Cities, Dead or Alive

• Planet of Slums: the hyperexpansion of giant cities
  
  Mike Davis, author of the far-famed City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in LA (1990)— now a standard text in contemporary urban studies— writes of the striking development of mega-cities around the globe: "Sometime in the next year, a woman will give birth in the Lagos slum of Ajegunle, a young man will flee his village in west Java for the bright lights of Jakarta, or a farmer will move his impoverished family into one of Lima’s innumerable pueblos jovenes. The exact event is unimportant and it will pass entirely unnoticed. Nonetheless it will constitute a watershed in human history. For the first time the urban population of the earth will outnumber the rural. ... In Africa, the supernova-like growth of a few giant cities like Lagos (from 300,000 in 1950 to 10 million today) has been matched by the transformation of several dozen small towns and oases like Ouagadougou, Nouakchott, Douala, Antananarivo and Bamako into cities larger than San Francisco or Manchester." (Article published in the New Left Review 26, March-April 2004)
• House of Cards: life in Las Vegas
  
  An article by Mike Davis which appeared in the Sierra Magazine, Nov-Dec 1995: "Too many people in the wrong place, celebrating waste as a way of life."