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. Instead, it is most probably a pit of human excrement.ĭavis takes us on a tour of 'megacities' throughout the world- though, mostly they are located in the Third World South, let's be honest. Except in this version, hell is not a pit of fire. 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.

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. This is one long howl of rage, interspersed with shockingly brief lucid sections, followed by another info dump of ineffable horror. Planet of Slums ends with a provocative meditation on the “war on terrorism” as an incipient world war between the American empire and the new slum poor.

He surveys Hindu fundamentalism in Bombay, the Islamist resistance in Casablanca and Cairo, street gangs in Cape Town and San Salvador, Pentecostalism in Kinshasa and Rio de Janeiro, and revolutionary populism in Caracas and La Paz.

He argues that the rise of this informal urban proletariat is a wholly original development unforeseen by either classical Marxism or neoliberal theory.Īre the great slums, as a terrified Victorian middle class once imagined, volcanoes waiting to erupt? Davis provides the first global overview of the diverse religious, ethnic, and political movements competing for the souls of the new urban poor. Davis portrays a vast humanity warehoused in shantytowns and exiled from the formal world economy. In this brilliant and ambitious book, Mike Davis explores the future of a radically unequal and explosively unstable urban world.įrom the sprawling barricadas of Lima to the garbage hills of Manila, urbanization has been disconnected from industrialization, even economic growth. According to the United Nations, more than one billion people now live in the slums of the cities of the South.

Dead cities mike davis