Planet Of Slums
by Mike Davis
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Read in January, 2008
People sometimes ask me to recommend good books about cities and architecture; it's a pretty hard question - for the most part, contemporary urbanism is a vast wasteland of aesthetic critique lacking any social context. About the only writer I can recommend on these subjects is Mike Davis. Planet of Slums is an amazing book that describes the develop of and life in the shantytowns that are on the margins of cities across the Global South - that is, the cities were most people already liv...more
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Read in July, 2007
recommends it for:
people interested in urbanization, globalization and care about their environment and the planet.
The book is extremely pessimistic. Davis aims to warn people of “Overurbanization”, “urbanization without industrialization” and the subsistence of the poor living in slums of megacities and hyper-cities. He harshly denounces the neoliberal policies of the IMF and the World Bank towards the Third World. Moreover, he points out that slum dwellers are not helped and that they are in addition abused by slum landlords, city developers, international organizations, and even their own governme...more
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Read in July, 2008
i've got a thing for mike davis. He has this way--so sincerely passionate, penetrating and precise--that pulls me right in and keeps me there. There is a clarity and crispness to his anger. With davis, even numbers come alive. I found myself needing to share (more like force feed) mind-numbing statistics, so effectively interwoven with analysis, to whatever nearby ear I could surmise had even the most rudimentary auditory intake capacities.
This guy is prolific too, with books from the avi...more
This guy is prolific too, with books from the avi...more
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Read in January, 2008
first and foremost, my knowledge of global economics is minimal, so take my two cents with a grain of salt here... anyway, as someone trying to get my head around the scale and scope of global poverty, this was pretty essential. the major complaint about this book-- and you'll see it if you read other reviews on this site-- is its lack of direct sources. and fair enough-- its minimal real-world interactivity (almost no interviews with people living in slum conditions, direct observation, etc.) d...more
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Davis' vivid analysis of the growth of urban slums worldwide contains little original research, but, to be fair, Planet of Slums serves as a prelude to he and Forrest Hylton's upcoming book about slum-based resistance to global capitalism. Here Davis provides a history and sharpens a thesis against neoliberalism, IMF/World Bank-directed economic planning forced upon emerging nations, privatization, and (ever the culprit) U.S. foreign policy. Although Davis maintains a distant and scholarl...more
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Read in March, 2008
I was very deeply impacted by this book—it left me crying pretty violently numerous times, both as I read it and afterwards when I thought of it. Mike Davis writes about the situation of urban peripheral poverty in Third World Countries, illustrating their historical development and inhumane living situations (sanitary and physical dangers aside, Davis writes of diminishing solidarity, growing exploitation and competition; governments have also pretty much abandoned them, instead opting to cri...more
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mike davis seems to me to be coasting a little on the success of his exhaustive, multi-disciplinary investigation of Los Angeles, City of Quartz. Don't get me wrong, he has written lots of books in the intervening 17 years. The ones I have read are interesting and all his newer titles appear to tackle worthy subjects. But they are all so, well, short. Easier to digest, to be sure, but also containing less depth. Pop-geography, you could call it? I imagine Davis wants to tackle all the issues tha...more
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Read in March, 2007
What can I say? Dense as all get-out. It is rough-going at first; wading through paragraphs constructed of sentences which jump from country to country and statistic to statistic. But, I appreciate that this book operates as a sort of counter to The World is Flat. Here we get a more thorough and accurate examination of the world’s poor. Davis writes frighteningly of mega-cities which are largely ringed by mega-slums as the proportion of world rural populations to urban populations tips in...more
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Read in November, 2006
recommends it for:
everyone with a heart and a brain
More than any other non-fiction book I have ready in the past 10 years, this book is a must read. This book describes the reality, the causes, and the results of urban poverty in the global south. It pins down things I had picked up on through my other readings, but made them more concrete. Not a cheery read, it reminds us that most of the world's population live lives we would consider without hope and without dignity. This fact is not something we can avoid forever--we are not as insula...more
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Read in March, 2007
This is an brilliant book, very helpful and moving, but it's a little harder to read than most of Davis's other works. (And I am a Mike Davis fan-- I celebrate the man's entire catalog.) He might go from Lusaka to Bangalore to Shanghai in the course of two sentences. I'd love to see an edition of this book with LOTS OF MAPS in it. It'd be clarifying and helpful for the reader, and you just can't go wrong with maps in books about global politics. Content: 5 stars. Organization... 3? Maybe? ...more
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Read in January, 2006
Malthusian prophecy unfolds. I rarely consider a case in support of a Hobbesian Leviathan. The author compiles vast sources of research and offers a glimpse of desperation and tragedy that we seldom see in countries we consider industrialized or developing. Davis didn't come off as preaching or full of righteous indignation. What makes this book such a strong argument against the IMF is that the accounts of bulldozing shantytowns, birth defects and layers of petty exploitation is told with a col...more
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Read in July, 2006
recommends it for:
class warriors and human rights advocates
I recently went to Brazil and saw favela first hand. It's pretty sobering. Davis, I believe, is targeting a general and non-technical audience with "Planet of Slums." Urban poverty and overwhelming urbanization are two very large issues before us in the 21st Century.
We're in a race to build urban gardens faster than slums expand. Davis thinks managing the forthcoming post-industrial blight is really the only option on the table. He's a bit of a pessimist. This is a worst case scen...more
We're in a race to build urban gardens faster than slums expand. Davis thinks managing the forthcoming post-industrial blight is really the only option on the table. He's a bit of a pessimist. This is a worst case scen...more
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8 comments
Read in July, 2008
What it lacks in prescription or message, "Planet of Slums" makes up for in ugly facts.
The early chapters are frustratingly devoid of anything but observation, but remain compelling, at least when the observations are backed with numbers and not anecdotes.
The three chapters provide the most vivid examples of just how depressing the world's slums have become in the past two decades. And they finally offer some culprits and grim predictions, though no real solutions. I'm not su...more
The early chapters are frustratingly devoid of anything but observation, but remain compelling, at least when the observations are backed with numbers and not anecdotes.
The three chapters provide the most vivid examples of just how depressing the world's slums have become in the past two decades. And they finally offer some culprits and grim predictions, though no real solutions. I'm not su...more
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Read in March, 2008
Overall, a really thorough assessment of where the world is at in terms of urban poverty and where it might be headed should things not change course. I was a bit dissatisfied however that there were no solutions or recommendations provided. It's a very simple thing to find fault with development projects, but it is a far more difficult thing to propose alternatives.
Side note, my International Development professor from American U, Fantu Cheru, was quoted towards the end of the book.
Side note, my International Development professor from American U, Fantu Cheru, was quoted towards the end of the book.
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Read in August, 2007
a study of the megacity, the withering state on the social services side, neoliberal capitalism, and its impending implosion. fascinating and alarming, but davis always leaves me hungry. the most interesting part to me: how people respond to poverty and oppression is left underdeveloped. he touches on the importance and proliferation of religious groups' community organizing and social provisioning, but spends too many pages on the doom and gloom, ad nauseam.
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I keep trying to read this book, but I keep on giving up. I was never very good at Macroeconomics and from what I can tell a knowledge of that seems vital here. Did anyone else have this problem? Is this book was intended for people in with a firm grasp of market mechanics or can anyone get into it? Or is it only the first few chapters that are like this?
Just to note: I read "City of Quartz" and found that a whole lot more approachable.
Just to note: I read "City of Quartz" and found that a whole lot more approachable.
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this man has done his homework. if you ever need to read a totally comprehensive, obsessively footnoted catalogue of the way that the first world is systematically screwing (plundering/enmiserating/slaughtering) the majority of the human race, right now, as we speak, read this.
with absolutely no recourse to hysteria or moral browbeating, he will rearrange your moral landscape. and if he doesn't, well. keep drinking the diet snapple.
with absolutely no recourse to hysteria or moral browbeating, he will rearrange your moral landscape. and if he doesn't, well. keep drinking the diet snapple.
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Read in April, 2008
This book is great, it outlines in a rather simple yet academic style, the reality of neo-liberal policies. This book offers amazing insights into slum life, informal employment and the trajectory of the modern urban environment. It is stark and scary. However, my one beef with this book is that does not elaborate on the resistance and social movements within urban slums.
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Read in November, 2007
recommends it for:
you and everyone you know
This book is quite overwhelming.
"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." (publisher's weekly via amazon)
Want to read it again...
"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." (publisher's weekly via amazon)
Want to read it again...
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Read in December, 2006
recommends it for:
Anyone interested in the anti-globalization movement
Davis, who is always interested in the idea of the city through his disparate and eccentric subjects, turns to the rapidly increasing production of slums around the world and ties it to neo-liberal global economics. Like much of Davis's writing, the end result is a rigorously argued book that is also widely accessible.
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