Planet Of Slums Book Report

Mike Davis’s book Planet of Slums does a good job at analyzing world urbanization, poverty and describing the conditions in which the poorest people on earth live in, however I disagree with his opinion that the slums are a lost cause. In the book Davis, which is an urban historian, seeks to provide a better understanding of the rapidly increasing urban population, the extreme levels of poverty, and exploitation of the poor around the world. His book had a deep impact in how I define poverty as it reveals so many harsh realities of what goes on in the rest of the world, but I would disagree with his belief that there is no solution to this problem. This is a great book at depicting slums, which as stated in the book are “a fully franchised solution to the problem of warehousing this century’s surplus humanity.”(P.201), and is one …show more content…
He also does a good job at explaining all the problems associated with the urban growth from the lack of housing to the rapid increase in the size of the cities which often consume surrounding villages as stated in the reading “rural people no longer have to migrate to the city: the city migrates to them.”(P.9). Worst of all is that most of the people that migrate to the cities do not live inside the city in any proper form of housing, but instead they live in huts in the outskirts of the city with no running water and in most cases no electricity. These areas where the huts are built to house the poor are the slums and as cities keep growing it is not always in the form of proper buildings, but these slums, which bring up a lot of problems.
Davis argues that the quality of life in the slums is very bad, and I would agree with his argument. Throughout the book Davis provides statistics and explains the harsh living conditions and the oppression that is part of the daily struggles of people who live in the slums. When reading it I found it hard to believe that other humans had to live