Evil Paradises

Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism

Mike Davis, Daniel Bertrand Monk

• Publisher: The New Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781595583925
• eBook ISBN: 9781595587787
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Urban Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Evil Paradises, edited by Mike Davis and Daniel Bertrand Monk, is a global guidebook to phantasmagoric but real places—alternate realities being constructed as "utopias" in a capitalist era unfettered by unions and state regulation. These developments—in cities, deserts, and in the middle of the sea—are worlds where consumption and inequality surpass our worst nightmares. Although they read like science fiction, the case studies are shockingly real. In Dubai, where child slavery existed until very recently, a gilded archipelago of private islands known as "The World" is literally being added to the ocean. In Medellín and Kabul, drug lords—in many ways textbook capitalists—are redefining conspicuous consumption in fortified palaces. In Hong Kong, Cairo, and even the Iranian desert, burgeoning communities of nouveaux riches have taken shelter in fantasy Californias, complete with Mickey Mouse statues, while their maids sleep in rooftop chicken coops. Meanwhile, Ted Turner rides herd over his bison in 2 million acres of private parkland. Davis and Monk have assembled an extraordinary group of urbanists, architects, historians, and visionary thinkers to reflect upon the trajectory of a civilization whose deepest ethos seems to be to consume all the resources of the earth within a single lifetime.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Introduction
• 1 - Dreamland
• 2 - Arg-e Jadid: A California Oasis in the Iranian Desert
• 3 - Sand, Fear, and Money in Dubai
• 4 - Capital of Chaos: The New Kabul of Warlords and Infidels
• 5 - Delirious Beijing: Euphoria and Despair in the Olympic Metropolis
• 6 - “Palm Springs”: Imagineering California in Hong Kong
• 7 - Johannesburg: Of Gold and Gangsters
• 8 - “Nueva Managua”: The Disembedded City
• 9 - Becoming Bourgeois: (Postsocialist) Utopias of Isolation and Civilization
• 10 - “Extreme Makeover”: Medellín in the New Millennium
• 11 - The Most Unjust Country in the World
• 12 - Bunkering in Paradise (or, Do Oldsters Dream of Electric Golf Carts?)
• 13 - Careless People: It’s the Real Housewives of Orange County’s World; The ...
• 14 - “Hell Is Other People”: Ted Turner’s Two Million Acres
• 15 - People Like Hicks: The Supreme Court Announces the Antiurban City
• 16 - Hubrispace: Personal Museums and the Architectures of Self-Deification
• 17 - Monastery Chic: The Ascetic Retreat in a Neoliberal Age
• 18 - Floating Utopias: Freedom and Unfreedom of the Seas
• 19 - Hives and Swarms: On the “Nature” of Neoliberalism and the Rise of the ...
• Notes
• Contributors
• Index
• Copyright Page