A Grim Exposure And Reminder of Why Our Strategy for Change Must Be Global, by a Leading Marxist Scholar and Writer.

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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 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 slum poor.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #189895 in Books
• Published on: 2006-03-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 256 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Urban theorist Davis takes a global approach to documenting the astonishing depth of squalid poverty that dominates the lives of the planet's increasingly urban population, detailing poor urban communities from Cape Town and Caracas to Casablanca and Khartoum. Davis argues health, justice and social issues associated with gargantuan slums (the largest, in Mexico City, has an estimated population of 4 million) get overlooked in world politics: "The demonizing rhetorics of the various international 'wars' on terrorism, drugs, and crime are so much semantic apartheid: they construct epistemological walls around gecekondus, favelas, and chawls that disable any honest debate about the daily violence of economic exclusion." Though Davis focuses on individual communities, he presents statistics showing the skyrocketing population and number of "megaslums" (informally, "stinking mountains of shit" or, formally, "when shanty-towns and squatter communities merge in continuous belts of informal housing and poverty, usually on the urban periphery") since the 1960s. Layered over the hard numbers are a fascinating grid of specific area studies and sub-topics ranging from how the Olympics has spurred the forceful relocation of thousands (and, sometimes, hundreds of thousands) of the urban poor, to the conversion of formerly second world countries to third world status. Davis paints a bleak picture of the upward trend in urbanization and maintains a stark outlook for slum-dwellers' futures.
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Review
A profound enquiry into an urgent subject…a brilliant book. -- Arundhati Roy

Scourge of neo-liberal nostrums, [Davis] debunks the irresponsible myth of self-help salvation, showing who gets the boot from 'bootstrap capitalism. -- Michael Sorkin

About the Author
Mike Davis lives in San Diego. He is the author of Prisoners of the American Dream, City of Quartz, Ecology of Fear, Magical Urbanism, and Late Victorian Holocausts.

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Customer Reviews

intriguing and infuriating
This is a bold, visionary work with many merits. It also has one major flaw which makes it infuriating. First, the merits. Davis highlights the way contemporary urbanization has become largely detached from such processes as 'modernization' and 'industrialization'. Instead, rural residents have simply been pushed off their land by neoliberal policies, civil wars and such to the point where urban residents may constitute a majority of humanity (he does not consider at all the possibility that anyone may have chosen to move to the cities, either to escape constrictions on their choices of sexual partners, to exit family feuds, to seek opportunities, to party all night, etc). Cities in the global south are now mega-holding pens for the poor, sometimes, as in some Sub-Saharan African cities, without even a modest-sized middle class. The most rudimentary sanitation and health care is non-existent (Davis notes, early on, that some of the aspects of the city--pollution, industry, consumption--have migrated to the countryside as well, but he doesn't come back to this point). Slums are constantly being demolished and people are being uprooted as governments make way for permanent (shopping malls, condominiums) or temporary (Olympic games) encampments of wealthier people. He effectively debunks a number of romantic myths about slums--that they are self-organizing communities (they use subcontractors to construct their housing), that they are hotbeds of militant squatter movements (such movements are often coopted, creating a new strata of slightly privileged landowners), that they are filled with micro-capitalists (more slum dwellers work for petty capitalists than control their own enterprises). Instead, he produces the much less gratifying picture of myriad levels of petty exploitation, for example, by owners of slum housing of a renting population. It is a sober and disturbing picture, all the more so because he argues that previous beneficiaries of various nationalist and social democratic programs have become part of a privileged strata--which, at least in my mind, raised questions about whether programs can possibly be crafted that would not fall into this trap (there are other themes in the book--the limits of NGOs, the problems with IMF austerity measures--that are likely to be highly familiar to people who've read the radical literature on the global south of the last fifteen years).
Now for the infuriating part. The book is strictly a review of the literature produced by anthropologists, geographers, sociologists, novelists, etc writing about slums. There is virtually no firsthand observation in the entire text. I have no idea why this is. Surely as part of the research he visited some slums? As a result, slum dwellers almost never speak in the course of the book (I can think of two exceptions, one actually being a fictional character, the other drawn from someone else's ethnographic research). The book as a result lacks the humanistic grit that characterizes Davis' earlier work on LA and his more recent reporting on New Orleans.

Great critique, but what's the way forward?
Planet of Slums is flambouyant, novel, and tremendously irritating. Mike Davis does a brilliant job of dramatizing conditions in the urban slums of "Third-World" cities, and makes an outstanding contribution in this respect. Predictably, he skewers the usual suspects - the IMF and the World Bank - like clockwork every 10 pages or so.

I looked in vain, however, for heroes or heroines, and for some sense of a way forward. There simply are none in this book. In the neo-Blade Runner urban universe of Planet of Slums, NGOs are agents of donor economic imperialism, the middle classes of countries enslave the poor, the poor exploit each other or are just victims, and the staff of the World Bank and IMF act like colonial bureaucrats overseeing the plantations down South. The author seems to purposely ignore the solutions and great effort of local people and their organizations, country governments, NGOs, private-sector companies, and others. As to the multi-laterals, Davis apparently does not know that many governments are repaying their loans much faster than new borrowing, and that these international organizations have largely become service providers with their clients increasingly in the driver's seat.

This extreme indifference to solutions and the agents of solutions is dangerous. Bad mouth donors and NGOs enough, and they will get gutted (as so much has), and low and middle-income countries will have to rely on capital markets or nothing.

Hopefully, Davis will use a bit of his profound creativity to investigate the way forward in the cities of the South in his next book. Even if he doesn't, I will probably read it.

The crisis of global capitalism
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!