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People sometimes ask me to recommend good books about cities and architecture; it's a pretty hard question - for the most part, contemporary urbanism is a vast wasteland of aesthetic critique lacking any social context. About the only writer I can recommend on these subjects is Mike Davis. Planet of Slums is an amazing book that describes the develop of and life in the shantytowns that are on the margins of cities across the Global South - that is, the cities were most people already live, and where most future population growth will happen.
Davis starts with some dense and sobering statistics on the scope and scale of urbanization, and it's tone and character in a selection of Asian, Latin American, African, and Indian cities.
But this is not a folio of statistics and demographics; Davis is one of the few writers on cities that I'm aware of who understand that contemporary urbanization is different from the process that developed nations went through during the Victorian "Industrial Revolution." "From Karl Marx to Max Weber," writes Davis, "classical social theory believed that the great cities of the future would follow in the industrializing footsteps of Manchester, Berlin, and Chicago..." however, rapidly urbanizing areas like "Kinshasa, Luanda, Khartoum, Dar-es-Salaam, Guayaquill, and Lima continue to grow prodigiously despite ruined import-substitution industries, shrunken public sectors, and downwardly mobile middle classes."
All of which is to say that Planet of Slums is the only book I have found so far that so completely outlines the process of the development and explosive of neoliberal cities. The IMF and the World Bank, trans-national corporations, debt, aid, and structural adjustment - Planet of Slums is about how these institutions and forces shape the urban landscape for the majority of the world.
Planet of Slums is a harsh book. You will find no romance in the revolution prose here. Squatters aren't heroic figures on the cusp of achieving their dreams, but rather a deeply exploited underclass facing the dual oppression of illegitimacy in the eyes of the state as well as subjugation to a exploitative class of illegal shantytown landlords with either (or both) government or gang connections - a condition that has been going on, in some places, for generations. These are glimpses into a world were homeless pedicab drivers have to pay rent to someone even to sleep on the sidewalk, where the organized squatter communities are still living on toxic dumps, flood zones, or in areas with 100,000 to one person to toilet ratios.
Further, Davis writes of the appropriation of anarchist anti-statist self-help ideal by the World Bank. Specifically, he writes of the use of the ideas of anarchist-urbanist John Turner by the World Bank under Robert MacNemera, (something I found fascinating and deeply disturbing), as well as a broader discussion of NGO's and their less then benevolent or democratic roles in the creation and perpetuation of urban misery.
Planet of Slums is challenging and insightful, brutal in it's descriptions of slums and it's lack of "rays of hope" or upbeat conclusions. It is well researched and dense with theory and analysis, and is, in that way vital to anyone who wants to understand how contemporary cities develop.
Davis starts with some dense and sobering statistics on the scope and scale of urbanization, and it's tone and character in a selection of Asian, Latin American, African, and Indian cities.
But this is not a folio of statistics and demographics; Davis is one of the few writers on cities that I'm aware of who understand that contemporary urbanization is different from the process that developed nations went through during the Victorian "Industrial Revolution." "From Karl Marx to Max Weber," writes Davis, "classical social theory believed that the great cities of the future would follow in the industrializing footsteps of Manchester, Berlin, and Chicago..." however, rapidly urbanizing areas like "Kinshasa, Luanda, Khartoum, Dar-es-Salaam, Guayaquill, and Lima continue to grow prodigiously despite ruined import-substitution industries, shrunken public sectors, and downwardly mobile middle classes."
All of which is to say that Planet of Slums is the only book I have found so far that so completely outlines the process of the development and explosive of neoliberal cities. The IMF and the World Bank, trans-national corporations, debt, aid, and structural adjustment - Planet of Slums is about how these institutions and forces shape the urban landscape for the majority of the world.
Planet of Slums is a harsh book. You will find no romance in the revolution prose here. Squatters aren't heroic figures on the cusp of achieving their dreams, but rather a deeply exploited underclass facing the dual oppression of illegitimacy in the eyes of the state as well as subjugation to a exploitative class of illegal shantytown landlords with either (or both) government or gang connections - a condition that has been going on, in some places, for generations. These are glimpses into a world were homeless pedicab drivers have to pay rent to someone even to sleep on the sidewalk, where the organized squatter communities are still living on toxic dumps, flood zones, or in areas with 100,000 to one person to toilet ratios.
Further, Davis writes of the appropriation of anarchist anti-statist self-help ideal by the World Bank. Specifically, he writes of the use of the ideas of anarchist-urbanist John Turner by the World Bank under Robert MacNemera, (something I found fascinating and deeply disturbing), as well as a broader discussion of NGO's and their less then benevolent or democratic roles in the creation and perpetuation of urban misery.
Planet of Slums is challenging and insightful, brutal in it's descriptions of slums and it's lack of "rays of hope" or upbeat conclusions. It is well researched and dense with theory and analysis, and is, in that way vital to anyone who wants to understand how contemporary cities develop.
