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by: Mike Davis  List Price: $16.95 Amazon.com's Price: $11.53 You Save: $5.42 (32%)Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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Binding: PaperbackDewey Decimal Number: 307.336416091724 EAN: 9781844671601 ISBN: 1844671607 Label: Verso Manufacturer: Verso Number Of Items: 1 Number Of Pages: 256 Publication Date: September 01, 2007 Publisher: Verso Studio: Verso Related Items:
Browse for similar items by category: Click to Display Editorial Review: Product Description: Celebrated urban historian's bestselling account of the global explosion of slums, with a major new introduction. 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 influential 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 unforeseen development and asks whether the great slums are, as a terrified Victorian middle class once imagined, volcanoes waiting to erupt. Average Rating:
 Rating: - Book is interestingWell written, definitely some criticisms of Davis's style, but it is accessible and raises a lot of questions about personal responsibility, lifestyle choices, and hazards geography. Rating:  - important yet flawedMike Davis' "Planet of Slums" is an important, eye-opening look at one of the most important global trends of the past fifty years: the explosive growth of third-world slums and the emmiseration of their inhabitants. Davis provides a lucid general overview, thoroughly grounded in recent scholarship across many disciplines. This is a real achievement. Davis wears his doctrinaire socialism on his sleeve, for better and for worse. There is no problem that cannot be traced to the IMF, the ... Read More Rating: - filteredThe book gave a one-sided view which blamed the IMF's structural adjustment programs for the exponential growth of slums around some of the richest cities in the world, while completely ignoring the responsibility of local leadership and corruption in national governments. Rating:  - Drinking from a firehoseOK Mike. Slums are bad, there are too many of them & the growth is incredible. I wanted a bit more about life in these places & a little more focus. My attention is demanded in Lima, Kenya, Rio & back again, all in a single page. Tremendous & frightening data. May as well have sent a spreadsheet. Rating:  - All SAPed OutWhat a tremendous work. I've got two chapters left to go, and thus far it's easily the most informative and scholarly book I've yet to read in 2008. Planet of Slums is all about how the Third World's major cities are growing at what seems like an almost exponential rate. They're turning into what Davis terms megacities and even hypercities: 20,000,000+ in population! In the next few years the world will have about ten hypercities with over 20,000,000 people. In the book he poses ... Read More 
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