Planet of Slums

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Verso, Sep 17, 2007 - Business & Economics - 228 pages

A celebrated urban historian’s bestselling account of the global explosion of slums.

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.
 

Contents

1 The Urban Climacteric
1
2 The Prevalence of Slums
20
3 The Treason of the State
50
4 Illusions of SelfHelp
70
5 Haussmann in the Tropics
95
6 Slum Ecology
121
7 SAPing the Third World
151
8 A Surplus Humanity?
174
Down Vietnam Street
199
Acknowledgements
207
Index
209
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About the author (2007)

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.