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."
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.
Cities are benign? Only if you don't count the per-head energy and resources required to maintain the city and it's residents' way of life. If you count that, then every morsel of food must be marked up to account for the energy of bringing it from rural areas to distribution points, to warehouses, to supermarket shelves, to your pantry and then to your mouth. That's just an example. City living is nothing more than a concentration of workers to benefit industrial interests.
I hate printers.
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'.
Dung can be used for fertilizing. Human and pig dung works fine to grow plants. Devoid of other alternatives, it is possible and the plants don't mind the source.
The problem is, you're closing a feedback loop on parasites and bacteria harmful to human or swine. All it takes then is any pathogen that survives composting to quickly increase its effects.
What? Your post is in stark and blatant contradiction to glaring facts. The "West", which does have a very low birthrate, constitutes only a small percentage of the population, less than 20%. China, another 20 odd %, has a low birthrate but only artificially. Everywhere else, birthrates have exploded since the introduction of large-scale vaccination and the 'food aid' industry that holds back starvation wherever famine crops up. Africa has about a billion people and shows no signs of slowing down, and no, they're not urbanising, they're not becoming educated, and their birthrates aren't dropping significantly. We may never reach 20 billion, sure, but that will more likely be due to the unsustainability of the current 'system' and limited resources.
I like your point about Libertarians. Many Ls are actually anarchists, saying that human society would actually be better-off with no government (other than self-rule). If Libertarian ideals took-over would we eventually end-up living in compact, filthy cities like our 1700s/1800s ancestors did?
You just changed the definition of "libertarian" and then postulated what might happen if (your definition of) "libertarians" "took over". WTF? A "libertarian" is not an anarchist, they are two *very* different things. Maybe you meant "some people who call themselves libertarians are actually anarchists", but did you make that omission on purpose? And then did you actually mean "If anarchists took over", or, "If libertarians took over"? Are you purposely trying to conflate the two, or did you just word your post extremely badly?
To clarify for other readers who might now have been misled by your incorrect statements, an anarchist believes there should be no government (leaving people to be entirely self-organising, and thus allowing private armies and thus, in all probability, the ultimate rule of whoever has the biggest private army), while a libertarian believes in small government, with individual rights and property ownership, and an enforcement system, but government retains a monopoly on force in order to enforce individual liberties.
Finally, you imply that libertarian societies would lead to "compact, filthy cities like our 1700s/1800s ancestors", conveniently leaving out that the results of that was the biggest economic boom in the history of humanity leading to a powerful society with one of the highest standards of living in human history, a technological superpower society that basically invented almost every useful bit of technology the rest of the world uses today to slowly catch up in dragging itself out of poverty.
I grew up in a rural area and it wasn't much different. We still drove about 20 minutes to the supermarket to stock our pantry. Add to that things like snow plowing cost a hell of a lot more per person to clear the road our house was on, the issue of garbage removal (we had a burning permit since none of the disposal services went out to our house), and about a million other things I can think of that I have no doubt what so ever that my current apartment life is much more efficient even with my increase in electricity use.
Computers allow humans to make mistakes at the fastest speeds known, with the possible exception of tequila and handguns
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.
While I get your point, fascism was in fact much less disregarding of general human welbeing than many capitalistic societies. For example, in Italy fascism was what laid out the basic infrastructure of the social welfare state (meaning essential housing, schooling and healthcare for everybody regardless of census, and leading to a consequent general improvement of the health and literacy of the population). It also brought forth the sanitations of swampy areas in the center-north Italy, with consequent reduction of endemic diseases such as malaria. So I seriously fail to see what's fascist about the article (given that it even lacks the _negative_ aspects of Fascism, such as the total lack of freedom of expression and all the other consequences of a totalitarian government, or the racist degeneration that came with its attachment to Nazism).
Personally, I find the article useless, in the sense that it doesn't tell me anything non-obvious: scarcity of resources leads to very efficient use (and re-use), lack of resources leads to the use of alternatives, abundance of resources leads to waste. Wow that's surprising. People that waste could learn from the people that are efficient. Wow that's even more surprising. The article also fails to point out how it's possible to increase efficiency and reduce waste _without_ carrying over the negative aspects of slum life, but it'll never happen because the behavioral patterns of human don't shift towards efficiency unless there's a pressing need for it.
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart" (Linus van Pelt)