Planet of Slums

Apr 15, 2011 Kelly rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: 21st-century, forandbecauseofgradschool, international-affairs, philosophy-theory-criticism, owned

This is one long howl of rage, interspersed with shockingly brief lucid sections, followed by another info dump of ineffable horror. You know how in The Dark Knight there's that line, "Some men just want to watch the world burn"? Mike Davis would like to inform you that the world is burning, that it is your fault, and that there is nothing that you can do to stop it. If this were the Middle Ages, Davis would have made a fine living as a fire and brimstone preacher, leading rows of self-flagellat...more This is one long howl of rage, interspersed with shockingly brief lucid sections, followed by another info dump of ineffable horror. You know how in The Dark Knight there's that line, "Some men just want to watch the world burn"? Mike Davis would like to inform you that the world is burning, that it is your fault, and that there is nothing that you can do to stop it. If this were the Middle Ages, Davis would have made a fine living as a fire and brimstone preacher, leading rows of self-flagellating monks through the streets and warning you that Judgment Day is coming. Except in this version, hell is not a pit of fire. Instead, it is most probably a pit of human excrement.

Davis takes us on a tour of "megacities" throughout the world- though, mostly they are located in the Third World South, let's be honest. He has eight different chapters describing a different aspect of why these slums are horrible beyond imagining, plus subdivisions into different shades of horrible so we don't confuse each source of awful with another. It's everything from the incredible density of people to the shoddy, amazingly small housing, the system of "slumlordism" that develops even with "petty" landlords with a few 10 sq ft clapboard rooms to sell (which means an amazing labyrinth of levels of desperately poor within the category of poor), the awful ecological conditions the slums are founded on, the terrible diseases, the toxic wastes and the daily body counts of people dropping in the streets because of this. And as if this weren't enough, he goes on to tell you why even the most selfish of first worlders should care- because the Pentagon is already preparing for slum warfare, because of course the oppressed of the earth will rise up one day. If their daily horror doesn't arrive in the form of pollution, overwhelming tides of migration or diseases that do not recognize borders, it will arrive through uncontrollable conflicts that spread, or through increased terrorism as more and more people give up on a system that they have never been inside to begin with.

That's one of his more fascinating ideas- that the capitalist world system has deemed these tens of millions of people "surplus" population, and never changed their status. They have always been outside. Slums have sprung up all over the world in an "illegal" way and cities have never given these areas even basic infrastructure- roads, sewers, electricity, you name it. State and local authorities routinely bulldoze the areas to try to "clean up the slums" and millions of people just end up moving somewhere with worse conditions that will involve even more deaths. If the state admitted them as a part of the "legal" system, they would have to do something about them, and quite frankly no one knows what to do about 20 million people in Kinshasa, a city that essentially has no industry at all, and no hope of providing for a tenth that many people. Europe got to offload its "surplus" to the New World. There is no New World anymore- these slums are hundreds of times the size of Victorian London, and ten times worse than the worse parts of seedy, colonial Dublin.

I thought that this was a good point to make, because I think when a lot of Euro-American people hear "slums" they think of the projects of Detroit or the soot filled back streets of Dickens. Just to give some perspective on this book... "projects" are actually considered a dream in many of these places. The state sometimes builds "low income housing" and the middle class usurps it, partially because "low" is still not low enough. The slums of the First World imagination are the middle class of certain areas of the Third World. This was one of the more affecting points of the book. Though the most affecting is an entire section entitled "Shit" where Davis describes in excruciating detail the "toilet" industry of the slums, where people actually pay to have access to a latrine, as public ones are about 1 per 1000 people in some areas. To get into some latrines you have to wade through rivers of urine and crap, as you do to get across the streets near them. Since the pay latrines are often too expensive and the public ones buried under piles of excrement, many people simply go anywhere- in the streets, in the parks. There are actually wars over "defecation rights" in certain cities (I am not making this up) between the middle and lower classes. Women can't go to the bathroom during the day because of societal expectations about modesty, so they try to wait to shit until nighttime (and often skip eating during the day so they don't have to until then). Except then when they go out to do it at night they get raped, beaten, and/or killed. This section I thought really got at the essence of just how horrible these lives are. I mentioned in class that it had made me physically ill to read, and everyone agreed with me. Do not approach this part with any food in your stomach, I warn you now.

However, his relentless assault of examples, numbing numbers and statistics and apocalyptic pronouncements don't really... accomplish anything. The reader is not left with a sense of wanting to do something about this... just really a sense of hopelessness. Davis tears down every attempt, native or foreign, rich or poor, to try to help slum areas as ineffective, condescending, evil, or worse. There is no way to be a person with any kind of resources and try to help the slum situation without being wrong in some way. He also emphasizes the sheer size of the problem over and over again- numbers one can't even begin to comprehend really. Any "high tech miracles" can't even begin to cover the number of people in these areas- all it does is increase inequalities. It's like facing the numbers that Stalin killed v. the numbers Hitler did. 6 million in the Holocaust, while an unbelievable existential horror is a number that pales in comparison to the 20 million plus who disappeared during Stalin's purges and because of his policies. It's much less talked about than the Nazi crimes. Because what do you do with a number like that?

I think that this translates to the slums. I've seen the slum problem acknowledged in popular culture- most recently of course in Slumdog Millionaire and all the run up/follow up to that about the actors' lives who were actually from the slum (apparently the slum that one of the child actors still lives in burned down the other week, by the way. Another pervasive hazard of slum life). There was a good deal of sanctimonious commentary about the directors' treatment of the people in this film, but I don't remember there being a lot of wider discussion about solving the problems of slum life. It was like acknowledging it was all people could do. This seems to be the case in other depictions I've seen as well- even stretching back into the 90s. I find myself doing the same thing.

I have errands to run, jobs to do-I don't even really have the time to spend writing this review about this book. What do you do with this idea when you finish this book and then need to go pick up your dry cleaning before the shop closes? It's difficult. I don't know. I'm glad I read this, but I wanted something more.(less)

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Jul 18, 2011 unperspicacious rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: development, ipe, revolution, urbanisation, agriculture, gender

Dear little Swallow," said the Prince, "you tell me of marvellous things, but more marvellous than anything is the suffering of men and of women. There is no Mystery so great as Misery. Fly over my city, little Swallow, and tell me what you see there." - Oscar Wilde, The Happy Prince.

There are at least four ways that this book can be read. Much depends, of course on the positioning of the reader.

First, straight up, as a catalogue of some truly horrific evidence of what human beings are able to d...more

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Jun 14, 2007 Fritz Brantley rated it 4 of 5 stars

probably the most important thing you can read.

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Feb 01, 2009 Anna rated it 3 of 5 stars

This was certainly an interesting book and after finishing it I understand more about the topic - the world's slums and the back-slipping that seems to be happening for the urban poor). That said, I do think this is probably the most grim and sensational version that could have possibly been painted. Universally critical of all governments, classes, NGOs and other international organizations, the author takes the stance that absolutely nobody really knows how to handle this problem and anything...more

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Feb 02, 2008 Morgan rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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 live, and...more 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 live, and where most future population growth will happen.

Davis starts with some dense and sobering statistics on the scope and scale of urbanization, and it's tone and character in a selection of Asian, Latin American, African, and Indian cities.

But this is not a folio of statistics and demographics; Davis is one of the few writers on cities that I'm aware of who understand that contemporary urbanization is different from the process that developed nations went through during the Victorian "Industrial Revolution." "From Karl Marx to Max Weber," writes Davis, "classical social theory believed that the great cities of the future would follow in the industrializing footsteps of Manchester, Berlin, and Chicago..." however, rapidly urbanizing areas like "Kinshasa, Luanda, Khartoum, Dar-es-Salaam, Guayaquill, and Lima continue to grow prodigiously despite ruined import-substitution industries, shrunken public sectors, and downwardly mobile middle classes."

All of which is to say that Planet of Slums is the only book I have found so far that so completely outlines the process of the development and explosive of neoliberal cities. The IMF and the World Bank, trans-national corporations, debt, aid, and structural adjustment - Planet of Slums is about how these institutions and forces shape the urban landscape for the majority of the world.

Planet of Slums is a harsh book. You will find no romance in the revolution prose here. Squatters aren't heroic figures on the cusp of achieving their dreams, but rather a deeply exploited underclass facing the dual oppression of illegitimacy in the eyes of the state as well as subjugation to a exploitative class of illegal shantytown landlords with either (or both) government or gang connections - a condition that has been going on, in some places, for generations. These are glimpses into a world were homeless pedicab drivers have to pay rent to someone even to sleep on the sidewalk, where the organized squatter communities are still living on toxic dumps, flood zones, or in areas with 100,000 to one person to toilet ratios.

Further, Davis writes of the appropriation of anarchist anti-statist self-help ideal by the World Bank. Specifically, he writes of the use of the ideas of anarchist-urbanist John Turner by the World Bank under Robert MacNemera, (something I found fascinating and deeply disturbing), as well as a broader discussion of NGO's and their less then benevolent or democratic roles in the creation and perpetuation of urban misery.

Planet of Slums is challenging and insightful, brutal in it's descriptions of slums and it's lack of "rays of hope" or upbeat conclusions. It is well researched and dense with theory and analysis, and is, in that way vital to anyone who wants to understand how contemporary cities develop. (less)

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Feb 19, 2009 TEAR Australia rated it 3 of 5 stars

Review by Kristy Hagan

READ MORE AT:
http://www.tear.org.au/education/revi...

Planet of Slums is an overwhelming and sobering treatise on the plight of the urban poor. Readers will find the global phenomenon of urban slums thoroughly sketched out, by region and by city, with the support of useful references, a plethora of statistics and the perspectives of numerous sociologists who have lived in slums. If you are interested in urban poverty, this is a must read.

However, the book lacks a few signifi...more

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Jul 07, 2010 Mary rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: nonfiction

Good luck figuring out what to do with yourself once you've finished this book. The title might sound hyperbolic, but Davis underpins his terrifying thesis exhaustively with this tidal-wave-o'-super-scary-facts-delivered-nonchalantly prose style, which, along with the occasional offhand allusion to Bladerunner and the profligate use of the adjective "Orwellian," makes this probably the scariest thing I have ever, ever read.

Which is not to say it isn't also incredibly erudite and well researched...more

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Dec 29, 2009 Frank Stein rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Mike Davis apparently took those complaints about his slippery relationship to the truth to heart, because this slim book is loaded down with footnotes. Unfortunately most of those cite just a select handful of left-wing texts, and even they often disagree with each other as to the reality of slum life in the Third World. Davis does nothing to reconcile them.

As far as I can tell from the book Davis never visited one of the slums he writes about, he never did any independent primary source resear...more

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Sep 14, 2009 Kyle rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Just finished Planet of Slums. Written like a sociology text, it explained example after example about how SAPs have turned the third world into a land of slums and gated communities with no middle ground. Shit floats down stream contaminating and polluting people's drinking water as they live in shantytowns with little to subsist on.

It describes "hot demolitions" which is where slumlords send flaming cats through shantytowns in order to set them ablaze so the slumlords can collect the insuranc...more

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Feb 12, 2012 Sven Nomadsson rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: humanitarian-aid-development

*Note: This is copied from my blog http://worldwritsmall.wordpress.com

I first found out about this book because I noticed that John Scalzi, author of Old Man’s War, was reading it. At first I thought that it might be an unheard of Sci-Fi story but it wasn’t. Planet of Slums is an academic treatise about slums. In it Mike Davis looks at the factors affecting slum creating, develop and growth and how today’s slums are far worse than anything that Charles Dickens or Rudyard Kipling experienced or w...more *Note: This is copied from my blog http://worldwritsmall.wordpress.com

I first found out about this book because I noticed that John Scalzi, author of Old Man’s War, was reading it. At first I thought that it might be an unheard of Sci-Fi story but it wasn’t. Planet of Slums is an academic treatise about slums. In it Mike Davis looks at the factors affecting slum creating, develop and growth and how today’s slums are far worse than anything that Charles Dickens or Rudyard Kipling experienced or wrote about.

This book is of particular interest to me because I live in Phnom Penh and while it never addresses any of the slums and the issues faced by Cambodians, aside from a mention of the Khmer Rouge expulsion of the city’s entire population, it still holds relevance. I’m now very many of the practices of Cambodians in a different light – namely that those who sit around all day are not utilizing their inherent manpower to the greatest extent. This isn’t to say that the Cambodians are lazy but rather that circumstances, namely the informal workforce present throughout Cambodia, are a result of numerous other factors.

It’s so easy to equate moto & tuk tuk drivers, or shop stall owners as merely a product of their environment – that the tropics makes for a laid back attitude to work, and it just may, but at the same time there’s a lack of recognized jobs for people to fill. Thus children, mothers, the elderly, etc are pushed into the informal job market in order for a family to make ends meet. The alternative is that one or two adults focus on work leaving children to gain an education and play. It’s something I had never considered before having read this book. But there is of course more to the situation which both Mike Davis and I have not touched upon.

At the same time, like so much these days, this book is a condemnation of the Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) forced on developing countries by the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF) and others. Combined with books like Shock Doctrine and No Logo by Naomi Klein, Bad Samaritans by Ha-Joon Chang among others, a picture is being painted that the world at large is waking up to – that this demand for by neoliberal economists to open up free trading is benefiting only certain parties. It’s together that these books put forth a message about what needs to be done to help the developing world.

Mike Davis alone doesn’t provide answers, but how could he when his book is about analyzing the causes of slums and their developments. He does leave off with further areas of study, which just happens to be covered by Stephen Graham in Cities Under Siege among others – a new book about the militarization of urban environments and one that is on my reading list for the coming months. And overall the situation for cities looks grim, just look at the polarization in America that takes place around elections when candidates look for “real Americans” who just happen to be living outside the cities, not within.

Planet of Slums is written with an urgency that bellies the significance of the matter. Full of situations and statistics it never gets boring but pulls you along as Mike Davis’ deft prose presents the situation with a clear, analytic eye that never white washes the situation. If you’re concerned about your town or city and how things are developing then you need to read this book before you consider doing anything.
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Jul 10, 2011 Michelle rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2011, non-fiction

An interesting read, assigned for a summer class, which I picked up a few weeks before class started. Definitely not a happy book as Mike Davis explores modern urban migration and the social problems which have arose, particularly in light of Washington/ World Bank/ IMF policies. However, I felt that there was not a lot of new ideas or shocking information presented in this book (at least for me, I've studied a lot of this before). Published in 2006, I also found this book quite dated. The world...more

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Jan 26, 2011 Corwin rated it 5 of 5 stars

Put quite simply, this is the most horrifying book I've read within the scope of my memory. It reeks of whatever foetid odors waft of out the city of Dis in Dante's hell, a future earth in which squalor and misery and death and excrement and unending street warfare in rapidly expanding magapoli devour the world until there's nothing left but a state of siege on the wealthy North and a state of oppression in the impoverished South.

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Apr 25, 2011 Andrew added it

Shelves: neoliberalism-and-postmodernity, policy-and-social-commentary

Mike Davis doesn't like you. You unwitting colluder with the atrocities of late-stage capitalism. That's right, child of the first world, the blood is on your hands.

I read City of Quartz. I liked City of Quartz. Planet of Slums is like City of Quartz, but it's not just LA that's fucked, it's everywhere. Neoliberalism builds the garbage cities of Manila, the City of the Dead in Cairo, the great spiraling nightmare that is Kibera in Nairobi. Davis is an exceptionally talented reporter, and he pain...more

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Apr 22, 2013 Bryan Schwartz rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: misc-history

Mike Davis joined SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) in the 1960s while he was studying at Reed College and pursued, but never completed, a PhD in history. Today, Davis teaches creative writing at UC Riverside and serves as an editor for the New Left Review. These facts, apart from being mere biographical material, can be used to asses the major theme behind Davis' terrifying portrait of urbanization Planet of Slums.
Davis' book describes the shift from rural living to the rise of the mega...more Mike Davis joined SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) in the 1960s while he was studying at Reed College and pursued, but never completed, a PhD in history. Today, Davis teaches creative writing at UC Riverside and serves as an editor for the New Left Review. These facts, apart from being mere biographical material, can be used to asses the major theme behind Davis' terrifying portrait of urbanization Planet of Slums.
Davis' book describes the shift from rural living to the rise of the megalopolis in terrifying detail. The book's focus on the third world can be partially explained by Davis' association with the “generation of 1968”. In the 1960s, the third world served as a galvanizing issue for youth movements around the world. The militancy preached by Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh against the perceived “neo-imperialism” of the United States prompted young people, like Mike Davis and his fellow SDSers (as well as men like Tariq Ali whom he thanks in the acknowledgments section of Planet of Slums) to anti-state activism.
Planet of Slums continues the efforts of 1968 by illustrating the disturbing decrepitude of third world cities and the detrimental impact of capitalism, industrialization, and urbanization. By joining the harsh reality of economic and demographic data to brief images of on-the-ground experience, Davis effectively showcases the current crises endemic to third world cities while simultaneously linking present issues to the past. By the end of his piece, Davis emphasizes the need for immediate action through the use of descriptive prose, a technique and a goal often absent from pure academic monographs. He depicts a world in which the lofty goals of “modernism” and “civilization” have been betrayed (or discarded) reverting the world, once again, to a transnational (global?) battleground reminiscent of the 1960s, “Night after night, hornet-like helicopter gunships stalk enigmatic enemies in the narrow streets of the slum districts, pouring hellfire into 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.”
Drawing on his generational experience in the New Left, Davis positions his monograph in the intersection between activism, history, and political science. To some, Planet of Slums may seem overly dramatic and harsh, but history has shown us that warnings framed in such terms often get results. (less)

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Apr 22, 2012 Ian rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: environment

Although quite short at just over 200 pages, I found this book a little trying to get through. Instead of a concise treatise on the subject filled with insightful observations one is instead offered reams of statistics (mainly in text form at that) on various aspects of slums around the world. Each chapter deals with a particular facet of the sociological phenomenon of slums from the mainly descriptive to overviews of government and NGO policies that have contributed to the rapid slumming of the...more

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Apr 01, 2013 Eddy Allen rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: arts-and-historical

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...more

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Jan 31, 2011 Adam rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: favorites

Devastating account of our world as we have allowed it to be made. This is what happens when individuals selfishly choose for themselves a capitalist lifestyle by looking out for number one rather than caring first and foremost for the helpless and the needy. I defy anyone to read this and not be completely furious by the end of it - impossible for anyone with a brain and a heart.

Aside from its harrowing, comprehensive analysis of Third World reality and condemnation of the IMF, World Bank and W...more

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Mar 25, 2009 Morgan rated it 5 of 5 stars

This book is more relevant now than ever. Developing economies are facing a perfect storm worldwide. As the global financial crisis tightens its grip on developed economies, their demand for imported products and services as well as basic commodities, has plummeted, leaving emerging economies in an unprecedented state of vulnerability. Millions of people live in the megacities of these countries and their corrupt governments have fewer resources at their disposal to mitigate the effects of the c...more

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Nov 29, 2008 Rick rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

So many numbers, sometimes without much context to help a reader understand them (I know that 25 million is a big number, but I don't know what percentage of children in Lagos it represents, etc.) The best writing in the book is in the foreward and the afterward, and aside from "there are a *lot* of slums, more than you probably think," Davis doesn't seem to have a thesis until the very end of said afterward -- but when it finally arrives, it's a really good one, and I'm glad I read the book jus...more

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Feb 18, 2009 Gill rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: academic, africa, south-america

Mike Davis describes the world of the future. Urbanization, peri-urban settlements... Slums. Class oppression enabled through a neoliberal myth of self help. A dagger to De Soto's arguments about the role of land title in freeing capital in peri-urban areas, he reveals that 'land regularization' actually pushes the poor closer to desperate means, making rent and taxes too high obligatory and too high a cost. A good book for tackling many of the statistics that describe our future. Not much first...more

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Jan 14, 2009 Dale rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: nonfiction, politics

There are now something like 1000 cities with over a million population. Urbanization has occurred with astonishing speed in the past 30 years, and around the world the majority of that growth has been in the form of urban slums. This growth has been driven by a number of factors, including overall population growth, forced relocations, IMF and World Bank policies that have driven peasants off their land, refugee flight, and so on. The old, pre-1970, drivers of urban growth have largely disappea...more

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Jul 19, 2007 Danee . marked it as to-read

There's nothing like grim predictions of the future to make you want to get up in the morning.

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Feb 06, 2009 Stephen rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

A comprehensive catalog of human degradation, although the author looks a little foolish trying to link the state of affairs in a place like modern-day Kibera with mid-1980's IMF policies. Certainly decades of civil war and natural disasters have played some role? And what about the third world population explosion? If the population of your country doubles every five years, does it even matter what economic policies you choose?

For a second perspective, I solicited the opinion of the Burundian r...more

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Aug 22, 2011 Ramin rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

"Planet of Slums" is a well-written book about an increasingly important set of issues. It might not be among Mike Davis's best work, but it is certainly worth reading. Slums are rapidly growing around major cities around the world (especially in developing countries) such that some places that were small towns a couple decades ago are now dominated by overpopulated and ecologically devastating slums. People living in slums are often next-to-homeless, and many of them are un- or under-employed....more

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Aug 29, 2010 Chris rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Planet of the Slums does an excellent job of revealing what's really behind the prevalence of slums across the globe. From bad government policy, destructive IMF and World Bank programs, and misdirected NGO involvement to profiteering military and government officials, small landowners trying to become a little less poor, and environmental distress Davis covers the issue with explicit and shocking detail.

Where it fell short, and frustrated me, was in presenting some kind of solutions. I can und...more

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Jan 23, 2010 John rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: housing

If you have ever worried that we might be concreting over south-east England, this book could be a useful antidote. The problem is not in Greater London. If anywhere is being concreted over, it’s Mexico City, Mumbai, Sao Paulo and the many other southern cities that have grown tenfold in just fifty years.

Although it would be rather more accurate to say that they are being covered with corrugated iron and bits of plastic sheet. The centres of the world’s megacities might be sprouting towers of co...more If you have ever worried that we might be concreting over south-east England, this book could be a useful antidote. The problem is not in Greater London. If anywhere is being concreted over, it’s Mexico City, Mumbai, Sao Paulo and the many other southern cities that have grown tenfold in just fifty years.

Although it would be rather more accurate to say that they are being covered with corrugated iron and bits of plastic sheet. The centres of the world’s megacities might be sprouting towers of concrete and glass designed by well-known architects, but at their edges they are sprouting slums at a devastating rate. The world’s slums add 25 million people to their populations every year.

Most of us are unaware of the problem. I am writing these words only a few hundred miles from the world’s biggest slum, but until I read this book I had never heard of it. It’s a slum complex called Neza-Chalco-Izta, and it houses four million of Mexico City’s 22m population. There are similar slums in Caracas, Venezuela and Bogota, Colombia, each housing at least two million people, and two more in Lima, Peru that together add a further three millions. So the ‘top five’ megaslums are all in Latin America - but Asia and Africa are not far behind.

‘Slum’ is a word no longer much used in Britain – for good reason, since most of ours have disappeared. Yet it is hard to avoid the word when contemplating the magnitude of informal, densely-packed settlements attached to the cities of the developing world. One fact from the many in Davis’s book says it all: Dharavi, in Mumbai (Bombay) which has the reputation of being Asia’s biggest slum, allegedly has 18,000 people per acre. Yes, eighteen thousand.

If Davis’s statistics are unremitting, so are his criticisms. The book is doubly depressing – the situation is getting worse by the minute, and apparently nothing is being done about it. Davis is respectful of slum dwellers and their campaigns for political change, but critical of most of the efforts being made – whether by governments, NGOs or slum dwellers themselves. He’s particularly incensed by the impact of the policies of bodies like the World Bank and the IMF – often for good reason, but without accepting that they might be learning from past mistakes.

I have visited only one or two of the places Davis writes about. But in Dharavi, for example, there are impressive self-build projects, sponsored by Homeless International and coordinated by local NGOs. The same goes for slum areas in Buenos Aires and Santiago (Chile). Such projects have escaped Davis’s notice. In fact, I began to wonder if he’d written this book at his desk, without having seen any slums himself. If he has visited them, the book is remarkably lacking in the personal stories of slum dwellers (and none are named in his Acknowledgements).

This is a pity, as the real story, as usual, is a mixed one: terrible problems, but people everywhere making enormous efforts to tackle them. Read this book to find out about the scale of the task, but don’t despair of helping the agencies and the people who are trying to do something about it.
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Jun 12, 2011 Libby rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: urban-issues, global-values

written frenetically. Great to learn about public expenditures in housing in Hong Kong; I've been familiar only with the island's hypercapitalist tendencies.

Oh man, tax policy in third world urban centers!
p. 67 "Urban elites and the middle classes in the Third World have also been extraordinarily successful in evading municipal taxation. "In most developing countries," the International Labour Organziation's A. Oberai writes, "the revenue potential of real-estate taxation is not fully utilized....more written frenetically. Great to learn about public expenditures in housing in Hong Kong; I've been familiar only with the island's hypercapitalist tendencies.

Oh man, tax policy in third world urban centers!
p. 67 "Urban elites and the middle classes in the Third World have also been extraordinarily successful in evading municipal taxation. "In most developing countries," the International Labour Organziation's A. Oberai writes, "the revenue potential of real-estate taxation is not fully utilized. The existing systems tend to suffer from poor assessment administration, substantial erosion of the tax base due to exemptions, and poor performance in terms of tax collection."

coming down harsh on NGO work
p. 76 "For all the glowing rhetoric about democratization, self-help, social capital, and the strenghthening of civil society, the actual power relations in this new NGO universe resemble nothing so much as traditional clientelism. Moreover, like the community organizations patronized by the War on Poverty in the 1960s, Third World NGOs have proven brilliant at coopting local leadership as well as hegemonizing the social space traditionally occupied by the Left. Even if there are some celebrated exceptions - such as the militant NGOs so instrumental in creating the World Social Forums - the broad impact of the NGO/ "civil society revolution,"as even some World Bank researchers acknowledge, has been to bureaucratize and deradicalize urban social movements. Thus development economist Diana Mitlin, writing about Latin America, describes how NGPs "preempt community-level capacity-building as they take over decision-making and negotiating roles..."

pretty awesome piece
p.77 "Veteran Mumbai housing activist P.K. Das offers an even harsher critique of slum-oriented NGOs:
"Their constant effort is to subvert, dis-inform and de-idealize people so as to keep them away from class struggles. They adopt and propagate the practice of begging favours on sympathetic and humane grounds rather than making the oppressed conscious of their rights. As a matter of fact these agencies and organizations systematically intervene to oppose the agitational path people take to win their demands. Their effort is constantly to divert people's attention from the larger political evils of imperialism to merely local issues and so confuse people in differentiating enemies from friends.""
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Oct 06, 2010 Drew rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: anthro, politics, economics

I'm a huge fan of Mike Davis, starting with the first book of his I read, Magical Urbanism. He's a great writer who just gets your heart beating and your energy focused. I have to say that it did take awhile for this book to get moving. The first 80 or so pages were just a nonstop recitation of facts that sought more to demoralize/depress me than actually motivate me to action. But, after this plethora of facts, he turns to analysis and that's where his writing skills shine.

There's items in here...more I'm a huge fan of Mike Davis, starting with the first book of his I read, Magical Urbanism. He's a great writer who just gets your heart beating and your energy focused. I have to say that it did take awhile for this book to get moving. The first 80 or so pages were just a nonstop recitation of facts that sought more to demoralize/depress me than actually motivate me to action. But, after this plethora of facts, he turns to analysis and that's where his writing skills shine.

There's items in here for anyone interested in poverty, slums, capitalism and global economic/social policy. He touches on 1st & 3rd world areas. He reaches back in time, thoroughly explores the present and turns to the future. He excels when talking about privatization efforts under SAP and neoliberalism's push in the late 70s and onward. Focusing on land titling and privatization, he raises the accurate, but sometimes overlooked fact, that when the state withdraws from its duty to its citizens, and then the citizen loses access to the private title to the land (through lack of money, jobs to get money, etc.), they're effectively without hope and removed from any sort of access to land. The state abrogated its responsibility and the capitalists see only profit, not the greater good.

Sadder, and sicker, topics are also covered. Things like urban planning in order to provide options for urban control (nice grids to direct troops/gear), arson to "speed up" evictions in slum housing, lack of clean water, privatized pay toilets to finance national debt, greed that erodes geography that leads to greater poor deaths, etc. Plus, one of my own personal pet peeves it touched upon, when Davis talks about the so-called panacea of microcredit. "While helpful to those informal enterprises managing to tread water, [microcredit and cooperative lending] have had little macro impact on the reduction of poverty" (p. 183).

The final thought I have is that even in the 21st Century, Marx is still ESSENTIAL reading.(less)

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Jul 09, 2008 Sara-Maria Sorentino rated it 4 of 5 stars

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 avian bir...more 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 avian bird flu to the car bomb to fucking massively forced starvation in the 19th century. his books Magical Urbanism and (the chapters I've read of) City of Quartz are basically extended mediations on the saying 'if these walls could talk…' physical structures are revealed to be structural in their generation, erected as they are on the most piteous foundations. the buildings in which we do our living begin to emanate stories of historical complexity and socioeconomic consequence. the explosive growth of third world slums, constructed to be unseen and unheard by those of us high up in skyrise fortifications or behind security fences, real or analytical, is supremely illustrative of the way neoliberalism creates and maintains a seemingly dispensable army of surplus humanity. but the out of sight out of mind policy doesn't work for long. The exception to this avoidance of engagement with the underworld davis notes at the end of his book is the Pentagon who, after studying the volatile terrain of the abstract mass of dispossessed, has been training and equipping their freedom fighters accordingly for this new sort of fighting. He doesn't see hope or promise in NGOs, and his discussion of their impotence is one I am grateful to read written so boldly. He is also critical of those who invest slumdwellers with a messianic revolutionary potential, preferring to conceptualize resistance in slums as varying in intensification and approach to survival. A slim book, and so a broad overview of thethird world urban landscape, but still provides a feel for all that goes into the hammer and the nail, or as the case more often is the torch, the bulldozer and the helicopter gunship.

some pretty crazy , devastating, overwhelming stuff. read it please.
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Mar 20, 2008 leighcia rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction

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 crimi...more

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