The classic,
brilliant, best-selling account of the rise of the world’s slums,
where, according to the United Nations, one billion people now live
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.