Planet of Slums

Not brand new, but still worth mentioning. Mike Davis, author of such bestselling looks at urbanism as "City of Quartz", "Ecology of Fear," "Magical Urbanism" and "Dead Cities", is coming out with a book this year that takes a decidedly bleak view of our urban future. It is called "Planet of Slums" and examines the "future history" of megacities. An excerpt from Planet of Slums appears in the latest issue of New Left Review. An excerpt http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR26001.shtml from Planet of Slums appears in the latest issue of New Left Review

"The earth has urbanized even faster than originally predicted by the Club of Rome in its notoriously Malthusian 1972 report, Limits of Growth. In 1950 there were 86 cities in the world with a population over one million; today there are 400, and by 2015, there will be at least 550. 1 Cities, indeed, have absorbed nearly two-thirds of the global population explosion since 1950 and are currently growing by a million
babies and migrants each week.2 The present urban population (3.2 billion) is larger than the total population of the world in 1960. The global country side, meanwhile, has reached its maximum population (3.2 billion) and will begin to shrink after 2020. As a result, cities will account for all future world population growth, which is expected to peak at about 10 billion in 2050."