Catching Up…

It has been interesting to watch the sudden surge of interest (here in the NYT, for example) in the $2 billion house/building that Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani is constructing for himself in Mumbai.  We covered the story way back in May 2008.  I’ll stick with my assessment from then:

I believe one might question how one man has amassed $43 billion in assets. But, once the guy’s got it, I can’t think of any reason why he shouldn’t spend it any way he wants. Looking through the pictures, I don’t much care for this place but if he and his family enjoy it then good for him.

More On Slums

Over the past couple of weeks, there have been a number of posts looking at the vitality and entrepreneurialism of slums in different ways (here, here and here.)  I came across another today in a discussion at Laphams about how the great nineteenth-century English Literature canon (Dickens, Hardy, Gissing, Dreiser etc) is more relevant today in the slums of Mumbai and Rio and Rangoon than it is to us in the west.

The concerns of that literature—the individual caught in an encompassing social web, the sensitive young mind trapped inside an indifferent world, the beguiling journey from countryside to metropolis, the dismal inventiveness with which people survive, the permanent gap between imagination and opportunity, the big families whose problems are lived out in the street, the tragic pregnancies, the ubiquity of corruption, the earnest efforts at self-education, the preciousness of books, the squalid factories and debtor’s prisons, the valuable garbage, the complex rules of patronage and extortion, the sudden turns of fortune, the sidewalk con men and legless beggars, the slum as theater of the grotesque: long after these things dropped out of Western literature, they became the stuff of ordinary life elsewhere, in places where modernity is arriving but hasn’t begun to solve the problems of people thrown together in the urban cauldron …

With Dickens, the sheer energy of invention (as well as the irresistible temptation of sentimentality) lightens up the darker implications of his vision. By contrast, a writer like Gissing, a late Victorian who was not blessed with Dickens’ dazzling imagination and bravura style but made up for it in hard-won sensitivity to the daily humiliations of London life, produced, in the course of a short life, novel after novel about men and women whose aspirations always end in suffering and sordid compromise. His eye for the petty details of thwarted lives was flawless …

[I]n a country like Burma, which has experienced neither modernity nor the welfare state, an intense young reader is better equipped to enter the world of Dickens than anyone in Los Angeles or New York, and knows it. Also for this reason, Dickens’ real heirs are less likely to have grown up in London than Bombay … In vast, impoverished cities like Bombay, Cairo, Jakarta, Rio, or Lagos, the plot lines of the nineteenth century proliferate. Not ignorant mass suffering, but the ordeal of sentient individuals who are daily exposed to a world of possibilities through a sheet of glass—satellite TV, the Internet—that keeps them out. The extreme conditions of megacity slums contain the extravagant material that animated Dickens. In the gap between what their inhabitants know and feel and what they can have lies all the poignancy of Hardy …

Lagos

[A] complex, informal, but quite rigid hierarchy controls life in Lagos, one that a reader of Oliver Twist would immediately recognize.In the relentless daily commercial hustle, everyone has an economic place in a system based on patronage: the person above you (your oga, or master) provides a subsistence living and protection of sorts, for which you owe him a pledge of loyalty and a cut of your earnings. For example, the boys who scavenge the gutters and streets for pieces of discarded plastic sell their haul to their oga, who in turn sells it to a plastics grinder. Lagos attracts the ambitious and desperate young from all over West Africa, 6,000 of them a day. They are drawn by stories of quick wealth, spread by immigrants who return home over the holidays flashing new clothes and gifts. When a newcomer arrives in the city, he’s initially dependent on an oga for a place to sleep and a meal or two. The charity lasts around twenty-four hours, then the new arrival is on his own and has to start paying back his oga for the kindness. Illusions quickly die, and he soon realizes what a young man who was cutting hardwood boards in a sawmill told me: “Nobody will care for you, and you have to struggle to survive.” But there is a great deal of latitude for entrepreneurship of a desperate kind (in a wholesale market, the poorest of the poor charge a few cents to wash the mud off the market women’s feet), which accounts for the spirit of striving that prevails in Lagos and molds people’s faces into a hard, weary, calculating expression.

These slums are not simple places, and their inhabitants are far from simple themselves. We need to understand how they live and work because, quite probably, the future belongs to them.

What Slums Can Teach Us

In Prospect Magazine Online, there is an insightful article about how modern urban planners are learning concepts and specific ideas from the squatter slums of India, Brazil and elsewhere.  This is the latest incarnation of the new urbanism that emerged in the 1970s.

One billion people live in these cities and, according to the UN, this number will double in the next 25 years. There are thousands of them and their mainly young populations test out new ideas unfettered by law or tradition. Alleyways in squatter cities, for example, are a dense interplay of retail and services—one-chair barbershops and three-seat bars interspersed with the clothes racks and fruit tables. One proposal is to use these as a model for shopping areas. “Allow the informal sector to take over downtown areas after 6pm,” suggests Jaime Lerner, the former mayor of Curitiba, Brazil. “That will inject life into the city” …

The book’s optimism derived from its groundbreaking fieldwork: 37 case studies in slums worldwide. Instead of just compiling numbers and filtering them through theory, researchers hung out in the slums and talked to people. They came back with an unexpected observation: “Cities are so much more successful in promoting new forms of income generation, and it is so much cheaper to provide services in urban areas, that some experts have actually suggested that the only realistic poverty reduction strategy is to get as many people as possible to move to the city.” The magic of squatter cities is that they are improved steadily and gradually by their residents. To a planner’s eye, these cities look chaotic. I trained as a biologist and to my eye, they look organic. 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.

I’m glad to say that Vancouver is well ahead of many other big cities when it comes to the next idea:

One idea that could be transferred from squatter cities is urban farming. An article by Gretchen Vogel in Science in 2008 enthused: “In a high-tech answer to the ‘local food’ movement, some experts want to transport the whole farm shoots, roots, and all to the city. They predict that future cities could grow most of their food inside city limits, in ultraefficient greenhouses… A farm on one city block could feed 50,000 people with vegetables, fruit, eggs, and meat. Upper floors would grow hydroponic crops; lower floors would house chickens and fish that consume plant waste.”

The article concludes with the following sobering thoughts:

And just as this was true during the industrial revolution, so the take-off of cities will be the dominant economic event of the first half of this century too. It will involve huge infrastructural stresses on energy and food supply. Vast numbers of people will begin climbing the energy ladder from smoky firewood and dung cooking fires to diesel-driven generators for charging batteries, then to 24/7 grid electricity. They are also climbing the food ladder, from subsistence farms to cash crops of staples like rice, corn, wheat and soy to meat—and doing so in a global marketplace. Environmentalists who try to talk people out of it will find the effort works about as well as trying to convince them to stay in their villages. Peasant life is over, unless catastrophic climate change drives us back to it. For humanity, the green city is our future.

Well worth the read.