Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of NeoLiberalism (Hardcover)

~ (Editor), Daniel Bertrand Monk (Editor)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In the evil paradises of this uneven anthology edited by scholars Davis and Monk, the free market coddles the wealthy at the expense of everyone else. With contributions from academics, architects and journalists, the essays explore how cities like Beijing and Johannesburg disregard good governance for prestige projects adored by the nomadic business elite. Though the message is consistent, the tone wanders from a fun and flimsy piece on Orange County by journalist Rebecca Schoenkopf to history professor Jon Wiener's overly somber look at Ted Turner's two million–acre landholding. In one essay, Davis launches a salvo at Dubai, distilling the glittering emirate into Milton Friedman's Beach Club, powered by the labor of imported near-slaves. California-style gated housing developments are a recurring theme, popping up in Iran and Hong Kong. More original is science fiction novelist China Miéville's brilliant essay Floating Utopias about a seafaring metropolis and tax haven to dwarf the largest ocean liner. The catch? This libertarian dream project will probably never be built because that philosophy, Miéville explains, is for people too small, incompetent or insufficiently connected to avoid taxes or, for that matter, to build a boat equipped with an airport. Even when it's not so pithy, this leftist world tour reminds us of development's human cost. (July)
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From Booklist

As neoliberal economic policies are increasingly applied to city planning, urban spaces worldwide increasingly reflect the deliberate effort to amass capital and stimulate consumer spending. The most dramatic neoliberal development schemes—private archipelagoes in Dubai, gated communities in Hong Kong, the Mall of America in Minnesota—can even be said to resemble capitalist utopias, free of the chaotic diversity of city life and immune from concern for the welfare of the broader public. As emphasized by each of the 19 pieces in this collection, however, every "dreamworld of neoliberalism" constitutes a spatial manifestation of inequality, serving the interests of an increasingly international bourgeois class at the expense of the global poor. Although voicing generally similar variations on a theme of socioeconomic inequality, these articles cover a diverse group of localities (including Beijing and Orange County, California) from a variety of generally scholarly perspectives. Its best moments may be where it is most interdisciplinary, such as in Don Mitchell's analysis of neoliberalism at the Supreme Court in Virginia v. Hicks. Driscoll, Brendan

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: New Press (July 23, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 159558076X
• ISBN-13: 978-1595580764
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 6.2 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #539,978 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Just in Case you wanna know how bad things really are..., July 26, 2007

By	Atahualpa Cohen (Buenos Aires) - See all my reviews

By the time you're done reading about the guy in the US who is arrested while delivering pampers because the city streets he walked all his life were privatized, or about the offshore hotels inhabited by the super rich so they never pay taxes in any country, or about Ted Turner's autonomous kingdom in Patagonia you'll start to put two and two together. This book does what I haven't seen anyone else do: look at the world we're heading towards by checking out the mini-'utopias' that the planet's plutocracy fashion for themselves in denial of inequality they produce. As the Dude put it: "New s@#t has come to light." Now what are we gonna do about it?

9 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Evil Paradises: A Seminal Analysis of our Dadaist Reality, July 18, 2007

By	Aaron Sprecher (Syracuse, NY) - See all my reviews

In "Evil Paradises", Mike Davis and Daniel Bertrand Monk describe the consequences of neoliberal politics across the world. From Dubai to Kabul via Hong Kong, Cairo or Los Angeles, this stunning analysis takes shape around a rich collection of essays from leading academic researchers including Sara Lipton, Jon Wiener and Marina Forti. "Evil Paradises" represents an essential work in the search for a description of our phantasmagoric reality. Highly recommended to anyone interested to learn about the consequences of global economy and politics.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Evil Paradises, February 9, 2009

By	M. A. Krul (Utrecht, Kingdom of the Netherlands) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism (Paperback)

Mike Davis has done it again: this collection, edited by Davis together with Daniel Bertrand Monk, is yet another forceful, readable, and compelling indictment of capitalism and its (re)shaping of our one and only planet. Unlike most other Davis books, this one is not mostly written by him, but instead collects a series of essays and observations by various authors on the single topic of capitalist, neoliberal cities and their anti-human properties. As is the nature of essay collections, there is some unevenness both in theme and quality in the book, but the general level of insight as well as writing style is high throughout, and almost all the essays are worth reading.

The collection totals some 19 articles, containing a fairly broad range of topics within the constraints of the general subject. Several essays are about the creation of neoliberal claustrophobic cities for the wealthy, from Hong Kong to Budapest; particularly worthwhile in this range is the polemic against the nightmarish 'paradise' of Dubai, now so hip in the Western media, done by Mike Davis himself. But there are also other themes: Sara Lipton has an article on monasteries as fashionable retreats for the bourgeoisie, Joe Day writes about modern 'personal musea' created by the ultra-wealthy as showpieces, Rebecca Schoenkopf mocks the bizarrely spoiled worldview of the upper class of Orange County, and so on. China Miéville's well-known essay on libertarian ideals, "Floating Utopias", is also part of this collection.

Overall, not all contributions are equally interesting, but generally this is a great book for becoming (or staying) infuriated about the pretense, arrogance, and cowardice of the wealthy few in our times, as well as the stranglehold they have over public space and even the formation of the very cities the millions of poor also have to live in; the same poor who do the work that makes their "Evil Paradises" possible.