Syllabus & Readings
Required Texts
- Mike Davis, Planet of Slums, Verso 2006
- Mike Davis & Daniel Bertrand Monk, eds. Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism. New Press 2007
- Tsung-Yi Michelle Huang, Walking Between Slums & Skyscrapers: Illusions of Open Space in Hong Kong, Tokyo and Shanghai. Hong Kong University Press 2004
- Additional readings: see detailed syllabus
From the State of the World’s Cities 2012/2013
UN-Habitat estimated that approximately a quarter of the world’s urban population lives in slums. This is down from 31% in 2001—but the absolute number of people living in slums worldwide has grown. Inthe world’s developing regions the number of people living in the slums was 863 million, in contrast to 760 million in 2000 and 650 in 1990. Given current urbanization trends, this figure is likely to have increased by 2014. These estimates suggest that one third of the developing world’s urban population is living in slums (UN-Habitat, Global Urban Indicators Database, 2012), representing 15% of all the people living in those regions.
From: Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism, 2007 p. xv
If the iron-and-glass arcades of the 1850s were the enchanted forests of early consumer capitalism, today’s luxury-themed environments—including city-sized supermalls, artificial island suburbs, and faux downtown “lifestyle centers”—function as alternative universes for privileged forms of human life. On a planet where more than 2 billion people subsist on two dollars or less a day, these dreamworlds enflame desires—for infinite consumption, total social exclusion and physical security, and architectural monumentality—that are clearly incompatible with the ecological and moral survival of humanity.