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In past writing, Davis’s unorthodox prose and unexpected comparisons - between action movies and patterns of urban settlement, for instance, in Ecology of Fear - have made even the gloomiest prognostications eminently readable, drawing him a much wider audience than most neo-Marxists could ever hope to enjoy.

But Planet of Slums lacks Davis’s characteristic flamboyance - most of it reads like a dry policy report. In fact, he does draw much of his data and observations from such reports, most notably the United Nations Human Settlements Programme’s 2003 report, “The Challenge of the Slums.” Statistic after statistic pummels the reader with a manic global tour of widespread suffering: the slums, despite the noble efforts of their residents to make them homey, are miserable; they are growing; and their growth is in large part due to neo-liberal policies of First-World lending institutions. In one paragraph we move rapidly from Beijing to Bangalore to Shenzhen. It’s dizzying, and difficult to discern any narrative other than that most lives anywhere other than North America and Europe are currently looking particularly nasty and brutish.

Davis’s most impassioned and gripping examples come in the chapter titled, “Slum Ecology,” when he revisits a theme prevalent in earlier books: how human expansion and environmental degradation propel disastrous feedback loops. Squatters often settle in dirty or polluted areas where lack of state-provided sanitation creates even more dirt and pollution. In Rio de Janeiro and Caracas, slums sit on unstable hillsides, whose recurring dissolution has killed thousands.

Most disturbing are the examples of millions of people literally “living in shit.” Kinshasa, in the Republic of Congo, has a population of 10 million and “no waterborne sewage system,” Davis says, leaving us to imagine gutters by the road filled with excrement. Worse are the examples of Indian slums with approximately nineteen latrines for 100,000 people. People relieve themselves outdoors, which - in addition to the obvious health problems in crowded areas - creates particularly onerous burdens for women, who wait for the cover of early morning or dark to excrete in public.

But why exactly have these states abandoned their citizens to lives of squalor? Davis explains: “As Third World governments abdicated the battle against the slum in the 1970s, the Bretton Woods institutions - with the IMF as ‘bad cop’ and the World Bank as ‘good cop’ - assumed increasingly commanding roles in setting the parameters of urban housing policy.” Slums are born out of “structural adjustment, currency devaluation, and state retrenchment.”

Unfortunately, no further discussion of Bretton Woods or structural adjustment, a term frequently bandied about by critics of neo-liberalism, follows his explanation. Three-quarters of the way through a book devoted to critiquing structural adjustment programs, Davis finally defines them as “the protocols by which indebted countries surrender their economic independence to the IMF and World Bank.” What are those protocols? A detailed example would do wonders.

It is also unclear if solutions lurk within Davis’s assembled facts and exposés. Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto has advocated making property owners out of slum dwellers, but Davis tells us it would do no good: newly empowered property owners simply evolve from slum dwellers to slumlords. ‘Titling,’ Davis further admonishes, is ultimately a nefarious scheme to undermine slum solidarity. So is the very concept of private property flawed? Can self-organized slums somehow demonstrate the virtues of settlement without property rights? Is Davis’s critique of ‘titling’ actually a plea for state-sponsored housing - unlikely as that seems given his skepticism of corrupt governments and substandard public housing projects? We simply don’t know what he thinks because he never tells us, moving quickly on to his next example of slum deprivation.

Davis once stood out among socialist critics because he was able to entertain lay readers. But Planet of Slums reads as if addressed to a seminar of grad students or New Left Review subscribers. If Davis means for it to be a wake-up call, he is ringing the morning bell in the commune of the already converted.

Still, the book is not entirely without its pleasures. Davis returns to form in the final chapter, offering the unexpected, off-the-wall, and trenchant cultural and political analysis that first made him famous in the classic City of Quartz. He suggests that the U.S. military may be the First-World institution best prepared to pragmatically answer the challenge of the slums, since it is from the slums that the next generation of terrorists and so-called freedom fighters will emerge.

The slums are growing at a ferocious pace; North Americans, Europeans, and the wealthy of Hong Kong, Mumbai, and Rio ignore them at their peril. Despite its lapses and ellipses, Planet of the Slums is an important goad to other writers and thinkers to pick up the cause.

This article appeared in the Fall 2006 issue of Next American City magazine. SUBSCRIBE NOW!