Planeta favela

According to the United Nations, more than one billion people now live in the shantytowns of the cities of the south. MacArthur fellow Davis explores the future of this radically unequal and explosively unstable urban world. He traces the global trajectory of informal settlement from the 1960s "slums of hope" through the debt decades of the 1970s and 1980s, to today's unprecedented megaslums. From the sprawling barricadas of Lima to the garbage hills of Manila, urbanization has been disconnected from economic growth. Instead of the cities of light once imagined by futurists, much of the 21st-century urban world squats in squalor on floodplains, precarious hillsides or near toxic dumps. He argues that the rise of this informal urban proletariat is a wholly unforeseen development, and ends with a meditation on the "war on terror" as an incipient world war between the American empire and the new slum poor.