Mike Davis charts the expected global urbanization explosion over the next 30 years and points out that outside China most of the rest of the world's urban growth will be without industrialization or development, rather a 'peverse' urban boom in spite of stagnant or negative urban economic growth.

Thoroughly researched...

"This multi-dimensional approach [of the UN in what qualifies as a slum] is in practice a very conservative gauge of what qualifies as a slum... UN researchers estimate that there were at least 921 million slum dwellers in 2001 and more than 1 billion in 2005." p.23

The filmmaker Prahlad Kakkar, the auteur of the toilet documentary "Bunbay," told a startled interviewer that in Bombay "half the population doesn't have a toilet to s*** in, so they shit outside. That's 5 million people. If they s*** half a kilo each, that's two and a half million kilos of s*** each morning." p.140

Meanwhile in China, where Urban shantytowns reappeared after the market reforms, many in-migrants live without sanitation or running water. "There are reports of people," writes Dorothy Solinger, "squeezed into shacks in Beijing, where one toilet served more than 6,000 people; of a shantytown in Shenzhen housing 50 shelters, in which hundreds subsisted without running water; and a 1995 survey in Shanghai revealed that a mere 11% of nearly 4,500 migrant households actually possessed a toilet." p.140

Just a couple of quotes from this terrifying book, that was published in 2006, to share in my review. I was going to quote another one about Kinshasa, but it's just too lengthy. ...From the beginning of time, men force or coerce women into having sex with them, and nine months later, ready or not, a baby comes. In Asia and Africa, the birthplace of Homo (not so) sapiens, this has multiplied faster than we have noticed, here, in our stolen country. The result in the 21st century, where the globe is ruled by crony capitalism, is a "planet of slums." No place is any longer planned for the poor of the world, who must squat wherever they can, as close as possible to a place where they can grub their scanty living. The rich obviously hope that by "dividing and conquering," i.e. letting the poor fight it out with each other for the crumbs, that they will kill each other off. To a great extent, this will happen, but the upper classes simply can't wall themselves off completely from the problem--there will be overspill. Since this book was published 13 years ago, the problem is horrifyingly so much worse today.

What can be done? Because the governments of the world, first through third, will do nothing about the problem of overpopulation and poverty, it becomes up to the individuals, who are critical thinkers, to do something about this. The only thing I can see to do, is simply do not reproduce. For the children that are already here, educate them about the world that surrounds them, so that they can be at least prepared psychologically for what they will be required to face in their lifetimes. Any child that is born into this world today, is born into an out-of-control ecology, where climate change can reach a tipping point at any moment, where no longer are jobs available for the vast population reproducing more everyday, where fresh water, air, and sufficient food simply cannot be guaranteed for the masses, where seemingly nobody is in charge. To have a child today, is to condemn them to a life that would be no life. ( )

It's like reading the first 5 pages of google search results for "slums+marxist". Maybe that's how it was researched. ( )

A magesterial tour through the worst and (limited) best of the urbanizing third world, in all its horror and potential. The global order, and neoliberalism in particular, still hasn't managed to devise any strategy for incorporating a billion sub-subsistence laborers into formal economies, not a way to provide infrastructure or public services.

Must we doom the developing world to the Dickensian role of "surplus population"? Mike Davis takes us on a tour and demonstrates how the indomitable human spirit prevails, but barely, and with such immiseration and struggle. No slum is alike, but neither is any slum a "good" one.

Davis includes an interesting epilogue with a brief survey of the US military's efforts to consider the city in the context of future urban warfare, and as one of the few elements of government to do so (particularly in the contemporary timeframe of 2005-2006). It foreshadows Stephen Graham's Cities Under Siege, but in a far more intelligible, less postmodern style of prose. That holds true for the rest of the boom as well. Very much recommended. ( )

Fascinating. DENSE. ( )