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Planet of Slums (Essential Mike Davis) Kindle Edition

by Mike Davis (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 237 ratings
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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.
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  1. Print length
    240 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Sticky notes
    On Kindle Scribe
  4. Publisher
    Verso
  5. Publication date
    September 17, 2007
  6. File size
    894 KB
  7. Page Flip
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  8. Word Wise
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Editorial Reviews

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.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

“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

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B004OA6KHO
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Verso; Reprint edition (September 17, 2007)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ September 17, 2007
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 894 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 240 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 237 ratings

About the author

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Mike Davis

Mike Davis

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

Customer reviews

4.4 out of 5 stars
4.4 out of 5
237 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Dr. Michael A. Rinella
5.0 out of 5 stars Essential Reading
Reviewed in the United States on June 24, 2013
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Planet of Slums has several arguments but I would distill the primary ones as follows:

1. The end of the Cold War "liberated" capital to spread to all those portions of the world formerly dominated by the Soviet Union and its allies. Parallel to this economic theories known as "neoliberalism" arose in the 1970s and became dominant by the 1990s. Neoliberal ideology advocates deregulation of industry, the downsizing of government social programs, and a broken "truce" with labor that in the US had existed in fragile form since the New Deal.

2. This spread of capitalism, often referred to as "globalization," has produced for the first time a truly global labor force. The competitive pressure is so intense, as any job is better than no job at all, that workers the world over are willing to take what they can. The world is teeming with an awful, terrible, "surplus humanity" living marginalized lives of poverty, misery, and violence.

3. At the same time, the world's population keeps getting bigger, and more and more urban. This in turn continues to expand the potential labor pool, driving wages down even further. The wage gap between the rich and poor, both between nations *and* within nations, grows wider and deeper. The naked reality of this becomes more visible with each succeeding economic crisis.

4. Rather than face the consequences of what neoliberal ideology was allowed to unleash global elites, led by the military might of the United States, whose corporations continue to amass enormous profits, have focused on expanding and developing their instruments of order-keeping, cleverly disguised under misleading umbrellas of "wars on ...". Terrorism, drugs, piracy, are just so many smokescreens.

5. This process cannot continue permanently. There is a simmering anger beneath the surface that, for now, expresses itself only in isolated outbursts that high-tech campaigns of repression are capable of pacifying. Someday, however, the simmer may reach a boil and the eruption will be more than any nation can handle.
31 people found this helpful
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Kevin C. Kresse
5.0 out of 5 stars when you need to challenge you assumptions about the world we live in
Reviewed in the United States on June 6, 2014
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there is no better place than to read a book written by Mike Davis. This is not the longest of tracks, nor the most poetic of his works, but what it lacks in length and drama it makes up for with succinct empirical analysis and the seriousness with which he addresses the plight of the vast majority of humanity. there is no easy way of getting around the issue of capitalism and the production of poverty and immiseration. Mike Davis makes sure you have a good understanding of why the planet is growing slums faster than it is growing the so called middle class. After reading this book, if you are not shaken by the new normal of global immiseration, you will at least be forced to question what you thought you knew about the world in which we live, and the policies of global elites driving this planet backwards into the abyss. if nothing else, reading this book will open some people's eyes to the fiction of the friedman's of the world peddling the nonsense of flat earth economics.
2 people found this helpful
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Izaak VanGaalen
4.0 out of 5 stars A Vision of Malthusian Dystopias
Reviewed in the United States on July 11, 2006
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Sometime during the writing of this book - 2005 - the global urban population surpassed the global rural population. It has been estimated that both populations stand at about 3.2 billion. What is startling is that Mike Davis has calculated that the rural population has reached its peak and will begin to decline by 2020, and that all future world population growth will be in cities, primarily megacities (8 million or more) and hypercities (20 million or more). The total world population is expected to peak at 10 billion in the year 2050. If I'm still alive, I will be 95. I hope to experience peak global population, even though my actuarial tables would indicate otherwise.

This massive movement to the city has not been accompanied by industialization and development, instead there has been massive urbanization without economic growth. The future cities of glass and steel envisioned by urbanists have not materialized, instead the urban poor are squatting in crudely constructed slum dwellings on the periphery of cities. A "surplus of humanity" is accumulating on the outskirts of urban centers, an "accumulation of the wretched."

It is no surprise that Davis grew up and currently lives in the Los Angeles area. (He also wrote "City of Quartz," a book about Los Angeles.) Angelenos tend to see the world as it is seen on television or at the movies. Davis' images of Third World slums are those of "Blade Runner" or "Escape from New York". One wonders if Davis has ever visited a Third World slum or interviewed one of its denizens. By referring to them as "the wretched," he will never be accused of being too close to his subject.

Why the massive movement toward cities? And why is this dystopian urbanization occurring on this scale? Davis puts the blame squarely on the neoliberal policies of the IMF. In the late 70's and early 80's, the IMF imposed its structural adjustment program (SAP). It was a one-size-fits-all program for debt burdened Third World countries to open up their economies and theoretically participate in global economy. The program (SAP) called for the deregulation of agriculture and the downsizing of the public sector. (Read also Joseph Stiglitz' "Globalization and its Discontents.") The consequences of this policy are still being debated, but Davis focuses only on the negatives. He points out that hundreds of thousands of workers - millions - worldwide are being pushed from the countryside without the pull of jobs in the cities. The results are masses of humanity in shantytowns on the periphery of urban centers.

If this book sounds extremely negative, it's because it is. Davis criticizes governments for not building enough public housing, and when they do, it's not in the right place and it lacks community. He complains when squatters do not have title to their land or cannot formally rent their shanties, but he also criticizes Hernando De Soto's campaign to do just that. He claims it would lead to further stratification and exploitation of the poor.

Davis sees no solutions to the current trends. He ends the book with the following image: "Night after night, hornetlike helicopter gunships stalk enigmatic enemies in the narrow streets of the slum districts, pouring hellfire into the shanties or fleeing cars. Every morning the slums reply with suicide bombers and eloquent explosions. If the empire can deploy Orwellian technologies of repression, its outcasts have the gods of chaos on their side."

I thought immediately of that scene in the last "Terminator" movie. Davis displays some eloquent prose and solid research, but he may have lost sight of the surplus of humanity living in slums.
46 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

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Adrian Rodarte
5.0 out of 5 stars Buen libro
Reviewed in Mexico on February 14, 2022
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Un libro más al estante.
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Kindle Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars A book everyone should read to help understand causes of poverty
Reviewed in Australia on July 5, 2019
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The chapter on the Congo and witchcraft was really compelling. How people's faith in elections and the state was eradicated through western economic hegemony which caused people to retreat into fantastic and bizarre religious practices and beliefs.
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Niki
5.0 out of 5 stars happy with the purchse
Reviewed in Canada on May 12, 2015
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Happy with the shipping. Great book by Mike Davis. Read it a while ago and just needed to own a copy.
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Pereira Santos Janaina
5.0 out of 5 stars Très accessible
Reviewed in France on April 4, 2016
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Excellent.
Je recommande vivement ce livre à toutes les personnes ayant envie d'ouvrir leur horizons et de comprendre les phénomènes urbains.
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Giacomo Valzania
5.0 out of 5 stars Masterpiece
Reviewed in Italy on August 21, 2015
Verified Purchase
An interesting lecture that I would suggest. Anyone (even slightly) interested in the topic is likely to enjoy this book.
The analysis made by Mike Davis is inspiring and based on a reach documentation which comes from all over the world. The topic is worth of interest, I would say pivotal in our contemporaneity, the way in which is presented open minding.
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