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Mike Davis

Planet of Slums Paperback – September 17, 2007

by Mike Davis (Author)

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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, and even from 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, as a terrified Victorian middle class once imagined, are volcanoes waiting to erupt.

Print length

228 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Verso
Publication date

September 17, 2007
Dimensions

5.04 x 0.69 x 7.76 inches
ISBN-10

1844671607
ISBN-13

978-1844671601
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“A profound enquiry into an urgent subject … a brilliant book.”
—Arundhati Roy

“With cool indignation, Davis argues that the exponential growth of slums is no accident but the result of a perfect storm of corrupt leadership, institutional failure, and IMF-imposed programs leading to a massive transfer of wealth from rich to poor … Like the work of Jacob Riis, Ida Tarbell, and Lincoln Steffens over a century ago, this searing indictment makes the shame of our cities urgently clear.”
—Michael Sorkin

“The Raymond Chandler of urban geography … In Planet of Slums, Davis’s genre is the global disaster movie, as directed by the chroniclers of Victorian poverty: Engels, Booth and Dickens. The scale of modern squalor revealed in his brilliant survey dwarfs its predecessors … a coruscating tragedy.”
—Independent

“The astonishing facts hit like anvil blows … Davis has produced a heartbreaking book that hammers the reader a little further into the ground with the blow of each new and shocking statistic.”
—Financial Times

“A terrifying, magisterial work.”
—Harper’s

“There can be no doubt about the achievement of Planet of Slums … it forces us, angrily, to confront the deplorable realities of slum existence and the limitations of slum policies in many developing countries.”
—Times (London)

“While many case studies have described what it means to reside in a favela, basti, kampung, gecekondu or bidonville, Davis provides a properly global portrait … And whereas urban specialists have focused on questions of space and land use in their discussions of slums, and developmentalists on the issue of their ‘informal economies’, Planet of Slums commands our attention as a broader historical synthesis of the two.”
—New Left Review

“Davis’s descriptions of the conditions endured by slum-dwellers provide reason enough to read this book. His analysis is full of gripping stories from globalization’s frontline.”
—New Statesman

“Packed with rigorous analysis and heart-stopping facts, this is a brilliant exploration of how millions of poor city-dwellers worldwide are being driven to the squalid periurban shadowlands of today’s megaslums … Davis’s book is absolutely vital reading.”
—Big Issue

About the Author

Mike Davis is the author of several books including Planet of Slums, City of Quartz, Ecology of Fear, Late Victorian Holocausts, and Magical Urbanism. He was recently awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. He lives in Papa’aloa, Hawaii.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Verso; Reprint edition (September 17, 2007)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 228 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1844671607
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1844671601
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 8.6 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.04 x 0.69 x 7.76 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,231,901 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #607 in Sociology of Rural Areas
- #927 in City Planning & Urban Development
- #938 in Urban Planning and Development

Customer Reviews:
186 ratings

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Mike Davis

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Mike Davis is the author of several books including City of Quartz, Ecology of Fear, Late Victorian Holocausts, Planet of Slums, and Magical Urbanism. He was recently awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. He lives in Papa'aloa, Hawaii.

Customer reviews

5 star		66%
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2 star		4%
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@Geniocratic

The second half is illuminating

Reviewed in the United States on November 17, 2019

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This book is incredibly insightful. However, it angered me that it was republished without information being updated. It's been over a decade since it was written and many of the slums referred to and problems therein have changed. The second half, with it's focus being slightly more historical, is more relevant.

Please, if you're going to spend money and time republishing a book then update the reference list. Outdated information should NOT be promoted.

14 people found this helpful

Helpful

John Maley

Planet of Slums is a great work

Reviewed in the United States on July 3, 2015

Verified Purchase

Mike Davis obviously has great knowledge and understanding of the current state of failing megacities. His style of writing is superb and I thoroughly enjoyed his descriptions of the various megacities he described. He points out the problems of megacities and the potentialities involved in their future growth. This is a book that keeps the reader's interest while providing essential information.

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Dr. Michael A. Rinella

Essential Reading

Reviewed in the United States on June 24, 2013

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Planet of Slums has several arguments but I would distill the primary ones as follows:

1. The end of the Cold War "liberated" capital to spread to all those portions of the world formerly dominated by the Soviet Union and its allies. Parallel to this economic theories known as "neoliberalism" arose in the 1970s and became dominant by the 1990s. Neoliberal ideology advocates deregulation of industry, the downsizing of government social programs, and a broken "truce" with labor that in the US had existed in fragile form since the New Deal.

2. This spread of capitalism, often referred to as "globalization," has produced for the first time a truly global labor force. The competitive pressure is so intense, as any job is better than no job at all, that workers the world over are willing to take what they can. The world is teeming with an awful, terrible, "surplus humanity" living marginalized lives of poverty, misery, and violence.

3. At the same time, the world's population keeps getting bigger, and more and more urban. This in turn continues to expand the potential labor pool, driving wages down even further. The wage gap between the rich and poor, both between nations *and* within nations, grows wider and deeper. The naked reality of this becomes more visible with each succeeding economic crisis.

4. Rather than face the consequences of what neoliberal ideology was allowed to unleash global elites, led by the military might of the United States, whose corporations continue to amass enormous profits, have focused on expanding and developing their instruments of order-keeping, cleverly disguised under misleading umbrellas of "wars on ...". Terrorism, drugs, piracy, are just so many smokescreens.

5. This process cannot continue permanently. There is a simmering anger beneath the surface that, for now, expresses itself only in isolated outbursts that high-tech campaigns of repression are capable of pacifying. Someday, however, the simmer may reach a boil and the eruption will be more than any nation can handle.

30 people found this helpful

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Tom Munro

Depressing but true

Reviewed in the United States on June 25, 2007

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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 are portrayed as hell holes. People live in grossly overcrowded housing with no access to fresh water. In the slum cities of the third world there is no provision for removal of sewerage so that it runs into the fresh water supply (Sao Paulo) or simply is deposited on the ground. The failure to treat sewerage results in large numbers of deaths mainly to children through dysentery and cholera.

The vast majority of those who live in the slums have the most marginal of jobs. Sitting beside a road selling a few vegetables, cleaning shoes a few times a day. Driving taxis for a few dollars a day. (Apparently one in 7 cars in Lima is a taxi.) One of the tragedies of the slums is that the desperation of families leads to children below 14 being the bread winners of families. Working in Indian textile or carpet factories for minuscule wages for 12 hours a day, losing their childhood and any access to education.

The book is a sustained attack on the Peruvian economist De Soto who posited a theory that the way to overcome the problem of slums is to give title to the slum dwellers of the land they squat on and to make available small loans for "business enterprises". What the book suggests is that in the last twenty or so years since the development of free market ideologies have led to the enforced retreat of the state in poorer countries from economic life there has only been disaster. Potentially the state could do something about water provision, housing or sewerage removal but the poorer countries are at the mercy of international institutions which prevent such anti market activity by tying conditions to loans. The life of slum dwellers is so marginalised that title to slum land will achieve nothing.

The book rather resembles Engels' book on the condition of the English working class in 1844. It is full of rather depressing facts and figures with anecdotes to bring home the nature of the misery and the total degradation of life that exists in the slums. Not a pleasant read but something which is a sober reminder that growth rates alone do not translate automatically into the reduction of poverty or human misery.

17 people found this helpful

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Vulcan Isadora

Most important book I read in 2006

Reviewed in the United States on January 3, 2007

Verified Purchase

Mike Davis is always the social critic that addresses the real human impact of urban mechanics. His earlier City of Quartz reveals the substructure of power in Los Angeles in a way that shapes your perception of that city and makes you question what is really going on in every other. Now, in Planet of Slums, Davis explains the economic and political factors that created the favelas and bidonvilles of the entire southern hemisphere. he reveals that it is not simply an inevitable cost of globaliszation but the outcome of policies that attempted to control the flow of populations and the diswenfranchisement and empoversihment of huge portions of populations needed to run the industrial complexrs in countries as they shifted their economies from agrarian to manufacturing. His predictions for the future are terrifying but utterly credible. Read this and understand the forces that are rhreatening human lives and that of the planet as a whole.

8 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Amazon Customer

Fails to offer any solutions

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 26, 2019

Verified Purchase

Everyone needs to know about the issue of over-population which this book describes. Vast and increasing slum communities are the result. The book paints vivid mini-pictures of some of them including some unusual situations. Egyptian tombs which have become slum dwellings. Rural fisherman who communities have been swamped by expanding slums and have been cut off from the fishing ground by a motorway. These are the more curious examples. Most slums are simply sub-human and growing rapidly.

The book appears to provide no answers except a very brutal one. I have to confess that I didn’t read to the end. I gave up when I realised that it was going nowhere. There must be things that can be done such as birth control to try to reverse the situation. The only solution offered is that armies need to be trained in guerrilla combat to put down inevitable slum uprisings.

This book offers no hope. A more creative mind is needed to address of our Planet of Slums.

2 people found this helpful

Max Willson

A great read even for non-academics

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 22, 2018

Verified Purchase

A great read even for non-academics. This provides a helpful insight into life in slums across the world and the socio-economic issues associated with them.

Paulina

Not for everyone

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 21, 2020

Verified Purchase

I'd say this is a good book if you're writing on/interested in the topic. It's not a pleasant or an easy read.

soju sim

Fascinating if hard book to read.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 5, 2013

Verified Purchase

Gives a detailed analysis of cities and slums in the world. The style is quite academic but is nonetheless very thought provoking to see how most of the rest of the "developed" world actually lives.

One person found this helpful

Dave W

Four Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 8, 2018

Verified Purchase

Interesting book with wide references

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