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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."
do others regard this as cynical as well?
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
You miss the point. The point is not that slums are good for the people who live in them. Slums are good for people who don't live in them.
We need a "+1 -- nice sig" moderation.
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.
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
I still don't think most of the readers have a concept of what it is you describe.
This topic was enough to get me up at 4am, log in to a computer that I usually do not use. Type in my horrendously complex password while still groggy eyed to expose the fantastic, misguided "progressive" bullhocky Stewart Brand is proposing.
I invite the rest of you out there to take a look at this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJhVM930YXY video, taken from a movie that I can't remember the title of at the moment in my 4am and see what it is that he thinks. The picture on the article is so sanitized it makes puke.
This is not what human kind should be reduced to. For the author of this article to believe its someones place to live like this to satisfy some "green" agenda is reprehensible.
Honestly, the best way that I've seen for enabling this segment of society to grow and prosper and have success is the availability of micro loans. The amount of success driven by this type of economic activity is truly inspiring.
I'm going back to sleep now.
Mod parent up. While I don't live there, I have been to the slums of both Bombay and Kolkata. The sights (and the smells) are indeed gripping:
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.
That hit the nail on the head. Add to that rackets who mutilate or amputate scores of children just to increase their begging ability, and other such nauseating scenes. Makes you think - even if they really do have less of an impact on the environment - so what? That is not the least of their concerns, and it certainly should be the least of your concerns as a relatively well off and comfortable 3rd party observer.
You shouldnt use a carnivore (or omnivore like a human)'s shit to fertilize anything you plan to eat.... bacteria, parasites all that good stuff. Why do you think humans used outhouses to shit in, but used cow pies to fertilize the crops.
Somehow in my world view, the concept progress somehow involved a rise in the standard of living globally... These people aren't comfortable
And yet, they are more comfortable than they would be given the other lifestyle options that are available to them.
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
Because subsistence farming is not that great, and his sons wanted a better life and moved to the city?
Don't compare the slums to a western standard of living. Compare them to the other options that these people have available to them. The slum prostitute choosing to service ten men a day doesn't do it because she likes the job, she does it because the alternative is worse.
"He goes and lives in Dharavi for a few weeks and describes his experiences from a micro and macro point of view."
All the time knowing he can fly home whenever he wants.
30yrs ago as a young married guy with one kid I lived on what American's call a trailer park, I worked 60hr weeks as a day labourer on nearby farms which still did not pay enough to live in a rented house. I lost count of the number of tourists I told to go fuck themselves after they had remarked to me what a "carefree lifestyle" I had.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
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.
Yeah, but sewage contains a whole lot more than just human shit, and there's an enormous volume of the stuff. The difference between a nutrient and toxin is often just a matter of degree. But if you're convinced that fertilizer and raw sewage are equivalent in practice, why not route your dwelling's sewage outflow pipe into your garden and tell us how it goes?
But we don't need to go into a self flagellating spiral of self destruction in order to achieve that
I think Manfred Mann speaks for progressives on this one: "But mama, that's where the fun is."
there is in my experience a strong connection between extreme leftist groups and eco-extremists
They're called "watermelons": "Green" on the outside, "red" on the inside. And they're hardly "extreme" anymore by today's standards. They're still just as crazy and evil as they ever were, it's just that this type of crazy and evil has gone mainstream and is now "normal". The far left is the new center. ("Reality has a liberal bias.")
While I share Your feelings about extreme Malthusians (I mean the people, who publicly welcome any catastrophe because it lowers population) - I have yet to meet any "eco-extremists" (or "dark greens" as others like to label those people). In the same time every related discussion is ripe with hate towards e.g. "Al Gore's followers" (rutinely used to those who accept the science of anthropogenic global warming) or those anecdotal "eco-extremists". But it's just my impression, I'm not American (I guess You are) maybe we are just surrounded by different types of people.
Reality check: billions of poor only survive their infant years by modern medicine and vaccination.
But the hatred towards a godlike wealthy elite is quite a problem, since every time I hear this or similar quotes, it is directed against the common man and woman in The West who lives a middle-class lifestyle.
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. Only a working, wealthy middle class can ever hope to control a corrupt elite. No one else can, not the entire People's Liberation Army. (Just look at the levels of corruption inside their ranks)
I bet Stewart Brand doesn't live in a slum.
lux
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 underlying question is how you allocate a finite resource to an unlimited number of humans.
I wrote on that subject before, because it is deeply concerning to me that the allocation mode for finite resources I prefer is currently under more pressure than ever before.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1545358&cid=31097186
The West is closer to a Communist society than it ever was, including 1968. Every angle of discussion always leads to more control from authority, more sharedness, more equalness, more restraint, more force, more coercion.
This is troubling.
Finite resources are finite. The number of human is infinite.
This has been true for a dozens millenia, this is the situation we've been living in since the apes came down from their trees. This isn't new or revolutionary stuff, not in the least.
Whenever people talk about scarcity of resources and the need of sharing these equally, peacefully among an arbitrary number of people from an arbitrary large "community", I listen up. Maybe my past in East Germany has given me a better understanding of the beginnings of totalitarism.
Of course the have-nots will not sit there and watch us having wealth. They never have. Again, this isn't new stuff we've discovered somewhere in the last decade. Not even in the last millennium.
As I've said before, we will never get all living humans to the standard of living of an average US American or German or Swiss or Japanese person today, in 2010. Oil, tantalum, copper will not suffice for the number of people TODAY, and there are 200.000 people MORE tomorrow. And the day after tomorrow, world population has increased by another 200.000 and the speed of increasing is increasing itself.
We have several questions to answer:
1.) Why do we want all living humans to live in equal standards of living?
2.) How do we prevent differences from re-occuring once we've equalized everything?
3.) How is this beneficial to us?
4.) Will this stop Rome from being ransacked by the Vandals this time around?
The simple preference for equality relies on questionable assumptions and requires velvety coercion at first and jackbooted authoritarianism in the end.
Equalness in this sense always implies "allocation based on need", with "need" defined by the number of mouths to feed. And just like today's welfare states, the world will never run out of mouths to feed.
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
Education, sanitation, health, social mobility, environmental footprint, cities are superior to villages in almost every way.
Except that I can't play my drums in the city without inciting a jihad from my neighbors. I can't keep a well stocked, functioning garage at a reasonable price with which to maintain my motorcycle. I can't open the garage door to my shop without my neighbors freaking out over the strange smells coming from that, "mad scientist's lab." I can't raise my pet cow in the city, which provides milk and, eventually, a couple years worth of meat for my family. I can't raise chickens in the city, which provide eggs and a convenient means of waste disposal, in the city. I can't clean my vintage rifle collection to ensure that they remain in good, functional condition without my neighbors freaking the crap out over the madman next door. I can't walk around without my shirt off on a hot day because some over-reactive mother thinks that means I am some kind of pervert.
So, sure, high population density areas are nice in quite a few ways. The one thing they are not nice about is encouraging innovation, invention, or trying something new. City life has its advantages, I will never deny that. But you can be damned sure that if you are going to live in the city you are going to have to fight for your right to try new things every step of the way.
I'll take my freedom any day, thanks.
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