“Sci-fi happens,” Mike Davis
One of the most interesting, most cantankerous writers on the urban and demographic realities of the new century is Mike Davis, who made a name for himself in his subaltern history of LA, City of Quartz
Orion Magazine, a fantastic literary magazine focusing on ecological issues, has excerpted Planet of Slums:
Orion > Orion Magazine > March | April 2006 > Mike Davis> Slum Ecology:
“Urban theorists have long recognized that the environmental efficiency and public affluence of cities require the preservation of ecosystems, open spaces, and natural services: cities need them to recycle urban waste products into usable inputs for farming, gardening, and energy production. And along with intact wetlands and agriculture, sustainable urbanism presupposes a basic level of safety%u2014of meteorological, hydrological, and geological stability, and protection against disasters like floods or fire. None of those conditions can hold in most Third World cities. Suffering under a series of crushing pressures, most recently a quarter-century-old regime of Draconian international economic policies, cities are systematically polluting, urbanizing, and destroying their crucial environmental support systems.”
(Via Orion Online.)
I’m a huge Mike Davis fan and just finished “Planet of Slums”–it left me less enthusiastic than other of his books (especially “Dead Cities” and my very favorite “Ecology of Fear”). “Slums” was heavy with facts laid out in chunky chapters; I missed the fluid language and deep explorations of individual places that fill his other books. If the book had stayed longer in fewer places it would have gone farther.