I don’t even know that I need to comment about why this is so offensive, distasteful, disingenuous, ignorant and downright savage. This comes from Slashdot:
How Slums Can Save the Planet
“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.”
Tourism? Self-organization? Why cities are “Cool”? The fact that comfortable westerners are willing to “tour” these destitute settlements of filth and desperation is offensive enough in its own right that they’d be gawked at. These are not places where people are being creative and expressive for the sake of the greater good, they’re simply trying to cope with inhuman conditions. If they figure out a way to stay alive in these miserable conditions, it’s not a beautiful work of self-organization, its human suffering, pure and simple.
I’m reminded of Joseph Stalin saying something like “One death is a tragedy – ten thousand are a statistic.” When you step back and see the slum grow and change, it might look like some kind of elegant mathematical expression, and perhaps it is. Yet what this is made up of is human beings, living in filth, squalor and constant danger of disease, fire, murder or any number of other things. And yes, while slums do often improve over time, it’s because the residents generally DON’T WANT TO LIVE IN SLUM CONDITIONS. Example: parts of New York City are now fashionable when in the late 1800’s they were about the cheapest and worst parts of the city. Nobody would want to go back!
Yes, I realize that this is a transitional thing and that some countries have not experienced industrialization to the extent they will eventually. Still, I’m amazed that these could be considered a good thing.
The original article is even worse. The ass who wrote it seems to think it’s amazingly efficient to live in a slum and points out that many slums see food grown locally, even with “pigs raised on the third floor,” as it subsistence agriculture and living in the excrement of a pig is somehow a positive thing.
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