How Slums Can Save the Planet 424
Standing Bear writes "One billion people live in squatter cities and, according to the UN, this number will double in the next 25 years. Stewart Brand writes in Prospect Magazine about what squatter cities can teach us about future urban living. 'The magic of squatter cities is that they are improved steadily and gradually by their residents,' writes Brand. 'Squatter cities are also unexpectedly green. They have maximum density — 1M people per square mile in some areas of Mumbai — and have minimum energy and material use. People get around by foot, bicycle, rickshaw, or the universal shared taxi.' Brand adds that in most slums recycling is literally a way of life e.g. the Dharavi slum in Mumbai has 400 recycling units and 30,000 rag-pickers. 'Of course, fast-growing cities are far from an unmitigated good. They concentrate crime, pollution, disease, and injustice as much as business, innovation, education, and entertainment,' says Brand. Still, as architect Peter Calthorpe wrote in 1985: 'The city is the most environmentally benign form of human settlement. Each city dweller consumes less land, less energy, less water, and produces less pollution than his counterpart in settlements of lower densities.'" Reader Kanel adds this note of perspective: "Kevin Kelly is another guy who wrote about slums in a very positive light, though he was more interested in self-organisation and why cities are cool, I think. Kelly also reports on the strange trend for slum tourism. What we're seeing here is that the 'slums' have become a vehicle for people to bring out their own ideas about cities, humans, and the universe at large. I have a feeling that we're not really going to learn a lot about slums if we study them through these guys."
Been there and hated it (Score:4, Interesting)
Slums? What a retarded story, yes I read it.
Where do the authors live? (Score:2, Interesting)
A Precious Illusion of Progress ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Somehow in my world view, the concept progress somehow involved a rise in the standard of living globally. In a more selfish angle, poverty anywhere is a threat to prosperity everywhere ... but it should come as no surprise that a low standard of living has a lower carbon footprint, but a reversal into the medieval dark ages, into a world of filth and disease is not where I thought progress would take me.
The hint of "noble savage" that this particular article seems to dig up almost horrifies me. The illusion that somehow all of us should aspire to simple living goes against two centuries of human culture. Even they aspire for me, as the article clearly spells out "Discomfort is an investment". These people aren't comfortable, the population explosion and the draw-in into the cities is causing the rural india to collapse, the two-bit farmer who grew his own grain & sold his veggies during the rains is gone. Fewer hands to till and more mouths to feed.
Because I live in urban India, I see slums day in & day out. I walk by them, I occasionally grab a cup of chai from the roadside vendor (hey, I got an immune system, don't I?). I end up people-watching, the drunkard husband, the garbage picker kids, the housemaid wife, the precocious teenager dreaming of a gangster life. Vivid, poignant & stark at the same time. But very rarely do I click a picture or write about what I see (maybe I'm in middle-class denial, I don't know). Though occasionally rant about the representation of it [dotgnu.info] in popular culture. This is the bombay [flic.kr] I love to visit, not the slums or the bombed hotels.
I want progress, not just for me ... but for everyone. Not a green planet that's So-so-Soylent. Let me have my dream, at least ... don't glorify my nightmares :(
Ugh, I think I've spent all the optimism I'd had for the day.
slums aren't all they're cracked up to be but... (Score:3, Interesting)
Architects, sociologists, city planners.. indeed all of us could learn something about the kind of innovation that goes on in slums as the result of necessity. Our cushy world is based so much around luxury, not necessity, that it's nearly impossible to strip away what we really need. Some MIT students studied the carbon footprint of homeless [newscientist.com] and found that een the homeless of the U.S. have nearly twice the carbon footprint of the global mean. If people with homes in ROW can get by, even be relatively happy with half the carbon footprint of our homeless, maybe they know something we should learn.
Whether we reach peak-oil, peek debt, peak atmospheric carbon or our population reaches a point where food and water becomes too scarce, eventually most of us will have to learn to live with what we need rather than what we want. We won't learn that if we (Like Beijing), take working old neighborhoods, Hutongs and silk market and replace them with hi rises and supermalls. We wont learn it if we do like the U.S. and declare such neighborhoods "Blighted" [americancity.org] and seize them by eminent domain and hand them over to private developers [wikipedia.org] who understand greed more than they understand the architecture and sociology of necessity.
Re:Where do the authors live? (Score:5, Interesting)
concentration camps
that's what spring to mind reading the description for this article
rather perverse (BladeRunner'ish) way of thinking eh :(
What? (Score:3, Interesting)
Having been to Barbados, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic I'm fucking speechless.
Recycling (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm a little shocked that people in the suburbs are always surprised to hear that dense cities, particularly areas with poor people recycle practically everything. In Bogota, Lima, Rio de Janeiro, and Buenos Aires - HUGE, bustling cities easily on par with the populations of NYC and LA -- it was not the least bit surprising to see an entire family (yes their 4 and 5 year old children happily helped out), or groups of widows, or simply a homeless man working together to pull apart the trashbags left out on the sidewalk and digging through all the thrown away food for the odd aluminum can, recyclable soda bottle, a pile of used staples or bent paperclips. At the end of buisness the streets would be teeming with boys aged 12-15 collecting shreded paper from banks in giant sacks 3' in diameter, carted off on wobbly, self made carts to who knows where, grinning at their great haul. Cleaning crews would show up about an hour later and cart off whatever was left behind (very, very little). Even in Dallas I've had to run off homeless people from my backyard, digging through my trash to find the odd bottle or soda can. Recycling is everywhere -- except the suburbs.
As Santiago, Chile has proven, there are many developed countries that are under the global radar with bustling cities that are rather self sufficient. The huge sprawling, wasteful metroplexes of the US are rather unique. Even poor China and India with their bad pollution recycles practically anything and everything.
Re:Where do the authors live? (Score:3, Interesting)
Why do all people living in the slum leave it at the earliest possible convenience if they can afford it?
Why do all people living outside the slum vote to demolish these settlements as soon as a political opportunity opens up?
If it is ecological wonderland, why do they have no sewage system, not even septic tanks?
If it is ecological wonderland, why do people die of disease, crime and poverty there?
If it is *regarded* as ecological wonderland, with such a low standard of living, filthy unsanitary conditions, high infant mortality, extreme crime levels, extreme poverty, garbage-digging humiliation, fire hazards - does it tell us something about the slum, - or does it rather tell us something about The Greens that rave and dream about living in a human-made hellhole?
I always suspected the Ecological Stalinists want us to go back into the caves. *Knowing* they dream of slums of totally impoverished illegal aliens is even more frightening.
Re:A Precious Illusion of Progress ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Wow, it's interesting to hear someone bring up the high concept of "progress". The way I remember it, the alternative to progress wasn't regression into the dark ages but the knowing recognition of limits to growth. We have to learn to live with each other and what we have now, the theory goes. The concept of progress is connected with the "frontier". You may have heard "America has always had a frontier" and statements like this are supposed to invoke some sort of vision of progress.. America, the ever expanding land of opportunity, and to most, that's exactly what it does. To some, though, the invocation of frontier concept makes them think of native Americans.. to these people the frontier is a place where wars are fought, where the natives give up their lands and their culture to the oppressors. These people would say America's frontier, right now, is Afghanistan and Iraq. You'll occasionally hear talk of bringing progressive government to these regions. Again, you're supposed to think of free elections and equal rights and economic expansion. America isn't stealing Iraq's oil and Afghanistan's gas reserves under the a flag of conquest.. they're building infrastructure so the native peoples can become a part of the world economic system.
I don't want to sound biased here, I think there's a little bit of truth in both philosophies.. I don't think its terribly fair to forcibly "elevate" people on the ladder of progress to get at their resources, but I also don't think it is terribly wrong to help lift people out of poverty when its incredibly obvious (to us) that they are materially rich and just don't have the means to utilize that wealth to increase their standard of living. I guess it's our motives they question, but I don't think selfish motives necessarily make an action immoral - they can be mutually beneficial.
And finally, as I'm a space nut, I have to say something about the "high frontier" and the promise of progress that it offers. The resources in Iraq and Afghanistan pale in comparison to the resources off-Earth and, in my opinion, there's literally no moral issues with acquiring and utilizing those resources to increase our standard of living. What, you might ask, could I possibly mean by increase our standard of living? America (and other western countries) have the highest standard of living in the world.. can't we be satisfied with what we've got? As you point out, I don't think that's human nature, nor is it desirable. And if such a limit to our growth is to be forced on us then I think *that* is a moral issue.
Imagine the price of platinum being no greater than the price of steel. Imagine the price of steel dropping so much that it is in the noise of the transportation costs (we're almost there!). Not everyone can own a private island.. but maybe one day everyone can own an island in space (Gerard O'Neil would concur). The seduction of progress from the ultimate frontier.. it's so alluring that it's not surprising there are some among us who see it as a hedonistic luxury, but most of our modern amenities seem that way to the rest of the world. Are they right?
Re:Where do the authors live? (Score:2, Interesting)
*Knowing* they dream of slums of totally impoverished illegal aliens is even more frightening.
It is indeed getting very worrying. The use of hate and fear is a well known political tool, and the increasing proficiency of these groups in using this tool along with media manipulation techniques is quite dangerous. They would have us hate and fear the air that we breathe (carbon emissions), our quality of life (just about everything), even hate and fear our own children (malthusian nuts, I'm looking at you).
There are issues with the environment, yes. We should reduce harmful pollutants, of course, and aim to reduce our general ecological footprint since we don't need to reduce biodiversity in order to thrive, not any more at least. Its just not best practise. But we don't need to go into a self flagellating spiral of self destruction in order to achieve that, far from it.
I find it interesting that you mention Stalinists also, since there is in my experience a strong connection between extreme leftist groups and eco-extremists. It is established doctrine among overtly communist organisations to infiltrate new movements and co-opt them into pushing their own agenda. Case in point the Green party here in Ireland has "redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor" as a central focus of their party constitution, what does that have to do with Green issues? Not to go all McCarthyist on the situation, but it is irksome to see perfectly good new ideas and movements utterly ruined by these bearded cultists.
Keyword here is teach (Score:4, Interesting)
However, I believe the key word here is 'teach'. There are many things that I admire in Bangkok that I'd like to introduce to the East End. Good street food at an affordable price rather than look-alike hamburger chains (as part of the informal economy), re-use of anything reusable, (often) better levels of respect for property and people, ingenuity that doesn't exist in the gadget-heavy west. Yes, there are rats and open-sewers as well, but that doesn't invalidate the rest.
Walkability is also a big factor. I live near a canal but many of my female neighbours won't use the towpath because no-one else does, of course, this is a downward spiral, so I'm trying to get it to be a little more attractive, then more people walk it.
Re:Population density (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Where do the authors live? (Score:5, Interesting)
You are missing the point.
Why do all people living in the slum leave it at the earliest possible convenience if they can afford it?
Of course they do, nobody is arguing that is not the case. But the opposite question also points out a truth - why do countryside dwellers move into the city slums at the earliest possible convenience if they can afford it? From TFA:
"Cities are so much more successful in promoting new forms of income generation, and it is so much cheaper to provide services in urban areas, that some experts have actually suggested that the only realistic poverty reduction strategy is to get as many people as possible to move to the city."
Cities encourage growth. The slums are a hive of economic activity, providing jobs, income, and increased standard of living. Not for you or I, but for the tens of millions of people in the third world who made the choice to move from the countryside to the city.
Why do all people living outside the slum vote to demolish these settlements as soon as a political opportunity opens up?
"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch". Middle and upper class residents don't want to live next to the lower classes. So where should the lower classes live?
If it is ecological wonderland, why do they have no sewage system, not even septic tanks?
If it is ecological wonderland, why do people die of disease, crime and poverty there?
TFA is discussing slums in third world nations and contrasting them with the countryside in those nations. Villages in the countryside in India and China generally do not have sewage systems. People also die of disease, crime and poverty in the countryside. Cities "promote new forms of income generation" - i.e. people move to cities because there are jobs and an opportunity to earn more than living in the countryside. In the third world (and even sometimes in the first), people do die of disease, crime and poverty, regardless of whether they live in a city slum or countryside. The comparison point here is not Vienna to a Mumbai slum - it is the Mumbai slum to the Maharashtra countryside that surrounds it.
Crime - Is the crime actually bad in comparison to, say, an American city? Here's a re-print of a newspaper editorial from The Harvard Crimson - Urban Poverty and Crime: Contrasting Boston and Mumbai, India [blogspot.com]:
"With over 18 million inhabitants, Mumbai has a population density four times that of New York City, and fully half of these inhabitants are homeless... Yet as of March 31, only 133 murders had been registered in all of Mumbai since New Years. This means that there has been one murder for roughly every 136,000 people this year, whereas Boston has had 16 murders in a city of under 600,000–roughly one murder for every 37,000 people."
does it tell us something about the slum, - or does it rather tell us something about The Greens that rave and dream about living in a human-made hellhole?
You are talking about Dark Greens [wikipedia.org] and trying to ascribe their views to the rest of society. The Green Party takes about 10% of the vote in German, but I can assure you that they do not aim to turn Germany into a "hellhole".
I always suspected the Ecological Stalinists want us to go back into the caves.
Again you project your fears about Dark Greens onto anyone who shows any concern for the environment.
Maybe you should consider some Libertarian benefits of the slums:
Re:Am I alone or (Score:5, Interesting)
I was immediately reminded of Isaac Asimov's Caves of Steel. In that novel the humans live in very, very compact fashion..... basically like dorms. One dorm per family. Shared bathrooms/toilets. They have to because there's not enough energy to live like we live, and support 20 billion people, so the humans must live in the most "green" way possible - minimally.
You can find someone to agree with any POV (Score:3, Interesting)
Go back a couple of hundred years and you can find monographs written saying what a wonderful thing black slavery was.
More recently, apartheid in South Africa provoked similar views - plenty of white South Africans didn't really see a problem with denying 80% of the population all sorts of rights.
This is just another example of someone saying "I'm rich and the status quo works in my favour. I am therefore going to defend the status quo, even if that means spouting on about how wonderful it is that all these poor people live in such terrible conditions".
Re:Where do the authors live? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Was Peter Calthorpe on crack? (Score:2, Interesting)
Why do you think it's necessary for them to drive at all?
The concept of the "footprint" is the reason (Score:4, Interesting)
Ecologism became a left-right issue about 10-15 years ago, when ecologists or socialists (or the rich) began to equal wealth with ecological destruction.
The entire concept of a "footprint" is deeply rooted in the belief that every man and woman has to have only some limited "right" to anything.
A "footprint", as in "carbon footprint" is a (very successful) political device to curb individual freedom and market mechanisms for resource acquisition and usage. It is a method of control, equalization and authority.
The "footprint" is an alternative and veiled description of the statistically normalized "need" of a human, influenced by authority and wishful thinking.
Just think about it: If you are driving an expensive sports car or living in a large mansion, you are not pursuing happiness through the wealth you acquired by talents, hard work, lucky investment or rich parents, you are just having a giant "carbon footprint".
Once people accept the concept of a "footprint", individual property is no longer free to use for the individual. It is at least immoral to exercise the benefits of your wealth, but from there it is only a few baby steps away from luxury taxes, licensing schemes (co2-caps anyone?) and outright disappropriation.
Environmentalists are already targeting SUVs and luxury cars in Europe and sometimes large private homes. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_D%C3%A9gonfl%C3%A9s [wikipedia.org]
"You are having a large footprint" is nothing else than "you are using more than your share of resources" (according to my definition of your "share") or "you are mis-using your share of resources" (giving me moral authority to take control over you). "Maintaining your footprint" is "keeping in line with the average".
This is exhibiting the key traits of communism: shared resources, limited individual freedom, harsh limits on private property, control of the indivudal based on minimum, average, statistical needs defined by a distant authority.
And the footprint of people in Elbonia is always lower than yours, so you need to abstain some more.
Re:Where do the authors live? (Score:2, Interesting)
Exactly.
Ideas that were regarded as "totally raving leftist lunatic" are now commonly referred to as only being "very lefty".
I could express any idea of Stalin himself on any leftist conference without drawing much criticism. I could quote Mao on every Green online forum and it would provoke no one to block my account. Quoting just Reagan would.
A few years down the road Mao and Stalin will look just like any other left politician. Just like the number of right wings or conservatives is decreasing. They are even today all "right wing lunatics".
Even today, "reducing immigration" is considered equal to "exterminating a million Jews" in public debate.
There's only a partly-socialist Middle (Obama, Merkel, Sarkozy), the socialist Left (Stalin, Mao)- and the Nazis. The perceived differences between those who "killed 40 million people" and those who "want to reduce welfare checks" is rapidly decreasing.
Re:Where do the authors live? (Score:3, Interesting)
Crime - Is the crime actually bad in comparison to, say, an American city? Here's a re-print of a newspaper editorial from The Harvard Crimson - Urban Poverty and Crime: Contrasting Boston and Mumbai, India [blogspot.com]:
"With over 18 million inhabitants, Mumbai has a population density four times that of New York City, and fully half of these inhabitants are homeless... Yet as of March 31, only 133 murders had been registered in all of Mumbai since New Years. This means that there has been one murder for roughly every 136,000 people this year, whereas Boston has had 16 murders in a city of under 600,000–roughly one murder for every 37,000 people."
I often see Boston get singled out in comparisons of this sort, most likely due to the unfortunate fact that the limits of the actual legally defined "City of Boston" are quite small compared with the metro area, and that the area contains a couple predominantly black neighborhoods that have been in a constant state of gang warfare since time immemorial. It takes a great statistical leap of faith to extrapolate that anomaly into how "safe" or "unsafe" the entire city of Boston is- if one were so inclined one could take the entire Boston Metro area into account and the per capita muder rate would drop through the floor. Don't expect anyone at the Harvard Crimson to acknowledge that detail, but they'll certainly use the statistics as an argument to get more gun control legislation passed -- as if anyone in Roxbury gives a fuck.
Re:Where do the authors live? (Score:2, Interesting)
>>>You just changed the definition of "libertarian" and then postulated what might happen if (your definition of) "libertarians"
No I didn't. I very clearly said, "Many libertarians are actually anarchists," and NEVER said all libertarians are anarchists. I did not redefine libertarianism but instead made an observation of the people that exist within my own Maryland Libertarian Party.
Although in retrospect I probably should replaced "many" with "some". It's only a few that are anarchists, while most Libertarians are like Ron Paul, supporting the idea of a small but limited government.
.
>>>a technological superpower society that basically invented almost every useful bit of technology
False. A lot of the inventions we think of as "American" are actually European imports. Like the printing press, the lightbulb, the camera, and so on. Even the very idea of libertarianism originated from Europe (from Scottish politics of the 1600s and Australian economists of the late 1800s/early 1900s). That's not to say Americans have not contributed, but I'd only give them half credit while reserving the other half to Europeans.
Re:Am I alone or (Score:4, Interesting)
Most of Africa is getting better, the distorted image you get from news reported from the war torn regions of Congo and Somalia doesn't change that. Please, allow your mind to be changed by this dataset.
Ha ha --- I don't derive my views from foreign news reports as I am African live in Africa - born here and have lived here my whole life, and have travelled to many African countries and into many African slums and spent a fair bit of time seeing the problems first-hand. My work involves, at times, working with local African communities. I think you might be the one who is confused by distorted media perceptions if you're buying into the notion that Africa is getting better. Statistics? We can look at actual statistics too, I do all the time, I've been studying Africa for years --- they also don't bear out your views. Africa is and remains, overall, a shithole, and no, it's not getting better.
Planet of Slums (Score:5, Interesting)
Slums are good for people who don't live in them.
This is one of the single most insightful comments in this thread. New urban megaslums exist because the political structures in those countries have failed to establish a civil society that redistributes the income more fairly among its inhabitants to create situational stability, upward mobility, without too much downward mobility below a certain floor [metafilter.com] . It is not so much a failure of wealth creation as a failure of political will, or a product of a definite politial will to clear the countryside so as to establish monoculture agriculture to grow cash crops for export to rich countries and to enrich a select few. To compare the slums of Lagos to expensive moored boats in Sausalito, and to imply that all slums are generating a transformation where "the progress is from hick to metropolitan to cosmopolitan [prospectmagazine.co.uk]", as Brand does, is to insult the intelligence of all but the most criminally naive and deludedly optimistic.
One of the single best books published within the recent few years about the new megaslums is Planet of Slums [amazon.com] by Mike Davis. He takes a little bit of a historical detour, illustrating that the phenomenon of urban megaslum is not unique to the late 20th century. There was a single example of amegaslum (that is, a place where 1m+ people subsisted on virtually no income for generations in the context of a markedly unequal society) and that was Dublin, Ireland, during the 19th century following the abolition of the Irish Parliament when the remote British Westminster Parliament basically deindustralised what had been one of the more advanced nations in Western Europe and left it subject to famines and depopulation. Anyway, Davis shows that during the late 19th century economists studied Dublin's inhabitants, wondering how it was that they managed to subsist on so little, and many of their arguments then echo those today from analysts across the political spectrum as they regard an increasingly slummy world where the City of Tomorrow is not made of gleaming postmodernist spies ala Dubai, but in fact is much smellier and grimier, and has no running water or sewage.
That literally billions of people precariously subsist in these cities today is a miracle. To imagine that they will survive the disruptions of the coming water and resource wars of the warming centuries is magnificently optimistic.
I'm copying here a blog post on Metafilter [metafilter.com] because it has some high-quality links, unlike the Brand/Kelly anti-thought drivel:
Re:Where do the authors live? (Score:4, Interesting)
Taxes don't target the elite, they hover above them. Everything you do only hits the middle class and by attacking them, you split their ranks into slum side and elite side.
I really like that line. The rich have enough left over to still be filth rich. The poor just get refunded in terms of public assistance. The middle see a distinct impact to their budget.
disclosure, I lean towards the FairTax myself.
Re:Am I alone or (Score:3, Interesting)
You've seen them, but have you lived in them?
I haven't seen them, but in Shantaram, by Gregory David Roberts, he paints them in a distinctly positive light. The main character is an Australian, at some point forced by circumstances to move into one of the slums. Before moving in he talks to two people from the slums. He realizes later that it was actually an interview: they were there to see if they were going to allow him into their community. Conditions looked delporable on the outside, but everyone lived as a big community, because their lives all depended on each other.
Obviously that's fiction, but it's based on the author's own experience in the slums in Mumbai.
Re:Been there and hated it (Score:5, Interesting)
The author talks about the benefits of high population density at all income levels. City dwellers use less resources than people in rural areas.
No one wants to live in a slum... except the millions of people moving from rural areas into slums every year. They're not all completely ignorant, it's just that the countryside around the city is even more of a hellhole than the slums. Thinking used to be that that wave of migration should be stopped at all costs but that has changed and in many country it's now policy to try and improve the situation in the slums instead. That's because planners have come to realize that by and large urban poverty's better than rural poverty. Education, sanitation, health, social mobility, environmental footprint, cities are superior to villages in almost every way.
I don't know where everyone got the idea that the author recommends that we turn regular cities into slums or that everyone should be poor. 90% of the upvoted comments are variations on "omg he sezs we should all live in slums. the author should try living in one, kthxbye." I haven't seen so many burning strawmen outside a Microsoft article in years.
P.S.: The only valid argument I could find in 10 pages was about transport costs but it still is wrong. Yes, transporting food costs energy. But it's not much. When people talk about local food in rich countries they aren't talking about growing vegetables on your roof. The problem is that vegetables from Virginia are shipped to Thailand for processing and then shipped back to Maryland.
Re:Am I alone or (Score:1, Interesting)
Then why do you claim to be a Californian in other recent posts?
Re:Am I alone or (Score:3, Interesting)
OK you caught me, you nailed it exactly --- I'm a member of Indian royalty who emigrated to USA California! Lol - you people are hilarious. Of course I'm African; there were hundreds of thousands if not millions of Africans already with Internet access back in '95, even Internet cafes were common then --- but don't let facts get in the way of you revelling in pure ignorance.