Dharavi, Mumbai, where population density reaches 1m people per square mile
In 1983, architect Peter Calthorpe gave up on San Francisco, where he had tried and failed to organise neighbourhood communities, and moved to a houseboat in Sausalito, a town on the San Francisco Bay. He ended up on South 40 Dock, where I also live, part of a community of 400 houseboats and a place with the densest housing in California. Without trying, it was an intense, proud community, in which no one locked their doors. Calthorpe looked for the element of design magic that made it work, and concluded it was the dock itself and the density. Everyone who lived in the houseboats on South 40 Dock passed each other on foot daily, trundling to and from the parking lot on shore. All the residents knew each other’s faces and voices and cats. It was a community, Calthorpe decided, because it was walkable.
Building on that insight, Calthorpe became one of the founders of the new urbanism, along with Andrés Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and others. In 1985 he introduced the concept of walkability in “Redefining Cities,” an article in the Whole Earth Review, an American counterculture magazine that focused on technology, community building and the environment. Since then, new urbanism has become the dominant force in city planning, promoting high density, mixed use, walkability, mass transit, eclectic design and regionalism. It drew one of its main ideas from the houseboat community.
There are plenty more ideas to be discovered in the squatter cities of the developing world, the conurbations made up of people who do not legally occupy the land they live on—more commonly known as slums. 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 reversal of opinion about fast-growing cities, previously considered bad news, began with The Challenge of Slums, a 2003 UN-Habitat report. 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.
Not everything is efficient in the slums, though. In the Brazilian favelas where electricity is stolen and therefore free, people leave their lights on all day. But in most slums recycling is literally a way of life. The Dharavi slum in Mumbai has 400 recycling units and 30,000 ragpickers. Six thousand tons of rubbish are sorted every day. In 2007, the Economist reported that in Vietnam and Mozambique, “Waves of gleaners sift the sweepings of Hanoi’s streets, just as Mozambiquan children pick over the rubbish of Maputo’s main tip. Every city in Asia and Latin America has an industry based on gathering up old cardboard boxes.” There’s even a book on the subject: The World’s Scavengers (2007) by Martin Medina. Lagos, Nigeria, widely considered the world’s most chaotic city, has an environment day on the last Saturday of every month. From 7am to 10am nobody drives, and the city tidies itself up.
In his 1985 article, Calthorpe made a statement that still jars with most people: “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.” “Green Manhattan” was the inflammatory title of a 2004 New Yorker article by David Owen. “By the most significant measures,” he wrote, “New York is the greenest community in the United States, and one of the greenest cities in the world…The key to New York’s relative environmental benignity is its extreme compactness. Manhattan’s population density is more than 800 times that of the nation as a whole. Placing one and a half million people on a twenty-three-square-mile island sharply reduces their opportunities to be wasteful.” He went on to note that this very compactness forces people to live in the world’s most energy-efficient apartment buildings.
The idea of measuring environmental impact in notional acres was first introduced by Mathis Wackernagel and William Rees in Our Ecological Footprint (1996) as a way to estimate the resource efficiency of cities and to condemn suburban sprawl. The concept has been very useful in shaming cities into better environmental behaviour, but comparable studies have yet to be made of rural populations, whose environmental impact per person is much higher than city dwellers. Nor has footprint analysis yet been properly applied to urban squatters and slum dwellers, which score as the greenest of all.
Urban density allows half of humanity to live on 2.8 per cent of the land. Demographers expect developing countries to stabilise at 80 per cent urban, as nearly all developed countries have. On that basis, 80 per cent of humanity may live on 3 per cent of the land by 2050. Consider just the infrastructure efficiencies. According to a 2004 UN report: “The concentration of population and enterprises in urban areas greatly reduces the unit cost of piped water, sewers, drains, roads, electricity, garbage collection, transport, health care, and schools.” In the developed world, cities are green because they cut energy use; in the developing world, their greenness lies in how they take the pressure off rural waste.
The Last Forest (2007), a book by Mark London and Brian Kelly on the crisis in the Amazon rainforest, suggests that the nationally subsidised city of Manaus in northern Brazil “answers the question” of how to stop deforestation: give people decent jobs. Then they can afford houses, and gain security. One hundred thousand people who would otherwise be deforesting the jungle around Manaus are now prospering in town making such things as mobile phones and televisions.
The point is clear: environmentalists have yet to seize the opportunity offered by urbanisation. Two major campaigns should be mounted: one to protect the newly-emptied countryside, the other to green the hell out of the growing cities.
***
More than any other political entity, cities learn from each other. News of best practices spreads fast. Mayors travel, cruising for ideas in the cities deemed the world’s greenest—from Reykjavik to Portland, Oregon, and my hometown of San Francisco. But what we need is a new profession of active urban ecology, which figures out how to fix the problems of urban living (cockroach predation, waste from markets or sanitation, a persistent cause of disease in slums) and helps cities engage natural infrastructure (rivers and coastlines play a role similar to highways and sewer lines) with the same level of sophistication brought to built infrastructure.
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.”
Urban roofs offer no end of opportunities for energy saving and “reconciliation ecology.” Planting a green roof with its own ecological community is well-established. For food, add an “ultraefficient greenhouse”; for extra power, add solar collectors. And the most dramatic gains can come from simply making everything white. According to a 2008 study from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, if the world’s 100 largest cities replaced their dark roofs in this way, it could offset 44 metric gigatonnes of greenhouse gases.
Some environmentalists already are proponents of urban compactness. New zoning rules can be used to allow people to live and work closer together. Taxes can cut car use. Child-friendly policies and subsidised housing could bring down the high cost of city centre living, which drives families to the suburbs (and good schools follow them).
Finally, it is better infrastructure that makes cities possible—so what would infrastructure rethought in green terms look like? Some of it will surely look like the new mass transit systems being built in China, or the high-speed rail that is finally coming to the US. And all of this should be powered by smart and micro grids—allowing local generation and the distribution of electricity. The new generation of small, modular nuclear reactors being developed in the US and elsewhere, which provide less than 125 megawatts and are built offsite, could have an important role.
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. The recent earthquake in Haiti demonstrates the danger of slum buildings. But if they are overall a net good for those who move there, it is because cities offer more than just jobs. They are transformative: in the slums, as well as the office towers and leafy suburbs, the progress is from hick to metropolitan to cosmopolitan, and with it everything the dictionary says that cosmopolitan means: multicultural, multiracial, global, worldly-wise, well travelled, experienced, unprovincial, cultivated, cultured, sophisticated, suave, urbane.
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.
LIFE IN THE WORLD’S SLUMS
In Bangkok’s slums, most homes have a colour television—the average number is 1.6 per household. Almost all have fridges, and two-thirds have a CD player, washing machine and a mobile phone. Half of them have a home telephone, video player and motorcycle. (From research for UN report The Challenge of Slums.)
Residents of Rio’s favelas are more likely to have computers and microwaves than the city’s middle classes (Janice Perlman, author of The Myth of Marginality.)
In the slums of Medellín, Colombia, people raise pigs on the third-floor roofs and grow vegetables in used bleach bottles hung from windowsills. (Ethan Zuckerman, Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School.)
The 4bn people at the base of the economic pyramid—all those with [annual] incomes below $3,000 in local purchasing power—live in relative poverty. Their incomes… are less than $3.35 a day in Brazil, $2.11 in China, $1.89 in Ghana, and $1.56 in India. Yet they have substantial purchasing power… [and] constitute a $5 trillion global consumer market.
(The Next 4 Billion, Allen L Hammond et al.)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: STEWART BRAND
Stewart Brand is one of the world’s most influential—and controversial—environmentalists. After graduating in biology from Stanford University, California, in 1960, he became involved with the hippy movement and writer Ken Kesey’s “merry pranksters,” who were the subject of Tom Wolfe’s book The Electric Kool-aid Acid Test. Brand’s hugely influential Whole Earth Catalog, a counterculture guide to self-sustainable, communal living, was published between 1968 and 1972, and occasionally thereafter until 1998.
Co-founder of The Long Now Foundation and the Global Business Network, Brand lives on a houseboat in San Francisco Bay.
His new book, Whole Earth Discipline (Atlantic Books), challenges many of the long-held opinions of the environmental movement.
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Comments (45):
Wow cities are great for the “environment,” huh?
Never mind the pools of sewage, industrial runoff, painful smog, or the ghettos stacked full of excruciating poverty and malaria. – –Places full of desperate people no longer reliant on their own gardens, but rather sweatshops and industrial factory farms! LOL
Never mind the centralization of power.
Never mind the fact that the slum “communities” you mention here are actually rife with ethnic violence and dramatically higher rates of mental disease.
“future cities can grow most of their food inside city limits.” – where? in your science fiction novel where poor people grow organic tomatoes out of their ear-lobes for the rich!
RIDICULOUS!
And New York, which you call the “greenest city” here (lol) is also the mother of the largest landfill on Earth, cancerous, and the engine of international consumerism. Enjoy your flea-bitten slums! THEY”RE SO “GREEN!” (wow)
This is rich – people should live more like paupers to improve their quality of life?
Nobody with any sense can argue against the observation that increased population density combined with lack of individual capability will lead to a very low-overhead, communal way of life. This is a valid point.
But nobody with any money or ambition will voluntarily choose that way of life. This is why the middle class has always and will always flee the city for suburbia, as soon as they are capable of doing so.
This article is not an argument for environmental improvement. It is environmentalism used as an instrument for a policy of social egalitarianism.
Overpoulation is curse: pure and simple. Why?because I know all about it. Need I say more?
Kamath
Bangalore, India
I live in Pune[Mumbai frist] second largest city of Maharashtra.Every year more than million people are migrating in Pune.As psyche of Indians accept what may danger fall upon but never try to solve that danger.So living in cities in India is just like hell.What will happen in 2050 no one care about that.We Indian donot believe in future plan,donot want to change present misery.Our highest aim is get relief from this life cycle and achieve libration from the bondage of life and death.
“It was a community, Calthorpe decided, because it was walkable.”
What nonsense. It was marginally livable because the urban area of San Francisco had sufficient excess capacity to support a group willing to live in close proximity and call it something else. Without SF, this is simply an unrelieved disaster.
Might all be an interesting alternative to the ‘Mike Davis School’ of apocalyptic middle-class, and I might add, often ‘professional class’ views of people. Not to forget, for instance, Engels’ ‘Condition of the Working Class in England,’ but to see other possibilities.
Now, off to read all that UN-Habitat report.
Okay, we don’t have to romanticize poverty to appreciate the ingenuity and efficiency of poor and often desparate people. The ideas proposed, painting roofs white, more common walkable areas, encouraging home and work to be close by and such are good. common sense ideas that we all ought to encourage. While covering our buildings in tomatoe and squash vines sound nice, it would be easier to just protect the farm land around our cities and suburbs from development. I would gladly give up my expensive car if we had decent transporation where I live.
High density does seem to work well….in certain environs as, uh, houseboats in San Francisco Bay. I am assuming, of course, that these HB dwellers do not subsist on poverty wages of $5 a day–or less and deficate in ditches or the Bay. It also appears that those respondents who actually live in high density Indian slums don’t think much of the Brandian concept of “Fifty Square Feet and Independence”! And New York? Also, wouldn’t planting millions of new trees and shrubs in cities and the country side reduce greenhouse gases without sugjecting millions of people living as side-by-side neighbors. But no, we cut down our great trees so the power lines can run under them without fear of limb damage. Those power lines could be underground and the trees left to prosper. Our country is moving backwards, not forwards!
As a lifelong city dweller I am sympathetic to highlighting the potential for cities to lift people into meaningful and prosperous lives.
That said, I find this article’s characterization of urbanites to be romantic… and condescending towards those who choose not to live in urban city-states (can we really call these places with populations bigger than some countries \cities\? They are states more than they are cities).
Mr. Brand has a simple equation: hick to metropolitan to cosmopolitan. That’s not just simplistic; it insults the variety of living styles and people that make civilizations diverse and interesting. Living among a multiracial, polylingual, well-travelled populace does not guarantee sophistication, kindliness, or thoughtfulness. Any decades long dweller of a big big city knows that. What, I am eager to know, is \suave, cultivated and sophisticated\ about Times Square on any given Saturday night?
So yes, let’s embrace the potential of cities to be self-supporting and innovative. But let’s reject the smugness that spoils this article.
I think this argument could use a more careful consideration of how cities out-source their economies. Historically, the growth of urban centers intensifies resource extraction and production industries in rural areas world-wide, and I don’t just mean oil. All roads, eventually, run back out to the hinterland
“The Dharavi slum in Mumbai has 400 recycling units and 30,000 ragpickers … Mozambiquan children pick over the rubbish of Maputo’s main tip. Every city in Asia and Latin America has an industry based on gathering up old cardboard boxes.”
Sounds great. Let’s see you move your family to one of these hell holes.
I wonder what the squatters think of this very romantic idea. Would they prefer the tension of a compact urban sardine box or the slow paced rural life? Given the economic choices including sustainable employment/water/healthcare, live on a small path of land with a goat (pig, cow…), a few poultry, a small vegetable patch and an extended family in the neighborhood including grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins…human will tend to build systems that can show you the economies of scale and scope as well (and still be \green\). It might take time and education. Another problem with Brand’s Utopian cosmopolitan man is this: what culture would emerge from it? 7 billion pairs of blue jeans chomping on burgers (oops, sorry, I meant the ubercool Kashi sourced from you know where), singing \Imagine\ in chorus…?
I hope Brand’s tribe will leave some places for a lot of people to laze around, amidst more primordial sounds, to weave a basket, paint the body, do the drunken dance to ancestors, tease the rowdy cousins in the shared commons of banyan tree of the hamlet by the river …Not just on weekends in Keene sandals and Land’s End weekend khakhis…but as they still do in millions of places. To hell with cosmopolitanism!
WastingtonDC:
Jewels of truth leak through here, as in most new world order, socialist or green change suggestions, but you have to read closely to pick them out from the clutter of hope and plans for public service union regimentation of every last free human, and spending their money, extorted as taxes, on pain of death.
Foremost among the good things reported evolving in these impossible slum conditions appear, in this case, to be the irrepressible human hunger for individual liberty that shaped the American Republic, and hence, the free world. Nearly extinguished here in America, it is increasingly thriving in the shape of freedom from excessive taxes, minimum wage laws, and near zero damage from social engineers, police, and politicians, who cannot, or dare not reach the tiny enterprises listed in this report. The less powerful foreign political criminals cannot count, or effectively spy on, and tax the low dollar enterprises responsible for the reported free enterprise. The free enterprise anarchy reported in the slums is still, even under those horrid conditions, routinely presided over by local warlords with, or in spite of the badges that usually, a la New Orleans, NY, NJ, MD et al, allow corrupt ghetto/slum police or other criminal forces to maintain their monopoly on drug sales, prostitution, etc.
Remember US slum police selling drugs out of their squad cars. Lawbreaking slum masters, be they police, politicians, or strong men, are simply free enterprise business men, selling influence, and all other illegal goods, and insuring their monopoly with violence, and badge power instead of the more ruthless total regimentation Americans are subjected to, by our 20 million public employees, revenuers, political masters and their enforcers.
Foreign criminals kill any who oppose their monopoly profits, but dare not rob, rape, and impoverish their victims as completely as America’s millions of civil servant’s, police and politician’s unions and their voter proof political masters do those crimes. Those monster’s thirst for other people’s money to waste, defines two words: infinite greed. In addition, criminals have better productive enterprise experience, and higher moral/profit incentives than our merciless politicians, since their profits depend on their victim’s enterprises making enough profits to pay their bribes, and feed their families, widows and orphans.
First world politicians on the other hand, live high regardless, skimming the taxes extorted from citizens on pain of death, whether our orphans starve, are killed and frozen in deep freezes as in DC, by failed foster care fraudsters, or left to wander the streets as prostitutes, thieves or millionaire drug dealers. The machine politicians do not care, since their jerrymandered districts protect them from any voter not permanently dependent on the public dole, and the politicians are above the law, and any corruption flowing from it. The frictional effects, murders, robbery, and gang wars caused by the war on drugs, are touted, to increase police, social services, and now socialized medicine employment numbers, and their union’s campaign donations.
The foreign slum’s more or less free enterprises are free of taxes other than bribes to police, or less organized strong men, and entirely free from the disasters of social engineering, minimum wage laws, and guaranteed profits from illegal pursuits. The productive people who own and operate them prosper in relation to their skills at employing capital, work ethics, courage, and connections. The same approaches would work to free American enterprises, absent the 17,000 percent profits guaranteed to first world drug dealers, with the irresistible appeal those profits offer to bright tough ghetto dwellers penalized for working. Their permanent public dole payments are routinely reduced for licit earnings, savings, ownership of tools, homes or transport. In addition, to keep them off the books, any substantive earnings are taxed beyond any rate that free men will tolerate.
Adoption of a maximum 15% flat tax rate, taken with ending the drug war on our children, and the horrors of social engineering, and the minimum wage, would allow free enterprise to flourish all over America, again. Instant biometric identification cards, and alien work permits, for citizens of any country offering the same rule of law, and free enterprise work permits, property ownership, and protection from corrupt police and bureaucrats, to American citizens would collapse the elitist dictator regimes that export their brightest and most dangerous workers to America, and milk the stupidity of US refusal to allow foreigner’s to legally work up to half of any five year period, in America. The slums and hinterlands of the third world would also benefit immediately, from continued injections of American cash, and the returning worker’s gains, in education, and hardened attitudes toward kleptocratic elites living off their most productive and least empowered peoples, as in most of South America, Asia, et al.
One third of our massive failed border patrol’s employees could issue instant biometric ID and work permits, at temporary employment offices, located at several border stations on every border. With American farmers and drug companies legal drugs, excepting deadly tobacco, ending all profits from illegal drug dealing, virtually all our South American drug fueled dictatorships would revise their exclusionary laws, to allow the same open borders, free enterprise, and reduced corruption that EU members were promised, and are now denied. Law abiding aliens could learn and work in the USA, for less than 50% of any five year period, beginning at 18 years of age. Minority alien military enlistment should be allowed, at 17 years of age. All successful years spent in US military service should earn two years consecutive work permits on honorable discharge, for each year served, and those years should not count against the 50% lifetime work permit limit for non military aliens. For those aliens who do well in the military, and retire after twenty or thirty years, dual citizenship might be the best approach, as a reward, for long and faithful military service, hard work, and compliance with American laws.
Personally owned alien worker social security coverage, designed and reserved permanently, for the alien’s retirement at US retirement ages, only after their return to their home of origin would reward their hard work, and compliance with US laws. Immediate return to their homelands, if necessary, using their mandatory accumulated return deposit would be enforced, at the end of each permitted period, upon serious law breaking, long term monetary impoverishment, or any resort to public assistance beyond one month.
Legal work permit status would preclude the slavery that many foreign diplomats have practiced in America, for centuries, with their own or other nation’s disadvantaged citizens. Draconian penalties on exploiting employers would discourage the millions of instances of exploitation of helpless illegal aliens now in progress. Lawyers taking civil or criminal exploitation cases pro bono, should be rewarded when their actions result in convictions, with a share of the fines and penalties collected. Deposit of 25% of the fines and penalties in the victim’s protected personal Social Security retirement accounts would encourage the victims to come forward, as well. The same penalty system would educate all employers to comply with the laws as strictly as the permitted alien is required to do. Simple written contracts at any wage negotiated between employers and workers, foreign or domestic, would document their legal status when displayed with work permits, and could be enforced by courts, when employers withhold their worker’s hire.
The end of public dole payments for able bodied persons would allow competition for available jobs, and for productive worker skills and time, without union enforced pay for play. Relaxation of draconian paperwork, taxes, etc, and allowing pay in kind, in the form of rent, food and transport, for those employed by senior citizens, farmers, and others reliant on part or full time care givers, helpers, farm workers, and such would allow free enterprise to flourish, with still predatory lawyers able to profit, when laborers exploit the aged, or any emloyers exploit workers. Lawyers helping the aged and exploited for profit, and free enterprise, including agreed upon pay, for agreed upon productive work, would do very well, for changes we can believe in.
\One hundred thousand people who would otherwise be deforesting the jungle around Manaus are now prospering in town making such things as mobile phones and televisions.\
–> Oh, please! How can one be so naive and ignore the fact that deforestation rates in Brazil have NEVER BEEN HIGHER, and that the \noble\ businessmen of that area have been known to have SLAVES to work on the deforested land.
As for the wonders of slums, and their efficient citizens, how can one be optimistic about squalor, when the maximum age in some slums in Sao Paulo, for example, is eighteen years of age?
Please travel the world. Christ, just travel to Oakland, even. This piece is absolute garbage. Rich, entitled hippy garbage. Grow up.
“New zoning rules can be used to allow people to live and work closer together.”
Replace the word “allow” with the word “coerce” in the sentence above and you come closer to reality. The simple fact is that most people have no desire to live and work in hive-like proximity to each other. Social planners and environmentalists can only impose on the rights and aspirations of other people to a certain degree before the backlash begins.
I have seen slums and I agree: they are hell holes but they are, nonetheless, efficient with innovative ideas springing up everywhere.
Interesting that there are so many negative comments. I thought it was an outstanding article.
There is a very high correlation between urban living and national wealth. Rural countries are invariably poor.
Also, all over the world, the rural poor vote with their feet, and go to cities. Perhaps they know more about rural poverty than middle class Westerners?
Jane Jacobs made some of the same observations in the early ’60s. She talks about walkable areas of cites, and the fact that cities are generators of economic activity.
I think too many people have pipe dreams about living on little farms. If it’s so great why do so many of the rural poor seek to get away?
I unintentionally found myself living (flat broke at 34 years old) in a slum off Jalan Wahid Hasyim in downtown Jakarta in ‘94 for two months. It was the most disgusting, scary, dark, bleak, psycho, messed up two months a person could have. I’m talking about swarms of dengue-infected mosquitoes from dusk till dawn, cockroaches slapping off the walls like flying moccasins nightly, bloated ticks on the walls, intense heat and 100% humidity always, an auto body shop that started banging hammers on car panels at 6am 7 days a week, a mosque on each side of our house, complete with blown-out speakers calling locals to prayer 5 times daily, a disco behind us thumping on till 7am every morning, rats, dogs, cats all of them wild, mangy, diseased, flea-and-tick-bitten, puking and hunger-crazed, regular power failures, single-mom hookers lurking, screaming, pot banging food vendors day and night, storm-triggered floods of black, stinking filth, the toxic stench of burning plastic and vegetation always. And that was just down the alley I lived on.
Walk out into the streets and it was thousands on thousands of cars, trucks, motorbikes, buses and two-stroke Indian-made Bajai taxis all jammed up, barely moving, all churning out black and blue smoke. Fold in rotting, burning garbage piled randomly with no hope of ever being collected, missing sidewalk covers over canals filled with what looked like black snot and choked with a billion plastic bags, coconuts, palm fronds, trees and Christ knows what else, plus disfigured, heartbreakingly filthy beggars here and there, the sick and aged homeless selling their trifles to make ends meet, corruption from the parking mafia on up to the president… and this wasn’t the city’s worst slum. Though I went there too and saw people bathing babies and brushing teeth in rivers you wouldn’t dare throw a lit match into.
Sorry, Mr. Brand. This is the most insane, out-of-touch pile of white-guilt-assuaging crap I’ve come across in decades. You have no idea what you are talking about, sir. Stay aboard your yacht in Marin where you’ll be safe in your delusions. I’ve also spent time on a yacht in your marina, and can tell you that that life couldn’t be any further removed from the reality of slum living, unless you moved it to the moon.
People in the slums hate their lives (no matter how much they may smile at you as you pass by in your Indiana Jones hat and cargo pants full of candies for their kids), and for thousands of sound reasons. There is nothing happy or applicable to be pulled out of slums other than the knowledge that they are cesspools of tragedy, misguided dreams, unimaginable filth and evil.
Maybe folks should read Brand’s article very carefully — it is obvious that some people have just kicked. It’s thoughtful.
Re-read.
I like the ideas here.
I understand the logic of the arguments relating to the efficiencies of high-density living but I’m not convinced that slums are an answer. Slums are useful in that they show how high-density living is currently being practiced but they have not yet demonstrated how such living can be healthy and civilised. Ragpicking is not aspirational or enjoyable but it does demonstrate how much useful waste is discarded and where there are business and earning opportunities. My experiences of Indian slums have shown great creativity, vibrancy, poverty, filth, disease and exploitation as well as the common human aspects of kindness and cruelty.
Good article though and we need radical, engaging thought about the future
Would it be rude of me to mention Birth Control?
This is why no one takes insane “environmentlists” seriously. If you people made a bit more sense, I’d listen to your arguments about climate change and pollution. This idiot is espousing that we all live in slums to “save” the planet. Never mind that less than 20% of the landmass is actually inhabited and that there are vast plains of land with density of a few people per square mile. This guy would probably secretly cheer on genocide for the sake of minimizing earth’s population.
Urbanisation is often seen as a process of civilising and that through civilisation a higher society and the goals of a greater humanity so achieved.
That may be so…
But that is not necessarily the actual steps, for the segue is downward . Cities are like oil sumps, or perhaps like a gravitation vortex that warps the normal distribution of humanity into the urbanised slums – and there the trapped chaff of humanity exist, having succumbed to the pressures of land ownership in frugal and unsustainable agri-existence dictated in the bush or deserts from whence these desperate people slide.
It is a process that supercedes planning, cognition, it is as if an invisible hand draws people down, down, lower and lower as they have neither the resource, energy nor power to climb out and extricate themselves from their human hell(s).
Much as huge rivers power vast hydro generation schemes this urbanistaion process is awesomely powerful. It cannot be prevented, policed, or fenced out – once a momentum is gained.
In Sub-Saharan Africa 4 or perhaps 5 major megatropolises are emerging that will be so huge and powerful that they will ultimately undo the damage implicit in a divided post-colonial continent. Three are likely to be 3 Anglophile urbanisations Johannesburg/Igoli/Witwatersrand centered around SoWeTo (SOuth WEstern TOwnship), Nairobi’s slums centered on Kibera, and Lagos with its huge pale of slums, The largest and perhaps darkest African Francophile slums surround the urbanisation of Kinshasa – the Matonge.
The collapse of the historical borders, already so porous as to be meaningless, will likely occur. Eg. There are already more Zimbabweans living in South Africa, than there are in Zimbabwe. More Lesothians, and more Tswanas and more Namibians in South Africa than in their respective countries.
There are also more Somali’s in Kenya than there are in Somali. Kinshasa is Populated by Congo Republicans, and draws heavily on Cameroonians, Chadians, & Angolans too. Lagos will probably absorb all of Benin, Togo, and Ghana as well…
Once the balance of power is tipped, these peoples can be CONTROLLED!, planning can occur, police forces structured, armies entrenched that will crush the lawlessness. Sub-Saharan Africa parallels the urban conditions of an early Victorian, Late Edwardian London in many ways. London’s growth was never planned – it too was once a slum. It too was the sump of humanity.
Then there was New York ….
Yeah, a number of comments have it right: the gist of this article is “Let’s tax and coerce people into efficient cities”.
What a moronic conclusion: the described efficiencies of these cities is a direct result of the individual freedoms (economic and otherwise) the inhabitants possess.
If governments didn’t squeeze so much freedom out of First-world cities with overly-centralized planning, high taxation, and heavy regulation, no one would have left for the suburbs in the first place, and those cities would be far more efficient than today. It was the US Government, not the Auto industry, that really killed the railroads, rail travel, and the economies they made possible.
I guess this is a poorly written article since everyone has seized on the idea that he is suggesting we all move into slums. The point is through their predicament, they have innovated efficiencies in ways we could learn from.
Scarcity is the mother of innovation, living in Japan, there are amazing efficiencies everywhere and Japan is feted for being so inventive. Why not look at the slums?
There is nothing noble about poverty, everyone wants to escape it but it is shortsighted to think we should ignore it as a form of spatial and economic organisation from which we could gain insights into sustainable living.
Why is suburbia so brilliant?
You have space but you have to maintain it yourself; you have to hop into a car and drive for miles to go to the shops, or see friends. What a waste of time, I can do that in a fraction of the time here. The suburbs will be the slums of the future. Sparsely scattered people, fearful of neighbours and home invasion.
I also saw in this article what few commentators have pointed out: that the author is suggesting that we look to slums as a means to inform our own ways of living. He does not at any point argue or even suggest that we should live in slums, or that our cities should devolve into slums. On the contrary, he observes that these slums could eventually transform into modern cities as opportunities for jobs and prosperity aggregate in these super-dense areas. I agree that our cities should become more dense, but that we also have choices.
Read Mike Davis’s book.
(Via Prospect Facebook)
For the very poor of these developing countries proximity to work/informal markets and living is everything–read any development studies book. As the countries become more developed, the more likely it is to see residents traveling greater distances to work/live, a luxury that urban poor cannot afford. He has tangled his focus and uses examples to suit his purposes–because density, urbanization is complicated. The idealization of NY is off too–it’s good relative to the US, but no world example as the Newman Kentworthy study reflects (and which he fails to mention).
As far as the negativity of those of you sitting, more than likely at least 15 lbs over-weight, in your suburban haven get involved in your community, start by walking around and observing what’s missing or what you’d like to see more of.
About 3/4 of the comments here are demonstrating a serious lack of reading comprehension.
Brand isn’t suggesting everyone, much less those of us in the developed world, pack their bags and move to a slum because it’s a wonderful life. He’s suggesting that as people in the developing world move out of rural areas and into slums (as they’re CHOOSING to do, because it’s a better life), that the environmental benefits of that move are enormous. And they clearly are.
And for those bringing up overpopulation and birth control, the fact is that urban life has lowered birth rates all over the developing world. In fact, moving to the city, specifically to these slums in many cases, does far more to impact birth rates than decades and decades of trying to ‘educate’ people living out in the country side has. Birth rates are dropping all over the planet, and urbanization is the primary driver of that.
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.
Why do all people living in the slum leave it at the earliest possible convenience if they can afford it?
Why do all people living outside the slum vote to demolish these settlements as soon as a political opportunity opens up?
If it is ecological wonderland, why do they have no sewage system, not even septic tanks?
If it is ecological wonderland, why do people die of disease, crime and poverty there?
If it is *regarded* as ecological wonderland, with such a low standard of living, filthy unsanitary conditions, high infant mortality, extreme crime levels, extreme poverty, garbage-digging humiliation, fire hazards – does it tell us something about the slum, – or does it rather tell us something about eco nuts that rave and dream about living in a human-made hellhole? Why does Stewart Brand not live in a slum instead of a million dollar houseboat in san fransico bay ?
Just one thought, I bet that Stewart Brand would’t give up his house or flat to live in a slum!
the london economists recently made the switch to pro-nuclear. hmm “nuclear power for everyone”
I treat it as a plan B factional dispute between elements of a dead system
when I see anti-techs pushing nuclear power, this factional dispute comes to mind.
and noting the authors relationship to Kesey, you can be sure a purpose of this piece is to get you comfortable with your intended future.
the most significant virtue of a city is its cultural potentialities.
To assert that crime rates are reduced indicates little knowledge of real slums. For example, 99.5% of electricity used by slum dwellers in Manila is stolen
Appalling hippy trash.
Efficient, as in an efficient way of ensuring you have a easily controllable slave workforce who live is sub-human conditions where they can be eradicated more ‘efficiently’ trough disease and lack of access to decent, healthy food not to mention the air quality.
Picking trough trash is a great way of making a living… spoken like a truly privileged useful idiot.
Why don’t all you supporters of this absurdly naive idea give up your cushy jobs as university lecturers and UN bureaucrats and go and live in the slums?
…What am I saying, the slums are coming to us.
Hold up Mr Brand! You just went from talking about cities in the developing world, to saying that 1 billion people live in these cities to talking about the people who live these squatter/slum cities. Do you realize what you just did with your game of rethoric words?
You just categorized developing cities as slum/squatter cities, which is wrong-not everyone who lives in a developing city/country lives in a slum. This is typical black-white world paradigm mentality. I lived in Bogota, Mexico City and now Istanbul and let me tell you never have a I or the majority of people around me have lived in or near a slum. ughh. A dense city does not equal or necessarly have to be a city of slums- article disregarded, who do you think you are to have the authority to label and frame so arbitrarily ? That’s my only proble with the article, good day!
You have no idea of how rural folks live outside of the US. They don’t need no sewer pipes or waste collection – it is all done within the household itself. Even water is drawn from a well. It is very sustainable. By moving people to the cities in a high density living, you are just moving the problem elsewhere, you are NOT making it sustainable.
I defy the person that wrote this article to go and live in this paradise on Earth, then.
Please sir, GO AHEAD. LEAD BY EXAMPLE.
I also dare Prince Charles, that trash who owns biological farms and palaces all over Britain, to go and live in a place provided with an “underlying intuitive grammar of design”.
Please sir, GO LIVE IN A SHANTY TOWN. Or a trailer park. And then we will talk about it.
Unless you are a hypocrite. And are just trying to sell the idea that the little people, the unwashed masses, INCLUDING IN THE WEST, should live in complete poverty and misery. That is sustainable for the banksters and government, see.
These are exactly the same things your oligarch masters in the neo-nazi-greenie movement have been prattling on about for decades. Including Charlie boy, whenever mommy’s not slaping him in the tooshie.
A fascinating read.
I have lived in the slums of Delhi and another southern Indian city. After grad school in the USA, I barely survived the murderous, roach-infested, stink holes around M & 5th st. of Washington DC on an internship of $20/10-hour day. (I had to “pay my dues”). I’d have been offended by your new age, hippy crap if I didn’t see the naiveté. Let it be, man….
Can you quote your sources more precisely ??
´´In the Brazilian favelas where electricity is stolen and therefore free, people leave their lights on all day´´
I can quote you two studies that affirm exatcly the contrary : Céline Sachs, Sao Paulo : Politique Publiques et Habitat Populaire, (Chapter 7) and CERU, Impactos Socio-culturais da Electrificacão em Favelas, 1985
And I have the impression that you doesn´t make the difference between being environment-friendly and being forced to consume few and recycle because of extreme poverty.
That´s sure that if every one were as poor are a slum inhabitant, there wouldn´t be pollution due to planes, consumption, holidays… But is that really an argument to flatter slums ??
@ Paul Fenn
Jakarta is pretty much the same today. I’m very glad I don’t have to live where you did, I have made several visits and life is still just as hard, 16 years on.
western people getting bad ideas from films…i’m thinking clockwork orange