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Planet of Slums
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 307.336416091724
EAN: 9781844671601
ISBN: 1844671607
Label: Verso
Manufacturer: Verso
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 256
Publication Date: September 01, 2007
Publisher: Verso
Studio: Verso
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Editorial Review:
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.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - filtered
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.
Rating:  - Drinking from a firehose
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.
Rating:  - All SAPed Out
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 ... Read More
Rating: - Provocative and Frightening
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 ... Read More
Rating: - Depressing but true
If one just looked at the figures over the last twenty or so years there has been a lot of economic growth in Asia and Latin America. Africa is still troubled with a lot of the sub Sahara countries having negative growth. On balance though one would expect the lot of people in poor countries to be improving. Not so according to this book. What has been happening is incredible increases in urbanisation. However this urbanisation is in the form of slums.
Slums in poorer countries ... Read More
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