Planet of Slums

by Mike Davis

Overview

The “profound . . . brilliant” account of the rise of the world’s slums and the failures of modern urbanization—by the world’s leading urbanist (Arundhati Roy, activist and Booker Prize–winning author)

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, and even from 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 unforeseen development, and asks whether the great slums, as a terrified Victorian middle class once imagined, are volcanoes waiting to erupt.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781844674855
Publisher:	Verso Books
Publication date:	09/17/2007
Series:	Essential Mike Davis
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
File size:	723 KB

About the Author

Mike Davis is the author of several books including City of Quartz, The Monster at Our Door, Buda’s Wagon, and Planet of Slums. He is the recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and the Lannan Literary Award. He lives in San Diego.

Table of Contents

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

Acknowledgments 207

Index 209

Editorial Reviews

A profound enquiry into an urgent subject … a brilliant book.”
—Arundhati Roy

“With cool indignation, Davis argues that the exponential growth of slums is no accident but the result of a perfect storm of corrupt leadership, institutional failure, and IMF-imposed programs leading to a massive transfer of wealth from rich to poor … Like the work of Jacob Riis, Ida Tarbell, and Lincoln Steffens over a century ago, this searing indictment makes the shame of our cities urgently clear.”
—Michael Sorkin

“The Raymond Chandler of urban geography … In Planet of Slums, Davis’s genre is the global disaster movie, as directed by the chroniclers of Victorian poverty: Engels, Booth and Dickens. The scale of modern squalor revealed in his brilliant survey dwarfs its predecessors … a coruscating tragedy.”
—Independent

“The astonishing facts hit like anvil blows … Davis has produced a heartbreaking book that hammers the reader a little further into the ground with the blow of each new and shocking statistic.”
—Financial Times

“A terrifying, magisterial work.”
—Harper’s

“There can be no doubt about the achievement of Planet of Slums … it forces us, angrily, to confront the deplorable realities of slum existence and the limitations of slum policies in many developing countries.”
—Times (London)

“While many case studies have described what it means to reside in a favela, basti, kampung, gecekondu or bidonville, Davis provides a properly global portrait … And whereas urban specialists have focused on questions of space and land use in their discussions of slums, and developmentalists on the issue of their ‘informal economies’, Planet of Slums commands our attention as a broader historical synthesis of the two.”
—New Left Review

“Davis’s descriptions of the conditions endured by slum-dwellers provide reason enough to read this book. His analysis is full of gripping stories from globalization’s frontline.”
—New Statesman

“Packed with rigorous analysis and heart-stopping facts, this is a brilliant exploration of how millions of poor city-dwellers worldwide are being driven to the squalid periurban shadowlands of today’s megaslums … Davis’s book is absolutely vital reading.”
—Big Issue

From the Publisher

A profound enquiry into an urgent subject ... a brilliant book.

Arundhati Roy

The Raymond Chandler of urban geography ... a coruscating tragedy.

Independent

If it's apocalypse you want – and frankly who doesn't, because how else to explain the mess we're in – nobody does it better.

Guadrian

Davis's prose exudes a crusading fervour – if not exactly messianic, close enough.

Village Voice

The astonishing facts hit like anvil blows ... A heartbreaking book.

Financial Times

In this trenchantly argued book, Mike Davis quantifies the nightmarish mass production of slums that marks the contemporary city. With cool indignation, Davis argues that the exponential growth of slums is no accident but the result of a perfect storm of corrupt leadership,
institutional failure, and IMF-imposed Structural Adjustment Programs leading to a massive transfer of wealth from poor to rich. Scourge of neo-liberal nostrums, Davis debunks the irresponsible myth of self-help salvation, showing exactly who gets the boot from ‘bootstrap capitalism.’ Like the work of Jacob Riis, Ida Tarbell, and Lincoln
Steffans over a century ago, this searing indictment makes the shame of our cities urgently clear.

Michael Sorkin