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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."
Slums? What a retarded story, yes I read it.
do others regard this as cynical as well?
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."
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
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!
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".
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.
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'.
Why do you think it's necessary for them to drive at all?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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.
I bet Stewart Brand doesn't live in a slum.
lux
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)
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
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
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.
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