Really interesting book, 07 Oct 2008
This book is brilliant! It uses maps of the world to display data by distorting the physical size of countries according to the relevant data - the result is a very visual feel for the data - much more powerful than figures or words could be. Every page has a global map displaying a different set of data and the range of data is huge, spanning from spread of diseases to energy use, from prevalence of national disasters to effectiveness of legal systems.

The book is pretty large and an ideal coffee table read. You don't need to be particularly analytical to get a lot from it - just need to be interested in the world. A fantastic new way of looking at the world.

Really interesting book, 07 Oct 2008
This book is brilliant! It uses maps of the world to display data by distorting the physical size of countries according to the relevant data - the result is a very visual feel for the data - much more powerful than figures or words could be. Every page has a global map displaying a different set of data and the range of data is huge, spanning from spread of diseases to energy use, from prevalence of national disasters to effectiveness of legal systems.

The book is pretty large and an ideal coffee table read. You don't need to be particularly analytical to get a lot from it - just need to be interested in the world. A fantastic new way of looking at the world.

Thought provoking and a great read, 25 Aug 2008
I heard about guerrilla gardening on the radio. I thought it was a modern urban trend. It was fascinating to discover it's history. There are page turning stories of many different individuals across the world. As well as gardening the book touches on a surprisingly wide range of relevant issues for society today, from the shortage of space in cities, developing world food security and even adbusting!


Above all I enjoyed reading it. It made me laugh and feel inspired.

Brilliant whether you like to garden or not, 29 May 2008
The thing I loved about this book was that you don't need to be a keen gardener to love or be interested in what it's all about.

An interest in making our surroundings a better place is all you need. Which helps give the lover of urban landscapes by providing an in-road into making their environment a better place - and appreciating how that has been achieved by others.

It's as inspirational a book as the reader wants it to be.

Great fun!, 12 May 2008
This book is a great read and shows how anyone can become a guerrilla gardener, with lot of easy tips and ideas. The pictures are really lovely. Very inspiring!

On guerilla's AND gardening, 10 May 2008
Richard Reynolds has produced a delightful handbook for and about committed gardeners around the world who `fight filth with flowers' to transform `orphaned' public land into community space. It is a beautifully conceived book and it is no surprise it took two years to draw together the wonderfully humorous yet deadly serious stories of those around the world who have taken up the mantle of guerrilla gardening. The book derives tools for this trade from more easily recognisable guerrillas such as Che Guevara and Mao. Though not condoning any particular politics, Reynolds uses the examples of history to tease out what tools have been used and are open to those guerrilla gardeners fighting their own `little wars' against misused land around the world. The book is spiced up with stories of the many guerrilla gardeners he has encountered and are engaging, humorous, fascinating and inspiring. They are not big stories in themselves, but rather it is the collective efforts of the many that creates the dramatic effect, and ultimately political movement, that is now termed guerrilla gardening.

The book is more than just a documentation of what has already gone on, it is in itself a productive force that will no doubt alter the landscape by its publication. It is a book that will help to legitimate the democratisation of land at a much more local and individual scale than is true of most of the famous political `guerrillas' he draws insight from.

This is much more than a book about guerrilla gardening and will be of interest to geographers, political scientists, and students of planning and landscape. It is a treatise on the use and misuse of space that challenges the reader to think about how spaces are conceived, used, abused and also how the legal ownership and use of that land is not as fixed as it may appear. Gardening in this book is more than planting; it is a tool for the democratisation of space.


Inspiring.., 09 May 2008
I love this book.. It is a great read, inspiring stories of Richards experiences, as well as the experiences of the many other Guerrilla Gardeners there are around the world. I have also found the tips very interesting, as although this is something that I have taken part in, the concept of doing it on my own has always been a bit daunting. Hopefully with the help of this book I shall be out on my own soon!

This book is a wonderful insight into what drives people to undertake Guerilla gardening, the history of the concept and what is possible.

Really interesting book, 07 Oct 2008
This book is brilliant! It uses maps of the world to display data by distorting the physical size of countries according to the relevant data - the result is a very visual feel for the data - much more powerful than figures or words could be. Every page has a global map displaying a different set of data and the range of data is huge, spanning from spread of diseases to energy use, from prevalence of national disasters to effectiveness of legal systems.

The book is pretty large and an ideal coffee table read. You don't need to be particularly analytical to get a lot from it - just need to be interested in the world. A fantastic new way of looking at the world.

Thought provoking and a great read, 25 Aug 2008
I heard about guerrilla gardening on the radio. I thought it was a modern urban trend. It was fascinating to discover it's history. There are page turning stories of many different individuals across the world. As well as gardening the book touches on a surprisingly wide range of relevant issues for society today, from the shortage of space in cities, developing world food security and even adbusting!


Above all I enjoyed reading it. It made me laugh and feel inspired.

Brilliant whether you like to garden or not, 29 May 2008
The thing I loved about this book was that you don't need to be a keen gardener to love or be interested in what it's all about.

An interest in making our surroundings a better place is all you need. Which helps give the lover of urban landscapes by providing an in-road into making their environment a better place - and appreciating how that has been achieved by others.

It's as inspirational a book as the reader wants it to be.

Great fun!, 12 May 2008
This book is a great read and shows how anyone can become a guerrilla gardener, with lot of easy tips and ideas. The pictures are really lovely. Very inspiring!

On guerilla's AND gardening, 10 May 2008
Richard Reynolds has produced a delightful handbook for and about committed gardeners around the world who `fight filth with flowers' to transform `orphaned' public land into community space. It is a beautifully conceived book and it is no surprise it took two years to draw together the wonderfully humorous yet deadly serious stories of those around the world who have taken up the mantle of guerrilla gardening. The book derives tools for this trade from more easily recognisable guerrillas such as Che Guevara and Mao. Though not condoning any particular politics, Reynolds uses the examples of history to tease out what tools have been used and are open to those guerrilla gardeners fighting their own `little wars' against misused land around the world. The book is spiced up with stories of the many guerrilla gardeners he has encountered and are engaging, humorous, fascinating and inspiring. They are not big stories in themselves, but rather it is the collective efforts of the many that creates the dramatic effect, and ultimately political movement, that is now termed guerrilla gardening.

The book is more than just a documentation of what has already gone on, it is in itself a productive force that will no doubt alter the landscape by its publication. It is a book that will help to legitimate the democratisation of land at a much more local and individual scale than is true of most of the famous political `guerrillas' he draws insight from.

This is much more than a book about guerrilla gardening and will be of interest to geographers, political scientists, and students of planning and landscape. It is a treatise on the use and misuse of space that challenges the reader to think about how spaces are conceived, used, abused and also how the legal ownership and use of that land is not as fixed as it may appear. Gardening in this book is more than planting; it is a tool for the democratisation of space.


Inspiring.., 09 May 2008
I love this book.. It is a great read, inspiring stories of Richards experiences, as well as the experiences of the many other Guerrilla Gardeners there are around the world. I have also found the tips very interesting, as although this is something that I have taken part in, the concept of doing it on my own has always been a bit daunting. Hopefully with the help of this book I shall be out on my own soon!

This book is a wonderful insight into what drives people to undertake Guerilla gardening, the history of the concept and what is possible.

slum mega cities, 11 Jun 2007
The scale and velocity of world population increase over the last fifty years has been unprecedented in human history. Urbanisation, with over a billion people living in cities has become the key signature of this growth, with the urban population for the first time greater than in the country. These facts are startling, if common knowledge, however they are not much examined in the mainstream. Mike Davis's book looks at this global phenomenon in detail, and shows clearly how the city has been turned into slums, and how poverty has been urbanised.

Slum mega cities have strange geographies, and densities that defy analysis and seeming logic. Here Peri urbanism where city and country are virtually indivisible is covered as is the continual subdivision of wealth and free space by mega slums that turn earthquake prone mountainsides into dense housing. These city slums are where the worlds problems will start, and where they must be solved.

But if you are looking for light reading this is not it, and although global capitalism is firmly blamed for this there are no fixes suggested in this book either. This story though is worth telling and the book is a powerfully argued proof that much of the world is suffering under impossible odds.

Thorough Description with No Prescription, 14 Feb 2007
Marxist cultural critic Davis's latest book tackles the global problem of the slums (he uses the U.N. definition: "characterized by overcrowding, poor or informal housing, inadequate access to safe water and sanitation, and insecurity of tenure."), which are exploding at a geometric rate across the world. Alas, at the end of this relatively brief work, we have learned of the scale and scope of the problem in mind-numbing detail, and we have learned the source of the problem (at least according to Davis), but that's about it. Alas, anyone interested in a book with this title probably already has a sense of both, and what is utterly lacking in Davis's analysis is any way forward.

Granted, if there were obvious solutions, we'd probably know about those as well -- the real problem is that Davis really, really likes to have it both ways. In other words, there since there is no policy or proposed solution he likes, he attacks all options, even opposite ones, with equal venom, leading one to wonder what the point is. For example: at one point he says that new "periurban" slums lack the community spirit of the inner-city slums people are being relocated from, but then elsewhere he says that this positive community spirit is all a myth and that all slums are Darwinian proving grounds. Governments that don't build public housing come under attack, and those that do also come under attack for it being substandard. Slums are depicted as terrible, and slum clearances are depicted as equally terrible. Sure, none of this is "good", in any sense of the word, but Davis doesn't have anything else to offer either. Most egregious to me is his flailing around on property rights: if the poor don't have titles to their land then they're subject to exploitation, if they do have title they'll just sell it and be exploited. Meanwhile he characterizes Hernando de Soto's interesting vision of how property rights might be used to lift people out of poverty (as detailed in The Mystery of Capital) as a "cargo cult" and "magic wand", which is a disappointingly cynical oversimplification of a rather nuanced and wide-ranging proposal (which is grounded in actual fieldwork instead of the library).

This book is certainly valuable for its description of the problem of slums -- it uses about 700 footnotes (yes, really!) citing an impressive array of books, articles, newsletters, and various published and unpublished reports by the World Bank, UN, governments, and NGOs to draw connections between slums from around the world. Davis paints a picture of slums that are created not by those coming to the city to earn more money, but by the involuntary relocation of those in the way of construction that benefits the wealthy, or the loss of farming at the hands of multinational agribusiness, or civil war, or drought. Of course, all the usual suspects come in for indictment as well (the UN, World Bank, IMF neoliberal capitalism), along with NGOs, the leaders of the third world, the elite of the third world, the middle-class of the third world, and at some points, the poor of the third world. In this book, everyone is guilty (and maybe everybody is, certainly the World Bank and IMF have a terrible track record and are indeed very culpable), but how does this view help anyone? Even worse, nothing we're trying works according to Davis: not micro-credit, not outside NGO help, not militant activism by squatters, and not even the self-help entrepreneurship of the poor.

Some have inferred that Davis is inherently suggesting a reversal of the policies that brought this miserable state to pass, and that massive public spending might be the answer. The problem Davis points out himself is that many of these policies are interwoven with global capitalism, so it's not a simple matter of passing some new resolution. Nor does Davis care for massive public spending (at least not in China or India), and since he points out over and over that third-world elites will simply steal their nation's wealth, the notion that some form of worldwide nationalization of natural resources doesn't seem particularly promising either. Given all this, one has to presume that Davis's unarticulated "solution" is that one day the revolution's gonna come and tear this mother (ie. global capitalism) down. Or maybe that's not what he thinks... we don't know, because Davis never tells us.

Provocative and vital, 06 Dec 2006
This stunning book compels the reader to a new view of the world. A "Planet of Slums" is pretty scary from a moral point of view. What kind of creatures are we to allow such an enormous number of our kind to live out their lives in squalor and poverty? What does this say for the soul of humanity?

From a national security point of view, of course we are not directly threatened, at least not yet. The percent of urbanites in our cities that are slum dwellers, according to a table on page 24 is 5.8 for a total of a "mere" 12.8 million people. Compare that to China's 37.8% (193.8 million) and India's 55.5% (158.4 million) and we are in relatively good shape. The worst country is Ethiopia with 99.4% of the city population living in slums, followed by the Sudan (85.7%) and Bangladesh (84.7%). I did a quick count of the number of people living in slums in the 20 countries listed on the table and it added up to maybe 700 million. Should we worry?

Davis reveals that the Pentagon and think tank thinkers are worried since the cost of dealing with disruptive mobs, slum-bred terrorists, criminal gangs, etc. not only will be high but will require new tactics and strategies. In a sense, some of the problems we are having in Baghdad are the result of our inability to deal with the people of the great slum of Sadr City. I say this somewhat tongue in cheek since of course our "problem" in Iraq goes well beyond slum dissidents.

On the other hand, we might ask, whose fault is it that so many people in the world are locked into such squalid conditions? Certainly you and I had nothing to do with it. Well, that is NOT Davis's point of view. He sees globalization and the policies of governments (especially rich Western governments) and NGOs (especially the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund) as the leading cause of slum proliferation and growth. He writes, "night after night, hornetlike helicopter gunships stalk enigmatic enemies in the narrow streets of the slum districts, pouring hellfire into shanties or fleeing cars. Every morning the slums reply with suicide bombers and eloquent explosions. If the empire can deploy Orwellian technologies of repression, its outcasts have the gods of chaos on their side." (p. 206)

This vision, which ends the book, comes from the Epilogue, "Down Vietnam Street." "Vietnam Street" is what the "unemployed teenage fighters of the 'Mahdi Army' in Baghdad's Sadr City...taunt American occupiers with," the implication being that the same failure we experienced in Vietnam is what awaits us in Iraq. (p. 205)

Could this be America a couple of generations down the road? The massive growth of slums in our inner cities in my lifetime as been staggering, even though it is not much compared to places like Mexico City, Mumbai, Cairo, Shanghai, etc. One of the differences between the typical American slum and that of many cities throughout the world is that American slums are of the inner city variety while the others are mostly "peripheral slums." Peripheral slums are worse at least in one sense: the poor not only live in filth without basic services, but they have to commute long distances to their jobs. This is something of an irony since the growth of slums is usually equated with their close proximity to low paying jobs.

Davis gives the official UN definition of a slum as a place "characterized by overcrowding, poor or informal housing, inadequate access to safe water and sanitation, and insecurity of tenure." (pp. 22-23) Clearly from a demographic viewpoint slums are occupied by poor people and poor people have little power, and that is one of the reasons they stay poor. Davis writes as someone who is on the side of the poor and an advocate for doing something about the eternal phenomenon expressed as "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer."

The people in the slums, as Davis points out, represent surplus labor or even--to use his terminology--superfluous labor. They are the dregs of humanity, caught in a downward spiraling situation in which lack of education, lack of nutrition, high instance of disease and mortality, low wages, bare subsistence, etc. guarantee that they and their children will stay in the same situation. The odds against a leap from the depths of poverty to a middle class existence are greater than ever.

At least that is the message I got from reading this sobering book. By the way, this is the sort of book that is a bit difficult to read because it is so jammed full of facts, figures and jargon terminology. Additionally Davis uses a lot of foreign words that he doesn't define (as though to show the reader that he's been there with the natives), although many of them are self-explanatory. I like the native terminology however and the use of the local names of slums within the larger city.

The overarching question that I was left with was, what does this incredible proliferation of poverty mean for the human race as a whole? What does it say about us? How does it bode for the future? Are we looking at not a perpetual war between nation states (as Orwell had it), but at a perpetual war between the haves and the have nots? It used to be the case that when things got really bad or just incredibly decadent, a revolution or an invasion from without would change things. Now it would appear that the difference between those at the bottom of the economic pyramid and those in the middle and upper classes will only widen. With the exponential explosion in technology that gap may become so great that the haves may someday regard the have nots as member of a different species.

Relentless, nihilistic, compelling, 17 Sep 2006
Mike Davis turns his sights away from Los Angeles and towards the phenomenon of global slums, and starts shooting away with his trademark machine gun prose style, a rat-a-tat-tat staccato of globalized urban poverty, misery, and exploitation, backed up with plenty of reading and research, but no first hand experience.

Davis' doomsaying Marxist critique of Structural Adjustment Programs, government housing reforms and micro-economic self-help is relentless, but ultimately nihilistic - nothing works, the population of an urban poor underclass is growing, and things are getting worse. There are no solutions offered in the book, not even glimpses into possibilities, small scale case studies or broad brush strokes to start a debate. It's powerful stuff, but it must be hard being Mike Davis.

Really interesting book, 07 Oct 2008
This book is brilliant! It uses maps of the world to display data by distorting the physical size of countries according to the relevant data - the result is a very visual feel for the data - much more powerful than figures or words could be. Every page has a global map displaying a different set of data and the range of data is huge, spanning from spread of diseases to energy use, from prevalence of national disasters to effectiveness of legal systems.

The book is pretty large and an ideal coffee table read. You don't need to be particularly analytical to get a lot from it - just need to be interested in the world. A fantastic new way of looking at the world.

Thought provoking and a great read, 25 Aug 2008
I heard about guerrilla gardening on the radio. I thought it was a modern urban trend. It was fascinating to discover it's history. There are page turning stories of many different individuals across the world. As well as gardening the book touches on a surprisingly wide range of relevant issues for society today, from the shortage of space in cities, developing world food security and even adbusting!


Above all I enjoyed reading it. It made me laugh and feel inspired.

Brilliant whether you like to garden or not, 29 May 2008
The thing I loved about this book was that you don't need to be a keen gardener to love or be interested in what it's all about.

An interest in making our surroundings a better place is all you need. Which helps give the lover of urban landscapes by providing an in-road into making their environment a better place - and appreciating how that has been achieved by others.

It's as inspirational a book as the reader wants it to be.

Great fun!, 12 May 2008
This book is a great read and shows how anyone can become a guerrilla gardener, with lot of easy tips and ideas. The pictures are really lovely. Very inspiring!

On guerilla's AND gardening, 10 May 2008
Richard Reynolds has produced a delightful handbook for and about committed gardeners around the world who `fight filth with flowers' to transform `orphaned' public land into community space. It is a beautifully conceived book and it is no surprise it took two years to draw together the wonderfully humorous yet deadly serious stories of those around the world who have taken up the mantle of guerrilla gardening. The book derives tools for this trade from more easily recognisable guerrillas such as Che Guevara and Mao. Though not condoning any particular politics, Reynolds uses the examples of history to tease out what tools have been used and are open to those guerrilla gardeners fighting their own `little wars' against misused land around the world. The book is spiced up with stories of the many guerrilla gardeners he has encountered and are engaging, humorous, fascinating and inspiring. They are not big stories in themselves, but rather it is the collective efforts of the many that creates the dramatic effect, and ultimately political movement, that is now termed guerrilla gardening.

The book is more than just a documentation of what has already gone on, it is in itself a productive force that will no doubt alter the landscape by its publication. It is a book that will help to legitimate the democratisation of land at a much more local and individual scale than is true of most of the famous political `guerrillas' he draws insight from.

This is much more than a book about guerrilla gardening and will be of interest to geographers, political scientists, and students of planning and landscape. It is a treatise on the use and misuse of space that challenges the reader to think about how spaces are conceived, used, abused and also how the legal ownership and use of that land is not as fixed as it may appear. Gardening in this book is more than planting; it is a tool for the democratisation of space.


Inspiring.., 09 May 2008
I love this book.. It is a great read, inspiring stories of Richards experiences, as well as the experiences of the many other Guerrilla Gardeners there are around the world. I have also found the tips very interesting, as although this is something that I have taken part in, the concept of doing it on my own has always been a bit daunting. Hopefully with the help of this book I shall be out on my own soon!

This book is a wonderful insight into what drives people to undertake Guerilla gardening, the history of the concept and what is possible.

slum mega cities, 11 Jun 2007
The scale and velocity of world population increase over the last fifty years has been unprecedented in human history. Urbanisation, with over a billion people living in cities has become the key signature of this growth, with the urban population for the first time greater than in the country. These facts are startling, if common knowledge, however they are not much examined in the mainstream. Mike Davis's book looks at this global phenomenon in detail, and shows clearly how the city has been turned into slums, and how poverty has been urbanised.

Slum mega cities have strange geographies, and densities that defy analysis and seeming logic. Here Peri urbanism where city and country are virtually indivisible is covered as is the continual subdivision of wealth and free space by mega slums that turn earthquake prone mountainsides into dense housing. These city slums are where the worlds problems will start, and where they must be solved.

But if you are looking for light reading this is not it, and although global capitalism is firmly blamed for this there are no fixes suggested in this book either. This story though is worth telling and the book is a powerfully argued proof that much of the world is suffering under impossible odds.

Thorough Description with No Prescription, 14 Feb 2007
Marxist cultural critic Davis's latest book tackles the global problem of the slums (he uses the U.N. definition: "characterized by overcrowding, poor or informal housing, inadequate access to safe water and sanitation, and insecurity of tenure."), which are exploding at a geometric rate across the world. Alas, at the end of this relatively brief work, we have learned of the scale and scope of the problem in mind-numbing detail, and we have learned the source of the problem (at least according to Davis), but that's about it. Alas, anyone interested in a book with this title probably already has a sense of both, and what is utterly lacking in Davis's analysis is any way forward.

Granted, if there were obvious solutions, we'd probably know about those as well -- the real problem is that Davis really, really likes to have it both ways. In other words, there since there is no policy or proposed solution he likes, he attacks all options, even opposite ones, with equal venom, leading one to wonder what the point is. For example: at one point he says that new "periurban" slums lack the community spirit of the inner-city slums people are being relocated from, but then elsewhere he says that this positive community spirit is all a myth and that all slums are Darwinian proving grounds. Governments that don't build public housing come under attack, and those that do also come under attack for it being substandard. Slums are depicted as terrible, and slum clearances are depicted as equally terrible. Sure, none of this is "good", in any sense of the word, but Davis doesn't have anything else to offer either. Most egregious to me is his flailing around on property rights: if the poor don't have titles to their land then they're subject to exploitation, if they do have title they'll just sell it and be exploited. Meanwhile he characterizes Hernando de Soto's interesting vision of how property rights might be used to lift people out of poverty (as detailed in The Mystery of Capital) as a "cargo cult" and "magic wand", which is a disappointingly cynical oversimplification of a rather nuanced and wide-ranging proposal (which is grounded in actual fieldwork instead of the library).

This book is certainly valuable for its description of the problem of slums -- it uses about 700 footnotes (yes, really!) citing an impressive array of books, articles, newsletters, and various published and unpublished reports by the World Bank, UN, governments, and NGOs to draw connections between slums from around the world. Davis paints a picture of slums that are created not by those coming to the city to earn more money, but by the involuntary relocation of those in the way of construction that benefits the wealthy, or the loss of farming at the hands of multinational agribusiness, or civil war, or drought. Of course, all the usual suspects come in for indictment as well (the UN, World Bank, IMF neoliberal capitalism), along with NGOs, the leaders of the third world, the elite of the third world, the middle-class of the third world, and at some points, the poor of the third world. In this book, everyone is guilty (and maybe everybody is, certainly the World Bank and IMF have a terrible track record and are indeed very culpable), but how does this view help anyone? Even worse, nothing we're trying works according to Davis: not micro-credit, not outside NGO help, not militant activism by squatters, and not even the self-help entrepreneurship of the poor.

Some have inferred that Davis is inherently suggesting a reversal of the policies that brought this miserable state to pass, and that massive public spending might be the answer. The problem Davis points out himself is that many of these policies are interwoven with global capitalism, so it's not a simple matter of passing some new resolution. Nor does Davis care for massive public spending (at least not in China or India), and since he points out over and over that third-world elites will simply steal their nation's wealth, the notion that some form of worldwide nationalization of natural resources doesn't seem particularly promising either. Given all this, one has to presume that Davis's unarticulated "solution" is that one day the revolution's gonna come and tear this mother (ie. global capitalism) down. Or maybe that's not what he thinks... we don't know, because Davis never tells us.

Provocative and vital, 06 Dec 2006
This stunning book compels the reader to a new view of the world. A "Planet of Slums" is pretty scary from a moral point of view. What kind of creatures are we to allow such an enormous number of our kind to live out their lives in squalor and poverty? What does this say for the soul of humanity?

From a national security point of view, of course we are not directly threatened, at least not yet. The percent of urbanites in our cities that are slum dwellers, according to a table on page 24 is 5.8 for a total of a "mere" 12.8 million people. Compare that to China's 37.8% (193.8 million) and India's 55.5% (158.4 million) and we are in relatively good shape. The worst country is Ethiopia with 99.4% of the city population living in slums, followed by the Sudan (85.7%) and Bangladesh (84.7%). I did a quick count of the number of people living in slums in the 20 countries listed on the table and it added up to maybe 700 million. Should we worry?

Davis reveals that the Pentagon and think tank thinkers are worried since the cost of dealing with disruptive mobs, slum-bred terrorists, criminal gangs, etc. not only will be high but will require new tactics and strategies. In a sense, some of the problems we are having in Baghdad are the result of our inability to deal with the people of the great slum of Sadr City. I say this somewhat tongue in cheek since of course our "problem" in Iraq goes well beyond slum dissidents.

On the other hand, we might ask, whose fault is it that so many people in the world are locked into such squalid conditions? Certainly you and I had nothing to do with it. Well, that is NOT Davis's point of view. He sees globalization and the policies of governments (especially rich Western governments) and NGOs (especially the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund) as the leading cause of slum proliferation and growth. He writes, "night after night, hornetlike helicopter gunships stalk enigmatic enemies in the narrow streets of the slum districts, pouring hellfire into shanties or fleeing cars. Every morning the slums reply with suicide bombers and eloquent explosions. If the empire can deploy Orwellian technologies of repression, its outcasts have the gods of chaos on their side." (p. 206)

This vision, which ends the book, comes from the Epilogue, "Down Vietnam Street." "Vietnam Street" is what the "unemployed teenage fighters of the 'Mahdi Army' in Baghdad's Sadr City...taunt American occupiers with," the implication being that the same failure we experienced in Vietnam is what awaits us in Iraq. (p. 205)

Could this be America a couple of generations down the road? The massive growth of slums in our inner cities in my lifetime as been staggering, even though it is not much compared to places like Mexico City, Mumbai, Cairo, Shanghai, etc. One of the differences between the typical American slum and that of many cities throughout the world is that American slums are of the inner city variety while the others are mostly "peripheral slums." Peripheral slums are worse at least in one sense: the poor not only live in filth without basic services, but they have to commute long distances to their jobs. This is something of an irony since the growth of slums is usually equated with their close proximity to low paying jobs.

Davis gives the official UN definition of a slum as a place "characterized by overcrowding, poor or informal housing, inadequate access to safe water and sanitation, and insecurity of tenure." (pp. 22-23) Clearly from a demographic viewpoint slums are occupied by poor people and poor people have little power, and that is one of the reasons they stay poor. Davis writes as someone who is on the side of the poor and an advocate for doing something about the eternal phenomenon expressed as "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer."

The people in the slums, as Davis points out, represent surplus labor or even--to use his terminology--superfluous labor. They are the dregs of humanity, caught in a downward spiraling situation in which lack of education, lack of nutrition, high instance of disease and mortality, low wages, bare subsistence, etc. guarantee that they and their children will stay in the same situation. The odds against a leap from the depths of poverty to a middle class existence are greater than ever.

At least that is the message I got from reading this sobering book. By the way, this is the sort of book that is a bit difficult to read because it is so jammed full of facts, figures and jargon terminology. Additionally Davis uses a lot of foreign words that he doesn't define (as though to show the reader that he's been there with the natives), although many of them are self-explanatory. I like the native terminology however and the use of the local names of slums within the larger city.

The overarching question that I was left with was, what does this incredible proliferation of poverty mean for the human race as a whole? What does it say about us? How does it bode for the future? Are we looking at not a perpetual war between nation states (as Orwell had it), but at a perpetual war between the haves and the have nots? It used to be the case that when things got really bad or just incredibly decadent, a revolution or an invasion from without would change things. Now it would appear that the difference between those at the bottom of the economic pyramid and those in the middle and upper classes will only widen. With the exponential explosion in technology that gap may become so great that the haves may someday regard the have nots as member of a different species.

Relentless, nihilistic, compelling, 17 Sep 2006
Mike Davis turns his sights away from Los Angeles and towards the phenomenon of global slums, and starts shooting away with his trademark machine gun prose style, a rat-a-tat-tat staccato of globalized urban poverty, misery, and exploitation, backed up with plenty of reading and research, but no first hand experience.

Davis' doomsaying Marxist critique of Structural Adjustment Programs, government housing reforms and micro-economic self-help is relentless, but ultimately nihilistic - nothing works, the population of an urban poor underclass is growing, and things are getting worse. There are no solutions offered in the book, not even glimpses into possibilities, small scale case studies or broad brush strokes to start a debate. It's powerful stuff, but it must be hard being Mike Davis.

Excellent introductory text to key comtemporary debates, 25 May 2002
This book provides undergraduates, particularly first year students in human geography a comprehensive grounding into the key debates within human geography. It is also a good text for any students wishing to re-familiarising with a variety of geographical issues. This book is easy to understand, but never simplistic. It also excellent case study material and references for further reading. A near essential book for any human geographers.

wish it was around when I started studying geography, 25 Oct 2001
This book gives the reader everything they need to start on a subject. It summarises as it goes along and provides recommendations for further reading on each topic. A brilliant all round introduction for human geography students.

A contemporary description of human geography, 02 Mar 2001
This book combines the expert views and knowledge to produce a book showing the varied spectrum of human geography. Using descriptive terminology, and detailed case studies, it relates to human behaviour and other aspects in a geographical spatial context.

It covers every aspect of human geography, from the historial development of hegamonic nations, to social-economic geography, to contemporary issues such as equity and sustainability. This book is a helpful undergraduate student textbook, precisely focusing on the subject. This book is technical and may not be be everyday readable material.

Really interesting book, 07 Oct 2008
This book is brilliant! It uses maps of the world to display data by distorting the physical size of countries according to the relevant data - the result is a very visual feel for the data - much more powerful than figures or words could be. Every page has a global map displaying a different set of data and the range of data is huge, spanning from spread of diseases to energy use, from prevalence of national disasters to effectiveness of legal systems.

The book is pretty large and an ideal coffee table read. You don't need to be particularly analytical to get a lot from it - just need to be interested in the world. A fantastic new way of looking at the world.

Thought provoking and a great read, 25 Aug 2008
I heard about guerrilla gardening on the radio. I thought it was a modern urban trend. It was fascinating to discover it's history. There are page turning stories of many different individuals across the world. As well as gardening the book touches on a surprisingly wide range of relevant issues for society today, from the shortage of space in cities, developing world food security and even adbusting!


Above all I enjoyed reading it. It made me laugh and feel inspired.

Brilliant whether you like to garden or not, 29 May 2008
The thing I loved about this book was that you don't need to be a keen gardener to love or be interested in what it's all about.

An interest in making our surroundings a better place is all you need. Which helps give the lover of urban landscapes by providing an in-road into making their environment a better place - and appreciating how that has been achieved by others.

It's as inspirational a book as the reader wants it to be.

Great fun!, 12 May 2008
This book is a great read and shows how anyone can become a guerrilla gardener, with lot of easy tips and ideas. The pictures are really lovely. Very inspiring!

On guerilla's AND gardening, 10 May 2008
Richard Reynolds has produced a delightful handbook for and about committed gardeners around the world who `fight filth with flowers' to transform `orphaned' public land into community space. It is a beautifully conceived book and it is no surprise it took two years to draw together the wonderfully humorous yet deadly serious stories of those around the world who have taken up the mantle of guerrilla gardening. The book derives tools for this trade from more easily recognisable guerrillas such as Che Guevara and Mao. Though not condoning any particular politics, Reynolds uses the examples of history to tease out what tools have been used and are open to those guerrilla gardeners fighting their own `little wars' against misused land around the world. The book is spiced up with stories of the many guerrilla gardeners he has encountered and are engaging, humorous, fascinating and inspiring. They are not big stories in themselves, but rather it is the collective efforts of the many that creates the dramatic effect, and ultimately political movement, that is now termed guerrilla gardening.

The book is more than just a documentation of what has already gone on, it is in itself a productive force that will no doubt alter the landscape by its publication. It is a book that will help to legitimate the democratisation of land at a much more local and individual scale than is true of most of the famous political `guerrillas' he draws insight from.

This is much more than a book about guerrilla gardening and will be of interest to geographers, political scientists, and students of planning and landscape. It is a treatise on the use and misuse of space that challenges the reader to think about how spaces are conceived, used, abused and also how the legal ownership and use of that land is not as fixed as it may appear. Gardening in this book is more than planting; it is a tool for the democratisation of space.


Inspiring.., 09 May 2008
I love this book.. It is a great read, inspiring stories of Richards experiences, as well as the experiences of the many other Guerrilla Gardeners there are around the world. I have also found the tips very interesting, as although this is something that I have taken part in, the concept of doing it on my own has always been a bit daunting. Hopefully with the help of this book I shall be out on my own soon!

This book is a wonderful insight into what drives people to undertake Guerilla gardening, the history of the concept and what is possible.

slum mega cities, 11 Jun 2007
The scale and velocity of world population increase over the last fifty years has been unprecedented in human history. Urbanisation, with over a billion people living in cities has become the key signature of this growth, with the urban population for the first time greater than in the country. These facts are startling, if common knowledge, however they are not much examined in the mainstream. Mike Davis's book looks at this global phenomenon in detail, and shows clearly how the city has been turned into slums, and how poverty has been urbanised.

Slum mega cities have strange geographies, and densities that defy analysis and seeming logic. Here Peri urbanism where city and country are virtually indivisible is covered as is the continual subdivision of wealth and free space by mega slums that turn earthquake prone mountainsides into dense housing. These city slums are where the worlds problems will start, and where they must be solved.

But if you are looking for light reading this is not it, and although global capitalism is firmly blamed for this there are no fixes suggested in this book either. This story though is worth telling and the book is a powerfully argued proof that much of the world is suffering under impossible odds.

Thorough Description with No Prescription, 14 Feb 2007
Marxist cultural critic Davis's latest book tackles the global problem of the slums (he uses the U.N. definition: "characterized by overcrowding, poor or informal housing, inadequate access to safe water and sanitation, and insecurity of tenure."), which are exploding at a geometric rate across the world. Alas, at the end of this relatively brief work, we have learned of the scale and scope of the problem in mind-numbing detail, and we have learned the source of the problem (at least according to Davis), but that's about it. Alas, anyone interested in a book with this title probably already has a sense of both, and what is utterly lacking in Davis's analysis is any way forward.

Granted, if there were obvious solutions, we'd probably know about those as well -- the real problem is that Davis really, really likes to have it both ways. In other words, there since there is no policy or proposed solution he likes, he attacks all options, even opposite ones, with equal venom, leading one to wonder what the point is. For example: at one point he says that new "periurban" slums lack the community spirit of the inner-city slums people are being relocated from, but then elsewhere he says that this positive community spirit is all a myth and that all slums are Darwinian proving grounds. Governments that don't build public housing come under attack, and those that do also come under attack for it being substandard. Slums are depicted as terrible, and slum clearances are depicted as equally terrible. Sure, none of this is "good", in any sense of the word, but Davis doesn't have anything else to offer either. Most egregious to me is his flailing around on property rights: if the poor don't have titles to their land then they're subject to exploitation, if they do have title they'll just sell it and be exploited. Meanwhile he characterizes Hernando de Soto's interesting vision of how property rights might be used to lift people out of poverty (as detailed in The Mystery of Capital) as a "cargo cult" and "magic wand", which is a disappointingly cynical oversimplification of a rather nuanced and wide-ranging proposal (which is grounded in actual fieldwork instead of the library).

This book is certainly valuable for its description of the problem of slums -- it uses about 700 footnotes (yes, really!) citing an impressive array of books, articles, newsletters, and various published and unpublished reports by the World Bank, UN, governments, and NGOs to draw connections between slums from around the world. Davis paints a picture of slums that are created not by those coming to the city to earn more money, but by the involuntary relocation of those in the way of construction that benefits the wealthy, or the loss of farming at the hands of multinational agribusiness, or civil war, or drought. Of course, all the usual suspects come in for indictment as well (the UN, World Bank, IMF neoliberal capitalism), along with NGOs, the leaders of the third world, the elite of the third world, the middle-class of the third world, and at some points, the poor of the third world. In this book, everyone is guilty (and maybe everybody is, certainly the World Bank and IMF have a terrible track record and are indeed very culpable), but how does this view help anyone? Even worse, nothing we're trying works according to Davis: not micro-credit, not outside NGO help, not militant activism by squatters, and not even the self-help entrepreneurship of the poor.

Some have inferred that Davis is inherently suggesting a reversal of the policies that brought this miserable state to pass, and that massive public spending might be the answer. The problem Davis points out himself is that many of these policies are interwoven with global capitalism, so it's not a simple matter of passing some new resolution. Nor does Davis care for massive public spending (at least not in China or India), and since he points out over and over that third-world elites will simply steal their nation's wealth, the notion that some form of worldwide nationalization of natural resources doesn't seem particularly promising either. Given all this, one has to presume that Davis's unarticulated "solution" is that one day the revolution's gonna come and tear this mother (ie. global capitalism) down. Or maybe that's not what he thinks... we don't know, because Davis never tells us.

Provocative and vital, 06 Dec 2006
This stunning book compels the reader to a new view of the world. A "Planet of Slums" is pretty scary from a moral point of view. What kind of creatures are we to allow such an enormous number of our kind to live out their lives in squalor and poverty? What does this say for the soul of humanity?

From a national security point of view, of course we are not directly threatened, at least not yet. The percent of urbanites in our cities that are slum dwellers, according to a table on page 24 is 5.8 for a total of a "mere" 12.8 million people. Compare that to China's 37.8% (193.8 million) and India's 55.5% (158.4 million) and we are in relatively good shape. The worst country is Ethiopia with 99.4% of the city population living in slums, followed by the Sudan (85.7%) and Bangladesh (84.7%). I did a quick count of the number of people living in slums in the 20 countries listed on the table and it added up to maybe 700 million. Should we worry?

Davis reveals that the Pentagon and think tank thinkers are worried since the cost of dealing with disruptive mobs, slum-bred terrorists, criminal gangs, etc. not only will be high but will require new tactics and strategies. In a sense, some of the problems we are having in Baghdad are the result of our inability to deal with the people of the great slum of Sadr City. I say this somewhat tongue in cheek since of course our "problem" in Iraq goes well beyond slum dissidents.

On the other hand, we might ask, whose fault is it that so many people in the world are locked into such squalid conditions? Certainly you and I had nothing to do with it. Well, that is NOT Davis's point of view. He sees globalization and the policies of governments (especially rich Western governments) and NGOs (especially the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund) as the leading cause of slum proliferation and growth. He writes, "night after night, hornetlike helicopter gunships stalk enigmatic enemies in the narrow streets of the slum districts, pouring hellfire into shanties or fleeing cars. Every morning the slums reply with suicide bombers and eloquent explosions. If the empire can deploy Orwellian technologies of repression, its outcasts have the gods of chaos on their side." (p. 206)

This vision, which ends the book, comes from the Epilogue, "Down Vietnam Street." "Vietnam Street" is what the "unemployed teenage fighters of the 'Mahdi Army' in Baghdad's Sadr City...taunt American occupiers with," the implication being that the same failure we experienced in Vietnam is what awaits us in Iraq. (p. 205)

Could this be America a couple of generations down the road? The massive growth of slums in our inner cities in my lifetime as been staggering, even though it is not much compared to places like Mexico City, Mumbai, Cairo, Shanghai, etc. One of the differences between the typical American slum and that of many cities throughout the world is that American slums are of the inner city variety while the others are mostly "peripheral slums." Peripheral slums are worse at least in one sense: the poor not only live in filth without basic services, but they have to commute long distances to their jobs. This is something of an irony since the growth of slums is usually equated with their close proximity to low paying jobs.

Davis gives the official UN definition of a slum as a place "characterized by overcrowding, poor or informal housing, inadequate access to safe water and sanitation, and insecurity of tenure." (pp. 22-23) Clearly from a demographic viewpoint slums are occupied by poor people and poor people have little power, and that is one of the reasons they stay poor. Davis writes as someone who is on the side of the poor and an advocate for doing something about the eternal phenomenon expressed as "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer."

The people in the slums, as Davis points out, represent surplus labor or even--to use his terminology--superfluous labor. They are the dregs of humanity, caught in a downward spiraling situation in which lack of education, lack of nutrition, high instance of disease and mortality, low wages, bare subsistence, etc. guarantee that they and their children will stay in the same situation. The odds against a leap from the depths of poverty to a middle class existence are greater than ever.

At least that is the message I got from reading this sobering book. By the way, this is the sort of book that is a bit difficult to read because it is so jammed full of facts, figures and jargon terminology. Additionally Davis uses a lot of foreign words that he doesn't define (as though to show the reader that he's been there with the natives), although many of them are self-explanatory. I like the native terminology however and the use of the local names of slums within the larger city.

The overarching question that I was left with was, what does this incredible proliferation of poverty mean for the human race as a whole? What does it say about us? How does it bode for the future? Are we looking at not a perpetual war between nation states (as Orwell had it), but at a perpetual war between the haves and the have nots? It used to be the case that when things got really bad or just incredibly decadent, a revolution or an invasion from without would change things. Now it would appear that the difference between those at the bottom of the economic pyramid and those in the middle and upper classes will only widen. With the exponential explosion in technology that gap may become so great that the haves may someday regard the have nots as member of a different species.

Relentless, nihilistic, compelling, 17 Sep 2006
Mike Davis turns his sights away from Los Angeles and towards the phenomenon of global slums, and starts shooting away with his trademark machine gun prose style, a rat-a-tat-tat staccato of globalized urban poverty, misery, and exploitation, backed up with plenty of reading and research, but no first hand experience.

Davis' doomsaying Marxist critique of Structural Adjustment Programs, government housing reforms and micro-economic self-help is relentless, but ultimately nihilistic - nothing works, the population of an urban poor underclass is growing, and things are getting worse. There are no solutions offered in the book, not even glimpses into possibilities, small scale case studies or broad brush strokes to start a debate. It's powerful stuff, but it must be hard being Mike Davis.

Excellent introductory text to key comtemporary debates, 25 May 2002
This book provides undergraduates, particularly first year students in human geography a comprehensive grounding into the key debates within human geography. It is also a good text for any students wishing to re-familiarising with a variety of geographical issues. This book is easy to understand, but never simplistic. It also excellent case study material and references for further reading. A near essential book for any human geographers.

wish it was around when I started studying geography, 25 Oct 2001
This book gives the reader everything they need to start on a subject. It summarises as it goes along and provides recommendations for further reading on each topic. A brilliant all round introduction for human geography students.

A contemporary description of human geography, 02 Mar 2001
This book combines the expert views and knowledge to produce a book showing the varied spectrum of human geography. Using descriptive terminology, and detailed case studies, it relates to human behaviour and other aspects in a geographical spatial context.

It covers every aspect of human geography, from the historial development of hegamonic nations, to social-economic geography, to contemporary issues such as equity and sustainability. This book is a helpful undergraduate student textbook, precisely focusing on the subject. This book is technical and may not be be everyday readable material.

Useful for A Level Geography, but not sufficient, 27 Nov 2003
We use this text book at school and it is very good for specific case studies. However, there are not always relevant ones and because it is not course specific, you will probably require additional information from other books. Excellent layout and colour pictures help give good background information for new topics. Contains helpful glossaries throughout text which are great for more complicated areas. Informative and interesting, but unfortunately not sufficient for my A Level Geography syllabus (AQA).

Helpful Geography Book, 22 Nov 2000
This really is good if you are doing AS-Level geography, it contains easy definitions that help you learn and also lots of really interesting graphs and maps. We actually use this book at my college and it really makes life easier when writing essays.

Really interesting book, 07 Oct 2008
This book is brilliant! It uses maps of the world to display data by distorting the physical size of countries according to the relevant data - the result is a very visual feel for the data - much more powerful than figures or words could be. Every page has a global map displaying a different set of data and the range of data is huge, spanning from spread of diseases to energy use, from prevalence of national disasters to effectiveness of legal systems.

The book is pretty large and an ideal coffee table read. You don't need to be particularly analytical to get a lot from it - just need to be interested in the world. A fantastic new way of looking at the world.

Thought provoking and a great read, 25 Aug 2008
I heard about guerrilla gardening on the radio. I thought it was a modern urban trend. It was fascinating to discover it's history. There are page turning stories of many different individuals across the world. As well as gardening the book touches on a surprisingly wide range of relevant issues for society today, from the shortage of space in cities, developing world food security and even adbusting!


Above all I enjoyed reading it. It made me laugh and feel inspired.

Brilliant whether you like to garden or not, 29 May 2008
The thing I loved about this book was that you don't need to be a keen gardener to love or be interested in what it's all about.

An interest in making our surroundings a better place is all you need. Which helps give the lover of urban landscapes by providing an in-road into making their environment a better place - and appreciating how that has been achieved by others.

It's as inspirational a book as the reader wants it to be.

Great fun!, 12 May 2008
This book is a great read and shows how anyone can become a guerrilla gardener, with lot of easy tips and ideas. The pictures are really lovely. Very inspiring!

On guerilla's AND gardening, 10 May 2008
Richard Reynolds has produced a delightful handbook for and about committed gardeners around the world who `fight filth with flowers' to transform `orphaned' public land into community space. It is a beautifully conceived book and it is no surprise it took two years to draw together the wonderfully humorous yet deadly serious stories of those around the world who have taken up the mantle of guerrilla gardening. The book derives tools for this trade from more easily recognisable guerrillas such as Che Guevara and Mao. Though not condoning any particular politics, Reynolds uses the examples of history to tease out what tools have been used and are open to those guerrilla gardeners fighting their own `little wars' against misused land around the world. The book is spiced up with stories of the many guerrilla gardeners he has encountered and are engaging, humorous, fascinating and inspiring. They are not big stories in themselves, but rather it is the collective efforts of the many that creates the dramatic effect, and ultimately political movement, that is now termed guerrilla gardening.

The book is more than just a documentation of what has already gone on, it is in itself a productive force that will no doubt alter the landscape by its publication. It is a book that will help to legitimate the democratisation of land at a much more local and individual scale than is true of most of the famous political `guerrillas' he draws insight from.

This is much more than a book about guerrilla gardening and will be of interest to geographers, political scientists, and students of planning and landscape. It is a treatise on the use and misuse of space that challenges the reader to think about how spaces are conceived, used, abused and also how the legal ownership and use of that land is not as fixed as it may appear. Gardening in this book is more than planting; it is a tool for the democratisation of space.


Inspiring.., 09 May 2008
I love this book.. It is a great read, inspiring stories of Richards experiences, as well as the experiences of the many other Guerrilla Gardeners there are around the world. I have also found the tips very interesting, as although this is something that I have taken part in, the concept of doing it on my own has always been a bit daunting. Hopefully with the help of this book I shall be out on my own soon!

This book is a wonderful insight into what drives people to undertake Guerilla gardening, the history of the concept and what is possible.

slum mega cities, 11 Jun 2007
The scale and velocity of world population increase over the last fifty years has been unprecedented in human history. Urbanisation, with over a billion people living in cities has become the key signature of this growth, with the urban population for the first time greater than in the country. These facts are startling, if common knowledge, however they are not much examined in the mainstream. Mike Davis's book looks at this global phenomenon in detail, and shows clearly how the city has been turned into slums, and how poverty has been urbanised.

Slum mega cities have strange geographies, and densities that defy analysis and seeming logic. Here Peri urbanism where city and country are virtually indivisible is covered as is the continual subdivision of wealth and free space by mega slums that turn earthquake prone mountainsides into dense housing. These city slums are where the worlds problems will start, and where they must be solved.

But if you are looking for light reading this is not it, and although global capitalism is firmly blamed for this there are no fixes suggested in this book either. This story though is worth telling and the book is a powerfully argued proof that much of the world is suffering under impossible odds.

Thorough Description with No Prescription, 14 Feb 2007
Marxist cultural critic Davis's latest book tackles the global problem of the slums (he uses the U.N. definition: "characterized by overcrowding, poor or informal housing, inadequate access to safe water and sanitation, and insecurity of tenure."), which are exploding at a geometric rate across the world. Alas, at the end of this relatively brief work, we have learned of the scale and scope of the problem in mind-numbing detail, and we have learned the source of the problem (at least according to Davis), but that's about it. Alas, anyone interested in a book with this title probably already has a sense of both, and what is utterly lacking in Davis's analysis is any way forward.

Granted, if there were obvious solutions, we'd probably know about those as well -- the real problem is that Davis really, really likes to have it both ways. In other words, there since there is no policy or proposed solution he likes, he attacks all options, even opposite ones, with equal venom, leading one to wonder what the point is. For example: at one point he says that new "periurban" slums lack the community spirit of the inner-city slums people are being relocated from, but then elsewhere he says that this positive community spirit is all a myth and that all slums are Darwinian proving grounds. Governments that don't build public housing come under attack, and those that do also come under attack for it being substandard. Slums are depicted as terrible, and slum clearances are depicted as equally terrible. Sure, none of this is "good", in any sense of the word, but Davis doesn't have anything else to offer either. Most egregious to me is his flailing around on property rights: if the poor don't have titles to their land then they're subject to exploitation, if they do have title they'll just sell it and be exploited. Meanwhile he characterizes Hernando de Soto's interesting vision of how property rights might be used to lift people out of poverty (as detailed in The Mystery of Capital) as a "cargo cult" and "magic wand", which is a disappointingly cynical oversimplification of a rather nuanced and wide-ranging proposal (which is grounded in actual fieldwork instead of the library).

This book is certainly valuable for its description of the problem of slums -- it uses about 700 footnotes (yes, really!) citing an impressive array of books, articles, newsletters, and various published and unpublished reports by the World Bank, UN, governments, and NGOs to draw connections between slums from around the world. Davis paints a picture of slums that are created not by those coming to the city to earn more money, but by the involuntary relocation of those in the way of construction that benefits the wealthy, or the loss of farming at the hands of multinational agribusiness, or civil war, or drought. Of course, all the usual suspects come in for indictment as well (the UN, World Bank, IMF neoliberal capitalism), along with NGOs, the leaders of the third world, the elite of the third world, the middle-class of the third world, and at some points, the poor of the third world. In this book, everyone is guilty (and maybe everybody is, certainly the World Bank and IMF have a terrible track record and are indeed very culpable), but how does this view help anyone? Even worse, nothing we're trying works according to Davis: not micro-credit, not outside NGO help, not militant activism by squatters, and not even the self-help entrepreneurship of the poor.

Some have inferred that Davis is inherently suggesting a reversal of the policies that brought this miserable state to pass, and that massive public spending might be the answer. The problem Davis points out himself is that many of these policies are interwoven with global capitalism, so it's not a simple matter of passing some new resolution. Nor does Davis care for massive public spending (at least not in China or India), and since he points out over and over that third-world elites will simply steal their nation's wealth, the notion that some form of worldwide nationalization of natural resources doesn't seem particularly promising either. Given all this, one has to presume that Davis's unarticulated "solution" is that one day the revolution's gonna come and tear this mother (ie. global capitalism) down. Or maybe that's not what he thinks... we don't know, because Davis never tells us.

Provocative and vital, 06 Dec 2006
This stunning book compels the reader to a new view of the world. A "Planet of Slums" is pretty scary from a moral point of view. What kind of creatures are we to allow such an enormous number of our kind to live out their lives in squalor and poverty? What does this say for the soul of humanity?

From a national security point of view, of course we are not directly threatened, at least not yet. The percent of urbanites in our cities that are slum dwellers, according to a table on page 24 is 5.8 for a total of a "mere" 12.8 million people. Compare that to China's 37.8% (193.8 million) and India's 55.5% (158.4 million) and we are in relatively good shape. The worst country is Ethiopia with 99.4% of the city population living in slums, followed by the Sudan (85.7%) and Bangladesh (84.7%). I did a quick count of the number of people living in slums in the 20 countries listed on the table and it added up to maybe 700 million. Should we worry?

Davis reveals that the Pentagon and think tank thinkers are worried since the cost of dealing with disruptive mobs, slum-bred terrorists, criminal gangs, etc. not only will be high but will require new tactics and strategies. In a sense, some of the problems we are having in Baghdad are the result of our inability to deal with the people of the great slum of Sadr City. I say this somewhat tongue in cheek since of course our "problem" in Iraq goes well beyond slum dissidents.

On the other hand, we might ask, whose fault is it that so many people in the world are locked into such squalid conditions? Certainly you and I had nothing to do with it. Well, that is NOT Davis's point of view. He sees globalization and the policies of governments (especially rich Western governments) and NGOs (especially the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund) as the leading cause of slum proliferation and growth. He writes, "night after night, hornetlike helicopter gunships stalk enigmatic enemies in the narrow streets of the slum districts, pouring hellfire into shanties or fleeing cars. Every morning the slums reply with suicide bombers and eloquent explosions. If the empire can deploy Orwellian technologies of repression, its outcasts have the gods of chaos on their side." (p. 206)

This vision, which ends the book, comes from the Epilogue, "Down Vietnam Street." "Vietnam Street" is what the "unemployed teenage fighters of the 'Mahdi Army' in Baghdad's Sadr City...taunt American occupiers with," the implication being that the same failure we experienced in Vietnam is what awaits us in Iraq. (p. 205)

Could this be America a couple of generations down the road? The massive growth of slums in our inner cities in my lifetime as been staggering, even though it is not much compared to places like Mexico City, Mumbai, Cairo, Shanghai, etc. One of the differences between the typical American slum and that of many cities throughout the world is that American slums are of the inner city variety while the others are mostly "peripheral slums." Peripheral slums are worse at least in one sense: the poor not only live in filth without basic services, but they have to commute long distances to their jobs. This is something of an irony since the growth of slums is usually equated with their close proximity to low paying jobs.

Davis gives the official UN definition of a slum as a place "characterized by overcrowding, poor or informal housing, inadequate access