Near to one billion people call slums their home, making it a reasonable claim to describe our world as a 'planet of slums.' But how has this hard and unyielding way of life been depicted on screen? How have filmmakers engaged historically and across the globe with the social conditions of what is often perceived as the world's most miserable habitats?Combining approaches from cultural, globalisation and film studies, Igor Krstic outlines a transnational history of films that either document or fictionalise the favelas, shantytowns, barrios poulares or chawls of our 'planet of slums', exploring the way accelerated urbanisation has intersected with an increasingly interconnected global film culture. From Jacob Riis' How The Other Half Lives (1890) to Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire (2008), the volume provides a number of close readings of films from different historical periods and regions to outline how contemporary film and media practices relate to their past predeccesors, demonstrating the way various filmmakers, both north and south of the equator, have repeatedly grappled with, rejected or continuously modified documentary and realist modes to convey life in our 'planet of slums'.

Celebrated urban theorist Davis provides a global overview of the diverse religious, ethnic, and political movements competing for the souls of the new urban poor.

This book looks at slums and social exclusion in the four major megacities of India and Brazil, and analyzes the interrelationships between urban policies and housing and environmental issues. The challenges posed in Delhi, Mumbai, Rio de Janeiro and Suo Paulo have spurred public reformers into action through housing, rehabilitation and conservation programs. Civil society and the inhabitants of these cities have also begun to get involved. On the other hand, one must wonder whether these challenges were partly created by the deficiencies of these very reformers and civil society, be it their lack of intervention (as advocates of government intervention would argue), or the flaws and inadequacies of their actions (as supporters of the free market would suggest). Are policies alleviating or aggravating social exclusion This book explores these questions and more.

Explains the uneven success of India's slum dwellers in demanding and securing essential public services from the state.

Urban slum dwellers—especially in emerging-economy countries—are often poor, live in squalor, and suffer unnecessarily from disease, disability, premature death, and reduced life expectancy. Yet living in a city can and should be healthy. Slum Health exposes how and why slums can be unhealthy; reveals that not all slums are equal in terms of the hazards and health issues faced by residents; and suggests how slum dwellers, scientists, and social movements can come together to make slum life safer, more just, and healthier. Editors Jason Corburn and Lee Riley argue that valuing both new biologic and “street” science—professional and lay knowledge—is crucial for improving the well-being of the millions of urban poor living in slums.

“A record of how a city of great wealth ignored the desperate poverty at its very heart . . . It is a lesson in the price of capitalism.” —North West Labour History Journal “It is all free fighting here. Even some of the windows do not open, so it is useless to cry for help. Dampness and misery, violence and wrong, have left their handwriting in perfectly legible characters on the walls.” —Manchester Guardian, 1870 Step into the Victorian underworld of Angel Meadow, the vilest and most dangerous slum of the Industrial Revolution. In the shadow of the world’s first cotton mill, 30,000 souls trapped by poverty are fighting for survival as the British Empire is built upon their backs. Thieves and prostitutes keep company with rats in overcrowded lodging houses and deep cellars on the banks of a black river, the Irk. Gangs of “scuttlers” stalk the streets in pointed, brass-tipped clogs. Those who evade their clutches are hunted down by cholera, typhoid and tuberculosis. Lawless drinking dens and a cold slab in the dead house provide the only relief from a filthy and frightening world. In this shocking book, journalist Dean Kirby takes readers on a hair-raising journey through the gin palaces, alleyways and underground vaults of this nineteenth-century Manchester slum considered so diabolical it was re-christened “hell upon earth” by Friedrich Engels. ENTER ANGEL MEADOW IF YOU DARE . . . “In this book the author expertly achieves driving home the grim horror that was Angel Meadow. These were conditions at the bottom of human endurance and conditions that go beyond imaginations of modern-day citizens.” —Crime Traveller