If you have ever worried that we might be concreting over south-east England, this book could be a useful antidote. The problem is not in Greater London. If anywhere is being concreted over, it’s Mexico City, Mumbai, Sao Paulo and the many other southern cities that have grown tenfold in just fifty years.

Although it would be rather more accurate to say that they are being covered with corrugated iron and bits of plastic sheet. The centres of the world’s megacities might be sprouting towers of concrete and glass designed by well-known architects, but at their edges they are sprouting slums at a devastating rate. The world’s slums add 25 million people to their populations every year.

Most of us are unaware of the problem. I am writing these words only a few hundred miles from the world’s biggest slum, but until I read this book I had never heard of it. It’s a slum complex called Neza-Chalco-Izta, and it houses four million of Mexico City’s 22m population. There are similar slums in Caracas, Venezuela and Bogota, Colombia, each housing at least two million people, and two more in Lima, Peru that together add a further three millions. So the ‘top five’ megaslums are all in Latin America - but Asia and Africa are not far behind.

‘Slum’ is a word no longer much used in Britain – for good reason, since most of ours have disappeared. Yet it is hard to avoid the word when contemplating the magnitude of informal, densely-packed settlements attached to the cities of the developing world. One fact from the many in Davis’s book says it all: Dharavi, in Mumbai (Bombay) which has the reputation of being Asia’s biggest slum, allegedly has 18,000 people per acre. Yes, eighteen thousand.

If Davis’s statistics are unremitting, so are his criticisms. The book is doubly depressing – the situation is getting worse by the minute, and apparently nothing is being done about it. Davis is respectful of slum dwellers and their campaigns for political change, but critical of most of the efforts being made – whether by governments, NGOs or slum dwellers themselves. He’s particularly incensed by the impact of the policies of bodies like the World Bank and the IMF – often for good reason, but without accepting that they might be learning from past mistakes.

I have visited only one or two of the places Davis writes about. But in Dharavi, for example, there are impressive self-build projects, sponsored by Homeless International and coordinated by local NGOs. The same goes for slum areas in Buenos Aires and Santiago (Chile). Such projects have escaped Davis’s notice. In fact, I began to wonder if he’d written this book at his desk, without having seen any slums himself. If he has visited them, the book is remarkably lacking in the personal stories of slum dwellers (and none are named in his Acknowledgements).

This is a pity, as the real story, as usual, is a mixed one: terrible problems, but people everywhere making enormous efforts to tackle them. Read this book to find out about the scale of the task, but don’t despair of helping the agencies and the people who are trying to do something about it.

I'm not going to lie: this is dry. Really, really dry. I like dry, as a general rule, or at least it doesn't bother me - but this? Man. Maybe it's because the things he covers are so wrenchingly, horribly emotional and in order to get through it with any objectivity he had to cloak himself in boringness. At any rate, the information is valuable - maybe critical - and well worth wading through the whole of the text. The glimpse of our urban future that Davis provides is one we need to look at, hard. And I tell you: you will never take your toilet for granted again.

Provocative and vital

This stunning book compels the reader to a new view of the world. A "Planet of Slums" is pretty scary from a moral point of view. What kind of creatures are we to allow such an enormous number of our kind to live out their lives in squalor and poverty? What does this say for the soul of humanity?

From a national security point of view, of course we are not directly threatened, at least not yet. The percent of urbanites in our cities that are slum dwellers, according to a table on page 24 is 5.8 for a total of a "mere" 12.8 million people. Compare that to China's 37.8% (193.8 million) and India's 55.5% (158.4 million) and we are in relatively good shape. The worst country is Ethiopia with 99.4% of the city population living in slums, followed by the Sudan (85.7%) and Bangladesh (84.7%). I did a quick count of the number of people living in slums in the 20 countries listed on the table and it added up to maybe 700 million. Should we worry?

Davis reveals that the Pentagon and think tank thinkers are worried since the cost of dealing with disruptive mobs, slum-bred terrorists, criminal gangs, etc. not only will be high but will require new tactics and strategies. In a sense, some of the problems we are having in Baghdad are the result of our inability to deal with the people of the great slum of Sadr City. I say this somewhat tongue in cheek since of course our "problem" in Iraq goes well beyond slum dissidents.

On the other hand, we might ask, whose fault is it that so many people in the world are locked into such squalid conditions? Certainly you and I had nothing to do with it. Well, that is NOT Davis's point of view. He sees globalization and the policies of governments (especially rich Western governments) and NGOs (especially the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund) as the leading cause of slum proliferation and growth. He writes, "night after night, hornetlike helicopter gunships stalk enigmatic enemies in the narrow streets of the slum districts, pouring hellfire into 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." (p. 206)

This vision, which ends the book, comes from the Epilogue, "Down Vietnam Street." "Vietnam Street" is what the "unemployed teenage fighters of the 'Mahdi Army' in Baghdad's Sadr City...taunt American occupiers with," the implication being that the same failure we experienced in Vietnam is what awaits us in Iraq. (p. 205)

Could this be America a couple of generations down the road? The massive growth of slums in our inner cities in my lifetime as been staggering, even though it is not much compared to places like Mexico City, Mumbai, Cairo, Shanghai, etc. One of the differences between the typical American slum and that of many cities throughout the world is that American slums are of the inner city variety while the others are mostly "peripheral slums." Peripheral slums are worse at least in one sense: the poor not only live in filth without basic services, but they have to commute long distances to their jobs. This is something of an irony since the growth of slums is usually equated with their close proximity to low paying jobs.

Davis gives the official UN definition of a slum as a place "characterized by overcrowding, poor or informal housing, inadequate access to safe water and sanitation, and insecurity of tenure." (pp. 22-23) Clearly from a demographic viewpoint slums are occupied by poor people and poor people have little power, and that is one of the reasons they stay poor. Davis writes as someone who is on the side of the poor and an advocate for doing something about the eternal phenomenon expressed as "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer."

The people in the slums, as Davis points out, represent surplus labor or even--to use his terminology--superfluous labor. They are the dregs of humanity, caught in a downward spiraling situation in which lack of education, lack of nutrition, high instance of disease and mortality, low wages, bare subsistence, etc. guarantee that they and their children will stay in the same situation. The odds against a leap from the depths of poverty to a middle class existence are greater than ever.

At least that is the message I got from reading this sobering book. By the way, this is the sort of book that is a bit difficult to read because it is so jammed full of facts, figures and jargon terminology. Additionally Davis uses a lot of foreign words that he doesn't define (as though to show the reader that he's been there with the natives), although many of them are self-explanatory. I like the native terminology however and the use of the local names of slums within the larger city.

The overarching question that I was left with was, what does this incredible proliferation of poverty mean for the human race as a whole? What does it say about us? How does it bode for the future? Are we looking at not a perpetual war between nation states (as Orwell had it), but at a perpetual war between the haves and the have nots? It used to be the case that when things got really bad or just incredibly decadent, a revolution or an invasion from without would change things. Now it would appear that the difference between those at the bottom of the economic pyramid and those in the middle and upper classes will only widen. With the exponential explosion in technology that gap may become so great that the haves may someday regard the have nots as member of a different species.

--Dennis Littrell, author of “The World Is Not as We Think It Is”

Reading this book one enters the nightmare world of the urban poor who dominate the Third World whose position has been much harmed by the neoliberal policies of the IMF/World Bank dictated by the US Washington Consensus. Perhaps the global future was inevitable of the transition from country dwellers to urban slum inhabitants of 90% of the world's population with the rich in their gated communities terrified of them. A book that must be read.

"Some would argue that urbanization without industrialization is an expression of an inexorable trend: the inherent tendency of silicon capitalism to delink the growth of production from that of employment. But in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and much of South Asia, urbanization without growth (...) is more obviously the legacy of a global political conjuncture – the worldwide debt crisis of the late 1970s and the subsequent IMF-led restructuring of Third World economies in the 1980s – than any iron law of advancing technology."

Mike Davis

long avec beaucoup d’exemples mais ça reste intéressant

There are two things I really like about Davis.

1) He practices a very practical, grounded, and compassionate leftism that provides a nice balance when overdosing on theory.

2) His furious non-stop info-dumps remind me of reading some of Thomas Bernhard’s more drawn-out works.

In Planet of Slums, Mike Davis pessimistically attacks contemporary urbanisation, citing the rising prevalence of slums as evidence that the large class gap is no longer rural versus urban, rather it is urban elite versus urban poor. Many of the examples Davis uses in this book are of formerly colonial "Third World" cities, which he highlights as having been particularly hard hit by colonial and post-colonial policies, including the colonial aristocracy denying native populations the "right to the city" as first explored by Henri Lefebvre, as well as Western non-government entities like the IMF and the World Bank imposing structural adjustment programs on countries in the wake of independence, further indebting them to the "First World."

On top of an in-depth exploration of why slums have become so commonplace in the modern metropolis, Davis describes the living conditions of the slum-dwellers, painting a grim image of densely-populated blocks of incredibly unsanitary, ramshackle, inadequate housing with limited - or sometimes without - access to toilets, drinking water, and many other basic needs for urbanites, and how the aforementioned governmental and organisational policies have led to these conditions.

This is certainly a book I would recommend to anyone with any sort of vested interest in urban studies, as it uses a realist approach to describe how past events have led to a new urban environment of incredible inequality and mass squalor. Davis provides more than enough examples of cities across the world and artfully pieces together ideas from other urban theorists to back up his own claims. He doesn't "beat around the bush", the messaging in this book is very direct and sticks with the reader.

Unsurprisingly slums are bad

the WTO protesters were right.

economic theories are simply an ideological framework by which we justify theft from the poorest among us.

This website was created for books like this: will educate and enlighten your perspective, well written, yet for the populus; and, most unlikely to be the one you pick up at the library.

More than any other non-fiction book I have ready in the past 10 years, this book is a must read. This book describes the reality, the causes, and the results of urban poverty in the global south. It pins down things I had picked up on through my other readings, but made them more concrete. Not a cheery read, it reminds us that most of the world's population live lives we would consider without hope and without dignity. This fact is not something we can avoid forever--we are not as insular as we have been taught to feel, when it comes to those people/i>. This work is so well written and argued and so compulsively documented that I almost wonder if the author is human or a emissary from the god I don't believe in.