A celebrated urban historian’s bestselling account of the global explosion 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 ambitious book,
Mike Davis explores the future of a radically unequal and explosively
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 vast
humanity warehoused in shantytowns and exiled from the formal world
economy. He argues that the rise of this informal urban proletariat is
a wholly unforeseen development, and asks whether the great slums, as a terrified Victorian middle class once
imagined, are volcanoes waiting to erupt.