By Mike Davis. Verso Books, 256 pp, $34, hardcover

Imagine a place where thousands live crammed together in makeshift shacks bordering toxic dumps, with no access to clean water or electricity. Residents defecate on the ground because there are no latrines, and perpetually live in their own waste because there are no sanitation services. Nobody maintains the roads or regulates traffic, so many perish in car accidents. There is no industry; there are no jobs, no education system, no health care whatsoever. Police presence is limited to collecting protection money. This dystopian vision may sound like the stuff of science fiction, but it's far from that–it's reality for more than one billion of the earth's population.

Renowned American scholar Mike Davis chronicles the horrific living conditions in the world's ghettos, favelas, and barrios, detailing the global policy decisions that have fuelled their explosive expansion. The text reveals that most of the world's population growth is taking place in developing countries, with 95 percent of that growth occurring in cities. There are now more than 200,000 slums on the planet, with populations ranging from several hundred to 20 million.

Davis ties the rise of slums to World Bank policy. For the last 30 years, the institution has been lending money to impoverished nations at high interest rates, then leveraging those debts to aggressively restructure local economies. Many nations now spend more than half of their annual budget on debt repayment, and the bank requires these countries to slash social spending for what's left. The result is the complete retreat of the state–and an unprecedented level of misery for the poor of the world.

The grim situation that Davis describes should ring the alarm for civil society and governments alike. Sadly, the academic approach of the book guarantees its readership will be limited. The text is packed with tables and statistics, but it's short on narrative. The reader walks away with a good understanding of how a billion people are living–but gains no real connection to this mass of humanity. In spite of its best intentions, Planet of Slums winds up reinforcing the abstraction of slum populations when it should be humanizing them.