Shantytown Planet

"Planet of Slums" analyzes the history and present day of slums, where a billion people still live in urban areas of Third World countries. Davis makes a series of very important observations as he describes the survival struggles of the poor in dozens of megacities like Mumbai, Cairo, Istanbul, Sao Paulo, and Seoul. According to Davis, the measures developed by states caught between the IMF and the World Bank to solve this enormous problem benefit the middle class, not the poor. While hundreds of thousands of poor people are forcibly evicted from their neighborhoods every year, the middle class settles in the places they vacate.

Examining urban poverty comparatively across a wide global geography stretching from Latin America to the Middle East, from Africa to South Asia, Davis arrives at this question: Is there no connection between the Pentagon declaring slums as the battlefields of the 21st century and the fact that the poor, who have been exiled to slums, suffer much more damage in natural disasters such as earthquakes and floods? Everyone should read this striking book, which draws a comprehensive worldwide map of the problem of poverty, which neoliberalism has both escalated to unprecedented levels in history and brazenly denied.