9781844671601-frontcover

Planet of Slums

The celebrated urban historian’s bestselling account of the global explosion of slums.

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 ambitious 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, and even from 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, as a terrified Victorian middle class once imagined, are volcanoes waiting to erupt.

Paperback, 228 pages

ISBN: 9781844671601

September 2007

$19.95 / £9.99

Reviews

  • The astonishing facts hit like anvil blows ... A heartbreaking book.
  • Davis's prose exudes a crusading fervour – if not exactly messianic, close enough.
  • If it's apocalypse you want—and frankly who doesn't, because how else to explain the mess we're in—nobody does it better.
  • The Raymond Chandler of urban geography ... a coruscating tragedy.
  • A profound enquiry into an urgent subject ... a brilliant book.

Blog

New Left Review—new issue out now

The November/December issue of the New Left Review has been released, and includes the following essays:

Mike Davis: Spring Confronts Winter

Against a backdrop of world economic slump, what forces will shape the outcome of contests between a raddled system and its emergent challengers? Mike Davis examines echoes of past rebellions in 2011's global upsurge of protest.

Mike Davis is author of Planet of Slums.

Robin Blackburn: Crisis 2.0

Internationally, austerity measures have resulted in unemployment, stagnation, the imposition of technocracies, the destruction of welfare systems and a collapse in global demand. Robin Blackburn outlines some radical transitional policy responses that could address the underlying causes of the financial crisis.

Robin Blackburn is the author of Age Shock: How Finance is Failing Us and The American Crucible.

Perry Anderson: Magri's Farewell

Perry Anderson looks back upon the life and work of Lucio Magri, the Italian revolutionary and writer who died last year. An incisive critic of the PCI from both inside and outside of the Party, Anderson traces Magri's unique synthesis of theory and popular struggle from the Hungarian Revolt to the Iraq War, including his last work, The Tailor of Ulm.

Visit the New Left Review website to read the essays in full (subscribers only)

 

Verso Books at the Occupy Boston Library

Via Stephen Squibb, a photo of Verso titles proudly stacked on the Occupy Boston Library milk crates:

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Books in the photograph:

Planet of Slums, by Mike Davis

Close to the Edge: In Search of the Global Hip Hop Generation, by Sujatha Fernandes

I'm with the Bears: Stories from a Damaged Planet, with contributions by Margaret Atwood, Paolo Bacigalupi, T.C. Boyle, Toby Litt, Lydia Millet, David Mitchell, Nathaniel Rich, Kim Stanley Robinson, Helen Simpson, and Wu Ming 1, and with an introduction by Bill McKibben

 

The Obama Syndrome: Surrender at Home, War Abroad, by Tariq Ali

Meltdown: The End of the Age of Greed, by Paul Mason

The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation, and Human Rights, by Robin Blackburn

News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media, by Juan González and Joseph Torres

Trampling Out the Vintage: Cesar Chavez and the Two Souls of the United Farm Workers, by Frank Bardacke

 

Mike Davis: Wall Street through the augmented eyes of “Rowdy” Roddy Piper

Who could have envisioned Occupy Wall Street and its sudden wildflower-like profusion in cities large and small?

John Carpenter could have, and did. Almost a quarter of a century ago (1988), the master of date-night terror (Halloween, The Thing), wrote and directed They Live, depicting the Age of Reagan as a catastrophic alien invasion. In one of the film’s brilliant early scenes, a huge third-world shantytown is reflected across the Hollywood Freeway in the sinister mirror-glass of Bunker Hill’s corporate skyscrapers.

They Live remains Carpenter’s subversive tour de force. Few who’ve seen it could forget his portrayal of billionaire bankers and evil mediacrats and their zombie-distant rule over a pulverized American working class living in tents on a rubble-strewn hillside and begging for jobs. From this negative equality of homelessness and despair, and thanks to the magic dark glasses found by the enigmatic Nada (played by “Rowdy” Roddy Piper), the proletariat finally achieves interracial unity, sees through the subliminal deceptions of capitalism, and gets angry.

Very angry.

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