Planet of Slums | 
 enlarge | Author: Mike Davis
Publisher: Verso
Category: Book
List Price: $16.95
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Rating:  22 reviews
Sales Rank: 4834
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 256
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 7.7 x 4.8 x 0.7
ISBN: 1844671607
Dewey Decimal Number: 307.336416091724
EAN: 9781844671601
ASIN: 1844671607
Publication Date: September 1, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Standard shipping arrives within 6-8 business days. This is the textbook only unless otherwise noted. Highlighting, cover wear, edge wear
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Product Description
Celebrated urban historian's bestselling account of the global explosion of slums, with a major new introduction.
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 influential 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 unforeseen development and asks whether the great slums are, as a terrified Victorian middle class once imagined, volcanoes waiting to erupt.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 17 more reviews...
 important yet flawed July 30, 2008
Mike Davis' "Planet of Slums" is an important, eye-opening look at one of the most important global trends of the past fifty years: the explosive growth of third-world slums and the emmiseration of their inhabitants. Davis provides a lucid general overview, thoroughly grounded in recent scholarship 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 other 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 begin to address 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?
filtered May 17, 2008
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
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.
 Drinking from a firehose April 28, 2008
0 out of 7 found this review helpful
OK Mike. Slums are bad, there are too many of them & the growth is incredible. I wanted a bit more about life in these places & a little 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.
 All SAPed Out April 16, 2008
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
What a tremendous work. I've got two chapters left to go, and thus far it's easily the most informative and scholarly book I've yet to read in 2008.
Planet of Slums is all about how the Third World's major cities are growing at what seems like an almost exponential rate. They're turning into what Davis terms megacities and even hypercities: 20,000,000+ in population! In the next few years the world will have about ten hypercities with over 20,000,000 people. In the book he poses questions about the ecological sustainability of these slums, the sewerage and waste problems, employment and wage outlook, transportation issues, and obvious social ills caused by the maldistribution of wealth and resources. Davis mentions that these megacities and hypercities do not just consist of one or two "ghettos" but often are made up of six to a dozen or so different "slum districts."
What's so key about the book is that this astonishing rush to urbanization is a relatively new phenomenon that's taken off at an extraordinary pace over just the past 20 years. Of course he touches on the structural adjustment programs that have been instituted by the global financial rackets and the export/import crop imbalance. He also addresses the fact that this major swing towards urbanization is in contradiction to standard economic theory which essentially states that folks will flee the countryside if wages are strong in the urban core. Clearly this is not what has been happening over the past few decades as Davis demonstrates in his book: wages and employment prospects in the major cities are grim at best with the vast majority of people relying on the informal sector to get by.
The chapter on 'slum ecology' should be required reading for every citizen of the world. Davis, a MacArthur Fellow, does a stupendous job laying out what in the hell's going on in the world today. All the dreadful statistics and anecdotes he brings to the table come with a pessimistic and almost misanthropic tone.
Another paradigm shifter from Verso Publishing.
Provocative and Frightening November 23, 2007
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
This is an actually frightening book by the provocative Mike Davis. Well written and very well researched, this is essentially a clear summary of the large secondary literature on the emergence of enormous slums throughout the Third World (joined since the fall of the Iron Curtain by large parts of the former Soviet Union and its former satrapies). Davis describes the magnitude and progressive growth of immiserated urban communities throughout the world. Reliable estimates place the inhabitants of these frequently hopeless locales in the 100s of millions and reasonable projections suggest that a large fraction of the world's future population growth will consist of the growth of these incredibly impoverished communities.
Davis provides a series of devastating accounts of the nature of life in these communities, characterized usually by insecurity of remarkably poor housing, little or absent public services, incredibly poor public health, a lack of economic opportunity, and continuous exploitation. The huge number of desperately poor people are exploited often by people only marginally less poor than themselves, by the local middle classes and elites of their countries, and often by their own governments.
Many factors contribute to the genesis of this horrible situation. Davis describes the legacy of colonialism, the exploitation of peoples by their own governments and elites, and the actions of international institutions supposedly encouraging development. Davis provides a particularly harsh, though I think substantially correct, critique of the neoliberal approach to development. In Davis' description, neoliberal policies have been accompanied by an exacerbation and expansion of the urban slum problem. Since these slums tend to be self-perpetuating, this is a dangerous legacy.
Davis doesn't address one possible contributing factor to the relative failure of the neoliberal experiment - the remarkable industrialization of China. The enormous expansion of the Chinese industrial economy had a strong negative effect on the economies of a number of other developing economies such as that of Mexico. This can hardly be considered a success for the neoliberal program as Chinese expansion is a good example of intelligent and fairly ruthless state economic management.
Davis also doesn't address a major cause of immiseration - population growth. It appears that our present system can produce enough nutrition to maintain fairly high fertility levels and enough control of epidemics to avoid horrible pandemics but providing a reasonable standard of living for all has escaped us.
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