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

_______________________________________________
in-enaction mailing list
http://mail.architexturez.net/mailman/listinfo/in-enaction  + Architexturez 
collaborative at http://portal.architexturez.org/

Reply via email to