Planet of Slums (Essential Mike Davis)

This book deals with the rise of urbanization in the Third World now and in the future. The consequences of millions of people packed into cities lacking the infrastructure to handle them are a public health and ecological disaster for their inhabitants and ultimately for the rest of the world. Imagine living in a city where there is one toilet per hundreds or even thousands of people. It is hard for people living in North America to reckon with this because, as Mike Davis points out, the worst examples of this are hidden in undeveloped areas of the Eastern Hemisphere. This is an excellent book that you should read with _The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu_ also by Mike Davis.UPDATE(O4/05/2011): Books that I recommend to read with this: _Urban Guerrilla Warfare_ by Anthony James Joes, _New Religions as Global Cultures: _Making the Human Sacred_ by Irving Hexham and Karla Poewe, and _The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity_ by Phillip Jenkins.

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.

Sometime during the writing of this book - 2005 - the global urban population surpassed the global rural population. It has been estimated that both populations stand at about 3.2 billion. What is startling is that Mike Davis has calculated that the rural population has reached its peak and will begin to decline by 2020, and that all future world population growth will be in cities, primarily megacities (8 million or more) and hypercities (20 million or more). The total world population is expected to peak at 10 billion in the year 2050. If I'm still alive, I will be 95. I hope to experience peak global population, even though my actuarial tables would indicate otherwise.This massive movement to the city has not been accompanied by industialization and development, instead there has been massive urbanization without economic growth. The future cities of glass and steel envisioned by urbanists have not materialized, instead the urban poor are squatting in crudely constructed slum dwellings on the periphery of cities. A "surplus of humanity" is accumulating on the outskirts of urban centers, an "accumulation of the wretched."It is no surprise that Davis grew up and currently lives in the Los Angeles area. (He also wrote "City of Quartz," a book about Los Angeles.) Angelenos tend to see the world as it is seen on television or at the movies. Davis' images of Third World slums are those of "Blade Runner" or "Escape from New York". One wonders if Davis has ever visited a Third World slum or interviewed one of its denizens. By referring to them as "the wretched," he will never be accused of being too close to his subject.Why the massive movement toward cities? And why is this dystopian urbanization occurring on this scale? Davis puts the blame squarely on the neoliberal policies of the IMF. In the late 70's and early 80's, the IMF imposed its structural adjustment program (SAP). It was a one-size-fits-all program for debt burdened Third World countries to open up their economies and theoretically participate in global economy. The program (SAP) called for the deregulation of agriculture and the downsizing of the public sector. (Read also Joseph Stiglitz' "Globalization and its Discontents.") The consequences of this policy are still being debated, but Davis focuses only on the negatives. He points out that hundreds of thousands of workers - millions - worldwide are being pushed from the countryside without the pull of jobs in the cities. The results are masses of humanity in shantytowns on the periphery of urban centers.If this book sounds extremely negative, it's because it is. Davis criticizes governments for not building enough public housing, and when they do, it's not in the right place and it lacks community. He complains when squatters do not have title to their land or cannot formally rent their shanties, but he also criticizes Hernando De Soto's campaign to do just that. He claims it would lead to further stratification and exploitation of the poor.Davis sees no solutions to the current trends. He ends the book with the following image: "Night after night, hornetlike helicopter gunships stalk enigmatic enemies in the narrow streets of the slum districts, pouring hellfire into the shanties or fleeing cars. Every morning the slums reply with suicide bombers and eloquent explosions. If the empire can deploy Orwellian technologies of repression, its outcasts have the gods of chaos on their side."I thought immediately of that scene in the last "Terminator" movie. Davis displays some eloquent prose and solid research, but he may have lost sight of the surplus of humanity living in slums.

Un libro más al estante.

The chapter on the Congo and witchcraft was really compelling. How people's faith in elections and the state was eradicated through western economic hegemony which caused people to retreat into fantastic and bizarre religious practices and beliefs.

Happy with the shipping. Great book by Mike Davis. Read it a while ago and just needed to own a copy.

Excellent.Je recommande vivement ce livre à toutes les personnes ayant envie d'ouvrir leur horizons et de comprendre les phénomènes urbains.

An interesting lecture that I would suggest. Anyone (even slightly) interested in the topic is likely to enjoy this book.The analysis made by Mike Davis is inspiring and based on a reach documentation which comes from all over the world. The topic is worth of interest, I would say pivotal in our contemporaneity, the way in which is presented open minding.