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Average Customer Rating:

Book is interesting	Customer Rating:
Well 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.

important yet flawed

Customer Rating:

Mike 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 World Bank, and other evil purveyors of "the Washington consensus." That said, his analysis calls these actors to account for genuine crimes against the world's poor. And he does lambaste corrupt governments and bourgeoise indifferent to their fellow citizens' fate. The major weakness of "Planet of Slums" is a lack of attention to the demographic causes of slum growth and global poverty. Davis occasionally notes in passing the staggering population growth in most of the countries where slum growth has been greatest. He devotes the better part of a chapter to "informal" employment and underemployment in the slums. But he fails to consider whether population growth, itself, needs to be halted, in order to begin to address the problems he brings to our attention. Could even the best-intentioned governments, NGO's or enlightened entrepreneurs find useful employment for all the unemployed and underemployed in India? Might not India simply have too many people?

filtered	Customer Rating:
The 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.

Drinking from a firehose	Customer Rating:
OK 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.

All SAPed Out

Customer Rating:

What 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 questions about the ecological sustainability of these slums, the sewerage and waste problems, employment and wage outlook, transportation issues, and obvious social ills caused by the maldistribution of wealth and resources. Davis mentions that these megacities and hypercities do not just consist of one or two "ghettos" but often are made up of six to a dozen or so different "slum districts." Davis addresses the fact that this astonishing rush to urbanization is a relatively new phenomenon that's taken off at an extraordinary pace over just the past 20 years. Of course Planet of Slums touches on the structural adjustment programs that have been instituted by the global financial rackets and the export/import crop imbalance. He also addresses the fact that this major swing towards urbanization contradicts standard economic theory which essentially states that people will flee the countryside if wages are strong in the urban core. Clearly this is not what has been happening over the past couple decades as Davis demonstrates in his book: wages and employment prospects in the major cities are grim at best with the vast majority of people relying on the informal sector to get by. The chapter on 'slum ecology' should be required reading for every citizen of the world. Davis, a MacArthur Fellow, does a stupendous job laying out what in the hell's going on in the world today. All the dreadful statistics and anecdotes he brings to the table come with a pessimistic and almost misanthropic tone. This book is another paradigm shifter from Verso Publishing.