Mike Davis: Planet Of Slums
04.05.06
Reviewed by David Goldblatt
Mumbai, already the most densely populated and ecologically impossible
city in the world, is heading for a peak of 33 million. The cities of
the West African coast are fusing into an urban giant that rings the
Gulf of Guinea and will exceed the size and population of the US eastern
seaboard.
However, unlike their Western predecessors, these monstrous
agglomerations are growing without widespread industrialisation,
infrastructure provison or formal job creation.
....
City centres have been abandoned to street dwellers and squatters. Davis
wonders if the opening scenes of the "war on terrorism" are really the
overture to a conflagration that pits the insatiable desires of Western
consumerism against the unfulfillable needs of the global slum.
He will never sell the script to Hollywood, but the Pentagon, with its
new doctrines of urban warfare, may have taken out an option.
cont'd....
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/6/story.cfm?c_id=6&objectid=10380280