Planet of Slums, Mike Davis
Planet of Slums, Mike Davis
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Planet of Slums

Author: Mike Davis

Narrator: Mike Lenz

Unabridged: 7 hr 45 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 06/23/2020


Synopsis

The classic, brilliant, bestselling account of the rise of the world's slums, where, according to the United Nations, one billion people now live.

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 new slum poor.

About Mike Davis

Mike Davis is the author of several books, including City of Quartz, Buda's Wagon, Ecology of Fear, Planet of Slums, and (with Jon Wiener) Set the Night on Fire. He is the recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and the Lannan Literary Award. He lives in San Diego.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Kelly on April 15, 2011

This is one long howl of rage, interspersed with shockingly brief lucid sections, followed by another info dump of ineffable horror. You know how in The Dark Knight there's that line, "Some men just want to watch the world burn"? Mike Davis would like to inform you that the world is burning, that it......more

Goodreads review by Jonfaith on February 18, 2020

Seismic hazard is the fine print in the devil's bargain of informal housing.. Planet of Slums begins as a torrent of statistics. One is easily lost in the scale of such misery. Debt management is the devil, even if we have to invent one. The restructuring of such debt has human consequences. Our feel......more