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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."
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.
When did this become a left/right issue ? Supposedly environmentalism exists across the political spectrum, no ?
Of course only the left wing would find this "shared infrastructure" that is called a slum a good idea. Not that any lefty would ever want to actually live in one, but they're perfectly suitable for all those dissidents and commoners. I'm sure they'd vote for a fence or a wall around them next.
Yes, you'd defineately need to be a lefty, and a sufficiently deluded lefty to think that you yourself wouldn't end up in one at that. No shortage of those though.