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Planet of Slums

By Mike Davis

(4)

| Hardcover | 9781844670222

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Book Description

Celebrated urban theorist lifts the lid on the effects of a global explosion of disenfranchised slum-dwellers.

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 fContinue

Celebrated urban theorist lifts the lid on the effects of a global explosion of disenfranchised slum-dwellers.

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, even 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 original development unforeseen by either classical Marxism or neoliberal theory.

Are 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. 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.Planet of Slums ends with a provocative meditation on the "war on terrorism" as an incipient world war between the American empire and the slum poor.

Critics

  • Shantytown apocalypse

    Planet of Slums by Mike Davis 240pp, Verso, £15.99 Hear this word, writes Mike Davis, ye kine of Bashan, that are in the mountain of Samaria, which oppress the poor, which crush the needy ... The Lord God hath sworn by his holiness, that lo, the day ... (read full critics)

    guardian.co.uk published on Sat, 25 Sep 2010

  • It Migrates to Them

    If any of us has seen the places in the developing world that Mike Davis catalogues remorselessly in Planet of Slums, it was probably from an aeroplane. That doesn’t always mean 35,000 feet, for as Davis points out, poorer people tend to colonise the ... (read full critics)

    lrb published on Sun, 5 Sep 2010

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Book Details

  • Rating:
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  • English Books
  • Hardcover 256 Pages
  • ISBN-10: 1844670228
  • ISBN-13: 9781844670222
  • Publisher: Verso
  • Pub date: Mar 01, 2006
  • Dimensions: 1355 mm x 968 mm x 194 mm Just how big is that?
  • Also available as: Paperback
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9781844670222 Hardcover $24.00 $20.89 bn.com
$24.00 $16.78 The Book Depository
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