Planet of Slums

Mike Davis (1946-2022) was a writer, political activist, urban theorist, and historian. He is best known for his investigations of power and class in works such as City of Quartz, Late Victorian Holocausts, and Planet of Slums. His last two non-fiction books are Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties, co-authored by Jon Wiener, and The Monster Enters: COVID-19, Avian Flu, and the Plagues of Capitalism. He was the recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and the Lannan Literary Award.

"A profound enquiry into an urgent subject ... a brilliant book."
-Arundhati Roy

"With cool indignation, Davis argues that the exponential growth of slums is no accident but the result of a perfect storm of corrupt leadership, institutional failure, and IMF-imposed programs leading to a massive transfer of wealth from rich to poor ... Like the work of Jacob Riis, Ida Tarbell, and Lincoln Steffens over a century ago, this searing indictment makes the shame of our cities urgently clear."
-Michael Sorkin

"The Raymond Chandler of urban geography ... In Planet of Slums, Davis's genre is the global disaster movie, as directed by the chroniclers of Victorian poverty: Engels, Booth and Dickens. The scale of modern squalor revealed in his brilliant survey dwarfs its predecessors ... a coruscating tragedy."
-Independent

"The astonishing facts hit like anvil blows ... Davis has produced a heartbreaking book that hammers the reader a little further into the ground with the blow of each new and shocking statistic."
-Financial Times

"A terrifying, magisterial work."
-Harper's

"There can be no doubt about the achievement of Planet of Slums ... it forces us, angrily, to confront the deplorable realities of slum existence and the limitations of slum policies in many developing countries."
-Times (London)

"While many case studies have described what it means to reside in a favela, basti, kampung, gecekondu or bidonville, Davis provides a properly global portrait ... And whereas urban specialists have focused on questions of space and land use in their discussions of slums, and developmentalists on the issue of their 'informal economies', Planet of Slums commands our attention as a broader historical synthesis of the two."
-New Left Review

"Davis's descriptions of the conditions endured by slum-dwellers provide reason enough to read this book. His analysis is full of gripping stories from globalization's frontline."
-New Statesman

"Packed with rigorous