Overview

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.

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9781844671601

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A brilliant book. - Arundhati Roy There can be no doubt about the achievement of Planet of Slums, especially because it forces us, angrily, to confront the deplorable realities of slum existence and the limitations of slum policies in many developing countries The Times The Raymond Chandler of urban geography. - Independent A heartbreaking book... the astonishing facts hit like anvil blows. - Financial Times

Author Information

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.

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