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Ben Gook on Mike Davis, Megaslum Lord.

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Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (Verso, 2006).

In Western nightclubs and cars over the past year, the sounds of Brazil's infamous favelas have soundtracked a few hundred sweaty and sticky nights. The music produced in these slum cities is one all its own--illicitly chopping up the hooks and lyrics of half-forgotten Western chart hits and serving them on a bed of simply programmed but remarkably effective hip-hop funk. The street parties for which this music was originally designed are increasingly host to 20-something tourists attempting to get the authentic baille funk experience. As the mythology breathlessly reports, much of this music is made against a background of drug deals and violence.

If Mike Davis' equally breathless Planet of Slums is to be believed, this confluence of Western and Brazilian culture is a fitting metaphor of where the global population is heading: these 'outsider' slum cities will, by sheer scale of numbers, come to press themselves in the eyes and ears of comfortable city dwellers from the West. The American author's work is at once a cautionary, forward-looking estimation and a report on what is already occurring.

Davis reports that Sao Paulo favelas, for instance, have grown at a startling rate: from 1.2 per cent of Brazil's total population in 1973 to 19.8 per cent in 1992. Throughout the...

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