Slashdot Mirror
How Slums Can Save the Planet
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."
Slums? What a retarded story, yes I read it.
do others regard this as cynical as well?
Whenever I think "Slums" I think of the Sector 7 slums from FF7.
I wonder how many of the cited authors live in "conurbations made up of people who do not legally occupy the land they live on."
Quote: "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."
Can anyone in their right mind take this seriously? How much land, energy, water, produce and pollution is made outside cities in order to produce the food and material goods that are transporting into cities for city-dwellers to consume? It also seems reasonable that cities produce a more materialistic lifestyle than small towns.
Was Calthorpe's statement based on any actual research, or just armchair bluster?
Professional Idiot
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 in popular culture. This is the bombay 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.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
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 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" and seize them by eminent domain and hand them over to private developers who understand greed more than they understand the architecture and sociology of necessity.
I think it is VERY ill-advised to get sociologists and urban planners to be holding up the "slum model" to folks who are not particularly interested in going green.
"Hey guys, this is the FUTURE!"
"No thanks"
I don't see how it can ever be pleasant to live so close to other people. I'm all for energy efficiency, but there has to be a better way.
So a brief summary of the article would appear to be: affluent Westerners living in air conditioned, well educated, health insured cosmopolitan urban areas think that slums with no sewage facilities, running water, health care or protection against corruption or physical violence are a great way of housing migrant, poor populations. Said poor will have more opportunities in life if they live in urban slums than rural poverty. Rich authors of articles do not offer to move out of their million dollar homes to move into the slums, despite singing their praises.
http://www.channel4.com/4homes/on-tv/kevin-mccloud-slumming-it/ Quite an interesting documentary series on the benefits and shortcomings of living in slums in Mumbai. He goes and lives in Dharavi for a few weeks and describes his experiences from a micro and macro point of view.
Absolutely ridiculous. Live in your toilet, it's green...
Having been to Barbados, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic I'm fucking speechless.
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.
moox. for a new generation.
Living in a slum is good because it's environmentally friendly and uses less resources? He may as well argue that's it's even more environmentally friendly to die young.
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
So in other words, to reduce our carbon footprint (which may or may not do anything about global warming), living in a literal concentration camp is the best alternative to the Western of life?
Is that the IPCC's plan to stop global warming, reducing our life to as much as possible short of executing unwanted polluters?
The inventions, innovations we see in the slums are the result of extremely harsh conditions, high crime and an incredibly accelerated *evolution* of ideas. Because people that don't have those ideas are rapidly killed by mobsters, starved by hunger or consumed by disease.
Face it, slums are almost like concentration camps, without the gas chambers. With the Mob taking over the role of the SS, and complete with starvation, humiliation, disease, poverty and the inability to really leave the place. Some leave the slums, but most who were born there also die in that place.
Imprisoned Jews in the concentration camps built simple submachine guns and radio transmitters out of rubbish, literally. If occupants of a slum produce similar incredible feats of poor-engineering, it is a testament of human endurance, ingenuity and spirit prevailing even in hellish environments. It is telling us how strong and clever humans can be, if they need to. It is not the future standard model of urban living.
What exactly can we learn from slums? Recycling is good? Waste not want not? We already know that, and we even have a pretty good grasp of how to do it, but we don't... because we don't have to, as you say.
It's not always greener to endlessly recycle either, and to keep stuff going beyond its useful life, the way they do in the slums. Better to have modern, fast, energy efficient trains than one ancient diesel with passengers hanging off the sides. Better to replace your crappy old car with a new one that pollutes less and uses less than half of the energy to run. Better to figure out how to build comfortable and energy efficient housing than to recycle your wood and steel into uncomfortable shacks. People in slums don't do any of that, not because they are stupid or because it makes no sense, but simpy because they have no options. We do. I bet there are a few clever tricks being cooked up in the slums, but I seriously doubt that those have great relevance for us. A bit like the advise given by the homeless guy in "The day after tomorrow", to stuff newspapers into your clothes to help you keep warm. Seriously, I think we can do better than that, for ourselves as well as for people living in those slums today.
I fully agree that we too will have to learn to live by necessities rather than wants, but I would counter the article with the statement that there is nothing the slums can teach us about future urban living... except that we had best make sure our future isn't all slums. Noble savages die very, very young...
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
I would rather subjugate an entire continent into forced labour to maintain my country's standard of living than live in a slum.
Worst. Train of thought. Ever.
Lots of people are making the entirely reasonable and correct point that slums are not very nice places to live. Nevertheless, the article is correct in saying that slums engender efficient, low-impact living, when compared to the lifestyles of the rich (anyone reading this is almost certainly rich, in global terms). I've heard various people say things along the lines of "you want to see an environmental disaster area - go and look at a slum". This thinking attempts to sidestep the responsibility of the rich by blaming the poor, who are in fact relatively guiltless. We might not want to live there, but we should jettison the popular idea that slums are bad ecologically, as it is the reverse of the truth.
http://savingiceland.org
Here's my translation of it:
Rich people could learn how to safe money from watching poor people.
Seriously? All you can learn from poor people about money is how they spend it when they -have no choice- in how they spend it.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
I agree with many of the posters here that say most of the current slums are horrific. Also, I live in a poor part of London and have just returned from Bangkok where I visited and walked through some of their slums.
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.
On y va, qui mal y pense!
The best way that I've seen for enabling this segment of society to grow and prosper and have success is the availability of education. Credit will not help people who have no marketable skills.
It is Fascist. Try to pass through a slum with a million people without sewers and see how green it is. Science without considering human wellbeing is not a good thing.
Math is beautiful... e^(pi*i)+1=0
Platinum is already extremely expensive. The technology to mine it in space mostly already exists, at least on the large scale. I'm not of the opinion that space will be an economical venture any time soon. Not before we have a real revolution in energy production, or it becomes really feasible for a small group of entrepreneurs to send some really damn good robots off-planet.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
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".
I live in India. If this is the future, I'm not interested.
This article just make me sick. Any discourse involving slums without considering the effects of poverty just comes out wrong. Of course people living in slums " have minimum energy and material use". They have to. They have no choice. With such a small amount of resources that the people in the slums have they are forced to use them as efficient as possible. Something we, wealthy people, don't need to. At least in our own narrow perspective. We, the rich, aren't less energy efficient because we happen to live less dense. It because we feel like we can afford it. I can go by car, not because it's the only means of traveling, but it's more convenient and it doesn't mean I have to refrain from eating a couple of days. A enormous amount of the worlds population don't have this luxury. One proof of this missintepration of why people in densely populated areas are more energy efficient is that rich people in, for example, Manhattan (as it is used in the article) will most likely travel a lot by taxi and several times a year, if not monthly, travel by air. The reason for this: because they have the resources to do so. It seems like we're benign to use whatever resources that are available to us. I don't want force everyone to live like those in Rosinha, Rio de Janeiro. Neither do I want everyone to put a strain on the world like the financial elite. Judging by the growth of the world population and the state of the environment, we, rich and lucky, need to learn to use what we have in a much sustainable and efficient manner. We might have to look to the poor for this knowledge, but don't think that they are more efficient for no other reason then a dire need to be so.
"Is that the IPCC's plan to stop global warming, reducing our life to as much as possible short of executing unwanted polluters?"
Jebus how far can you strech something to suit your politics. The IPCC is a scientific review panel, if you want to attack the international politics of climate change by linking them to concentration camps you should at least know the acronym you are looking for is the UNFCCC.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
The problem with that is that not all trash has the same value.
Beverage cans are made of aluminum, which has the highest price among common garbage items. No one will want to waste their time recycling plastic bottles if there are aluminum cans available. There's very little value in recycling plastic which will most probably end in a landfill, no matter how many people are gathering garbage.
Empty plastic bottles float in water and get washed away to the nearest water course after any heavy rain and ultimately end in the ocean
You could fit the entire population of the earth very comfortably in an area the size of Texas, thats a plot of land for each man, woman and child.Obviously something like that would need careful planning and probably subsurface transport infrastructure etc, not that
No you couldn't - even with careful planning. It's impossible for 7 billion people+ and growing. Getting the potable water there and handling the sewage - even if you had unlimited funds. That's the plan breaker right there.
Their food and energy needs could be readily taken care of by using the rest of North America, leaving everywhere else completely empty.
Ah. Just out of curiosity, how would you get all of that there? Truck and trains? All those truck and trains converging into one mega-city?
Not gonna happen - even if this were Star Trek days and they could do it with those flying transport thingys.
I live in one of the biggest cities of the world, and that would be São Paulo, Brazil. The population is around 12 million people. The city core (which actually compromises a huge stake of the total city area) is pretty much highly developed (except for the huge daily congestion). Now, if you go to the outskirts, you will reach the slums. Have you ever been to one, I ask you? Do you really think it's green? You don't really know what you're saying then. First, most of the slums here are located in the southern portion of the city - which compromise hills, and, guess what, forests. However, the green hills no longer exist. They have been swept by slums. This also happens in Rio, just google for pictures and you'll know what I mean.
Slums don't have piped water. That means the population will dispose at nearby rivers or land, causing irreversible environmental damages. Slum "houses" are poorly constructed wood made structures. Now guess what happens when it rains? The water force takes everything downhill, houses and garbage. The avalanche destroys everything on its ways. People get killed. The garbage ends up on rivers anyway, or clogging the city sewage, causing massive floods. How green is that?
There are a bunch of counter arguments on the "slum is green" stupid theory. I could spend hours talking about them, but I think it is also worth mentioning the social side.
Hell, would you leave your comfortable house now to dwell in a place which is even worse than tree houses? Dirty? Dangerous? Rain prone?
Why don't you ask India whether they like their slums, sir?
I am sorry, but in theory it might even sound a little bit cute. In practice, you ain't got no damn idea of what you sayin'.
There are plenty of resources, there are too many people. When people start praising the virtues of living like slum rats, you know society is beginning to lose all perspective. Overpopulation isn't some far-fetched future problem, it has been a problem for quite some time now.
"Slums are good because they're green"?!?!
WTF? Anyone think any of the purveyors of that absolute stupidity ever lived in anything other than a sheltered suburban home with no exposure to any hardship whatsoever? And their Mommy and Daddy took care of all their needs, paying for their college "education", after which they got a "hard" job typing on an (energy-sucking!) computer at some useless "think" tank where they could "save the planet from the EVIL humans"? Clueless dimwits.
Calling someone who thinks that slums are good a shit-for-brains idiot is an insult to every single turd ever pinched out over the entire lifespan of the Universe.
"The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was negotiated on the basis of initial IPCC findings. The UNFCCC was established and signed by almost all countries in 1992 at the Rio Summit."
So UNFCCC exists only because of the IPCC, which tells us something about their relationship.
I would distrust this organization just for the six-letter acronym. Knowing it is the in^h^hmanifestation of IPCC makes things even worse.
Why do we have a scientific research panel, when the science is settled? How scientific is that and why should we continue to tarnish the reputation of science with this global warming agenda?
"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 [which is one-fourth that of] Boston" [...] consider some Libertarian benefits of the slums: [...]Despite the lack of effective policing, crime rates are lower than one would expect
By those statistics, of course private security and a private judicial system would result in fewer registered crimes: private prosecutions, private trials, and private sentences wouldn't be registered with the central government.
Entrepreneurs generally use private security in preference to the (somewhat corrupt) police
But what happens when two private security firms engage in coercion (violence or fraud) against each other?
I suppose Socialists find slums desirable.
Everyone can be equal in their poverty in a slum. True equality for all is human destiny!
Why was this modded "Troll"? Socialism is all about "sharing the wealth" and "income redistribution", described as "economic justice" and "social justice".
Most of the world lives closer to the conditions of the Mumbai slums than they do to the average US suburbanite, so when all this "equalization" occurs, do you think the average standards will end up being closer to the standards enjoyed by the average US suburbanite, or to a Mumbai slum resident?
It's *much* easier to reduce significantly the standards enjoyed by a few hundred million than it is to raise significantly the standards of many billions to achieve equality.
Think about that simple fact whenever someone goes on about how Socialism isn't that bad, and how "social & economic justice" is a great thing and what that may mean to yourself, your children, and their children.
And no, this isn't a zero-sum game; raising living standards in one part of the world does not necessarily mean that some other part must go through a reduction in those standards. This is class-warfare guilt-tripping for political manipulation and not based on actualities.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Since everyone is equally miserable, Liberals can take great joy in the success of their socioeconomic theory - economic equality through equal suffering.
Do people become environmentally friendly in a large scale only when they don't have any other choice left?
Living in a slum might be "green"*, but it is a horrible situation. People there often either depend on environmentally friendly actions (recycling) or can't do anything else (having/driving a car). Does it say something about us?
*except for the overpopulation and constant growth of the slums themselves, which often are invasions on protected lands.
The good, the evil and the vacuum tubes.
This reminds me of the BIG BALL OF MUD theory by Brian Foote and Joseph Yoder at the Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Clicky the linky above to read the whole paper. It is full of useful insights for many disciplines besides computer science.
We are saving the planet? From what?
From people? From pollution? From cute grass-jumpin cats? From what?
Why does every spoiled left-wing liberal arts major tags their ideas and projects as something that will "save" earth? Is the new eco religion that self-centered?
About the article: It's funny to see how the radical left (I'm not from the Right, before anyone confuses me with a Pro-Life Republican, I'm not even from the US and I don't vote right-wing where I live) has turned sides on the poverty issue. Things turned from "we should all save the poor from the destruction caused by the heterossexual white man, we should distribute the wealth that was stolen from the poor" into "the poor should stay poor to avoid damaging the environment" after what, one decade?
Nobody can talk about saving the planet until it's PROVEN that the planet needs to saved from anything. This kind of silly tagging reminds me of how Democrats tag their bills with names like "fairness" and "recovery". Until you recover something or bring fairness to a situation, shut up. Don't brag before the results and don't polarize the discussion with charged names. Democrats should respect the discussion and think for at least one moment that 1. They might be wrong, 2. Their solution might not achieve the desired results, 3. The results itself might not be necessary or even prejudicial to the actual issue.
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
"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.
TFA is obviously written by someone that has never even seen a slum, nevermind lived in one.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
For me environmentalism is all about quality of life. Energy efficiency makes for an easy example: the savings in electricity cost should approximately cover the increased capital cost, so we have a net added value in the form of reduced pollution and reduced use of energy resources. Those benefits are to society rather than me individually, but doing it this way is not sacrificing my standard of living much and if everyone is doing this kind of thing then in the grand scheme it comes back to me eventually.
Sure it's not always so clear-cut, but examples are supposed to be straight forward. Some things being put forward in the name of environmentalism don't have a good enough cost vs. benefit, for example electric cars are useless with even a 1 hour charge time because it means the car is impractical as anything other than a form of local transport (on the other hand maybe we could swap in pre-charged batteries, but I digress).
Therefore, the idea of living in slums to be more environmental is that we should massively sacrifice our standard of living in order to avoid sacrificing our standard of living. Huh?
But... The article doesn't say that. I doesn't actually say slums are a good thing. I only says slums have SOME good things, which we can learn from. Unfortunately it does also highlight that some slums aren't necessarily quite the cesspools we imagine them to be from watching Slumdog Millionaire, but this is just confusing his message, it's not saying slums are some way forward. It's there in the title: "The squatter cities that have emerged can teach us much about future urban living".
Credit will not help people who have no marketable skills.
I believe it's called a "student loan".
Sure being poor is always green but not by choice and claiming the green virtues of a slum town isn't going to mean squat to any one. The biggest thing that needs to be done for pollution and population health is to get people out of their cars.
I wonder how many blacks would be willing to return to Ian Smith's Rhodesia versus living in Mugabe's Zimbabwe.
An article seems to bring out a higher quantity/percentage of quality comments.
One mans slum is another mans home.
So what does all this really mean?
Could it be that Haiti doesn't really have a problem from the quake?
They don't really need all the money that's been and being collected up, now do they?
So where do you think the money is really going?
Guess my name.
I bet Stewart Brand doesn't live in a slum.
lux
If the vast majority of the worlds population becpme more wealthy then they will demand and get a better standard of living, and use more of the worlds resources. If they stay poor then they will stick to riding bicycles instead of driving SUVs.
The slums are not eco-friendly because they are slums but because the people there have a low standard of living. Burning materials in a non well-controlled way, having houses with little isolation only works in areas where people throw away a lot of burnables and the climate is warm.
Maybe that dude is an architect who can design something good, but he has no idea whatsoever what it takes to sustain a city and the people there.
'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.'"
That's just a complete steaming pile of crap.
There's a rather inhumane experiment that has been performed many times down through history that proves this without any doubt whatsoever. It's repeatable, it is completely scientific and valid, you will get the same results over and over.
Wall a city off, or besiege it, whatever, so that no external sources are brought in. Now, see how well these "low impact" people do. Big hint, they starve, run out of fuel, run out of water, etc.
Big city dwellers, whether in the scrap constructed slums or the penthouses or in the apartments in between, use the same amount of resources, it is just one or more steps removed from where they are at, they are using all the land, energy, resources, etc, that anyone else is, just by proxy and delivery truck or delivery wire or delivery freight train or delivery pipeline, and to a large extent by economic exploitation, forced true wealth transference, from other folks, outside of the city, via their physical labor and governmental theft and/or severe underpayment or compensation of natural resources.
They don't "exist" in any real sense divorced from outside the city resources. That's some fairy tale I have seen repeated many times by people with no clue whatsoever. Typically I'll read some drivel like "well, I get by with just walking or using my pogo stick or riding the tube, so there, I R just so much greener and "low impact" than you are!!".
Just clueless. Completely misses how stuff works or where things come from or what real energy and resources are really needed in order so that they can commute by skateboard or rickshaw or "shared taxi" and "live".
These slum dwellers exist on scrap from what stuff is imported to the more affluent urban dwellers. Remove those imports, eventually even the scrap waste users "go broke", their wealth becomes depleted, and their existence becomes *completely untenable*. Sure they recycle, so do a lot of other people outside the city, so what's the point there, you can only recycle if you live in a city??
And here's another clue, most of those people in the green slums work as hard as they can in order to get the heck out of that "green" slum, because they live there and know it major league *sucks*.
And a lot of them would have never moved to some urban slum or existence in the first place if their rural areas weren't run into the ground economically in the first place by urban centric internal exploitation and colonialism or imperialistic policies. They get their resources stripped bare by governmental and business exploitation, it gets shipped to these big cities, then they become desperate, move to where what were their resources got shipped to.
Colonialism doesn't necessarily have to mean as the only definition that nation A goes and takes over and exploits nation B, it frequently means nation A subset b urban scene exploits the heck out of nation A subset c rural areas and peoples. and they can be so overly exploited that they become desperate refugees, even if they get a few bones thrown back at them by the urban scene, it frequently won't be enough.
"...environmentally benign form of human settlement."
Except when you consider human beings as part of the environment, that is.
'Modern' squatter-slums / shantytowns ("periferias") are "The Lord of The Flies" brought out of fiction and into dwelling. Warren-humans. Goldrush camps or Tent Cities. "Urbanized". Essential (Raw. Practically chafed :) ) humanity in new collective environments. "Rousseau's Savages" gone Social (minus the "nobility, mostly). The "Nietszchean" Triumph of the Lumpen. The Unterklasse. (A Contradiction, see? :p ) Shakespeare's "How noble, this creature, man"... etc.).
The LOTF ;) was, among other things, a teacher's denounciation of what happens to children when they are left without responsible adult guidance, tutelage, and care. They revert to Natural Law and what fragments of civility they are able to maintain or recover. It was a reference to (then) Modern Society - and delinquence.
"Periferias" are what happens to people uprooted from their physical and social environments, transplanted into new ones, having to cobble up rock-bottom social contracts on-the-run. They're usually collections of (more-or-less forcibly) transplanted people left to fend for themselves. "The State" makes it a point of ignoring them. Specially ignoring safety and all basic services. The solutions and organizations that sprout depend on the shreds of cultural social tools that survive and remain viable in the new environment.
People are squeezed into concentrations and densities that would drive rats insane. With as little support as possible. Except for eventual violent incursions by "the state". Reasons don't really matter. Who also enforces the perimeter-lines. Directly or through semi-formal surrogates : crime cartels, militias, death-squads, general bullying.
Everyone is in everyone else's face. Learning to ignore is a survival trait. As is learning to endure. To make-do. And dodge.
Any sofistication (of social principles or interaction) usually consists alien fragments meticulously maintained as one would potted plants or hothouses. Ground rules are usually rough-hewn, coarse, brutal and short. Oh, and sensitive. As in "touchy". Really twitchy.
Rather interesting, to come to considering that a paradigm for urban humanity. Massed, abandoned, virtually unserved, uprooted humanity. The opposite should be the case. But societies' governments everywhere were (and are) too occupied looting and serving themselves from the spoils (squatters included, usually). It should not be so. Nor should it be an excuse for failing to do things right from the beginning.
Globalized Anthropological Sociology ? Neat.
But bound to be opposed and reviled by the extant more provincial varieties, alas!
I suggest we ship Stewart Brand and Kevin Kelly over to India post-haste.
Boys, you have to put put your money where your mouth is.
If they like slums so much they are free to go live in one, as for me and my family we will stay on our 120 acre's. sure we may use more electricity and water. but we are doing our part for energy and water conservation, we have two 100ft by 40 ft steel buildings whose roofs are covered with solar cells. we sell so much electricity during peak times that our electric bill every month is about -$140. part of that electricity is stored by battery and powers our water well pump. Since we have an all electric house, we are almost completely off the grid. we have no water bill no electrical bill.
there are 10 types of people in this world, those who read binary and those who don't. which are you!
There are two kinds of opportunity available in the slums that you will not find in the country: the opportunity to prey upon many people in a small area, and infrastructure. Bring transportation and communication infrastructure to the people in the hills rather than forcing them to concentrate around your hubs and they will have all the opportunity they can handle.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You do NOT find out what it is like to be blind by closing your eyes. You do NOT find out what it is like to be homeless by sleeping for one night on the street. You do NOT find out what it is like to be disabled if you once sat in wheel chair with a broken leg.
All these things are temporary experiences that you can end or know they will end. The real thing NEVER ends.
It is one of the reasons that poverty is so poorly represented in the media. Nobody in media is poor. Even if they were poor before, you quickly forget about that. And temporary poverty as say a student doesn't even begin to count. Poverty is NOT having to use a washing machine that has fallen apart, it is the washing machine having fallen apart and no option to replace it (and laundromats are EXPENSIVE and cost more time). It is a race to the bottom where you can easily end up in a situation that every advance you make becomes a step backward. Get a job, can mean 100 increase in income but 200 increase in expenses because of the need of clean, clothes and transportation.
Now it is true that in slums some people rise above it all. But it seems a waste full process. Millions of people living in slums to produce a handful that rise out of it? Oh yeah, that is using resources efficiently. And in rich areas, how many people rise above it? Would suck if it is the same or even a higher percentage wouldn't it? Quick, how many doctors does a slum produce versus a decent area?
No, there is nobility in the poor. That is just what the rich want to believe so they can feel better about hoarding all the resources.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
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 . 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", 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 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 because it has some high-quality links, unlike the Brand/Kelly anti-thought drivel:
Da Blog
Hooray for capitalism! What an asshole. A privileged white male from America lecturing us on what creative thing slums are!
"If you want to know what happens to you when you die, go look at some dead stuff."
Didn't think so.
Easy for Stewart Brand to say all this nonsense from his home in zip code 94965 ....
http://www.movoto.com/neighborhood/ca/sausalito/94965.htm
People in the country own more land.
But they use fewer resources.
Your land use is not just your dwelling. It's roads, hospitals, schools, stores, bars, gov't agencies and so forth.
If anything, cities use more land because they offer more services and cater to people who want more things like fast food, nail polishing, designer haircuts, etc.
How this idiotic and unscientific article got on the front page of Slashdot... I'm guessing it's just an easy pitch for troll batting practice.
Futurist Traditionalism
The giant urban slum is a phenomenon of the last 50 years. Fifty years ago, New York City was the biggest city in the world. It had poor people, but most of them had real jobs. New York is now in 13th place (one can argue over how to count), and the top 5 are all third world cities surrounded by slums. This is called "over-urbanization".
There's a step up from the "favelas out to the horizon". It's the "housing project". The better-organized big cities have vast numbers of cheap concrete high-rise apartment blocks, resembling US housing projects of the 1960s. That's what Tokyo, Beijing, Hong Kong, and Shanghai residential areas look like. It's an efficient way of warehousing a large number of humans. Whether it's a good life depends more on the people than the architecture. (Luxury apartment buildings and housing projects cost about the same to build per room for the basic structure. The luxury building may cost less to run, because vandalism and crime will be lower and the number of children per household will be lower.)
The US is unique in having most of its population in suburbs. Only cheap oil made that possible.
Sounds like the latest version of those who don't have live in poverty romanticizing the lives of the peasantry.
I bet that, as usual, the peasants and the poor don't feel particularly blessed.
As a westerner living in Jakarta, I am very familiar with slums around here, and believe me, the article is just romanticizing the whole thing. Sure, yay, slums are green. You know why recycling is a way of life there? Because it's the only income some people have. 30.000 rag pickers in Mumbai you say? Well, anyone think they're doing it because they want to be "green"? Fuck no, they're doing it because it puts their meal on the table.
Just for fun, think about this: You have a wife, and a child. You are living in, say, Jakarta, Indonesia. If you are lucky, every day you have $2 to spend on *everything*. If you aren't lucky, you have $0. Your "house" consists of plywood, 2x4's, maybe some sheet metal, and whatever else you have managed to fish out of the river that you live next to, that is filled with human waste, industrial waste, and god knows what else. This same river has a tendency to flood, so every so often you will have to take whatever belongings you have, and find refuge someplace else. That is, if the police hasn't performed what's colloquilly called an "eksekusi" where the original land owners want the slums cleared. In case the slum residents are unwilling, mysterious fires often solve the problem of them not wanting to move. Oh, I forgot, your trash picking that you do, every day, to bring money home? Yeah, you have to pay the local thugs "protection" money. So in the event that you get lucky and manage to make $2, expect to have to pay half to them. So, there you are with your dollar. Now you have three mouths to feed, clothe, and one child to educate. Of course, you cannot afford to educate your child, so he or she will never get any sort of good job. Food will consist of a bowl of rice. Maybe some veggies if you're lucky. If you're really lucky, a small piece of chicken. Split three ways. You bathe in the same river you shit in, you wash your clothes in the same river you shit in. Your clothes, by the way, are hand-me-downs, or free "event" t-shirts and shorts. You walk barefoot through the most disgusting things. You walk miles daily, barefoot, until your feet are so calloused up you could stand on knife points and not feel it. If you get ill, or injure yourself, the chances of seeing a doctor or the inside of a hospital are next to none.
Yeah, I see how that's being "green", how that is so "cool" and "urban" and how slums are such a good thing, and how slums are so incredibly self-organising. Some people need to have the blinds removed from their eyes, and see things for themselves. Yet, I want to bet the authors of the respective articles haven't set a damn food inside a slum for longer than the few hours it took to do their "research". Live it for a few months and see if you're still so enthousiastic.
There is no sig...
There is a non-trivial amount of people is western countries that call themselves environmentalists who idealize non-industrial, tribal type lifestyle. They will talk about how screwed the planet is and how we all need to revert to more or less a pre-industrial society to save everything. Ok, well you'll notice two things:
1) Their ranting is not backed up by facts and research. It is just general "We are going to use up everything and are doomed!" kind of stuff.
2) None of them are volunteering to do this. They all still want to live their comfortable, rich, lifestyles.
So just ignore them. They have no clue what they are talking about. They'll be happy to tell you all about saving the environment, while doing little to nothing themselves. They'll be happy to tell you how great slum living is, from their upper Manhattan apartment.
These are the same types who said (and sometimes still say) that we needed to write off India and China and so on, because of a coming food catastrophe (back in the 70s). There was no way we could feed everyone in the world, in particular India and China were so populous that they were just going to have to face mass starvation. Write them off, save ourselves, etc, etc.
Of course some scientists (and one in particular, Norman Borlaug) decided that was a load of shit, worked on food technology and spreading it around. The disaster did not happen, and it seems probably won't.
Ignore these jackassess who have lived nothing but a privileged life yet want to tell the rest of the world how to live. I personally have faith in science and human ingenuity. I think we will continue to find ways to overcome our problems, to make life better.
The answer seems to be to make life better for all those people. As quality of living goes up, population growth seems to go down. We have low, even negative, growth in many first world nations.
Many people look to basic biology to try and predict how humans will react. Well, with single cell organisms, the more resources there are, the faster they grow. If you take something like a bacteria or yeast and give them an ideal growth environment with more or less unlimited resources they'll go nuts. They'll grow and grow and grow until they deplete the resources and populations crash. The only way to deal with it is to regulate the amount of resources they get.
Well, turns out humans are a bit more complex than single cell organisms and don't quite work that way. Our growth rates are the highest in places with low standards of living, not high ones. In places where we have everything we need, we voluntarily curb our growth. I mean look at Europe. They could have massively more growth than they do. They've got the space, the food, etc that families could be cranking out babies non-stop and they still would have most of them survive. They could grow like nothing else (for awhile at least).
Yet they don't. Growth rate is low, even negative. This isn't because people are dying off left and right, it isn't because the government is trying to force people not to have kids, it is a voluntary thing because the individuals don't feel the needs to have as many, if any, children.
So it would seem that if we want humans to moderate their population growth, the answer is more prosperity, not less. The answer is to trying and bring up the standard of living of everyone, so they don't feel the need to have so many children. More resources, not less.
Um, yeah. That's because the people living in slums are dirt-bloody-poor. But it's interesting that someone would describe such dismal living conditions in positive terms: I've long suspected that much of environmentalism is nothing more than crypto-Luddism or -primitivism, and this only adds to that suspicion.
Liberty in your lifetime
Great, now I have the Bee Gees and Elton John vying to see who can get stuck in my head.
Islands in the stream that is what we are ...versus...
No one in between how can we be wrong
Sail away with me to another world
And we rely on each other, ah ha
Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids
In fact it's cold as hell
And there's no one there to raise them if you did
Thanks a bunch!
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
'The magic of squatter cities is that they are improved steadily and gradually by their residents,'
The rivers and streams near these settlements are shit in, washed in, used as a garbage dump and polluted to high heaven until the very area around reeks with a foul stench and the water is turned black. IMPROVED? WTF.
Maximum density? Y'know what, let's build 10 square foot apartments for everyone, that'll minimise their land use! Hurrah. Dumbass.
RECYCLING?? This is what I hate the most. Y'know how they recycle? Gather all electronic components in a pile and set fire to it. To extract the small quantities of gold and what not used in it. Why, that's ridiculous, extremely toxic and inefficient you say? Yes. It's stupid and there are people who do it.
There are lines for and fights over water. Clean water is rare if at all present. The ONLY way it produces less pollution is if there isn't a full factory in the place. But, there are plenty chemical producing tiny huts and plastics and 'recycling' places. All generating a tiny amount of pollution and vastly less goods than a factory would. The inefficiency cancels out the low pollution. BTW, even with low pollution comparatively, the entire area stinks bad, it would choke any non-local entering it.
Most environmentally...this guy needs a swift kick in the nuts. It spews pollution everywhere around and just take a look at it on google maps. The damn brown haze will block the view.
The author is a massive moron.
I read the article, and I see _some_ value in it, but it misses the mark by praising slums too much, and not connecting them well to the world people able to read the article live in. How many people want to live in a space of less than 30 square feet? (which is how much space you get with a million people per square mile).
We actually already do quite of bit of recycling and re-use. I shop at thrift stores relatively often, and you can find some incredible bargains if you're willing to look. Over a period of a year or so for I bought an entire collection of around 10 pieces of old Revere Ware (steel and copper pots and pans) that was probably already 40 years old and in great condition that'll easily last another 30-40 years. It easily cost less than $40. You can find similar deals for construction materials at places like Habitat for Humanity re-use centers. To many people think old=bad, and new=good.
I think much of the point is, we can already make better use of the "waste" we produce instead of producing more and disposing of the old. To some degree I'll bet Craiglist and Ebay have only increased re-use. I know I've certainly bought a lot of used items on both sites that I wouldn't have had they not existed. The point being that we don't have to live like people do in slums. We can learn something from people that are forced to be efficient though.
AccountKiller
I think the author completely overlooked the issue of sanitation.
Slums have no sewer treatment systems. All of the sewer is deposited directly in the local water system or local soil.
Slums also have no garbage management. The garbage is usually just piled up somewhere in open air, and sometimes just left on the streets.
It just takes a quick visit to any slum anywhere in the world to see that it is no way to live.
The most ecologically sound place to put people is underground. The dead don't reproduce (though, surprisingly, their number increase every day) and they don't use energy, food, or other resources.
That doesn't mean that it's a good way to live.
What do you expect from people who believe food comes from the grocery store? Arithmetic???
Seastead this.
The answer seems to be to make life better for all those people. As quality of living goes up, population growth seems to go down. We have low, even negative, growth in many first world nations.
Bingo, thats it in a nutshell. The future lies not in slums but in creating conditions such that everyone experiences or has the chance to experience a "first world" lifestyle. This is likely to send many environmentalists into a fit, but it is the only possible solution barring mass extermination which some *cough malthusians* might in fact favour.
Can the earth handle such a solution? Sure, the earth doesn't care one way or the other, its a ball of insensate rock. Will the resources available be sufficient? Yes, if they aren't immediately available more difficult to reach ones become economical to plumb. As far as energy goes we are swimming in the stuff, literally, food, there is already more than enough to make sure everyone has a good meal three times a day. The rest comes down to planning and socioeconomic strategy.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
Stewart Brand has been going on about this for years. I don't know anyone who would want to live like these people have to. In fact, I challenge Brand to go live as a squatter in Africa.
What a maroon.
Modding up a summary to five that is a clear result of misreading the story only makes the moderator seem strange. The author does not say that slums are great--only that they are preferable (to the people who move to them!) than the rural poverty they replace. The author lives in a houseboat in an area that was once considered a slum....
There are probably towns in the US that have few if any homeless people. But many areas have large numbers of homeless and certain areas refuse to shelter them. Southern Florida is one such area. The reasoning is that any little thing done to help the homeless may well attract many thousands more. It is like the feeding the pigeon theory. The more you feed the more you get.
And that line of thought has very,very, dangerous roots. When eugenics was in vogue it included the notion that medical care or death prevention allowed the unfit to reproduce. The homeless were considered unfit as they were considered defective in their ability to meet social norms. This actually led to the slaughter of large numbers of Americans. For example one mental hospital deliberately used tuberculosis infested milk to see how many inmates would have the ability to resist the disease. If they got sick they were not treated and the disease took them to their graves.
The tension remains. Ft.Lauderdale has about 8,000 homeless on a typical day. If they are allowed to build huts the fear is that many more will come as the climate here is less harsh. Neglect can be a form of mass murder.
My first proposal since the author is so enamoured of slums is to move the bastard there. I have long suspected that militant greenies would like to lower our standard of living and take away anything that makes our lives more convenient. This particular greeny has proven that he is just like that. So lets start with him. Take away all his money and possessions, strip him of his citizenship and put him in a slum with no prospect of getting any outside help. See how he feels about it in 5 years (if he's survived). Fucker!
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Hooray! the second person in two days with a clue on /.
There is some hope after all...and it's not Obi-Wan
This article must be a contender for the gold medal of stupidity. Anyone who would say slums are good for the planet obviously doesn't give a damn about humanity. Anyone who has been in or anywhere near a third-world slum knows they are a cesspool of sewage, disease, malnutrition, illiteracy, poverty, infant mortality, and crime. People who live in slums would leave them in a second if they had a chance. The lifespan of people in slums is probably the shortest of any urban setting. But I guess if you think slums are good for the planet, then people dying early is a good thing. Only a sick misanthropist could advocate slums.
The rest of you would pollute a lot less then!
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
I'm Stewart Brand, and I'm a total fucking idiot.
No fair, you RTFA'd! You've got a lot to learn about Slashdot etiquette. Here's a link to a very thought provoking video in which Brand addresses this and some related topics:
http://fora.tv/2009/10/09/Stewart_Brand_Rethinking_Green
I didn't RTFA, but based on the summary, I've come to the conclusion that bums are the ultimate green people. Even more so than those slum-dwellers. They own very little. They eat very little. They sleep on small sections of sidewalk, pavement or a park bench... It's the ultimate in no-impact to the planet.
Hurrah! Let's all be bums.
Slums are ecofriendly ? Are you nuts ? Have you lived in one or anywhere close to one They may be energy efficient but that is not by choice but by bloody necessity .. because there is neither energy, nor the money to buy them.
Life is hard, tough and painful in a slum and those who live there do so because they have no other choice. Given half a chance any self respecting slum dweller would leave it on the first available opportunity. But circumstances are such -- and this is not the place to go into the causes of urban despair -- that they have no way to move out. So they grin and bear it ... and try to make a virtue out of necessity. So let us not have any illusions about the "beauty of slums"
Insight into much, Influence over nothing !
Many people have been working to bring Internet connectivity to rural areas of developing nations with this goal in mind. Social innovators like Grameen Bank have also focused on the rural poor. We will hopefully invent sustainable means of bringing electric power to villages.
Perhaps we can one day solve the urban slum problem by solving the rural poverty problem.
"the science is settled?"
Sigh, look up the origin of that slogan. It comes from the well known tabacoo "scientist" and all round anti-science propogandist Fred S Singer who falsely claimed to be quoting Tim Wirth. Your politics is allowing you to be played like a fiddle by lobbyists who think of you as nothing more than a useful idiot. If I am wrong then simply point to ANY climate scientist who has made that statement.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
You are right, the correct quote was
"The time for debate is over".
http://chge.med.harvard.edu/media/letters/documents/01_08_07_nyt_chivian.pdf
“I say the debate is over. We know the science. We see the threat. And we know the time for action is now.” Arnold Schwarzenegger, Governor of California, 2008
So the science may not be settled, but all findings to the contrary of AGW are deniers, lobbyists and so on. Useful idiots if they are against AGW, level-headed scientists if they are in favor.
Talk about double standards.
Unfortunately, I don't remember when there ever WAS the allowed time for debate. I only remember opposing views being booed, ridiculed or at best ignored.
We are here to live and use the earth. We are not here to preserve the earth.
I know that Arnie was in a few hit science fiction movies but that hardly makes him a scientist. Your posts consistently talk about politics, politics is the anti-thesis of science. Also note that the quote from Arnie comes 10yrs after Singer instigated the stupid meme in a somewhat successfull attempt to descredit real scientists.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
If the realness of scientists is defined by their pro or anti stance to AGW, I doubt your definition of science.
If "real" scientists can only be in *favor* of AGW, then the science is in fact settled. (or hoped to be)
Wow, that's a mighty clean brain you have, who does your laundry?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
There's an obvious contradiction here so the question arises: why?
Because people have always moved from the countryside to the cities.
The difference now is that cities have sewage and trash collection and
some vaccinated populations and so they are no longer engines for the
annihilation of entire cohorts of immigrants. In the pre-modern era in
the West, an incredibly high death rate coupled with regular, periodic
epidemics ensured that the population of cities turned over quite
rapidly and people's psychology was markedly different, especially as
it related to personal violence and civil rights. Basically, you were
ahead of the median if, after arriving in a city, you lasted 30 years.
This had profound effects on people's attitudes, not to mention their
economic development. Imagine how difficult it was to establish
long-lasting businesses and corporations if 10% of the staff randomly
died (ie, not just the ones near retirement) or were rendered infirm
every year, and every few years an epidemic killed 20-50% of the
population.
The net effect of this was that cities were an incredibly efficient
way of absorbing surplus population from the countryside and using it
up without requiring an expansion in the size of the city. Only in our
modern era have we created a situation where cities can grow at an
accelerated rate because of a merkedly reduced death rate. Now the
only limit to the size of cities appears to be the restrictions of the
transport infrastructure necessary to sustain such a dense population
in terms of food and water.
You seem to be asking why people move from the countryside to the
city? Well, "countryside" has a fixed surface area, and much of it,
especially in countries where the economics of ownership is weighted
very heavily to the top of the pyramid, is not owned by the
inhabitants but rented, and the extraction of the rent through direct
rentiership or through labour on cash crops or the creation of local
foodstuffs for commodity extraction is the paramount non-urban
socioeconomic behaviour. Thus, as well as a pull phenomenon from
cities, there is also a push phenomenon whereby people are literally
forced from the land into cities, oftentimes as a precursor for
emigration or asylum seeking.
I suggest you read about the history of Ireland in the 19th century. Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World is as good a place as any to start, and it cleverly links together Ireland India, and China's economic fates, demonstrating how some countries managed to reindustrialise during the modern era while others sank into a funk for a century or so.
There's an explanation for why there are so many Irish-Americans in
the world outside Ireland, and it is linked to this push-pull
phenomenon coupled with the desire of landowners to clear land for
cash crop cultivation and to maximise rentiership. It's a pattern repeated time and again, from the earliest domus plantations of the absentee Roman landowners in North Africa and Gaul during the early first millenium CE to the vast pampas plantations of Argentina during the early modern era. And it's a pattern that forces massive migration of surplus populations from the countryside. Cities are the first magnet destination for the economically displaced... if they are a port then they become a gateway to an overseas destination.
Da Blog
As it is plainly obvious that the slums are not a better place to live, the question, I repeat, is: why?
This is a false dichotomy. Given a choice between two goals closely-ranked in odiousness, but with transfer costs associated in the move from one goal to another, and with the possibility of opportunity cost in the disruption of moving from one to another and the loss of social networks, and with imperfect knowledge, I am not sure that any meaningful question as to "why" can be posed with the surety of an answer that convinces. I'm pretty sure that what exists instead is an equilibrium weighted heavily in terms of transfer rate because of contingent environmental constraints.
Da Blog