Mike Davis in his Planet of Slums portrays an apocalyptic

observation of the world. Migrations from rural to urban meshed

with ineffective poverty reduction policies have resulted in around
one-sixth of worlds population living in urban slums. In his
pessimistic prediction, they will persist and their conditions will only
exacerbate.
Throughout the book, the author presents a host of examples of bad
cities, describing the prevailing poverty and the forces that bring
about these conditions. However, being a Marxist, Mike David
selected a non-random group of urban places, in which a problem of
slums is encountered by a set of state and non-state policies that
have a comparable and inefficient effect. He indicated the
incapability of local organizations, in particular NGOs, to be among
the most significant failures to address this issue. Therefore, his
analysis, in some extent, is biased, as it does not reflect the
numerous positive outcomes of local NGOs engagement that in
many places occur. Also, he did not emphasize the underlying links
between international agencies and grassroots organizations.
Indeed, there is a lot of criticism of the former but his arguments did
not capture many vital aspects of their failure to tackle poverty in
urban environments. Firstly, the author failed to highlight the
significance of funding for local NGOs that should be provided by
international agencies. The incapability at a local level is more often
than not a result of insufficient financial resources. Secondly, the
structure of many international agencies is improperly designed and
consequently it threatens their ability to affect the targeted areas.
It can be argued that Planet of Slums is deprived of a first-hand
experience and comprehension of living in urban slums. Mike Davis
draws on a wide-range of literature to provide examples and indepth descriptions that are often too neutral and impersonal. In
addition, some of his accounts of conditions prevailing in those bad
cities are too simplistic, as they are not based on empirical and
theoretical evidence. In contrast to his frequent abstract reasoning,
in City Life from Jakarta to Dakar: Movements at the Crossroad
Simone AbdouMaliq develops a rigorous academic approach to
analyze poverty in urban settlements. The author is less concerned
with case studies and devotes less attention to in-depth descriptions
and analysis of poverty as a problem. Instead, he offers an
abstract and philosophical inquiry into a city, being a distinctive
space of possibility, in which politics of anticipation occur. In the
course of his study, he does not forecast a pessimistic future of
urban slums and in its place he focuses more on the resilience and
preparedness in cities.
The approaches taken by Mike Davis and Simone AbdouMaliq are
fundamentally different. With the similar object of the study, the
former author delivers a rather simplistic account of urban slums

and its future, based on case studies and abstract thinking. Simone
AbdouMaliq, however, opens new spaces for academic analysis due
to his engagement with poverty and the urban through a rigorous
and a theoretical framework.