Planet Of Slums Book Report

Ap Human Geography
Ryan Tillery
August 30, 2016
B2
Planet of Slums essay During my summer vacation I was visiting New York City on one hot, humid day. As I was making my way to my destination I had to get on a train. This being my first time in New York City I wasn’t prepared for what I was about to experience. I was in a jammed packed train, so crowded I couldn’t even lift my arms all the way up without awkwardly touching someone. It felt like it was a hundred plus degrees and it also reeked a distasteful smell. For fifteen minutes I had a taste of what it was like to be in a crowded slum-like area. Famously known American writer, political activist and urban theorist, Mike Davis is famously known for his
writing in his book, The Planet of Slums. Davis piles on evidence upon evidence to educate the reader about slum life and the rate at which we are increasing slums. Using passionate(ethos), despairing, and vigorous analysis of the economic, social, and environmental state of cities in third world countries. The quintessential type of evidence Davis uses is statistical evidence. The wide majority of all his claims and predictions is based on statistical probability. Davis's goal of the book is to show how much things have changed since industrialization and how it has impacted society in a negative way. The growth and transformation of slums from all Third World countries are a symbol and a cause of a widening gap in opportunity between rich and poor. The core of the book is to show that the current Third World urban poor are in especially worse conditions, similar to how people in the nineteenth century suffered for long grueling amounts of time.
On the other hand, in one of the many insightful historical comparisons made throughout this book, Davis sees the impact of today's "neoliberal globalization" on Third World cities as very comparable to the ways in which nineteenth-century imperialism shaped rural life through "the forcible incorporation into the world market of the great subsistence peasantries of Asia and Africa … ." Planet of Slums often showed the similarities between past and present realities. Davis used this tool as a way of implying that things are very much similar today to what they used to be in past generations. Although he does this, he does it while emphasizing the scarcely known nature of current global forces. By doing the opposite Davis implies that things are very much different in today's
world. Third World cities grow rapidly in population without high availability of jobs, leading to competition over "crumbs" [jobs] in the urban cities. This is why population and location were such a huge aspect in proving his thesis. Because of population, slum life became what it was because there's not enough for everyone. Not enough jobs, not enough food, not enough room, not enough housing etc. Because of location the reader is able to understand the social and economic struggle of a particular area to grasp and understand how devastating slum-life is. Davis uses Population as a way to describe how scarce and uncomfortable life was.
Davis explained a issue between "the haves[ the rich] and the have-nots[the poor]." This issue seems as if in no way can get better. The rich get richer while the poor get poorer. He uses this as a way to show the continuous growth in separation between upper and lower class citizens. Ironically, instead of fixing the problem were increasing the problem.
Davis organizes the book around themes. He uses themes to serve as a structural template for the book. Most of the chapters, whether focused on housing, urban ecological dangers or SAPs— had numerous examples and statistics to back up all of the information Davis was giving. For example, in every chapter a city or place in India was a recurring example. This tactic purpose is to illustrate the specific issues at hand while giving the reader a chance to understand that particular city's everyday life. "Seismic hazard is the fine print in the devil's bargain of informal housing" is how Davis sums up the disproportionate vulnerability of poor neighborhoods to the deadly threats of earthquake-prone cities. His characterization of the U.N.'s Millennium Development Goals as "the last gasp of developmental idealism" is emphasizing a sense of a " last hope kind of situation," this helps engage the reader using ethos [ emotion ] and help the reader understand the Third world countries drastic situation. Contemporary global capitalism is powerful and rapacious enough, argues Davis, that local-level entrepreneurship and organization are rarely much more than survival strategies. In this and other ways, Davis's critique is more old than new, and it is somewhat a refreshing concept in its realism.
One other strength of Planet of Slums is Davis's extensive revisiting of a generation or two of debates in development studies and connecting them to current day twenty-first-century urban problems.There is a tension in the text between the somewhat more sophisticated readings in the political economy and what is now a somewhat predictable recourse to SAPs and more broadly "neoliberal globalization" as the necessary and sufficient explanation of Third World struggles.
This perspective leaves Planet of Slums fundamentally ambivalent, or having mixed thoughts, about the role of states, and quiet about social movements as forces for addressing and ultimately narrowing the chasm between rich and poor, or even for simply alleviating the most harmful aspects of urban existence, whether lack of access to water, exposure to toxic environments, or subsistence incomes. Davis occasionally mentions urban riots and protests against the growing inequality and reduction of social services in various cities around the globe, but does not address the conditions under which these demonstrations happen or how those who have benefited from the social branches of cities have apparently gotten away with it so
easily.
In his conclusion, Davis piles on evidence upon evidence to educate the reader about slum life and the rate at which we are increasing slums. Using passionate(ethos), despairing, and vigorous analysis of the economic, social, and environmental state of cities in Third world countries he is able to educate the reader of slum life and the rate at which we are increasing slum life within the next few decades. He used topics such as population, location, political and economic resources as topics to prove his thesis. With the continuous number of cities and slums being built everyday, maybe it's time for someone to actually help those in need rather than finding loopholes so that they can keep their money.