Planet of Slums by Mike Davis

“Who, exactly, is the enemy that future robo-soldiers, trained in the slums of Detroit and LA, will stalk in the labyrinth of Third World cities? Some experts simply shrug their shoulders and answer ‘whatever.’ In an influential article on ‘Geopolitics and Urban Armed Conflict in Latin America,’ written in the mid-1990s, Geoffrey Demarest, a leading researcher at Fort Leaven worth, proposed a strange cast of ‘anti-state actors,’ including ‘psychopathic anarchists,’ criminals, cynical opportunists, lunatics, revolutionaries, labor leaders, ethnic nationalists, and real-estate speculators. In the end, however, he settled on the ‘dispossesed’ in general, and ‘criminal syndicates’ in particular. In addition to advocating the use of research tools borrowed from architecture and urban planning to help predict future surversion, Demarest added that ‘security forces should address the sociological phenomenon of excluded populations.’ He was particularly concerned with ‘the psychology of the abandoned child,’ since he believes—along with many advocates of the so-called ‘youth bulge’ theory of crime—that slum children are the secret weapon of anti-state forces.”

-Mike Davis, 2006