Planet of slums

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 ambitiousbook, Mike Davis explores the future of a radically unequal andexplosively 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 vasthumanity warehoused in shantytowns and exiled from the formal worldeconomy. He argues that the rise of this informal urban proletariat is awholly unforeseen development, and asks whether the great slums, as a terrified Victorian middle class once imagined, are volcanoes waiting to erupt.