstances from one ghetto to the next. Finally, in searching for solutions, there are none on these pages except by inference, or perhaps by extension, through revolution. We are left thinking that since global lending, aid organizations, government urban planning and property owner powers are the indicated cause, then thwarting them or doing the opposite must be part of the solution. I was left wondering, where is the model to point the way out of the urban slum?
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