Mike Davis is the indispensable guide to geopolitics. In drawing the big picture he never loses sight of the details that are its reality.

Mike Davis doesn't like you. You unwitting colluder with the atrocities of late-stage capitalism. That's right, child of the first world, the blood is on your hands.

I read City of Quartz. I liked City of Quartz. Planet of Slums is like City of Quartz, but it's not just LA that's fucked, it's everywhere. Neoliberalism builds the garbage cities of Manila, the City of the Dead in Cairo, the great spiraling nightmare that is Kibera in Nairobi. Davis is an exceptionally talented reporter, and he paints a stunning portrait of the slum world.

But it is is a Grand Guignol of third world poverty, and there's something weirdly pandering about it. His history of what causes slums is minimal and weakly supported, and no policy suggestions are made, even tentatively. The globalists and DeSoto-ites don't care. They fully believe their market panaceas will cleanse the slums, and recite the mantra of trade liberalization with the faith and determination of sadhus.

And he doesn't seem to take into account the human element of the slums other than their sheer misery and squalor. It's ultimately a privileged-class perspective in which his writings transform the slum from a place of living humans into an object of transfixing horror. Good for agit-prop, yes, but it totally feels like he's writing it from a comfortable office in Southern California. I'd like to hear more from the slum-dwellers themselves, and about their lives.

An essential Mike Davis explores in "Planet of Slums" is what kind of world do we live in where we are more concerned with meeting our own creature comforts than trying to help millions of people who are exposed to epidemics, solely because they lack access to clean water? Unfortunately, there are no answers, but Davis provides ample research to prove the inequalities that exist in today's urban areas. For instance, cholera, once thought to have dissipated during the Victorian era, still poses a large threat in many regions of the world. Urban poor are increasingly denied their basic rights in an attempt for the urban rich to better their own lives. "As the third world middle classes increasingly bunker themselves in their suburban theme parks...they lose moral and cultural insight into the urban badlands they have left behind."
I have seen this ideology of 'ignorance is bliss,' while visiting New Delhi. Students who attended a private school had no idea of the lifestyle of the school-aged children who lived only a moment's walk from their school grounds. Here students lacked access to electricity and water, and instead of being able to attend school, they were forced to beg on the streets. The inequalities that exist among the haves and have-nots have reached epidemic proportions, and Davis's book is a reminder that we need to take action. However, much criticism is given to the World Bank, SAPs, and the IMF because they only encourage the cycle of poverty instead of helping move people out. In a world were megacities are quickly becoming the norm, this system of poverty is being replicated, instead of eradicated.
It is quite evident that the author spent many hours researching statistics and facts for his book, but I found the listing of numbers left a disjointed quality to the text. Mr. Davis offers so much statistical information in his chapters that, at times, it felt like he was just reciting list after endless list. Perhaps if the book had been set up with a list of essential questions and each chapter designed as a case study to explore those questions for a specific city, the book would not have been as difficult to follow. "Planet of Slums" does offer a good introduction to megacities and all the problems that come along when urban areas spread into rural areas, and I would recommend this book to anyone looking for a good survey of the topic.

قليل من التحليل الكثير من الوصف
قليل من الاسباب والمقدمات الكثير من النتائج
الكتاب عبارة عن
screenshots
لاوضاع العشوائيات حول العالم بالذات في الفترات ما بعد الاستعمار وال
80s

الكتاب مفتقر للارقام بشده بالذات في نقطة دور البنك الدولي وسياسات التكيف الهيكلي
في قفزات عجيبة بين الاسباب والنتائج دايما
الترجمه جيده جدا بل ممتازة على الرغم من ان المترجم حب يستعرض عضلاته الثقافية وارائه المتحيزة في مقدمه الكتاب الي اقل ما يقال عنها انها "بضان"

Excellent and scary condemnation of neoliberalism and bootstrap capitalism.

Hell exists on *many* places on earth. The depth of human cruelty and neglect described in these pages was overwhelming. Also appreciate that Davis didn’t try to wrap it up in a cute little bow with recommendations for what the western world can do to fix these problems of our design. Instead it ends with a description of the RAND corps recommendations for urban warfare to fight the inevitable anti state violence borne in these mega slums

Too many "isms" and "izations" for my tastes. Jesus Christ, can this guy use some real words instead of this jargon? So many footnotes...but, the content is certainly interesting if you can get beyond the invented words.

This book is more relevant now than ever. Developing economies are facing a perfect storm worldwide. As the global financial crisis tightens its grip on developed economies, their demand for imported products and services as well as basic commodities, has plummeted, leaving emerging economies in an unprecedented state of vulnerability. Millions of people live in the megacities of these countries and their corrupt governments have fewer resources at their disposal to mitigate the effects of the crisis. Millions of people are already facing food and water scarcity, millions more will join them in the next few years unless the developed world makes a concerted effort to provide the support and sustained funding they need.

“Urban segregation is not a frozen status quo, but rather a ceaseless social war in which the state intervenes regularly in the name of 'progress,' 'beautification,' and even 'social justice for the poor' to redraw spatial boundaries to the advantage of landowners, foreign investors, elite homeowners, and middle-class commuters.”

This is a thorough examination of an epic planetary problem that will probably go unsolved until it's too late. It's probably already too late. (One long string of milk-curdling expletives) homo sapiens and our complete and utter lack of foresight.

Based on some key studies published by the UN-HABITAT programme, Mike Davis transforms data into a compelling narrative about the contemporary slums and "global catastrophe of urban poverty." He describes the underlying process of the rise of the mega-city in the Third World, challenging the widespread omission of the material realities of the billion people living in slums. Davis argues: "We are dealing with a fundamental reorganisation of metropolitan space, involving a drastic diminution of the intersections between the lives of the rich and of the poor, which transcends traditional social segregation and urban fragmentation."
He believes that the main single cause of increases in poverty and inequality is "the retreat of the state" (its minimalist role) which was dictated and reinforced by the neo-liberal systems. Accordingly, those who lack the material means to insulate themselves are subject to a range of hazards including their quality of life as they are more susceptible to earthquake, flooding, arson, toxic industries, and collapsing infrastructure. However, my only reservation is Davis's reliance on data and numbers which seems to create a distance from his subjects and a more fully engagement with their lived experiences.

This was certainly an interesting book and after finishing it I understand more about the topic - the world's slums and the back-slipping that seems to be happening for the urban poor). That said, I do think this is probably the most grim and sensational version that could have possibly been painted. Universally critical of all governments, classes, NGOs and other international organizations, the author takes the stance that absolutely nobody really knows how to handle this problem and anything they do, even a strategy that produces local gains will in the end do nothing to fight (and may even worsen) the absolutely catastrophic dimensions of the problem.

It's discouraging in a sense, but I have to revolt against this perspective. At one point after describing a slum population so beat down it is unable raise itself from the (literal) muck, the author discusses the presence of NGOs working to get sanitation, micro-financing and other humane services to people in slums. He says sneeringly "They are staffed by retired civil servants and businessmen at the top and, lower down, by social workers, from among the educated unemployed and by housewives and others without roots in the slums." HOUSEWIVES! How dare they?! How could educated people who know only democracy and domestic comfort attempt provide relief effort? I think this mentality is the key fault of this book. It is so focused on problems and critique that it feels obligated to tear down everything in its path, pull out every quote and statistic possible to point out that the whole business is completely hopeless. In that way, although it is very informative and a (somewhat disorganized) survey of the most prominent and desperate slums in the world, it is not really a "helpful" book. I am now very interested in reading some scholars who are proposing alternatives to the type of one sided relief and active suppression that is currently being practiced.

devastating critique of ruling class urban politics and the neoliberal global consensus, impeccably researched, Mike Davis was and is a national treasure and everyone should read all his shit as soon as possible and so on and so forth