[Questions for Mike Davis, “Planet of Slums”]
  1. What has recently happened to the worldwide urban/rural balance?
  2. What are some of future projections with regards to urban population growth?
  3. What distinction does Davis make between megacities and second-tier cities?
  4. What’s happening to rural areas themselves?
  5. How do the dynamics of Third World urbanization “both capitulate and confound the precedents of nineteenth and early twentieth century Europe and North America?”
  6. How are most cities more like Victorian Dublin than Victorian Berlin or Chicago?
  7. How does the UN’s publication of TheChallenge of the Slumsindict the neoliberalism of the IMF, World Bank, and other international economic organizations?
  8. What is the derivation of the word, “slum?”
  9. How many people are estimated to be living in slums? Where are the percentages the highest?
  10. How are new slums different than the older ones?.
  11. How does the amount of land available for settlement affect slums?
  12. What is the status of the infrastructure in the slums?
  13. In what kind of terrain are the slums taking root?
  14. What is in store for the slums over the coming decades?
  15. Characterize the evolution of the new urban poverty.
  16. What are “Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAP)?” What had their impact been?
  17. What areas were hardest hit by the policies promulgated by the IMF and the Reagan administration? What happened in these places?
  18. What impact did the economic shocks of the 1980s have on the rest of the Third World?
  19. How is urban poverty gendered?
  20. What happened to urban poverty in the 1990s?
  21. How is what happened in the 1980s and 1990s in the Third World analogous to the era of late Victorian imperialism?
  22. What has happened to both state employees and the urban proletariat over the past few decades?
  23. What are informal workers? What do the represent in the new urban economy?
  24. What is bootstrap capitalism? What is Davis’s critique of it?
  25. How has classical Marxism and modernization failed in anticipating recent growth of a global informal proletariat?
  26. Why does Davis assert that “only the slum remains as the fully franchised solution to the problem of warehousing the twenty-first century’s surplus humanity?” What are some of the other potential alternatives that Davis believes are not going to prove fruitful?
  27. What does Davis mean by “Marx has yielded the historical stage to Mohammed and the Holy Ghost?”
  28. Why does Davis believe this is a problem?