According to the UN, more than one billion people live in misery cities, in favelas, hills, shacks, quarries, camps and slums in the global South. In this ambitious and brilliant book, Mike Davis portrays the reality of a vast and horrendous warehouse of human beings banished from the world economy in hyperdegradable poor cities. From the expansion of slums in Lima to the mountains of garbage in Manila, urbanization of the misery cities has separated from industrialization, and even economic growth.

The author makes a quantification of the terrifying mass production of misery that characterizes contemporary cities and argues that the exponential growth of misery cities is not accidental, but is the result of a simultaneous conjunction of the corruption of leading classes, the institutional failure and the action of the IMF and the Structural Adjustment Programs (SAP), aimed at transferring wealth from poor to rich. Scourge of the neoliberal system, Davis discredits the irresponsible myth of self-salvation showing exactly who is expelled from "self-sufficient capitalism."

Are these marginal cities, as the terrified Victorian middle class imagined, terrible volcanoes waiting to erupt?

"The stunning data collected in the book hit like real blows ... a heartbreaking book." Financial Times

"If you expect an apocalyptic tone from this book - and who does not, certainly, then how to expose if not the mess we are in - there is no one to explain it better." The Guardian