In this brilliant and ambitious book Mike Davis charts the expected global urbanization explosion over the next thirty years and points out that outside China most of the rest of the world's urban growth will be without industrialization or development, rather a 'perverse' urban boom in spite of stagnant or negative urban economic growth. With a third of the global urban population living in Dickensian slums, at least half under the age of twenty, Mike Davis explores the threat of disease, of forced settlement on hazardous terrains, and of state violence, on huge populations. He shows also how poverty not only grew massively in the 1990s (when the IMF policies of the 1980s were supposed to reap huge rewards) but how the gap between rich and poor countries expanded and how women and minorities fell further behind. Mike Davis argues that this enormous population of marginalised labourers is not a frenzied beehive of ambitious entrepreneurs but an 'active' unemployed, who have no choice but to subsist by some means or starve, in an arena of extreme Darwinian competition amongst the poor.It is a stagnant ferment which threatens to overflow the shanty-towns, and swamp the homes and businesses of the urban rich.