Planet of Slums
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Product Description
Celebrated urban theorist lifts the lid on the effects of a global explosion of disenfranchised slum-dwellers. 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 describes a vast humanity warehoused in shantytowns and exiled from the proper 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 fantastic 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.
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OK Mike. Slums are terrible, there are too many of them & the growth is incredible. I wanted a bit more about life in these places & a small more focus. My attention is demanded in Lima, Kenya, Rio & back again, all in a single page.
Tremendous & frightening data. May as well have sent a spreadsheet.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5
The book gave a one-sided view which blamed the IMF’s structural adjustment programs for the exponential growth of slums around some of the richest cities in the world, while completely ignoring the responsibility of local leadership and corruption in national governments.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
Mike Davis’ “Planet of Slums” is an vital, eye-opening look at one of the most vital global trends of the past fifty years: the explosive growth of third-world slums and the emmiseration of their inhabitants. Davis provides a lucid all-purpose overview, painstakingly grounded in recent erudition across many disciplines. This is a real achievement.
Davis wears his doctrinaire socialism on his sleeve, for better and for worse. There is no problem that cannot be traced to the IMF, the World Bank, and additional evil purveyors of “the Washington consensus.” That said, his analysis calls these actors to account for genuine crimes against the world’s poor. And he does lambaste corrupt governments and bourgeoise indifferent to their fellow citizens’ fate.
The major weakness of “Planet of Slums” is a lack of attention to the demographic causes of slum growth and global poverty. Davis occasionally notes in passing the staggering population growth in most of the countries where slum growth has been greatest. He devotes the better part of a chapter to “informal” employment and underemployment in the slums. But he fails to consider whether population growth, itself, needs to be halted, in order to start to take up the problems he brings to our attention.
Could even the best-intentioned governments, NGO’s or enlightened entrepreneurs find useful employment for all the unemployed and underemployed in India? Might not India simply have too many people?
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
excelent overview about slums around the world, with inumerous sources. Although, the descriptions are too generic. More a report than a critic.
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5
Mike Davis has certainly hit the nail on the head when reffering to the greatest crisis of recent times. He has of course done it in a way that if one can get past the first sixty pages or so of statistics highlighting the crisis, the reader finds that the developing world has excellent reason to despise the G-8 and the United States in particullar. Through the painstaking research of Mike Davis, one finds it simple to accept that the entire world is in huge distress, due to the fleeting-term moneitary gains sought by the IMF and the World Bank. In addition, the U.N. is shown as an orgainzation that obiviously cannot meet this crisis head on and will ultimately fail in it’s attempts to relieve the suffering of 2.5 billion people. This text has helped sharpen my resolve in being prepared for the comming clamity that will beseach us all in the comming years.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5