Jeremy Harding writes:

If any of us has seen the places in the developing world that Mike Davis catalogues remorselessly in Planet of Slums, it was probably from an aeroplane. Davis, the urban historian who also excels at apocalyptic geography, sketches the various ways in which slum inhabitants can make ends meet. He also lists ways, based mostly on exploitation, in which they might even profit. In the end, the burgeoning pauper conurbations are as wretched as they look from the cabin window. Ragged, substandard urban sprawl, constantly reshaping its margins, is for Davis the manifest destiny of cities in poor countries expanding under the pressure of deregulated market economies. If there are countries in the South where more people live in slums than live in cities proper, and if by 2020 half the world’s urban population will exist in poverty, then the slum deserves more attention than it’s getting from planners, sociologists, environmentalist, epidemiologists and demographers.

(LRB 8 March 2007)

Available in a paperback edition

Verso | hardback |ISBN: 9781844670222