City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in São Paulo

“This is an extraordinary treatment of a difficult problem. . . . Much more than a conventional comparative study, ”City of Walls is a genuinely transcultural, transnational work—the first of its kind that I have read."—George E. Marcus, author of "Ethnography Through Thick & Thin

"Caldeira's work is wonderfully ambitious-theoretically bold, ethnographically rich, historically specific. Anyone who cares about the condition and future of cities, of democracy, of human rights should read this book."—Thomas Bender, Director of the Project on Cities and Urban Knowledges

Apocalyptic anti-urbanism: Mike Davis and his planet of slums

by Tom Angotti, 2006

The title of Mike Davis’ latest tome should make every progressive cringe. Boston’s Mel King, prominent African-American community activist, once said that for him the term slum meant that ‘somebody else defined my community in a way that allowed them to justify destruction of it’. Slum clearance was the high-minded objective of the federal urban renewal program in the US, the program that displaced millions of people, disproportionately poor and African-American. Around the world today, working people are evicted by governments and private developers who have determined that their neighborhoods are hopeless ‘slums’ filled with disease, crime, and unemployment, problems which they claim will go away once the people are out of sight and cities stop growing. While ‘slum’ is used in other parts of the world without the negative connotation it enjoys in the US, such homogenizing labels continue to obscure both the underlying relations of social and political inequality and an increasingly complex urban world.

Review of Mike Davis' 'Planet of Slums'

by Richard Pithouse, Interactivist, 5 May 2008

Visions of the future, presented as aspiration or inevitability, exercise tremendous power over certain kinds of decision making in the present. In cities where local elites are able to imagine a convivial future for themselves and where the economy is based on local consumption as well as production or extraction for export, the vision of the future is, above all, the idea of a ‘World Class City’. This is the idea that guides and justifies the decisions of the technocratic elites organized in ‘partnerships’ across governments, donor agencies, NGOs, the academy and corporations. Their decisions produce broadly similar results around the world – the exclusion and eviction of the poor, the commodification of public space and public investment in projects for private profit such as conference centers, casinos, hotels, shopping malls, golf course estates, major sports events and so on at the direct expense of public investment in public housing, public facilities and public space. Rem Koolhaas tells us that it is time to get real and the reality is that shopping is “the last remaining form of public activity.”1